TOP TO BOTTOM, from (“The Cinemas Project“)
© Zubin Pastakia

This series visually traces the lives of Bombay’s single-screen cinema halls.

On the one hand, this collection of images is a repository of the architectural form and detail of these buildings that range from the classic to the idiosyncratic. These halls seem to exist today in defiance of the generic aesthetic and cultural experience of the city’s new multiplexes.

To look at these halls merely nostalgically, however, would be to deny their existence as lived spaces whose contours have been shaped and inscribed over time by interactions with both audiences and inhabitants. As sites of escape, anonymity, mystery, fantasy and residence, the relationship that many of these halls share with the city changed significantly as colonial Bombay metamorphosed into post-industrial Mumbai.