Maharashtra’s travelling cinemas are on their last reel

In March 2020 Anup Touring Talkies was screening the Marathi film Bharla Malvat Raktane in Maharashtra’s Satara district when they heard the news of a country-wide lockdown. It was the middle of the ‘jatra’ season, which runs from around September until May, when talkies snake through rural Maharashtra, setting up giant outdoor movie screens inside tents.Priced on average at Rs 30 per ticket, with dozens packed on floor mats or plastic chairs, these enterprises have been a long-romanticised, but steadily declining feature of Maharashtra’s cultural landscape.Owner Anup Jagdale couldn’t afford another body blow to the business and optimistically assumed the lockdown would last a couple of weeks. They stayed put in the village, until they ran out of food and rations and had to return home. “We had never heard of a lockdown before,” he says. “We thought it would pass.”But it didn’t. medium nocaption82048283The lockdown continued for months, sequestering people in their homes, decimating businesses and derailing cultural events. Though theatres reopened in cities last November, touring talkies haven’t been able to screen a single film in the past year. The state’s new partial lockdown announced last week may seal their fate for good. “I am very tired,” says Jagdale. “I can’t see hope anywhere.”Fewer than 100 talkies remain, down from 1,200-plus in their heyday in 2000 (the union can account for 52 today but suspects the actual number may stretch to 90). These survivors have weathered the television boom, the smartphone and cheap internet revolution. But with the pandemic, they are facing their biggest existential challenge yet. A delegation of five talkie owners met the cultural affairs minister Amit Deshmukh last month, seeking urgent life-support: annual financial aid, low-interest loans and discounted electricity rates among other things.“If the government helps, then this culture will benefit,” says Jagdale. “Otherwise, the climax [scene] of the tent cinemas has begun.”Anup Touring Talkies, a nearly 50-year-old business started by Jagdale’s father, has for decades synced with the rhythms of the “jatra” season – community carnivals mixing devotional and other events. Trundling from village to village by truck, spending a few weeks in each, showcasing a variety of films, mostly Marathi, Jagdale’s childhood was bound up with cinema. His first memory is of watching Amitabh Bachchan’s Sharaabi as a five-year-old, then helping with the business as he grew up. He took over in 2006, following his father’s accident, but by 2012 as costs grew and profits sunk, he was already despairing, ready to shut. “But my workers said, what will we do instead? So I thought let us continue as much as we can,” he says. medium82048367Now Jagdale and others are questioning these choices. Last year, Mohammed Navrangi, owner of Buldhana-based Sumedh Talkies, was forced to sell vegetables to earn during the lockdown. Navrangi, who also grows soya and toor dal in his small farm, is trapped between two atrophying options. “Farming has its issues, cinema has its issues, what shall I say?” asked Navrangi. He too joined a family business, seeing cinema less as a magical vocation of stories and images but as a pragmatic livelihood. “I like to show people movies, not watch as much,” he said. “To try and understand what the public likes, that is a different kind of pleasure.”But what the public likes is not always what the talkies can offer. For instance, they cannot afford to pay large advances –going up to a lakh – to distributors to show the latest Hindi releases in digital format.Jagdale has more than Rs 30 lakhs worth of loans to pay off. Money that was borrowed to upgrade their facilities, for maintenance of projectors and tents, and to pay employee salaries. Nashik-based Sanjay Dhadwe, who runs Pushpanjali and Abhayraj Touring Talkies, has been selling or mortgaging his equipment to sustain his family even as he struggles with Rs 9 lakh in debts.The talkies themselves have been stars of movies including the Marathi feature Touring Talkies and the Cannes-award winning documentary The Cinema Travellers. But nostalgia can’t pay the bills. medium nocaption82048339“Never in my dreams did I imagine such terrible days would come or wish it on any enemy,” says Niraj Kamble, the Buldhana-based owner of Anand Touring Talkies, who is also president of the Maharashtra Touring Talkies Union. “I think, look where we were once, and where we are now.”It’s virtually impossible for people like Kamble, veterans of this business, to pivot to something else. “There is nothing else we know,” he says, echoing a sentiment each one of them articulated. “We have few other options.”Kamble joined the business in 1989 during the era of Amjad Khan, Shatrughan Sinha and Shashi Kapoor. These were the golden years in the business when a single show packed up to 1,000 people, with five or six daily screenings from noon until deep into the night. “But then after 2005, when so many private channels came in, our business was hit,” says Kamble. “People had multiple options on television itself.” The advent of mobiles through the 2000s, and then low-cost internet meant that from 2015 people were simply preferring small screens over big ones.Not just that. Even in the jatras, there are manifold entertainment options for visitors. “Earlier there were only talkies,” says Kamble. Navrangi added that jatras now had dance floors, Kid’s zones and circuses.Talkies emerged in the 1950s as enterprising men brought movie prints from Bombay and carted them to entertainment-scarce towns and villages of interior Maharashtra. Devotional films, Marathi and Hindi films were all lapped up, with cinema-going entrenched as a deeply communal activity. “The identities of these jatras were defined by our cinemas,” says Kamble. “The two are closely linked.”Marathi films are entitled to subsidies, and recently the government announced assistance for tamasha troupes, proponents of another endangered art form in the state. Talkie owners hope for similar support; not just because they are sources of mass entertainment, but also a source of employment. The government has promised to help.“Even if it is a very old way of watching cinema, it has its cultural and heritage importance and must be preserved,” says Amit Deshmukh, the cultural affairs minister who met the union last month. “I have given my word that the government will fully support them.” Union members said they were happy with their initial meeting.Until recently these owners operated in silos, seeing each other as competition in a shrinking market. “Now all that is gone,” says Kamble, on the regrouping of their union and how the pandemic had forced collective action. “Everyone thought it is best to come together and coordinate to survive.”Even if the business is given a financial boost today, the culture itself will take time to get re-established. “Not just time but a lot of effort,” says Dhadwe, the Nashik-based talkies owner. “It will take at least two years to recover.”The group’s other demands include a single window for exhibition licenses, permission to show advertisements before films and pensions for retired employees. Deshmukh says the “majority” of their demands were “acceptable” and that they were working on a “roadmap” that would crystallise in the next six months.But Dhadwe is almost out of patience. “In six months we will die,” he says. “We can see no alternative but to take our lives.”With inputs by Raju Shinde