%0 Journal Article
%T From the Ruins of Chanakya: Exhibition History and Urban Memory
%A Ipsita Sahu
%J BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies
%@ 0976-352X
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0974927618767285
%X Unlike the somewhat natural decay of other single screen theatres of Delhi, the demolition of the famous Chanakya cinema (1969¨C2008) was an iconoclastic event. When the theatre was demolished in 2008 to pave the way for a multiplex and shopping mall, a wide and intensifying wave of dissent reigned, as the city was rudely awakened to the realities of urban transformation. At a time when film theatres had started to decline in India with the emergence of home entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s, Chanakya theatre offered a distinctive culture of cinema and urban leisure to the middle-class residents of Delhi, foreshadowing the multiplex imagination decades before its arrival. This article attempts to understand the Chanakya story and its theatrical legacy as a prehistory of globalisation. It explores the phenomenon of Chanakya¡¯s auratic presence in the city¡¯s imagination as it maps the theatre¡¯s biographical journey, starting from its precarious inception in one of the more remote areas of Delhi through to its prominent place in the city¡¯s cultural life for almost 30 years, followed by its afterlife as a potent emblem symbolising the end of a bygone era in the city¡¯s collective memory. The micro-analysis of the Chanakya story explores the complex circuits within which architecture, film text, urban materiality and public memory converge
%K New Delhi
%K cosmopolitanism
%K Hollywood films
%K film festivals
%K urban memory
%K urban redevelopment
%K iconoclasm
%K film exhibition
%K multiplex
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0974927618767285