From the Ruins of Chanakya: Exhibition History and Urban Memory

Unlike the somewhat natural decay of other single screen theatres of Delhi, the demolition of the famous Chanakya cinema (1969–2008) 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