Where Histories Reside

“With grace and flair Priya Jaikumar shows how the pre-production practices and industry cultures of cinema—from expedition and nature films to commercial Bollywood cinema—produced and reinforced the spatial notions of territory and empire that dominated geopolitical histories. She looks forward to contemporary Indian geopolitics, as the privatization of economic resources increasingly harms vulnerable populations—even while location-based films exploit these populations and iconic precolonial architecture, now often in ruins, for a cinematic backdrop or ambience. Here is a magnificent study.” — Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor, Harvard University