Where Histories Reside

“With grace and flair Priya Jaikumar shows how the preproduction 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

“Where Histories Reside is a superbly written book in which Priya Jaikumar uses the optics of space to recast the discourse of Indian cinema and its pasts. Landscape, territory, and architecture are brought into conversation with geography, cultural theory, cinema studies, and politics. The result is a magnificent and methodologically daring approach that displaces the desire for causality with the spatialization of historical inquiry.” — Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi