Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Argument -- Imaginaries -- The Structure of the Book -- Part I: Obsolescence -- 1. The Nineteenth-Century Indian Techno-Bazaar -- From Novelty to Apparatus: Photography's Material Cultures -- Formal Expertise and Informal Know-How -- Proto-Global Influences: The Scalar and Spatial Logic of Empire -- Conclusion -- 2 Traveling Showmen, Makeshift Cinemas: The Bioscopewallah and Early Cinema -- Phantasmagoria Shows -- Lantern Slides, Kinetoscopes, and Junk Films -- Mobile cinema and Visual Education -- A Recycled Modernity -- Part II: Mechanical Reproduction and Mass Culture -- 3 Copyright and Cultural Authenticity: The Politics of Mechanical Reproduction in South Asia -- Introduction -- Empire and the Impossibility of Originality -- From Genius to Genus -- Turning the Tables: The Nationality of the Image -- Cultural Patrimony Meets "Popular" Culture -- 4 The Cinema as Mass Culture: The Melodramas of Mechanical Reproduction -- Phalke the Craftsman -- The Craftsman in the Meshes of Pirate Networks -- Cinema as Mass Culture in Postcolonial India -- Postscripts: Reminiscing the Age of Prints -- Part III: Intermediality -- 5 The Emergence of Topicality: Snapshot Cultures and Newspaper Photojournalism -- Bicycle Photography -- The Ethnographic and the Picturesque Image -- Photo-Illustrations and Film -- Mimesis or Exemplarity? Crime Films and Photographs and the Legacy of Topicality -- Black Sheep (1953) -- 6 Politics across Media: The Partition of Bengal (1905) and the Cinematic City -- Cinema and Urban Space: From Imperial Ritual to Nationalist Politics -- Cinema and the Standardization of Time -- The Emblematic and the Tidal Crowd -- Facing the Crowd -- Conclusion -- Part IV: Archives -- 7 The Abundant Ephemeral: The Protocols of Popular Film Historiography in India.

Cinema Cinema (1979) -- Film Hi Film (1983) -- 8. Postscript -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Filmography -- Index.