The articles in this issue of BioScope explore the ongoing conundrum of how to access historical spectatorship when records are scarce or non-existent. Our authors examine traces left on radio-listening in small town India, letters in Bangladeshi film magazines, emotionally charged memories linked to once thriving cinema sites in elite urban India and remote, rural hinterlands. Temporality emerges as an object of inquiry, in motifs of disappearance, ruination and decay, from the ghosts of past cinema-going practices and the rubble of a former cinema-house, to radio stations’ now empty mail rooms, or the Mumbai dressmen’s deliberate ruining of film costumes as a way of inserting time into the on-screen world.
Editorial
Ravi S. Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, S.V. Srinivas, Debashree Mukherjee, Lotte Hoek
Articles
Imagining Sound through the Pharmaish: Radios and Request-postcards in North India, c. 1955–1975
Vebhuti Duggal
From Villain to Hero: Masculinity and Political Aesthetics in the Films of Bangladeshi Action Star Joshim
Arpana Awwal
Wrinkles in Time: Ageing Costume in Hindi Film
Clare M. Wilkinson
From the Ruins of Chanakya: Exhibition History and Urban Memory
Ipsita Sahu
Fieldwork
Agnipareeksha (Trial by Fire)
Amit Madheshiya
Book Reviews
Book Review: Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre, and Ideology in Tamil Cinema
Hrishikesh Ingle
Book Review: Shannon Mattern, Code + Clay … Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Debashree Mukherjee