This conference was part of the golden jubilee celebrations of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and was organized by The Sarai Programme to commemorate 100 years of Indian cinema. The conference sought to draw on the diverse heritage of Indian cinema to highlight the importance of cinema studies in the wider architecture of disciplinary engagements. This was with a view to bringing cinema into the academy as subject matter that required not only specialist analysis, but also as something which offered fresh perspectives, methods and materials to the human sciences.