A walk down the memory lane of my cinema-obsessed youth

A few years ago, speculation about the future of Bombay’s Eros Cinema, which had been closed for refurbishment, made me think about movie-going itself and the imprint of cinema theatres and their trajectories on the life of a city. I was reminded of another cinema house that played an important role in my early years in Poona.

The motion pictures came to Poona (now Pune) with the coming of electricity in 1910. The first cinema house to be set up was Napier Cinema in Poona Cantonment. The Napier started showing silent movies to paying audiences in a shed-like structure.

With time and growing popularity, the Napier was renovated. Around 1919, a fairly well-boned neo-Classical building replaced the shed, with timber framing and a stone gable, and a Baroque-ish front. The Napier was very popular and is mentioned in several accounts of Poona at the time.

One popular type of screening that attracted Poona’s citizens to the Napier was of short serial features – David Fenster, in his book Mehera-Meher: A Divine Romance, writes: “Most of the movies screened in Poona were American. A serial titled The Broken Coin (1915), starring Grace Cunard and Francis Ford, was a favourite. Every week there was a new episode, but eventually they [the audiences]...

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