The crowd outside the lettered city: Imagining the mass audience in 1920s India

Abstract

Drawing on the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report of 1928 and the transcripts of its hearings and interviews, this essay shows how middle-class elites in colonial India imagined the mass public created and made visible by the cinema as a divided audience, primarily segmented along class lines, simultaneously menacing and vulnerable. © 2009 by the University of Texas Press.