Making of a Peasant Industry: Telugu Cinema in the 1930s–1950s S.V. Srinivas Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore Abstract What can the cinema tell us about its time? This article explores the problem by focusing on the role the Telugu film industry played in the rise to economic and political prominence of a post-colonial and post-feudal elite in what is now the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. A two decade period in the history of Telugu cinema is examined to show how the industry came under the control of entrepreneurs of peasant origin by becoming a destination of surpluses generated by agriculture and related activities. During this period, an industry model that facilitated the absorption of large infusions of capital at the production center in Madras, as also relatively small retail investments at the local level, was assembled. The model, predicated on syndicated investments and distribution of risk, fell into place at a time when peasants began to migrate out of the village for a variety of reasons and were expanding their activities from agriculture, commodity speculation, and rural money lending. Keywords Telugu cinema, ilm industry, peasantry, migration, Madras In a typical small town, the pride of place is taken by the twin symbols of Coastal Andhra: Cinema halls that look like rice-mills and rice-mills that look like cinema halls, give or take a chimney stack. (Balagopal, 1988, p. 154) In this article I examine a film industry that is relatively unfamiliar to the students of cinema and ask a set of questions of the cinema that the discipline of cinema studies does not often engage with. The dou- ble detour of sorts is motivated by a sense of unease that I am sure is rather familiar to our discipline. While we recognize the need to engage in productive and sustained conversations with other disciplines, we remain, for the most part, filmic text-centred in our analyses and the film industry continues to be undertheorized. As a result, the usefulness of cinema for writing social and economic history tends to be limited to the interpretations of signs on the screen. My starting point, therefore, is the question, what can the cinema tell us about its time if our exploration is not confined to individual films? My object is the Telugu film industry during an important period in its history, the 1930s–1950s—roughly the period between the arrival of the talkie and the formation of the state of Andhra Pradesh, created in 1956 from three distinct regions, namely Article BioScope 1(2) 169–188 © 2010 Screen South Asia Trust SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/097492761000100207 http://bioscope.sagepub.com S.V. Srinivas is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India. E-mail: srinivas@cscs.res.in NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE