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48 24 Ci n e m a a n d t h e L e t t e r e d Ci t y i n C o l o n ia l I n d ia In spite of their exciting implications for the study of film history and modernity, such revisionist approaches to early cinema are often limited by their tendency to take certain localized and hegemonic experiences of modernity, modernism, and the cinema to be universal, and to posit the cinema mainly as a catalyst and a consequence of a culture of speed, sensation, and extreme fragmentation. 49 It is certainly true that American and, to a lesser extent, western European cinemas and the cultures of urban modernity they grew out of and helped shape have become paradigmatic as a result of their portability and metropolitan status.

The roles of print media, vernacular publications, new genres, and indigenous communication networks in creating a colonial public sphere in India have attracted considerable attention from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, literary scholars, and political theorists. 34 Sudipta Kaviraj, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Bernard Bate, Anindita Ghosh, Francesca Orsini, Veena Naregal, and Farina Mir, among others, have delineated the role print cultures played in the emergence of the “vernacular public spheres” central to the regional and national articulations of modernity and political identities in nineteenthand early twentieth-century India.

49 It is certainly true that American and, to a lesser extent, western European cinemas and the cultures of urban modernity they grew out of and helped shape have become paradigmatic as a result of their portability and metropolitan status. However, our understanding of modernity and its relationship to cinema will remain rather provincial if we assume that these instances of Euro-American modernity can speak for the entire world—or conversely, that we can grasp the relationship between cinema and modernity in Europe and the United States without considering the role of the so-called peripheries of the world system as markets and imagined spaces central to the constitution of metropolitan modernity.