Even as theatres reopen, Maha's tent cinemas stay on pause

Till a few years ago, any resemblance of mass Telugu action hero Gopichand to mass Bollywood action hero Ajay Devgn was not purely coincidental, at least in pockets of Marathwada that film distributors refer to as ‘Nizam circuit’.

- Sharmila Ganesan

Two researchers had found that diehard Gopichand fans in Jalna, Beed, Nanded, Aurangabad, Osmanabad, Nanded, Parbhani and circuits such as Vidarbha used to believe Gopichand to be “Arjun Devgn”, Devgn’s dagger-wielding brother. This myth wasn’t the handiwork of fake news but that of morphed film posters and drunk announcers that populated the fast-shrinking world of Maharashtra’s tent cinemas.

Once an important 2000 strong Marathi cinema distribution platform, the state’s touring talkies—nomadic theatres that travel from village to village atop trucks appended with projectors to beam Hindi, Marathi and dubbed Telugu movies into ‘tambus’—have now been reduced to mere Cgrade box office windows by the viral ravages of saas-bahu soaps, mobile phones, Wi-Fi and OTT platforms. Besides the recent freightload of Covid-induced debts, shutdowns and job losses, the parked trucks of the 52 surviving tents are rusting under another fresh death blow.