Cinemas of the hinterlands? Politics of cine-travel and the new cartographies of regionality in India’s local film cultures

In recent years, a paradigm shift from the cosmopolitan city centres to small towns and cities has propelled scholarship on the politics of spatial representation. With the mapping of digital media cultures, the ‘region’ as an industrial construct has expanded to accommodate video and digital cultures as a new coordinate of Cinema Studies, one that neither fits linguistically demarcated category of big-scale ‘regional cinema’ nor does it adequately represent the neoliberal-touristic imagination of ‘small-town’ in mainstream Bombay cinema’s post-2000s ‘regional turn’. But how do these localized film practices of the ‘hinterlands’ articulate their regionality? This article draws on the contestations and negotiations of the region in recent film scholarship and argues that the decentering of the urban sprawl of the metropolis for a more diffused spatial imagination of tier-1 and tier-2 cities and towns needs to be studied in conjunction with an alternative parallel visual regime of mobility and travel in local film cultures. By turning to the socio-industrial act of making the ‘travel film’ Malegaon to Dubai, I analyse how epistemic erasures of ‘other regions’ reveal overlapping cartographies of ‘region’ that challenge the spatial-industrial boundaries and reveal how travel and mobility can exceed the touristic representation of small-town India.