A History of Colour Cinema That Can Account for Indian Cinema: The Bombay Film Laboratory, Kashmir’s Climate and Gevacolor’s Pamposh

Visual analysis and questions of aesthetics are central to global histories of screen colour, yet many early Indian colour films are now lost. This archival absence has therefore produced a scholarly silence on colour in Indian cinemas. How then can we develop new methods for studying colour that can account for Indian cinema? Focusing on Bombay contexts, we take the lost film Pamposh as a case study. A demonstration film designed to showcase the new colour laboratory at Film Center Bombay, the film was shot on location in Kashmir using Belgian Gevacolor film stock. While no colour materials from the film have survived, it has left rich traces in other forms as music, text, paper ephemera and oral history. These alternatives sources illuminate different histories of Bombay film colour from those developed around extant films, revealing how the assimilation of colour into Bombay cinema became a paradigm for the assimilation of Kashmir into India. As we explore, Pamposh’s Kashmiri locations were chosen both for their climatic conditions (closer to the European norms that Gevacolor was designed for), and as part of an ideological campaign to assimilate Kashmir against a backdrop of geopolitical conflict over the region.