Pirate Histories: Rethinking the Indian Film Archive

This article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema. Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” ( Steyerl, 2009 ), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt to control cinematic history.