The history of early Marathi cinema has a necessary passage through the studio era, and specifically Prabhat Studios, in Kolhapur and Pune. This article elaborates two aspects: (i) early regional film-making—its strategies of imagining a cinema through regional content, and (ii) the notion of social respectability—that circumscribes the industrial enterprise, as evident in the history of Prabhat Studios. It also deliberates on the negotiation of a national and regional cinema as observed in the practice of bilingual film-making in Prabhat.
