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Marathi cinema is a prominent regional film industry located in Mumbai, Pune and Kolhapur in western India. Since its early history, this film industry has evolved within a network of performance forms like the Marathi theatre, folk music and dance, and devotional singing (abhanga and
kirtan), and the inter-exchange of personnel between these cultural formations. When the state of Maharashtra was constituted in 1960, this networked formation became even more prominent, and had to negotiate the rising competition from the more dominant Hindi cinema. Marathi cinema also had
to contend with the patronage of Marathi audiences for other artistic forms like the theatre and folk performances. The attempt here is to theorize this state of in-betweenness through a spatial detailing and critical mapping of industrial tendencies, textual practices and regional entrenchment.
The questions that informs this study are directed to understand regional cinema in India, and its manifestations over the decades of 1960 to 1980. Specifically, the article forwards some propositions to the ideas of: how can the history of Marathi cinema be situated against the dominant and
collocative national Hindi cinema industry, with which it shares a common geography of filmmaking, exhibition and audiences? And how the concepts of social and cultural space can be extended to analyse some distinctive historical tendencies of the Marathi cinema? This analysis proposes a dialectics
of space for a regional Marathi film practice, which is confirmed by a reading of films, anecdotal biographies, archival materials and trade journals.