Imagine the sun setting over an open field, a film projector being set up, a screen being tied between poles by two young men, and as the night sky darkens a large number of men and children taking their seats on the ground for an evening of entertainment. Tickets were cheap at around four to four-and-a-half annas (around 28 paise in today’s decimal Rupee system) drawing a sizable audience. Even a larger number of people watching from a distance with a mix of curiosity, resistance, moral anxiety and the draw of the screen. This was a typical night out to cinema in and around Dhampur, a small town in Western Uttar Pradesh, where touring cinema was introduced in the mid-1950s. Avtar Singh, now a prominent citizen of Dhampur, was one of those two young men screening films in the open-air theaters.
The story of Dhampur’s cinema culture is inseparable from the life journey of Avtar Singh, a man whose family came from their ancestral village in Shakargarh tehsil, Narowal district, Punjab province, in today’s Pakistan. Like countless families during the Partition of 1947, his kin were split by an arbitrary border. Their land, property and some family members remained on the other side, while a part of the family was resettled in Gurdaspur district of Indian Punjab. Avtar Singh completed his graduation from Gurdaspur. Then he followed his elder brother to district Bijnor, where his brother was already involved in running a touring cinema showing films in the open air temporarily in different locations.
Recognizing that cinema needed a more permanent and respectable space, in 1958 Avtar Singh and his brother shifted from touring cinema to a rented hall in Dhampur. This hall came to be known as Basant Talkies, the first permanent cinema hall in the town. This move marked an important transition, from touring shows to institutionalized entertainment at a landmark location in the map of the town.
In the initial years, the days of institutionalized cinema were uncertain. There were days when no audience turned up “no man, no show”. But Avtar Singh continued popularizing cinema, gradually experimenting with programming and show timings. Early screenings focused on stunt films and later on social and family-oriented films titles such as Mother India, Naagin, Anarkali, Mughal-e-Azam etc.
The turning point for cinema in Dhampur came in the early 1970s with large infrastructure projects in the region, particularly the construction of the Kalagarh and Harevli dams. These projects attracted thousands of workers from outside the town. Dhampur’s railway station became a crucial node for the labour movement, and the town’s economy expanded rapidly. For migrant workers living away from families, cinema was one of the few affordable forms of entertainment. Basant Talkies benefited directly from this demographic shift. Show numbers increased from one show a day to two, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s, three or more shows on weekends.
In small towns like Dhampur, cinema is not just about films. It is about acceptance of a new form of entertainment and aspirations of the people to be modern. It is not only a major form of mass entertainment but also a marker of social change. According to Avtar Singh, the Dhampur society at that time was hardly receptive to cinema. Films were looked upon with suspicion as something immoral. Respectable families hesitated to watch films and women never went to the cinema.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Dhampur’s cinema story is how deliberately it was used to negotiate social change. During the 1960s, Avtar Singh introduced special “lady shows” and children’s shows. Religious and social films were screened specifically to encourage women’s attendance, making it easier for families to send their daughters accompanied by mothers. Flat ticket rates, removed class distinctions inside the hall, also making it more affordable.
In a town where women’s presence in public spaces was minimal in the early 1960s, cinema became one of the first socially sanctioned reasons for women to step out. What began as mothers escorting their children to see films transformed into women going out to enjoy cinema for themselves. Cinema, in this sense, functioned as a quiet social reform trigger for normalizing women’s visibility outside the home and asserting their right to entertainment.
At present, Dhampur has two functioning cinema halls namely; Sheela Talkies, established in 1977 and Bansal Cinema in 1979. According to Umesh Bansal, the owner of Bansal Cinema, the audience turnout has steadily declined over the years. A noticeable exception is during festivals such as Eid and Diwali, when films starring Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan get released and shows run to full capacity. Outside these festival windows, however, the halls rarely witness a full house. Ticket prices range between ₹100 and ₹200, and are not seen as high-price. A key reason for the decline of the audience is the growing dominance of television and OTT platforms, which have transformed viewing habits and expectations. OTT platforms offer a wider variety of content; web series, regional films, shorter formats etc., which are more attractive to the younger audiences than mainstream theater-based cinema releases. The convenience of watching films at home where viewers can pause, resume, or abandon content at their will has begun to replace the fixed, time-bound outside home experience. Cinema, once a shared social outing for families and groups of men and women, has increasingly become an individual and private form of entertainment.
What makes Avtar Singh’s story compelling is not only that he helped establish cinema culture in Dhampur, but that he did so without inherited capital or land. Subsequently, he also became a successful businessman who owns a shop selling readymade garments and footwear. His journey from a Partition-affected family that lost all their property in 1947 to becoming a cultural entrepreneur in a small Indian town by the late 1950s reflects a broader post-Partition narrative of rebuilding lives through education, enterprise and upward social mobility.
Cinema, in this story, is not just a business. It is a lens through which we can see changing attitudes towards leisure, gender, morality, and public space. In Dhampur, the flicker of a projector helped loosen social boundaries, brought women into public view, and offered migrant workers a sense of pause in an otherwise harsh working life.
Today, when multiplexes dominate urban landscapes and single-screen theatres struggle to survive, stories like Basant Talkies remind us that cinema once played a much larger social role. In towns like Dhampur, it was a bridge between past and present, between private homes and public life, and between a displaced past across the border and a rooted future in a new town.
