Imperial Films Company

Est: 1926. Successor to the Majestic and Royal Art Film companies set up by Ardeshir Irani as a diversification of his exhibition interests in partnership with Esoofally, Mohammed Ali and Dawoodji Rangwala. Organised as a vertically integrated combine with its own exhibition infrastructure. Started following the decline of Kohinoor, it continued many of the latter’s Mohanlal Dave-inspired genres, often with the same stars and film-makers. Imperial became closely associated with the costumed historical genre launched with Anarkali (1928), shot and released almost overnight in direct competition to Charu Roy’s The Loves of a Mughal Prince (1928). Irani also rushed out Alam Ara (1931), released as India’s first full talkie narrowly beating Madan Theatres’ Shirin Farhad (1931). Imperial was the first studio to shoot scenes at night (in Khwab-e- Hasti, 1929) using incandescent lamps. It owned India’s top silent star, Sulochana, and promoted her along with Zubeida, Jilloo and, for a while, the young Prithviraj Kapoor. This was perhaps the first major instance of a deliberate manufacturing of a star-cult as a marketing strategy. Top Imperial film-makers include R.S. Choudhury, B.P. Mishra and Mohan Bhavnani, whose film-making set the house style, as did Nandlal Jaswantlal’s sound films. A fair number of the studio’s talkies were remakes of its own silent hits with Sulochana (Anarkali, 1928 & 1935), Wildcat of Bombay (1927) became Bambai Ki Billi (1936), etc. It made films in at least nine languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Burmese, Malay, Pushtu and Urdu. The first Iranian sound film, Dukhtar-e-Lur (aka Dokhtare Lor Ya Irane Diruz Va Emruz, 1932) was also made here. Kisan Kanya (1937) by Gidwani was India’s first indigenously manufactured colour film, made with the Cinecolour process. When it closed in 1938, its economic and generic inheritance was continued by Sagar Movietone.

Studio