K.D. Brothers

Often described as India’s largest film importers in the early silent era, the company, not well documented because of its early closure, was apparently owned by Krishnadas Dwarkadas. By 1917 the company was well known as importers of projectors and raw stock, with branches in Calcutta and Benares. Its advertised film imports in the Bombay Chronicle include William Fox’s A Wife’s Sacrifice (1919), the Gaumont Gazette and, in 1921, independently made newsreels showing events connected with the Swadeshi agitations: e.g. Collecting Foreign Clothes in the Streets of Bombay, Enthusiasts on their way to the Bonfire near the Elphinstone Mills and several shots of Gandhi and Maulana Shaukat Ali. By the early 20s, K.D. Brothers mainly dealt with newsreels such as Chimanlal Luhar’s early work. Probably starting with tent bioscopes, by the early 20s their interests expanded to include two of Bombay’s frontline theatres, the Globe and the West End. An advertisement saying that the West End would release ‘no serial and no Indian film’ while the Globe would show the ‘best of serial chapter plays and the pick of Indian productions’, clearly reveals their twin distribution interests. Among the Indian films they distributed, within India and abroad (foreign distribution was for a while controlled by A. Narayanan) were Hindustan Cinema and Bharat films, the first two Dhiren Ganguly films and Suchet Singh’s Narasinh Mehta (1920).

Glossary