'''Madan Theatres'''

Giant distribution corporation and studio
which dominated India’s silent cinema. Built by
Jamshedji Framji Madan (1856-1923) into one
of the country’s premier Parsee theatre
companies. J.F. Madan came from a middleclass
Bombay Parsee family of theatre
enthusiasts: his brother Khurshedji was a
partner in the Original Victoria Theatrical Club
while Jamshedji and another brother, Pestonji,
started as actors. Jamshedji acted in
Nusserwanji Parekh’s Sulemani Shamsher
(1873, produced by Elphinstone), while
Pestonjee played lead roles in two famous
plays, Eduljee Khori’s Gul-e-Bakavali and
Jehangir, staged by Dadabhai Thunthi. In the
1890s, J.F. Madan bought two prominent
theatre companies, the Elphinstone and the
Khatau-Alfred, including their creative staff and
the rights to their repertoire. Shifted his base to
Calcutta in 1902, establishing J.F. Madan & Sons
(maintaining his other interests like
pharmaceuticals). By 1919, J.F. Madan & Sons
had become the joint stock company Madan
Theatres, running the Elphinstone Theatrical
Co. (expanding from the Elphinstone Picture
Palace and the ancestor of the Elphinstone
Bioscope) and its flagship organisation, the
Corinthian Theatre. They employed several of
the leading Urdu-Hindi playwrights
(Kashmiri, Betaab) and stars (Patience
Cooper, Seeta Devi). Some historians claim
that J.F. Madan started showing films in a tent
bioscope in 1902 on the Calcutta maidan, but it
is more likely that the Madans did not seriously
get into film until 1905, financing some of
Jyotish Sarkar’s documentaries (e.g. Great
Bengal Partition Movement, 1905) which they
presented at the Elphinstone. In 1907 the
Elphinstone followed the Minerva and Star
theatres (see Hiralal Sen) and went into
exhibition and distribution, winning the agency
rights for Pathé, who also represented First
National. They expanded by buying or leasing
theatres located in urban areas with European
residents, commanding higher ticket prices and
catering to the British armed forces before and
during WW1. On J.F. Madan’s death, the third
of his five sons, Jeejeebhoy Jamshedji Madan,
took over and expanded the empire,
continuing to direct some of the company’s
films. By 1927 the Madan distribution chain
controlled c.1/2 of India’s permanent cinemas.
At their peak they owned 172 theatres and
earned half the national box office. Up to WW1
they showed mainly British films supplied by
the Rangoon-based London Film, but after the
war they imported Metro and United Artists
product, mostly bought ‘blind’ with rights for
the entire subcontinent. Many of these they
appear to have distributed as their own
productions, e.g. Wages of Sin (1924) and
Flame of Love (1926), which Virchand
Dharamsey’s recent filmography of silent
cinema (Light of Asia, 1994) identifies as
imports, contrary to the claims made in their
initial advertising. By the mid-20s they were the
first of the five major importers of Hollywood
films, followed by Pathé, Universal, Globe and
Pancholi’s Empire distributors. In the silent
era, their exhibition and distribution were more
important than their production work, mainly
making shorts for export until Satyavadi Raja
Harishchandra (1917) and Dotiwala’s
Bilwamangal (1919; the first Bengali feature)
both proved successful. Their early features
were mainly filmed plays, converting their
playwrights into scenarists and their actors into
stars. Many were directed by C. Legrand,
formerly a Pathé man, and later by Jyotish
Bannerjee. Claimed to have done
international co-productions, although Savitri
(1923) made by Giorgio Mannini for Cines in
Rome and starring Rina De Liguoro opposite
Angelo Ferrari, probably was not co-produced
but only released by Madan. However, he did
work with the Italian cineaste E.D. Liguoro and
cameraman T. Marconi. In the early 20s, the
Madans also acquired the rights to the major
19th C. Bengali novelist Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay’s writings, forming the basis of
their ‘literary film’ genre which came to
dominate Bengali cinema for several decades.
By the end of the silent era the group had
become too large for its managerial structure. It
invested heavily into sound after it premiered
Universal’s Melody of Love at the Elphinstone
Bioscope (1928) and made the expensive
Shirin Farhad (1931, narrowly beaten by
Alam Ara as India’s first sound film), Amar
Choudhury’s Jamai Sasthi (1931, the first
Bengali sound feature) and Indrasabha
(1932). Their closure in the late 30s is usually
blamed on a failed deal with Columbia but this
may only have put the final seal on a decline
caused by crippling sound conversion costs,
the stabilisation of film imports and the spread
of the more efficient managing-agency system
able to attract more speculative financing.

[[Studio]]