From its outset in the late 1980s Film Studies in India took popular mainstream cinema as its primary object of theorization and research. The ambition was to explore a cinematic imaginary that engaged mass audiences, and highlighted the relationship of cinema to modernity, nationhood and democracy through a post-colonial lens. Key topics included the specifics of industrial form, as in the informal economies of the so-called bazaar and its ties to a broader visual and print culture. Scholarship also explored differences between mainstream Euro-American codes and local practices, the distinct forms and functions of melodrama, and the question of song and dance sequences key to the popular format. Identity questions provide a larger frame within which a theorization of the popular has unfolded. The national is both invoked and problematized by research into the film industries of India’s diverse linguistic states and industries, regional circulations that exceed territorial states, and the role of cultural networks as in the so-called Islamicate dimensions of Indian cinema.