This article offers an archeology of vintage, obsolete, pirate and “junk” media forms related to the cinema in India, with the Bioscopewallah or traveling picture showman at the center of such an archeology. The article traces the origins of the Bioscope to nineteenth century European entertainment in Calcutta, and follows its numerous subsequent reinventions, as it weaves in and out of the European and Indian worlds, private, commercial and state initiatives, and plays a central role in movie exhibition in early twentieth century Bengal. It concludes by mapping itinerant cinema’s place within India’s contemporary media ecologies. Linking technology and commerce to each other on the ground of seemingly vestigial artifacts from an earlier era, it argues that the obviation of obsolescence, as an historically contingent and geographically variable survival tactic, is critical to the logic of media history in India.
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