Moving pictures were first exhibited in Hyderabad and Secunderabad within a few months of the famed Lumiere exhibition in Bombay in 1896.1 S. C. Eavis brought ‘Edison's latest phonograph or the talking machine’ and ‘the marvellous kinetoscope [sic] or living pictures’ to the cantonment town of Secunderabad, after which he went to Madras in 1896. T. Stevenson, the proprietor of Madras Photographic Stores, exhibited films for the first time in Hyderabad in 1897 as a part of his south India tour.

However, we do not see Hyderabad and Secunderabad in any early cinema map of South Asia. This is because of two reasons. Most of the historiography of South Asia in general and film historiography in particular has focussed on British India, and the colonial cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.3 As a result, what we understand as the history of modern South Asia is most often the history of British India. Relatively, we know much less about the princely states of India4 that had control over significant land mass and people in South Asia. The focus on colonial cities is also because of the availability of sources. The colonial cities are relatively better documented and their sources are in English and hence easy to access.