Walking the lanes of London during my visit to the British Library, I usually heard street musicians. One evening, near London Bridge, I had a conversation with a busker named Richard Hydr, who I often listened to.

‘Where are you from?’ Richard asked.

‘India,’ I said.

‘Where in India?’ he asked.

‘You wouldn't have heard of it, Hyderabad,’ I replied.

‘My name is Richard Hydr. Hydr is for Hyderabad. My ancestors had worked in Hyderabad,’ he said.

Thus, I found Hyderabad in London.

I have seen the world through Hyderabad, in comparison with it, and in conversation with it. This book is a Hyderabadi's attempt at recovering some lost histories of the city.

My interest in film came from hearing stories that my mother and aunts told me; their youth, as they recounted, was full of watching morning shows and matinees in cinema theatres that are now defunct but remain in their memory. It is from these stories that I wanted to understand my beloved city through cinema. Hyderabad today is known as the global information technology hub and home of the Ramoji Film City (RFC), the largest film city in the world, built on 2,000 acres of land. Most of the literature available on the question of interrelationship between cinema and Hyderabad was on the Telugu film industry, with a marked absence of any discussion on film culture before 1948. Most of the newspapers and magazines spoke of the city as a tabula rasa, which was made into a site for the Telugu film industry in the 1960s.