The article seeks to understand the genealogy of censorship derived from prior British attempts to regulate literary and dramatic productions. In the 1920s, anxieties about the maintenance of law and order and protection of British rule during a period of increasing Indian nationalist unrest had to be integrated with various concerns about deteriorating economic conditions. As Indian cinema struggled to come into its own, the issue of control became a central concern for both coloniser and colonised, while both faced threats from the influx of foreign (especially Hollywood) films.

The article also explores why it was deemed so important to bring cinema under the colonial gaze. While there was no unified front on how to deal with this new medium, it was perceived as highly in-fluential, with great potential for harmful or beneficial propaganda impacts. Finally, considerations of the competing demands of moral concerns were juxtaposed to the growing economic needs of the Indian film industry.

Throughout, it transpires from archival research how defining policy issues became ever more critical and how the complexities of implementation were made more difficult by the ‘global’ nature of policy formation as opposed to the more ‘local’ nature of the performance of control.

Since the bar stood across the road from the tomb of a Muslim saint, rumours spread that the disaster was the direct result of the insult to the holy man and implicitly of the transgression of Muslim space by the combined efforts of the Hindu bar–owner and his bibulous patrons. This short essay explores the moral tensions that found expression with the collapse of the Sita Ram Building through a comparison of its reportage in an English–language newspaper and an Urdu hagiography of the offended saint. At the same time, it draws attention to the neglected importance of colonial Bombay as a prime location of the early Muslim experience of globalising modernity.