The word bioscope is Greek by way of English — bios, life, and skopeein, to look — and it was coined by Granville Penn in a Christian tract of 1812 to mean a measure of human life. Cinema repurposed it. In Britain, Charles Urban sold Bioscope-branded cameras and projectors from about 1905, and the trade weekly The Bioscope ran from 1908 to 1932; in South Africa the word still means cinema. In India it took a different and more durable form.
The first film shows in the subcontinent were in 1896, including one in Calcutta, and within a few years the term bioscope had attached itself both to the projected film and to a portable, hand-cranked viewing box that a man could carry on his shoulder or push on a cart. That box is the Indian bioscope: a painted wooden cabinet with a row of round glass eyeholes, a reel of images inside, a crank on top, and frequently a gramophone bolted on for accompaniment. Several children watched at once. The showman turned the handle and sang or spoke a rhymed commentary over the pictures — the Taj Mahal, the Kumbh Mela, a king, a war, a hanging, a foreign city.
Its ancestry is the European raree show or peep show, which reached Calcutta in the nineteenth century and was absorbed and remade. Its descendants are the travelling cinemas, the tent bioscopes, and finally the Bengali film industry itself. Calcutta was the pivot: the Royal Bioscope Company, founded by Hiralal Sen in 1898, was India's first, and Jamshedji Framji Madan built the country's first exhibition chain out of the same city.
What killed the box was the thing it prefigured. Cinema halls, then television, then video, then the phone, each removed a layer of its audience. The form survived in India far longer than in Europe or North America because the fairground economy it depended on lasted longer, and it survived in Bengal as a word and a memory long after it stopped being a trade.
