A new photo book is turning attention to one of Bengaluru's less-documented cultural geographies: the working-class neighbourhood of Laggere, where cinema is not merely watched but inhabited as part of daily life. 'Reel Duniya, Real Duniya: Cinema, Memory, and Leisure in Laggere,' a photo-illustrated essay book by Eshwari and Mahima, explores how film culture is experienced, remembered and circulated in the area, offering a textured account of leisure beyond the city's more familiar technology and startup narratives.
The project is the outcome of the India Foundation for the Arts' Project 560 programme, which supports work that engages with Bengaluru's social and cultural histories. In this case, the authors have used photography and essayistic writing to document the relationship between cinema and community in Laggere, a locality where film-going, informal leisure and memory intersect in ways that are often overlooked in mainstream accounts of urban culture.
Cinema As Social Practice
The book's central intervention is to treat cinema not as a standalone art form or a consumer product, but as a lived social practice. In neighbourhoods such as Laggere, film culture extends beyond the theatre hall: it includes conversations, shared viewing habits, local references, memories of stars and stories of access, aspiration and belonging. By focusing on these everyday dimensions, the book challenges the assumption that cultural life in a city is defined only by elite venues or digitally mediated consumption.
That perspective matters in Bengaluru, a city often described through its economic transformation rather than its cultural plurality. Laggere, like many working-class neighbourhoods, offers a different lens on urban life. Here, cinema can function as a collective language, a source of leisure and a repository of memory. The book appears to position these experiences as worthy of serious documentation, not as peripheral anecdotes.
A Neighbourhood Archive
The photo-essay format gives the project particular force. Images can capture the material settings of leisure — streets, gathering points, posters, interiors and faces — while the accompanying text can interpret how these spaces are used and remembered. Together, they create an archive of a neighbourhood's cultural habits, one that is likely to be as much about absence and change as about presence.
Such a record is significant because working-class cultural histories are often under-archived. Urban documentation tends to privilege institutions, landmarks and official heritage, while the informal worlds of neighbourhood leisure remain scattered across memory. By centring Laggere, the book contributes to a broader effort to recognise how ordinary spaces produce cultural meaning.
The title itself, 'Reel Duniya, Real Duniya,' signals the tension and overlap between cinematic imagination and lived reality. That framing suggests the book is interested in how film offers escape, aspiration and identification, while also being shaped by the material conditions of the people who watch it. In that sense, the project is not simply about movies; it is about how cinema helps structure social life.
Bengaluru Beyond The Usual Lens
The publication also arrives at a moment when Indian cities are increasingly being re-read through local histories, neighbourhood studies and community archives. In Bengaluru, this kind of work is especially important because the city's public image often obscures the diversity of its residents and the unevenness of its development. A project like this widens the frame, showing that cultural production does not only happen in studios, galleries or multiplexes.
By emerging from Project 560, the book also reflects a growing interest in place-based research and storytelling. The programme's support indicates a recognition that city life is best understood through granular, grounded accounts rather than broad generalisations. Laggere becomes, through this book, both a specific locality and a case study in how cinema shapes urban experience.
For readers, the book offers more than nostalgia or visual documentation. It proposes a way of seeing the city through its audiences, its routines and its shared pleasures. In doing so, it places working-class leisure at the centre of cultural analysis — and reminds us that the history of cinema in India is also the history of the places where people gather to watch, remember and imagine.