Centenary commemorations or centenary contestations?—Celebrating a hundred years of cinema in Bombay

The commemorations of the hundredth year of the arrival of cinema in India staged by the Government of Maharashtra were a combination of public and semi‐public rituals inscribing the history of cinema in India onto the urban landscape of Bombay. This article examines those commemorations to show how the history of cinema becomes an arena for the state to proclaim its distinct cultural identity. The centenary commemorations are an example of how a world‐historical moment like the Lumière screenings is appropriated by the state government to assert a particular cultural claim over the city of Bombay.