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“It was like we woke up one morning and they were all gone,” said V. Geetha, one of the authors of “The 9 Emotions of Indian Cinema Hoardings,” just launched at Chennai.

Published by Tara Publishing, the book is a tribute to this vanishing art form and the artists who lost their livelihood with the advent of digitised hoardings.

“We didn’t want to do just a documentary of the artwork,” said Geetha, writer, translator Instead she and co-author Sirish Rao set out on a more ambitious task: to capture the navrasa, the nine emotions of these hoardings, ranging from the righteous fury of the angry young hero to the terror of the heroine. But it was far from easy, given that none of the old artists kept any record of their work, and that few archives or collections of the artwork exist.

“In Hollywood, old cinema posters have been documented — you can look up the original poster of ‘Gone with the Wind’, for example,” said film historian Theodore Bhaskaran, speaking at the launch. “Unfortunately, cinema hoarding art in India has been neglected, in spite of producing artists of the calibre of M.F. Hussain.”

The book also contributes to film studies literature with four essays on hoarding artists, the history of the art.

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