# IRS officer’s vintage Bollywood posters trace cinema history in Lucknow show 2026-08-21T03:25:43+00:00 | World & Diplomacy | Indian Opinion Desk Corroboration: 1 independent outlet An Indian Revenue Services officer's personal collection of vintage cinema posters, spanning from the late 1930s to the present, is on display at the Bioscope: Caravan Guzar Gaya exhibition in Lucknow's Kokoro Art Gallery. Suboor Usmani has gathered rare hand-painted originals including Pukar (1939), Ram Rajya (1943), Aan (1952) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960). Usmani, a former Mastermind India winner, attaches trivia to each poster: Ram Rajya (1943) was the only film Mahatma Gandhi ever watched, and Usmani acquired a damaged copy free with a Don (1978) purchase at a Mumbai antique shop. The show also highlights lesser-known facts, such as Nirupa Roy playing Razia Sultan in a 1961 film before the better-known 1983 version. Curator Vandana Sehgal said the collection documents how posters evolved from hand-painted labour to digital prints. The free exhibition, inaugurated by former bureaucrat Navneet Sehgal and Lucknow Film Forum founder Renuka Tandon, runs until August 20. ## Indian Opinion Analysis An IRS officer's private collection, built over years at antique shops and flea markets, now serves as an informal archive of Indian cinema's visual history. Hand-painted posters, a craft that employed thousands before digital printing, are themselves vanishing artefacts, making each surviving piece a document of both film and labour history. The Lucknow exhibition runs for two more days, whether such ephemera will find a permanent institutional home, or remain dependent on individual collectors, is an open question for cultural preservation in India. ## Coverage - hindustantimes.com Straight arts-and-culture reporting with no political or ideological framing applied to either the collector, the exhibition or the government. This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Tags: Bollywood, Lucknow, Mughal-E-Azam, Suboor Usmani, Vandana Sehgal Canonical: https://indianopinion.org/irs-officers-vintage-bollywood-posters-trace-cinema-history-in-lucknow-show/ License: Summary and commentary (c) Indian Opinion, reusable with attribution. Facts belong to the linked sources. Cite: https://indianopinion.org/irs-officers-vintage-bollywood-posters-trace-cinema-history-in-lucknow-show/#story-in-brief Review state: restored archive article, accurate at time of publication, not offered to search indexes. How this brief was made: an AI model read the report linked above and wrote this summary and analysis, which were published automatically. Published briefs are sampled every hour by an automated quality check; the editor verifies its findings and approves corrections, and corrected briefs carry a dated correction line. We do no original reporting. Methodology: https://indianopinion.org/ai-use-policy/