Indo-Persian romance and female stardom in the late silent and early sound era Anupama Prabhala The late silent and early sound era in India saw two notable films made by the Iranian scholar Abdolhossein Sepanta. Both were romances: “Cheshman-e Siah” (Black Eyes,1936) and Leyli and Manjun (1937). Given that Sepanta had played the male lead in, and written the script for, Lor Girl—produced by the Imperial Film Company and directed by Ardeshir Irani for Iran, both Cheshman-e Siah (Shree Krishna Film Co.), and Leyli and Manjun (East India Film Co.) mark a departure to unusual Indian studios and production companies. The two films also mark an ironic geographical shift away from Bombay as a site of film (co)production into different metropolises in order to enhance the imagination of Iran as a locus of “Oriental” romance. Shree Krishna was located outside Bombay in Pune and the East India Film company in Calcutta. However, both studios were stakeholders in disseminating a Parsi-Irani film culture through Sepanta’s involvement with Indian film production and its circulation in “foreign” countries like Iran that were nevertheless aligned with India through Islam as a religion and culture. This paper is framed around the following set of questions: in what ways was Iran imagined as the Orient in a South Asian country like India? To what extent, and how, did Sepanta intervene in the Persianate and Islamicate idioms circulating in the historical romance and costume genres prevalent in Indian cinema of that time? Last but not the least, given the taboos on female acting in cinema in both Iran and India, how did Sepanta’s introduction of Fakhrozzaman Jabbar Vaziri, who starred in three of Sepanta’s films, including Shirin Farhad (1934), Cheshman-e Siah, and Leyli and Manjun, enhance the imagination of Iran as an exotic but still accessible foreign space? Could one Orient (India in the British imaginary) cancel out another Orient (Iran in the Indian imaginary)? Could Vaziri’s Iranian identity—outside Iran but within India—circumvent shared taboos on female acting?