Film history has been coming of age, bringing forgotten histories and complex forces of production into view. Where historiography has often focused on the films and the stars, recent inter-disciplinary methodologies have been taking in a broader sweep. They have been engaging with the less discernible, less glamorous activities of filmmaking: the finance, the materiality, the technologies, the politics and the people behind the scenes.
In doing so, cinema is made visible as a force that has, among others, influenced social change, created trends in fashion and interiors, made (and lost) fortunes, created fandom, and provided employment, albeit often of a precarious and sometimes of a downright dangerous nature. Existing alongside other areas of production, filmmaking has been required to be both industrial and creative in the same breath.
Bombay Hustle – Making Movies in a Colonial City, Author: Debashree Mukherjee, Publisher: Columbia University Press.
In viewing cinema “as an ecology of practices and practitioners” Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle – Making Movies in a Colonial City provides a significant and timely contribution to our understanding of how these apparently disparate forces mesh together to form what she describes as a cine-ecology, distinct from the more imprecise ‘film industry’. Seeing cinema as “a fluctuating, transnational form that has borrowed blithely from multiple contexts” Bombay Hustle considers filmmaking in this early period of sound film in Bombay, roughly from the end of the 1920s, through the 1940s; and it is here that we benefit from her insight as both practitioner and academic.
Looking beyond the cinematic frame
Bombay Hustle opens with a photograph of a light boy on the Bombay Talkies’ set of Jawani-ki-hawa (Franz Osten, 1935) inviting the reader to look over his shoulder and consider not only the set in front of him, but to speculate on the possibilities beyond the frame. As with the majority of workers involved in film production, however, he remains anonymous. Mukherjee introduces several individuals throughout the book from this “fragmented, multivocal archive of the past” and discussion of the body, as a source of energy and exhaustion, desire and voice, is central to the text.
Divided into two sections headed ‘Elasticity’ and ‘Energy’, the sections are further subdivided into three chapters, each bearing a dual language title, thereby grounding the narrative in Bombay and differentiating this specific cine-ecology from the Hollywood model that is so frequently evoked in historiographies of the film.
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The first chapter, Speculative Futures/Teji-Mandi, considers the inherently unstable nature of Bombay’s cine-ecology at this time. Financed from a variety of sources from cotton trading to capital investments to maharajas, teji-mandi describes the alternatively fast-paced/slowed down nature of the activity. Mukherjee points out how observations of financial uncertainty, such as gambling, often crossed over into the narratives of social films.
Chapter two, Scientific Desires/Jadu Ghar, invokes the duality of filmmaking that embraces scientific advancements while acknowledging the “capacity of science to be popularly seized on as a modern form of magic,” perhaps also a nod to descriptions of film studios as the dream factory or Traumfabrik. Illustrating this chapter with three interventions that made the process of filmmaking more ‘scientific’: the continuity script; the technical specialist; and the double-unit shooting system, Mukherjee lays the groundwork for the ongoing discussion of the human at the centre of the cine-ecology.
As is clear from its title, Voice/Awaaz, the third and final chapter in the first section, considers the new technology of sound film and the resultant change this brought about with regard to bodies in general and female bodies in particular. In contrast to other areas of film production, it is women’s voices and bodies that provoke the most anxiety in the Indian context during this period.
A still from the movie Alam Ara.
An important theme in Bombay Hustle is Mukherjee’s discourse on the position of women, many of whom “posed a perplexing challenge to Indian society in their newfound role as film professionals and cine-workers”. The perceived threat to the respectability of the female body performing publically bedevilled filmmakers from Dadasaheb Phalke, who employed family members and young men in female roles; to Himansu Rai who strove to emphasise the high standard of education of his high caste female actors.
Sound film’s requirement for the embodied female voice unleashed further disruption, a factor that initially caused problems for Bombay Talkies when the studio released its first film, Jawani-ki-hawa, at once launching the lasting careers of two Parsi sisters – Khorshed and Manek Minocher-Homji, also known as Saraswati Devi and Chandraprabha – but losing three of the studio’s Parsi directors in abrupt resignation.
‘Energy with a sense of purpose’
Section two focuses on energy and opens with Vitality/Josh, where josh signifies “energy with a sense of purpose”. This provides the opportunity to discuss the male body as depicted in Manto’s short story Mera Naam Radha Hai, as a site of energy and strength and yet one that “exposes the searing gulf between bodies differentiated by caste, class and gender”.
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Contrast this with the hero from Bombay Talkies’ Nav Jeevan (Osten, 1939), Mahendra, a hypochondriac who is “unused to modern regimes of physical culture”. Discussing modernity’s “obsession with energy and its depletion”, Mukherjee illustrates this discussion with a fabulous advertisement recommending Horlicks to a Bombay film director whose “chances are ruined by night starvation”. A reminder that historical research can draw on many sources.
Representational image of old Indian cinema. Photo: Rajkamal Kalamandir Film Company, CC BY-SA
Chapter five, Exhaustion/Thakaan, considers what happens when this human energy is depleted. Mukherjee introduces this discourse with Shanta Apte’s 1939 hunger strike. Although a highly publicised complaint about her treatment by Prabhat Studios, Mukherjee reminds us that this was also a common form of rebellion against colonial authorities, as practised by Gandhi. Apte’s Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I join the movies?) comes under Mukherjee’s scrutiny to reveal the film star’s political insights into the way India’s film industry treated its workforce, “drawing comparisons of film work with factory work”.
The struggles
The final chapter in this section, Short Circuit/Struggle, argues ‘struggle’ from its Mumbai/Bombay perspective for, “to struggle in Bombay is to hustle for the elusive ‘big break’ in the movies”; it is this hustle that gives the book its title. There is much here that resonates with media industries in general: the precarity of labour and the dangers of labour.
Mukherjee explores the ease with which this precarity of labour has arisen, fed from the early days by an endless stream of fans, whose passion for cinema entangles them in the struggle to gain entry to the cine-ecology. Including the notion of fandom as part of a cine-ecology is thought-provoking and novel. Turning to the dangers of labour, she cites numerous instances of accidents in studios and on sets, examples of which can be found around the globe, but nevertheless an area that has so far received scant attention from film historians.
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“Histories of everyday production are hard to grasp … we can approach them only through memories, oral histories, anecdotes, and speculative historiography.” Historical research often requires lateral thinking and openness to engage with a variety of sources, not all of them respectably curated in archives.
Mukherjee’s extensive research has benefited from access to two significant family archives related to the Bombay Talkies. The archive of curated photographs taken by the German cinematographer, Josef Wirsching, recording both the process of filmmaking as well as the people involved; and Devika Rani’s own archive, now in the possession of the Dietze family in Australia, direct descendants of Devika’s co-founder of Bombay Talkies, Himansu Rai.
This is a book to return to again and again, for there is much here to engage with.
Eleanor Halsall is a film historian working on STUDIOTEC at the University of Southampton.