No powerful industry can survive without self-mythologisation. Hollywood has excelled at such mythmaking, with several films about the origins and pioneers of its industry. Bombay cinema too has made attempts to render its cinematic history into screen fodder, but its myths usually belong to two types: the tragic fall of an artistic genius (eg. Kaagaz ke Phool), or the dreams and disillusionment of a struggling actor (eg. Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon).
The new Amazon Prime series Jubilee crafts a new, more resonant myth in the genre of Hollywood self-mythologies (think Sunset Boulevard to Babylon) – a tale of ambition, revenge and cold-blooded murder. This is a dark story of the original hustle, where India’s film practitioners constitute the first sector of workers who gambled away their wealth, bodies and loyalties for that thrilling dream called “love of cinema”. The show’s story and its ambitions are epic, and the plot is chockfull of epic stuff – the emergence of a film industry from the dastardly murder of a great talent, a sinister opening tone that resonates through the series alongside the murderous energies of the Partition and its aftermath.
Jubilee, helmed by Vikramditya Motwane, is loosely based on the rise and fall of Bombay Talkies, a legendary film studio founded by the Europe-returned couple Himansu Rai and Devika Rani. The show opens with the real-life elopement scandal that threatened to destroy the studio in its first years when Devika Rani ran away to Calcutta with her leading man, Najmul Hussain. Several rumours exist about what exactly happened, but as I have written elsewhere, it is clear that the two had fallen in love, and that Devika Rani was trying to leverage her star power to negotiate a joint contract for herself and newcomer Najmul at the legendary New Theatres studio in Calcutta.
As someone who has spent two decades researching the history of the Bombay film industry, and a few years working in that industry too, I am elated by Jubilee’s scale and grandeur. From lovingly designed Art Deco preview theatres to the immaculately accurate Roy Talkies canteen (BT insisted on its employees living in Malad and ran a great canteen), well-researched refugee camps (rarely seen on screen) and gorgeously simple lyrics and tunes, the makers have spared no expense or effort in bringing a lost era back to life in all its atmospheric textures. Kudos to production designers Aparna Sud and Mukund Gupta. Pratik Shah and team steal the show with sensuous cinematography and lighting, especially in night shots and interiors. This is film history as Bombay noir, with hardboiled heroes (Srikant Roy, Madan Kumar, Jay Khanna) unleashing moral chaos even as they script Bollywood’s future.
But this is where the showrunners miss a golden opportunity. Jubilee reinforces some cliched narratives of the Bombay film industry, the most unshakeable of which has been the myth of male pioneers. Srikant Roy may be unscrupulous but he is a creative visionary; Madan Kumar may be a murderer but we are asked to identify with his quest for stardom; and Jay Khanna may be an insecure sexist but he is marked for a sparkling career. To be sure, all three characters are played to perfection by the actors – Prasenjit, Aparshakti Khurana, Sidhant Gupta – but the question remains why pick these three to dominate the entire series?
Halfway through Jubilee, as I watched the shooting of the duet “Udan Khatole”, I was struck by the absence of Saraswati Devi. The mise-en-scene is accurate, with a live orchestra for sync sound recording, but as the camera pans 360 degrees around this space, the only woman we see is the singing actress. It might come as a shock to readers that Bombay Talkies had hired a woman, Khorshed Homij (renamed Saraswati Devi), despite great resistance from the local Parsi community, as its in-house music director in 1935. How wonderful it would have been to see an actually existing historical role model as a woman music director in the show. In fact, industry folklore is still divided between who deserves credit for inventing playback singing. Some say it was R.C. Boral of New Theatres, while others maintain it was Saraswati Devi at Bombay Talkies. In Jubilee, the credit goes to Srikant Roy and Madan Kumar in a charming and very clever little scene.
Saraswati Devi (right) watching a rehearsal with Devika Rani and Kishore Sahu for a song sequence in ‘Jeevan Prabhat’. Image courtesy Wirsching Archive/Alkazi Collection.
Jubilee returns obsessively to what is cast as the original sin of Bollywood – the murder of a great creative talent, Jamshed Khan. Every episode takes us back to Khan’s screen test and the violent snuffing out of his talent by the usurper Madan Kumar. Of course, we know that Madan Kumar is a character based on the beloved thespian Ashok Kumar, who indeed was a laboratory assistant at Bombay Talkies before he was summoned to replace the disgraced Najmul Hussain. For the showrunners, Jamshed Khan serves as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim tensions that have shadowed cinema in India since its earliest years.
What else could the premature death of Jamshed Khan symbolise?
Based on my research, the story of Najmul Hussain isn’t the story of a Hindu takeover of the film industry but a surprising story about female stardom. Himansu Rai wasn’t upset about the loss of Najmul Hussain but outraged that his single-most prized asset – Devika Rani – might join another studio. Female stars ruled the marquee in the pre-Independence film ecology and intense bidding wars took place to control actresses and their star power. Studio bosses spent thousands of rupees to hire and hold big names such as Sulochana (born Ruby Myers), Shanta Apte, Meena Shorey, and Ermeline, all of whom were also dragged to court on various charges. Indeed, it is anecdotally known that it was Ermeline who picked out Prithviraj Kapoor from a line of junior artistes and made him a leading man!
Star actresses played key roles in production with Gohar Mamajiwala as a co-producer at Ranjit Movietone (her partner Chandulal Shah is the historical reference for Srikant Roy’s cotton fiasco), while Jaddan Bai (Nargis’ mother), Pramilla (born Esther Abraham), and Protima Dasgupta ran their own production companies. None of this is surprising once we understand that actresses were the foundation on which the film industry was built. Actresses like Sulochana, Gohar, Devika Rani and Sabita Devi had bigger fan bases than the male stars, and the evidence for this is aplenty. It was these actresses whose names were lit up outside theatres, headlining screen credits and advertisements, and it was actresses who were the earliest brand ambassadors for everything from soaps to telephones. Friends are astonished when I tell them that in the 1930s actresses like Sita Devi were earning four times the salary as their male counterparts such as D. Billimoria and Prithviraj Kapoor!
Star salaries in 1932.
Memory is fallible and can therapeutically select only those elements that serve us in the future. The male heroes, directors, and producers who took over the industry in the 1950s cannot be relied on to remember the women of the pre-Independence era. If, as Jubilee suggests, it is the victors whose version of history survives, the show also tells us that this history is forged through cowardice, ambition, and lies. Madan Kumar/Binod Das overcomes his nightmares by creating a narrative in which he is simply a bystander rather than a perpetrator. Jay Khanna, largely modelled on Raj Kapoor, joins Binod in this coverup. Who then, is the Jamshed Khan who haunts the show and the history of Bombay cinema? What was erased on the eve of Independence that continues to haunt our film history? Could it be Bombay cinema’s OG stars, its women?
It is true that by the time Ashok Kumar played Bombay’s first anti-hero, Shekhar, in Kismet, the era of female stars was waning. And that is one of the big industrial transitions that the Bombay cine-ecology goes through between the 1940s and the 1950s. But when the radio magnate Jotwani tells the star-producer Sumitra Devi that “masses follow male heroes” it is an outrageous lie. Jotwani cites Mehboob Khan’s Aurat as evidence that woman-centric films flop. What he doesn’t say is that Aurat was declared a “triumph” in the press and its 1957 remake, Mother India, starring Nargis, was one of the biggest hits of all time! Most of the earliest hits of Bombay – be it Telephone Girl (1926) or Achhut Kanya (1936) were heroine-centred films. And I believe that it is urgently important for our current generation of actors and producers to know this. As Sumitra Devi sits there listening to the obnoxiously smug Jotwani I felt a chill down my spine for the many times that Aditi Rao Hydari herself must have heard this spiel from her own male contemporaries.
Wamiqa Gabbi, who is stellar as Nilofer Qureishi, plays a part we know all too well: the kothewali-turned-filmstar who is serially exploited and betrayed by the men around her. While this trajectory is not historically untrue, it becomes harmful through repetition. It erases all the other imaginations of lives actually lived by women in the pre-Independence film industry. To give you just one direct parallel to Nilofer: in the 1930s an established and wealthy courtesan, Shamshad Begum, moved to Bombay and bought an expensive flat on Marine Drive. She was grooming her daughter to be a film actress and shooing off suitors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad’s most eligible son, Moazam Jah. This daughter was Naseem Banu, who came to be known as Pari-chehra Naseem and commanded one of the highest salaries in town. In later years, Naseem’s daughter Saira Banu became a star in her own right, stylishly outfitted in costumes designed by her mother. Naseem’s story could have easily been Nilofer’s, but our writers seem to prefer stories of female suffering over female success.
One of my favourite moments in Jubilee is when at end of Episode 2 we see Nilofer walking bare feet at Independence Day celebrations on the streets of Bombay, lustily drinking straight from a bottle, and laughing at gawking men. Here we have a rare moment of lightness in a show that is unduly burdened by the seriousness of its own mythmaking masculinist agenda. For me, this Nilofer embodies that brief interlude in South Asia’s film history when some women of the entertainment world enjoyed a rare creative freedom and a lightness of being.
Debashree Mukherjee is the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020) and editor of the photo-anthology Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema (Mapin and Alkazi).