New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xv, 420 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9780231196154.
It was not an accident that the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913) directed by Dadasaheb Phalke, was produced in the colonial city of Bombay. At the turn of the last century, the colonial city emerged as a “city of arrival” for writers, actors, singers, and dancers from all over the Indian subcontinent. In the city, cine-workers joined engineers, builders, salespersons, clerks, managers, and traders toiling for fortune and fame. The story of the origin of cinema as a modern cultural industry is the subject of the biopic film on Phalke, Harishchandrachi Factory (2009). In the film, director Paresh Mokashi shows how cinema emerged precariously at the intersections of the performing arts with modern industry, trade, technological innovations, and finance. However, the prehistory of Indian cinema has eluded scholarly attention—until now.
The study of Bombay cinema—intersecting with the history of cine-work, filmic practices, and media ecology—is the subject of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City by Debashree Mukherjee. Bombay Hustle draws the reader into a cine-ecology of interrelated and interdependent relationships among material and cultural practices of cine workers and the trader-mercantile substratum in which the early studios emerged and thrived. Mukherjee shows how a central feature of the fluidity and precarity of the talkies era was the speculative aspect of hustling associated with the game of kismet in trading stocks and commodities, gambling, and horse racing.
Bombay Hustle is likely the first archeo-anthropology of cinema in India. Mukherjee focuses on the late colonial period from 1931, the year the first talkie Alam Ara was made, to 1949, the year India transitioned from a colonial dominion to a republic. The talkies period laid the foundation of the norms and practices of cine-work that stabilized in the 1950s and in some ways still persists in the city. Sadly, out of 2,126 talkies produced in these two decades less than 10 percent of the film prints survive.
It is refreshing to have a book on the colonial period in Indian cinema that is not primarily a study of films as texts. Instead, like an archeologist, Mukherjee digs into film sites of production, objects, bodies, practices, and modes of production and finance to show immaterial structures of entangled and interdependent relationships in the cine-ecology of late colonial Bombay.
Mukherjee shows how cinema thrived in the late colonial period because of a collaboration that brought people together from diverse social and vocational backgrounds. Discussing the magic of cinema as a jadu ghar (house of magic) she writes, “Indian film technicians with training at the Phototone Studios in Neuilly or photography institutes in New York collaborated with set designers from Marathi theater and screenwriters from the Urdu modernist movement, who in turn relied on singers from Calcutta’s courtesan economy and bodybuilders from Java, to concoct something we now consider Bombay cinema” (23).
The book highlights the entangled relationship among technology, trading, capital flows, and filmmaking as a business and cultural practice. Unlike Hollywood in its formative years, the Bombay film industry was not easily amenable to corporatization. However, as Mukherjee shows, a failure to secure institutional capital neither stopped the filmmaking enterprise from prospering nor did it squelch the creativity of the artists. The hustling practices linked to speculation of teji (bull) and mandi (bear) of Satta Bazaar informed how film projects were pitched to financiers who were mostly familiar with the risks of investments in stock and cotton commodity exchanges of Bombay that were linked to the global economy or the informal decentralized dynamism of Satta Bazaar. Mukherjee elucidates this through case studies of Ranjit Movitone (est. 1929), Sagar Movitone (est. 1929), and Bombay Talkies (est. 1934).
But did the early talkies have a place for awaaz (voice) of women? Mukherjee addresses this question in a section devoted to what she described as “abhinetri film.” She shows that what emerges is “complex claims made on talkie actresses who were at once ‘real women’ playing fictional characters, ‘Indian women’ performing tropes of ideal femininity, and ‘modern women’ embodying technological and social promises of the cinematic age” (163). The gendered values of society coexisted with the emancipatory potential of modern women as doctors and lawyers in films such as Dr. Madurikha (1935), Hunterwali (1935), and Madam Fashion (1936).
Nearing the end of the book, the author looks into the coping abilities of the bodies of cine workers. The appreciation of the feeling of thakaan (exhaustion), the bodily limits, is perhaps something that was not often appreciated by film producers and studio owners. Mukherjee addresses the theme of thakaan by discussing the famous hunger strike in 1939 of Shanta Apte, an iconic actress and singer who featured in mythological talkies. To protest non-payment of salary, and exploitative and disrespectful treatment by a director working for Prabhat Studios, Apte conducted a hunger strike. Not surprisingly her hunger strike was seen and compared with hunger strikes and dharnas (sit-ins) undertaken by Mahatma Gandhi and his followers. Mukherjee draws our attention to Apte’s highly personal journaling published under the title Jaau Mi Cinemaant? (Should I Join the Movies?). Apte through her hunger strike and writing brought into focus how the depleting labour power at the end of days’ work, or over years, merits adequate compensation and security.
The chapter on exhaustion segues into the final chapter on workforce and unionization in the Bombay film industry. Mukherjee, originally from Mumbai, is a self-avowed fan and a former cine worker herself. She concludes her discussion with a cognitive mapping of the network of energy flows among fans, creative artists, and the industrial workforce that overcame precarity in the late colonial period. This book should be a must-read for scholars of South Asian cinema and cultural studies.
Anup Kumar
Cleveland State University, Cleveland