Bombay Hustle, by Debashree Mukherjee (introduction)

Introduction Mapping a Cine-Ecology

A young man stands looking out onto a film set. We cannot see his face, and his name has disappeared into the back rooms of history. But this silhouetted figure is the protagonist of an entire world of meaning contained inside the photographic frame. With the camera positioned just behind him, we are invited to gaze on the scene from his point of view.

Who is he? What does he see?

The man stands straight but at ease, one hand in his pocket, waiting. Another man in trousers and shoes hurriedly blurs out of the right edge of the photograph. Our protagonist is wearing shorts and might be barefoot. These are clues that help us speculate about his identity. Judging by the shorts and his location within this spatial field, our anonymous hero is most probably a “light boy,” a below-the-line film worker whose job is to carry and position lights during a shoot.1 He stands amid a thick tangle of lines and edges, objects and currents: electric cables, freshly sawed partitions for a new set, lights, furniture, scaffolding, and other humans, each waiting in the shadows to be called on for the next spurt of filmmaking activity.

Peering over the shoulder of this anonymous light boy, Bombay Hustle presents a practitioner’s eye view of filmmaking activity in late colonial Bombay (1920s–1940s).2 I frame Bombay cinema as an ecology of practices and practitioners, generating new insights into the relation between a modernizing city in the throes of political agitation and a

film industry struggling to craft a viable cultural and commercial form.

It is through a whirlpool of synchronous and incommensurable material practices generated by diverse film workers that cinema was forged as a distinctive and nameable medium for the modern age. Cinema, in this account, exceeds the content on the film screen and embraces a density of embodied techniques that are predicated on a future image but take place long before the final film product reaches the screen.

Thus the work of ideating, acting, writing, dancing, stitching, lighting, and simply waiting on the sets in preparation for a shot are equal parts of the history of cinema and should be central to our understanding of local productions of modernity. By keeping my ears to the ground and my gaze at street level, I show how practices of filmmaking were critical to the production of variegated visions of the individual, the modern, freedom, and unfreedom in a moment of high nationalism.

Animating the book are two basic questions: What does it mean to do film work, and what can a history of film practice tell us about the life of cinema in India? Each chapter focuses on a different kind of practice—from financial speculation and screenwriting to dialogue delivery and stunt work—demonstrating cinema’s inextricable ties with Bombay’s indigenous credit networks, colonial science, industrial struggle, urbanization, political oratory, and local geography. The historical figure of the film practitioner, in my account, could just as easily be a producer as a background dancer, showing us that filmmaking has historically been a dispersed and collaborative enterprise. Taking this idea a step further, I frame the terrain of film production in Bombay as a cine-ecology wherein bodies, institutions, technologies, and environments collectively shape the production and circulation of cinematic meaning.

The term cine-ecology describes a material reality as well as a method for a processual and nondualist approach to film. I offer it as a provisional analytical tool rather than a grand system of explanation. If the older “media ecology” debates that took center stage in North America in the 1960s were focused on how a technological form can produce a sensory-perceptual environment, cine-ecology positions technology as only one among a plural, though unequal, field of actors.3 Cine-ecologies emerge out of the energetic entanglement of practices, symbols, infrastructures, ideologies, actors, and climates that swirl around the film 2

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image in locations where filmmaking and film consumption are prominent aspects of everyday life. Bombay, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Lagos, Tokyo, and Paris constitute just a handful of locations where the work of film production has produced continually mutating cine-ecologies. A cine-ecology is tied to its time and place, even as it is imbricated within translocal material and affective relations. Cinema, which has always been a transnational force, comes to mean very different things as it settles into a specific cine-ecology in Istanbul or Sydney. A tropical place under colonial rule, a modernizing city that becomes the site of a talkie industry, Bombay with all its peculiarities of infrastructure, weather, and social politics—these are the contours of the talkie cineecology that I describe in this book.

Bombay Hustle zooms in on the years of India’s talkie transition, that is, the years in which sound technologies took over India’s silent film landscape and infused filmmaking practices with an altered aural imagination. The wholesale embrace of synchronized sound in 1930s India was momentous. “All talking, singing, dancing films” introduced new aesthetic practices and production techniques, contributed to the consolidation of regional production centers in a land with striking linguistic diversity, reconfigured the landscape of film distribution and exhibition, and enabled new hierarchies of film finance and labor.

Whereas in Hollywood the period between 1908 and 1915 is considered critical to the consolidation of cinema as culture, industry, and “respectable” entertainment, in India it was during the talkie transition, roughly between 1931 and 1936, that cinema started to unfold as the preeminent mass cultural form of twentieth-century South Asia.4 I look at the period roughly between 1929 and 1942, starting a little before and ending a little after the main technological transition to sound, in order to understand the multiple transmedial and transindustrial forces that converged to create India’s cinema century.5 Ever since the first film screening in Bombay in 1896, cinema and the city hurtled into the future on parallel tracks. In the early nineteenth century Bombay solidified its position as the urbs prima in Indis, the most spectacularly legible engine of modernity in South Asia. A magnet for merchants, politicians, sailors, poets, gamblers, princes, millworkers, sex workers, revolutionaries, and smugglers, Bombay city exuded an edgy aura as a city of hustle, evading the disciplinary In tr o du ction

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authority of colonial-imperial capitals such as Delhi and Calcutta, and built by wresting land over centuries from the mighty Indian Ocean. In 1896 the city was almost destroyed by the bubonic plague, but the same year also saw the cinematograph enter into a crowded terrain of urban entertainment forms. This inchoate technological form called cinema intervened in—or shall we say mediated—local processes of industrial modernization, financial speculation, cultural production, anticolonial resistance, and social reform. By the 1930s Bombay was synonymous with stock exchange thrills, art deco architecture, industrial strikes, the sweeping vistas of the reclaimed Marine Drive promenade, electrified suburban trains, nationalist rallies, and, yes, urban poverty. This was a city momentous, and cinema both gathered together and spewed out the many different energies and emotions that spelled “Bombay.” Unlike most emerging film production centers of the world, Bombay’s production ecology established itself without structured support either from the state or from local financial institutions. As I discuss in chapter 1, this financial abandonment positioned cinema in India as a decidedly speculative space of opportunity as well as crisis. Speculative extrapolations permeated the cine-ecology in its monetary, infrastructural, technological, and industrial practices, and film practitioners wagered daily on their profits, dreams, and lives. Precarity, risk, and danger marked cinema as a space of hustle. To hustle means to move swiftly and hurriedly, or to compel another to move rapidly, to jostle and push. Taken further, hustle can also mean to work desperately, sell aggressively, or to persuade duplicitously. The velocity implied in hustle lies somewhere between desperation and deception (even self-deception) and speaks to the speculative underpinnings of Bombay’s cine-ecology. Hustle is a form of speculative action, a gamble on the future from a site of immediate precarity. Embodied in the nervous energy of corporeal tactics of survival and materialized in the transformation of hope and calculation into short-term gains, hustle is emblematic of every high-speed migrant city in the world but takes on different valences in a colonial city like 1930s Bombay.6 Bombay Hustle asks what is to be gained when we think of colonial and urban modernity via cinematic practice. Indeed, how can we avoid the connection? Whether we look at film producers who actively courted colonial favor, muscular action stars who displayed a collective wish for 4

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national-corporeal strength, or impassioned film dialogues that reiterated the discourse of freedom, Bombay cinema in this period is unmistakably marked by its urban colonial condition.7 The talkie transition closely paralleled the final intensification of India’s freedom movement and was caught between the competing claims of the colonial state and nationalist audiences. In 1927 a colonial inquiry commission—the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC)— was instituted to survey the local film trade, including its infrastructure, methods, and audiences. One of its main tasks was to assess the state of film censorship across British India. Even though the commission’s final recommendations in 1928 were for greater state support for local filmmaking, the colonial gaze was fixed on disciplining film content rather than supporting an indigenous industry. Indian cinema was legible to the colonial state only as an unruly entertainment form that could serve as a propaganda machine for supposedly susceptible natives. Priya Jaikumar notes that “colonial Indian cinema was a survivalist cinema,” battling the financial neglect of the colonial state.8 Crucially, this very neglect prodded different factions in India’s film trade to band together as coherent “industries” with centralized associations that actively maneuvered for state and commercial leverage (more in chapter 2).

But the imbrication of Indian cinema and the colonial condition went beyond either state intervention or neglect and seeped into the everyday textures of life and work. The very fact of colonial occupation created an ambivalent space for cinematic representations of modernity. Filmic protagonists in the trendy “social films” of the 1930s were required to prove their continuity with global icons of fashion and progress as a measure of national worthiness, even as they had to indicate some level of local resistance to foreign influences. This led to interesting on-screen contradictions. If heterosocial college education, freespirited working women, and motor cars were emblems of positive modernity in films like Hunterwali (Homi Wadia, 1936) and Nirmala (Franz Osten, 1938), they could easily be deployed as perilous imported evils in films like Dr. Madhurika (Sarvottam Badami, 1935) and Madam Fashion (Jaddan Bai, 1936) (fig. 0.2). This ambivalence, born of a pressure to be modern and traditional, global and local at the same time, defined the modern as an episteme predicated on asserting ontological binaries.9 It also created one of the most vexing problems of India’s film In tr o du ction

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figures 0.2a and 0.2b Song booklet covers for Dr. Madhurika (Sarvottam Badami, 1935) and Madam Fashion (Jaddan Bai, 1936) convey contemporaneous excitement about the modern woman. (Images courtesy of National Film Archive of India)

figure 0.2a and 0.2b (continued)

industries: how to be modern and “respectable” at the same time; how to showcase cosmopolitan progressiveness and demure Indianness simultaneously. Obsessively focused on the female body, public concerns about cinema as contagion were founded on salacious extrapolations from scenes of on-screen intimacy, the participation of women In tr o du ction

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from traditional performing backgrounds, and the late hours necessary in studio work. Female film professionals thus had to hustle hard for their right to work in a profession that offered unprecedented earning possibilities for women.10 At least since the late 1920s, Bombay was a regular site of religious riots, a situation that worsened in the 1930s and 1940s.11 Film industry stakeholders viewed the growing Hindu-Muslim conflict with great anxiety as riots led to stricter policing and the imposition of curfews, which meant that paying audiences could not go to the movies after sundown. In 1941 the Indian Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association declared: While any other business under the Sun can be transacted from sunrise to sunset, the business of entertaining people by means of the cinema, which provides 90% of the entertainment in India, must remain mostly a nocturnal business, which must needs be suspended in compliance with the curfew orders. During the current riots in all parts of India the cinemas have not collected even one-third their normal collections, while the usual expenses have had to be met nevertheless.12

The commercially motivated panic of producers and distributors gives us a glimpse of the everyday impact of communal violence on individuals’ relationship to the city and their sense of freedom and safety in accessing spaces of pleasure and leisure. As Prem Chowdhry notes, “the lack of alternative kinds of entertainment in the urban centers resulted in the cinema emerging as a popular and comparatively cheap form of entertainment for the lower classes, whose only other form of relaxation was roaming the streets of Bombay.”13 Cinema not only took a hit for tense social conditions but had also become an arena for political mobilization. Apart from routine petitions to colonial censors about films that were perceived as offensive to religious sentiments, Bombay’s film audiences started taking to the streets in the 1930s to picket foreign films that stereotyped and denigrated Indians.14 The stubborn unpredictability of film as business combined with the everyday contingencies of the colonial city. Class, gender, religion, and caste precarities braided with financial market volatility and 8

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political turmoil to render film workers as intensely vulnerable and peculiarly mobile. This precarious mobility will be on prominent display in the following chapters as we journey through Bombay with young fans who achieve spectacular stardom against the obstacles of middle-class gendered morality and producers who meet with spectacular ruin despite the advantages of community-based finance networks.

These itineraries narrate the career of cinema in Bombay as acutely speculative; a history of hustle at every level.

What we mean when we say “cinema” today is a long distance away from what cinema meant to its participants in the 1930s. The word cinema variously connoted the built space of a theater, the shared experience of a darkened auditorium, a frisson of illicitness, a vision of modernity, the incarnation of technological advancement. Cinema was the entire affective and material ecology that cradled and enabled practices of film going and filmmaking. Its meanings were hotly contested and repeatedly redefined to suit the agendas of an array of stakeholders. To echo Brian Larkin, “Debates about what media are, and what they might do, are particularly intense at moments when these technologies are introduced and when the semiotic economies that accompany them are not stable but in the process of being established.”15 By focusing on a history of practices that emerged around the new technological assemblage of the talkie feature film, I highlight the material and epistemic instability of cinema, its continual coming-into-being, and its relations with other media, things, and bodies.

C I N E M A A S P R AC T I C E

Life itself changes form, as cinema inflects the conditions of being, seeping through into the very textures of everyday practice.

—Ravi Vasudevan, “In the Centrifuge of History”

From 2004 to 2007 I worked full-time in Mumbai’s film and television industries. Those four years packed a lifetime’s worth of experiences as I freelanced from job to job and moved from one apartment to another, struggling to keep up with rent increases. I worked as a producer for a television serial, an assistant director for films, and a cameraperson for a reality TV show. Mumbai was not new for me as I had spent many In tr o du ction

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high school years in the city. But navigating urban space as a media professional was quite different. My journeys through the city involved work inside studios and on film sets, shooting on streets and from rooftops, typing on computers and sourcing costumes, keeping track of the 180-degree axis and controlling spontaneous crowds gathered to watch their favorite film stars. During these years I frequently had the intuition that my work and my city were uncannily intertwined. As I returned home in an auto rickshaw late at night, a street corner awash in yellow tungsten light suddenly felt like a film set; a chai break in a paan-stained, draughty stairwell during postproduction felt like the definition of Mumbai. Driving along Marine Drive or waiting at Churchgate Station for the Borivili fast train, I would find myself humming songs like “Rim jhim gire saawan” or “Bawra mann,” where memories of cinema articulated my subconscious emotions. In moments like these, cinema and the city merged into one and bodily affects seamlessly traversed the worlds of film and life.

Thinking with lived experiences such as these, I view Bombay cinema as a set of cultural practices entangled with the lifeworld of the city. I add my own embodied experience of film work to scores of other experiences that are registered, whether in bold or in faint lines, in the archives of Indian cinema in order to foreground certain resonances between past and present and to complicate any easy historicism. By placing the “I” in the text, my hope is that worlds both inside and outside the archive can stay in dialogue through absence and uncanny presence.

As affect, the “cinematic” in late colonial Bombay describes an emergent sensory intuition quite like my own, an intuition of the modern world as deeply enwrapped with a techno-industrial assemblage dedicated to creating fictional representations of the world. The practices that produced Bombay cinema and helped reproduce its social, cultural, and financial power included corporeal-cultural techniques such as positioning an electric arc lamp, writing a continuity script, and holding a boom microphone steady.16 As different bodies pushed a camera trolley, adjusted the focus on a lens, or mixed pigment powders to match an actress’s skin tone, they also crafted fresh imaginations of who they were and what they could be. In the process, cinema altered the city and a new historical figure came into being—the cine-worker.

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I describe the cine-worker as any person involved in the production of films, irrespective of pay scale. While important legislation in India provides a wage-based definition of the term in order to afford legal protections to vulnerable below-the-line workers, I extend the term to embrace all levels of the industrial hierarchy, recognizing that it is a bodily orientation toward cinema and an understanding of cinema as vocation that binds all cine-workers, even as multiple class (and other) differences divide them.17 Work, as performed by the cine-worker, comprises the set of daily gestures she uses as she interacts with the technical objects and geographical particularities of her cine-ecology. These gestures take place within overlapping regimes of value that commercially appraise the significance of work along parameters such as productivity, utility, and human creativity. The repetitive doing of work produces the worker.

Such a somatic intuition was felt by the celebrated writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto when he worked as a screenwriter in the 1940s: I was in Bombay at the time. On regular days I would take the electric train from Filmistan and reach home by 6pm. But on that particular day, I got a little late. The heated discussions over Shikari had gone on endlessly.

When I got off at Bombay Central station I noticed a girl who had just emerged from the third class compartment. She was dark.

Her features were good. Young. She had an unusual gait. It looked as though she were writing the scenario of a film.18

At the time described, Manto was employed at Filmistan Studio in Goregaon and working on the film Shikari (Savak Vacha, 1946). He was also an ethnographer of the city and its film industry. In several of his Bombay stories we meet Manto himself as a chronicler of the everyday, making keen observations on the city’s myriad spaces of darkness and shadow, of which the world of film production was an intimate part.

There is much to return to in Manto’s Bombay work, but I want to pause here on the intriguing meaning of the sentence “It looked as though she were writing the scenario of a film.” As an erstwhile screenwriter and script supervisor, I have puzzled over this very odd simile. After a long day of writing and script discussions, perhaps the whole world starts to In tr o du ction

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look like a movie? Why else would you compare a stranger’s gait with the act of writing a screenplay? Maybe because one’s own body becomes so saturated with an acquired film technique that other people’s bodies also take on a cinematic resonance? In producing this comparison, Manto produces screenwriting as a distinct bodily attitude that can be used as a referent for other routine activities. In the moment that Manto-the-literary-writer uses his film practice as a reference for the world, Manto-the-screenwriter reflexively comes into being. Cinema shows itself as more than a finished film or text, but rather, a set of practices through which media and subjects are mutually constituted in an ongoing process of individuation.

Practice is repetitive activity oriented to a future, the rehearsal of a task and the rehearsal of the self as produced by the task. As a set of learned habits of the body, practice is tethered to a specific time and place, as also to specific objects. A film actress practices her craft at the intersection of her body, her institutional location, costumes, makeup, and props; as also coactors, directors, cameras, and lights. In practicing her craft, the actress shows herself as continually becoming-actress, trying to change, adapt, and improve, or just struggling to stay relevant.

Practice may be aimed at perfecting a skill or stabilizing an operational procedure, but it cannot shed the indeterminacy intrinsic to its processual and relational nature. A technology like the motion picture camera can work most efficiently when it articulates with a camera operator within an energy grid that can power the machine, supported by controlled light, color, and noise conditions. The cinematographer and the camera are defined by their relation to each other but are also dependent on a network of uncredited and often unobserved actors such as gaffers, light stands, light boys, camera assistants, reflectors, steady voltage, and film stock. This network of actors, once recognized, reveals that filmmaking is a complex and collaborative set of operations and that creative agency is dispersed across a film set, capable of surprises at multiple nodes of contact (fig. 0.3).

Precisely because filmmaking involves complex, hierarchical, and intricately networked relays between numerous people, objects, and machines, cinematic practice is a slippery object of study. What should we study when we study the making of movies? For a long time the answer to that question was that we should study the practices that 12

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figure 0.3 A film crew preps to move to the next location. Bombay, circa 1938.

(Josef Wirsching Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

seem most particular to the medium of cinema—the work of acting, directing, camerawork, or editing. The neo-Marxist interventions of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson introduced a turn to studies of “mode of production” in cinema industries, connecting economic imperatives with aesthetic decisions.19 More recently, the rise of media industry studies signals a different structural approach to contemporary film production. Filmmaking is viewed as a large-scale corporate enterprise, and questions of infrastructure, finance, distribution networks, institutional policy, and transnational collaborations are of paramount concern here.20 The role of the practitioner, however, can get obscured in these investigations. This is mainly due to a political economy emphasis that can abstract practices and processes into structures and patterns. Alongside these macrostudies we also have explorations of the micropractices of creative labor or “production cultures.” Notable work in this model of production studies uses ethnographic questions and methods to explore the “cultural practices and belief systems” of anonymous, behind-the-scenes media workers or the “identity work” done by invisible media practitioners that reproduces the very notions In tr o du ction

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of industry that keeps their labor hidden.21 A third approach to production comes out of a renewed turn to materiality in film studies, which has yielded substantive new research on mise-en-scène as a vital part of the stuff of cinema.22 Each of these emphases can be noted in Indian film studies as well, with a burgeoning body of work that considers the institutional, discursive, financial, technical, representational, and transnational frames of film production using a range of methods, including ethnography, social theory, political economy, and film and media theory.23 In Bombay Hustle I attempt something allied but different. I join existing work on industries and practices in their attempts to expand the sites and objects of media production but take the archival route to visit a past moment in cinematic practice, separated from today by almost a hundred years. I approach the archive with a mixed bag of tools, dialogically considering the sensuousness of labor and its imbrication in logics of structure. What would it mean to narrate an ecology of practices that bridges the particular and the pattern, the embodied and the institutional, contingency and convention? I am quite conscious of my location in the present and its urgencies and also aware that one can never fully capture the ephemerality of practice, especially when combined with temporal distance. Instead of capture, I choose conjugation as a reflexive method committed to the libidinal coupling of texts, images, data, and memories, as I will discuss further in this introduction. The work of conjugation is resolutely not a flattening of sources or of historical actors, and I pay attention to the lived textures of power.

The new materialisms of today are increasingly turning to inanimate things in a move to displace the human subject as the hubristic center of societies, ecologies, and imaginations.24 Indeed, this is an urgent critical and ethical move, but it comes at a time when calls to decenter Western and Northern approaches to media, culture, and technology are finally gaining momentum. Therefore it becomes imperative to recognize the simultaneity of differential human depletion alongside planetary exhaustion, of the exacerbated precarity of some human lives at the same time as the extinction of water, forest, and animal lives.

The historical film worker engaged in the practice of making movies is not a unified, stable subject but an unfolding figure gradually 14

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moving toward individuation. Here I draw on the concept of individuation as theorized by Gilbert Simondon, whose emphasis was on the processual and the emergent, on ontogenesis rather than ontology.25 Individuation is the process of becoming-subject, of continually coming into being in relation to other individuals and things. The individual, or the becoming-individual, is a set of potentialities that are energized through specific couplings. Building on these ideas, I approach filmmaking as a processual and relational activity that emerges within a networked ecology of heterogeneous embodied practices. I draw insights from theories of assemblages and actor-networks to view creative production as a dispersed process involving distributed agency.26 There is also a durational temporality to individuation-as-process. In this book you will meet the singing star, the freelance director, the background dancer, the film financier—each at once a historical actor and an unfolding category of work. At the same time, struggles for individuation are deeply situated practices that foreground corporealaffective vulnerability. Some of these actors are also silhouetted characters, like the anonymous light attendant at the start of this book, located on the edges of the historical record and public memory. It is a symptom of their extreme marginality that they ceaselessly strive toward selfdefinition, resisting the erasure of their singularity. For that is the real struggle in a world marked by power asymmetries—the fight to retain a sense of self, to make oneself legible to structures of power.

What would it mean to rethink historicity via embodied practice?

Cinema in the early twentieth century was not only a device that could speed up still images into life-like motion, nor was it solely a medium that could arrest a real moment in time and capture it on celluloid. It was not only an archive with definite temporal limits, vulnerable to the ravages of weather, fire, and wear and tear, nor was it simply a technology that could transport the viewer across wide gaps of space and time.

The daily hustle of filmmaking in late colonial Bombay shows us that cinema was also an affective site of pleasure, thrill, and fulfilment for hundreds of cine-workers who actively embraced its industrial and economic contingencies. Cinema as production experience invited workers, then and now, to imagine new horizons for the self, marking the labor of filmmaking with a particular futurity. Indeed, in the fragmented archive of Indian film history, as well as in twenty-first-century In tr o du ction

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accounts of film production, there are two aspects to the experience of filmmaking that cine-workers continue to cite as distinctive: waiting and recursive operations. Both aspects depend on duration, that is, the time in which things happen, to mark out the singularity of the experience. The durational experience of waiting combines with the recursivity of filmmaking to make production experience a particular temporal orientation of the body. Waiting for a break, waiting on set, waiting for box office results combine with the repetitive gestures of rehearsals and retakes (even remakes), giving rise to a bodily consciousness of film as work and the self as cine-worker.27 S PAC E A N D T I M E I N T H E C I N E - E C O L O G Y

After working as a media professional for a few years in the mid-2000s, I decided to research the history of film production in Bombay. I had heard that one of the most legendary film studios of the 1930s, Bombay Talkies Ltd., was still around, perhaps in ruins. In the summer of 2008 I set out to look for the remains of this early talkie studio based on an archival address and Google maps. I told the auto rickshaw driver to take me to the intersection of Nanabhai Bhuleshwar Road and Chincholi Bunder Road, that we would find a police post and a little temple along the way. We drove in circles for a while but could not find the landmarks I had suggested. Then a friend called me on my cell phone and I told him I was going to give up on looking for Bombay Talkies.28 When I hung up, the auto driver turned around exasperatedly and asked, “So you want to go to Bombay Talkies? Why didn’t you say so before?” It turned out that even though the studio buildings had been destroyed decades ago, the place where the studio once stood continues to be called “Bombay Talkies” by its daily users and inhabitants. I realized that past forms of cinema linger in the material spaces of the contemporary city, even as cinema exceeds the bounds of the screen and spills over into collective memory and spatial practice (fig. 0.4).

Even when a built form such as a film studio disappears, the frenetic skein of practices that cohered around it generate a spatial meaning in its place that endures. During the years of the talkie transition in India, practices of film production, distribution, circulation, and viewership permeated and marked the urban landscape. Such a spatial dispersal of 16

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“This is a stunningly ambitious, deeply innovative, and poetic account of the Bombay film industry during cinema’s transition to sound. Debashree Mukherjee brings an embodied knowledge of the city and a material historian’s keen sense of objects, institutions, and energies as she breathes life into a web of stories about the film studios, entrepreneurs, stars, aspirants, film crews, and extras of early Bombay cinema.”

—PRIYA JAIKUMAR AUTHOR OF WHERE HISTORIES RESIDE INDIA AS FILMED SPACE

“Meticulously and inventively researched, Bombay Hustle offers a methodological model for media historians with its staggering and creative array of sources. Offering an experiential feel for the precarious, open-ended, and speculative terrain of Bombay film production, it also simultaneously takes the reader on a spatial tour of the city itself.”

—NEEPA MAJUMDAR AUTHOR OF WANTED CULTURED LADIES ONLY! FEMALE STARDOM AND CINEMA IN INDIA S– S

“Bombay Hustle is a brilliant excavation of the entangled ecologies of Bombay and its cinema during the 1920s–1940s. It uncovers the improvised traffic between the technological apparatus, the urban environment, and cine labor, showing how these intertwined practices made the city and its talkie cinema the signs of colonial modernity. The interpretation is as dynamic and creative as the hustle of Bombay and its cinema.”

—GYAN PRAKASH AUTHOR OF MUMBAI FABLES A HISTORY OF AN ENCHANTED CITY AND CO-SCREENWRITER OF BOMBAY VELVET

“This is an incredibly astute and original contribution to media studies and media theory. It brings together social theories of the modern and the urban, media production and labor, sexuality and gender, and science and technology to understand the formation of a Bombay subjectivity as indivisible from the development of the film industry.”

—VICKI MAYER AUTHOR OF BELOW THE LINE PRODUCERS AND PRODUCTION STUDIES IN THE NEW TELEVISION ECONOMY

“A brilliant achievement! Bombay Hustle bristles with energy, coupling a revolutionary approach to media history with imaginative, skillful writing. By conceiving film history as ‘cineecology,’ Mukherjee hustles her way around tired historical models. For anyone interested in what ‘talking pictures’ meant in colonial India, this book is required reading. I haven’t been this inspired in a very long time.”

—JENNIFER M BEAN EDITOR IN CHIEF FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORIES AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

DEBASHREE MUKHERJEE is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She worked in Mumbai’s film and television industries from 2004–2007.

FILM AND CULTURE SERIES Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover image: Production still from the sets of Achhut Kanya (Untouchable Girl, Franz Osten, 1936). Image courtesy of the Josef Wirsching Archive and the Alkazi Collection of Photography

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK CUP COLUMBIA EDU

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