Book Review: Rosie Thomas,Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies

What if—Rosie Thomas wonders in Bombay before Bollywood—popular Indian cinema was not primarily defined by revered artists like Dadasaheb Phalke, Raj Kapoor, and Guru Dutt, or by “indigenous” genres like the mythological, devotional, social, and historical? How might we reconsider Indian film history once we acknowledge the persistent popularity within it of the films of JBH and Homi Wadia, filled with stunts and magic, swordfights and flying carpets, wrestlers and circus animals? What if the iconic figures of Indian cinema are not (or not just) Mughal emperors and sacred Hindu mothers, but Ali Baba, harem dancers, genies, and fairies?

The title of Thomas’s book itself demands that we employ a kind of double vision, or time travel, to envision alternative histories. Let’s revisit Bombay but before Bollywood, the subordinating conjunction reminding us that our view is unavoidably retrospective, at a Bombay neither yet Bollywood nor Mumbai, but now inevitably configured as a precursor of both from our twenty-first-century vantage point. Appropriately, then, Thomas’s book is organized via a dual structure: it is arranged in two large parts that trace a loose chronology from the earliest Indian cinema to the present, with her main focus on popular Hindi cinema prior to the emergence of the cultural configuration we now (often reluctantly) call Bollywood. In this linear unfolding, Thomas challenges us to recognize another (or an other) history of popular Hindi cinema than the one established within recent scholarship, centered on a relatively narrow canon of now “classic” films and “major” figures from the “Golden Age” of post-Independence India. Rather than a nationalist, local, or even fiercely independent swadeshi cinema, she proposes a reconsideration of Indian cinema defined by “a Westernized Indian modernity, in touch with global popular culture” (p. 26).

Here is where a second, underlying layer of Bombay before Bollywood comes into view: as her prefatory comments and footnotes clarify for readers not already familiar with her work, the book’s “deep structure” revises not only the history of popular Hindi cinema, but its disciplinary historiography. Boldly, Thomas redirects the trajectory of popular Hindi cinema’s emergence and development as a legitimate field of inquiry for film studies. From this perspective, two chapters in the second half of the book (two previously unpublished) are this study’s actual origin, and the first half of the book seems to have been written in some sense as a response to the body of work Thomas’s own earlier work helped generate. This review will therefore start at the beginning (the 1980s) of this plotline, embedded in Part Two, circling back to where the book actually begins, with a revised account of early Indian cinema in Part One. In other words, I will follow the more recent history of Indian film studies contained within Bombay before Bollywood in order to engage with the earlier history of Indian cinema, the twin concerns of Thomas’s book.

It seems silly to “review” two of the four chapters in Part Two of Thomas’s book, since both are literally fundamental to the study of popular Hindi cinema, if not Indian cinema more broadly. “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity,” first published in Screen in 1985, and “Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologisation of Mother India,” first published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video in 1989, fully deserve to be called groundbreaking. These essays, with few peers at the time, largely initiated and legitimized the serious consideration of popular Indian cinema within academic film studies. Remarkably, both also remain (as they were when they first appeared) perhaps the best introductions for Western film studies scholars (and film audiences) to popular Hindi cinema. For many of us, Thomas’s 1985 essay provided our first access to ways to critically approach and appreciate rather than simply dismiss a vast and heretofore largely unknown cinema. Her essay on Mother India had a similar impact, clarifying the ongoing significance of a (arguably, the) key film in the history of Hindi cinema by firmly locating it within modern Indian history. With few other critical resources available at the time, these essays were crucial announcements of the overdue arrival of popular Indian cinema within the discipline of film studies; a now significant body of work appeared in their wake and remains in their debt.

One other chapter in Part Two, while newly published, dates from the same era as those essays, and is a largely descriptive account, based on ethnographic research of the notoriously elusive and unsystematic “political economy” of Bombay film financing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While a valuable record of an important moment in the unofficial industry, Thomas’s account of an earlier era has been inevitably superseded by more recent analyses by, among others, Aswin Punathambekar (2013), Tejaswini Ganti (2012), and Nitin Govil (2015) of this ever-shifting and often willfully obscured activity. A final chapter, “Mother India Maligned: The Saga of Sanjay Dutt,” updates the extra-textual story that began with the gossip surrounding the off-screen romance between Nargis and Sunil Dutt, the stars of Mother India, by extending into the also frequently scandalous life of their son Sanjay Dutt, a film star as notorious for his off-screen troubles as for his movie roles. As a supplement to the earlier essay, it effectively reinforces Thomas’s consistent point that Hindi films are rarely consumed as isolated, autonomous texts, but obtain meanings from a dense network that assumes audience knowledge of film history as well as gossip, the latter only intensified in the modern Indian media landscape.

It is especially intriguing, then, that Thomas’s pioneering work on what has come to be called Bollywood, which facilitated a vibrant scholarly specialization in that topic, has led her to move back to “Bombay before Bollywood,” and to engage with films that remain marginalized within what had previously been the world’s most marginalized mainstream cinema. The first part of her book thus consists of five linked chapters devoted to recovering a stubbornly persistent strain within popular Indian cinema of emphatically impure, hybrid forms, and transnational traditions which have been dismissed or disregarded as vulgar and lowbrow. In this cinema, stunts performed by fleshy (male and female) performers, magic tricks (rather than the miracles of Hindu mythologicals), and the sheer thrills of furious action are the primary attractions. Most significantly, Thomas devotes precise attention to illustrating the continual popularity of Islamicate or “Oriental” stories and motifs in B- and C-grade Indian cinema, often derived from the Arabian Nights tradition and its offshoots, a tendency in Indian cinema that begins as early as Hiralal Sen’s now-lost Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in 1903, whose neglect has allowed us to elevate Phalke’s 1913 Raja Harishchandra to seminal status.

The general thesis of this half of the book is largely the same, but bears repeating: popular (genuinely popular, that is) Hindi cinema regularly demonstrated its operations at two levels, as “local and ‘traditional’ but also, apparently paradoxically, as international and ‘modern’” (p. 33). Indian filmmakers and audiences, no less than their Western others, have been fascinated by a “transnational, imaginary Orient” (p. 34) embodied by the fantastic figures of “Arabian” legend and fantasy. Reinforced by an impressive accumulation of examples, Thomas argues that attempts to isolate and define popular Indian cinema in culturally specific terms are always haunted by this critically ignored but consistently popular tradition that implies an audience (also disregarded) attentive to global popular culture and transnational pleasures.

Thomas proceeds through deft close readings of distinct cinematic artifacts, reminding us again that the popular consumption of cinema extends beyond films, even if they remain its most privileged objects. Following an impressive overview of the persistence of Arabian Nights-derived tales in Indian popular cinema, she turns to more focused discussions of (in Chapter 3) the inventive soundtrack of Lal-e-Yaman (1933), the improbably but wildly successful career (in Chapter 4) of stunt queen Fearless Nadia, a pair of typically gaudy posters (in Chapter 5) for the C-grade films Zimbo Finds a Son (1966) and Khilari (1968), and (in Chapter 6) a random assemblage of moldering lobby cards from an archive that posits, like the entire section of the book, an alternative history of Indian cinema that undergirds an alternative modernity that challenges popular Indian film history as we have assembled it.

Overall, Bombay before Bollywood provides both a vivid addition to the belatedly written history of Indian cinema and a slyly subversive account of the development of Indian film studies, which only a few decades ago had virtually no presence in Europe and North America. The development of that scholarship, reversing earlier disdain or (more often) obliviousness, owes a great deal to Thomas, so it is delightful to see her now addressing blind spots within that development. Once more, Thomas is asking us to confront popular Indian cinema on its “own terms of reference” (p. 228), but now insists that these terms have always been emphatically cosmopolitan and transnational, demonstrating an inherently ambiguous authenticity that stretches across its entire history.