Book review: Debashree Mukherjee,Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

To open the pages of Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle is not to encounter a history of the movies; it is to become immersed in a fascinating and complex world. Through thick descriptions and imaginative connections, Mukherjee animates Bombay in the 1930s and 1940s, placing readers in the environment of the city’s sounds, sites and the myriad struggles of its people negotiating India’s colonial modernity through cinema. Though many of the films and print materials from this period are lost, the culture of Bombay’s early sound cinema suffuses the contemporary memory and geography of this now post-colonial, neo-liberal metropolis. A case in point: Mukherjee recounts searching for the remnants of Bombay Talkies Ltd., one of the most prolific film studios of the 1930s. With only an outdated address in hand, the author and the rickshaw driver turn in circles. Frustration mounts until the driver overhears Mukherjee calling a friend to help with navigation. Once the driver hears the name of the studio, he asks incredulously: ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ He then deposits Mukherjee at the site of the studio’s remains. The address is obsolete, and the old buildings exist as unmarked ruins, but all local inhabitants know the area of Bombay Talkies. As Mukherjee explains of this episode: ‘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’ (p. 16).

As if writing both a book and a screenplay, Mukherjee crosscuts between the present and various flashpoints of early sound production to recover cinema as a lived and entangled experience between people and things, technology and climate, infrastructure and energy. Bombay’s ‘talkies’ both shaped and responded to the city’s topography and its networks of finance and transportation. The movies, as both entertainment forms and a mode of production, gave shape to the fears and fantasies of India’s diverse population. This book, then, is not in search of lost images or even ruined buildings; it is a journey through sound cinema’s emergence and early flourishing, a story that takes us through the cotton mills and speculative financing, electrification of the city, new recording technologies, modern concepts of labour, gender, voice, work and endurance and, of course, a star-struck culture of celebrity. As a history come alive, Bombay Hustle is a tour de force!

The method of analysis is what Mukherjee describes as a cine-ecology, one that is informed by her own career in the Mumbai film industry. Equal parts ethnography, human geography and material history of film production and reception, each chapter traces a different network of people, things and energy flows that manifest on screen in the form of a movie. Three studios ground the study: Ranjit, Sagar and Bombay Talkies. Chapters capture both ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ processes of these institutional cultures. In the first chapter, ‘Speculative Future | Teji-Mandi’, Mukherjee traces the parallel financial schemes and money streams from cotton market speculation to investments in early sound films. In this way, a reader learns the connections among the cotton mill workers (who weave the material of Bombay’s key export) and the film workers (funded, in part, by cotton money, who help to craft stories about the modern economic life) and the star (as bankable commodity) who enlivens the screen. Fittingly, one of the early films financed through the speculative cotton economy and its futures was entitled Karma (1933). Indeed, many movies in this chapter thematise their own conditions in narratives about gambling, chance and fate; they also model new ways of surviving and even thriving in this fast-changing economic milieu.

The chapter titles, presented in both English and Hindi/Urdu capture not only assemblages of materials and people; they are reflective of a colonial bilingualism and code-switching, suggestive of how the same expansive phenomena can be named and experienced differently in the context of empire. For example, the second chapter ‘Scientific Desires| Jadu Ghar’ traces the rise of technical-industrial culture in Bombay that also comes to structure the ever-more-complex film studio that is organised according to paradigms of scientific management and divisions of labour. But the Hindi/Urdu phrase, or ‘shadow title’ for the chapter, ‘Jadu Ghar’ offers another idea and genealogy of the film studio and its methods: a house of magic. Shuttling between these two ways of describing this world, Mukherjee teaches readers to think about networks that may take the same form but create different meanings for people enmeshed in its logics.

With its rich and immersive account of cinema culture and its emerging publics, Bombay Hustle keeps good company with landmark books such as Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Zhang Zhen’s Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937, and Ben Singer’s Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts all of which consider a relationship between silent cinema and the emancipatory experiences of urban modernity, along with its shocks and perils (Hansen, 1991; Singer, 2001; Zhen, 2005). In Mukherjee’s study, cinema is already part of the fabric of every life (inseparable, in fact, from the cotton industry). But sound cinema in Hindi/Urdu amplified an emerging sense of embodied identity, or what Mukherjee calls the ‘picturization of affective vocality’ as the city became the centre of India’s film production (p. 145). The voice on film registered the tremulous signifiers of class, caste, religion and education, especially for women actors negotiating this new acoustic public culture. The cinematic voice both authenticated an actress’s star power, as the one who had triumphed over the ‘voice test’ and, therefore, whose voice confirmed her image (p. 159). At the same time, women performers from diverse backgrounds learned to manipulate intonation and, as a matter of acting, to assume ‘a vocal identity’ not their own, what Mukherjee describes as a kind of vocal masquerade that could transcend the seemingly intractable markers of social difference. ¹ The ‘actress film’ genre (abhinetri film) such as Basant (1942) and Actress (1934) reflexively foregrounded acting as a career and mode of performative identity-making. If women could learn how to manipulate the social codes of speech to become film actors, they could forge other professional opportunities as well, such as barristers and politicians, which, in Bombay movies, were also presented as acting and vocalising professions for women, enabling them to secure financially independent futures.

The optimism of Voice/Awaaz is tempered, however, in Mukherjee’s study of the labour and exhaustion of being a cine worker, a person bounded by studio contracts, often made to wait, and always exposed to the precarious conditions of a shooting location on and off the set. That electrically powered technology could operate around the clock meant that cine work came to feel more like factory labour than it did art, and the studio workers looked to the textile industry to find modes of labour organisation and to emerging political strategies, including the use of hunger strikes, as a tool of contract negotiation. Protesting the terms of her contract, specifically the studio’s underutilisation of her talents, superstar Shanta Apte turned her two-day hunger strike into a performance staged on the public-facing verandah of Prabhat Studios. Drawing a crowd and many reporters, Apte successfully resisted the terms of her labour. In this fascinating chapter on exhaustion, the body is both an affective machine, a tool for designing art and a biological entity subject to depletion (from too much work, or too much waiting) and death. Pushing against the colonial stereotype of the Indian as a lazy worker, films about vitality and exercise (discussed in earlier chapters) counselled audiences to manage their bodies to maximise productivity (pp. 193–196). Behind the scenes, however, the cine worker laboured in a state of exhaustion that was often intensified by class and caste difference. This trajectory towards depletion and death, as Mukherjee reminds us, is also the story of celluloid in the digital age. A focus on exhaustion, links ‘material histories of celluloid and equipment with experiential histories of embodied film practice’ (p. 265). This chapter raises the possibility of a new reading of the image not in terms of the story or even just acting technique and bodily/voice manipulation, per se. Attending to questions of work, we could start to read the image as a product of hidden labour as, for example, perceiving illumination on screen as the dangerous work of gaffers plugging into networks of energy that are also powering mills. We could connect illumination on screen to sources of power (coal, wood, water) that have to be laboriously extracted and harnessed. What would it mean to read for labour in an image that appears to be natural, spontaneous and equipment free? Mukherjee invites us to consider not only the labour of filmmaking, but the expansive networks that elude us on film. This approach opens up new and urgently needed modalities for film and media history.

A finicky reader may find that this book, in aspiring to capture the sensory details, stories and networked experiences of film history, is a bit meandering and repetitious. Also, in a few places, the taxonomies (key words of chapters further modified by key words of subheadings) and analogies (between systems and people) obscure more than they illuminate the phenomena under discussion. This is especially true in the last chapter ‘Short Circuit| Struggle’ in which the analogy between metallurgic weakness and workers’ fatigue become figured in yet another term, ‘accident’ to describe events that sound more like crimes and malfeasance. But these are very minor quibbles. For this is an ambitious book that in revivifying a lost and complex archive brings the history of cinema and its lived experience to the page and thus to the imagination of the reader. I can also picture this superb study inspiring a movie or two.