Movie Clips from Bombay Hustle
In Bombay Hustle, I revisit the transition to talkies in India with a focus on material practice and techniques of film production. One of my biggest challenges while researching for this book was the fragile and fragmented nature of the official archives of Indian cinema.
Approximately 95 percent of the films made in India during the 1930s and 1940s are considered “lost films” today. Working with a slice of celluloid history has been a challenge as well as a creative opportunity. You can read more about my research methodologies and sources in the book. But for now, I want to focus on some extant and digitized gems that have kept me going over the years. I hope you enjoy these rare clips on my blog post here:
From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city.
Drawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, I offer a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production—finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts—to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. I develop the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.
You can buy the book here:
Reviews
“This is a stunningly ambitious account of the speculative economy, production practices, and urban milieu of the Bombay film industry during cinema’s transition to sound. 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. A deeply innovative and poetic account of the tangle of film practitioners, technologies, and techniques in India’s late colonial period, this book is a revelation of new archives, histories, and modes of thought. It is a sensational addition to the fields of South Asian studies, film history, labor history, new materialism, affect studies, and actor-network theory.”
— Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space
“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, speculative finance, the urban environment, storytelling, sound technology, cine labor, actors, bodies, symbolic values, politics, and ideologies, 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
“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, 1930s-1950s
“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 impressive research with imaginative, skillful writing. For anyone interested in what "talking pictures" meant in colonial India, this book is required reading. It's also a game changer, a rare gift to the field. By conceiving film history as a "cine-ecology"—an entangled web of urban space, studio structures, weather, bodies, silhouettes, desires, gossip, policies, and finances among other objects and forces—Mukherjee hustles her way around tired historical models. At its core this study is a capacious invitation, a call for a new generation of film and media scholars to foreground the transfer of energy between human and non-human, between on-screen and off-screen, and between archival absence and embodied experience. I haven't been this inspired in a very long time.
— Jennifer M. Bean, Editor-in-Chief, Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal