Spotlight on tinseltown
Bombay has starred on the silver screen for decades. In her new book, Bombay Hustle, Debashree Mukherjee looks at why it was this city that became inextricably linked to Hindi cinema. Mukherjee has a PHD in cinema studies from New York University and is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, but before that she worked in Mumbai’s TV and film industries, from 2004 to 2007, on films such as Omkara (2006), where she was assistant director to Vishal Bharadwaj. Excerpts from an interview:
Why pick this period — the early to mid 20th century?
The period I look at, roughly between 1929 and 1942, is when the Indian film industries made the transition from silent films to talkies. This is the period when Bombay starts to become the centre of film production on the subcontinent. This is also the final phase of the freedom movement, emerging anxieties about a rumoured Partition, intense labour struggles and strikes in Bombay’s textile industry, and a time when women start to become much more visible in the public sphere. So this period allows me to locate the story of film within the political, social flux of the time.
What can you tell us about the city’s earliest patrons of film?
Bombay’s mill workers were among the first paying audiences of Bombay cinema. But even as factory workers pumped money into producers’ pockets by buying tickets and financially supporting an undercapitalised indigenous industry, film’s growing fandom meant that starry-eyed strugglers provided a steady workforce for an industry considered socially taboo at the time. Of course, this also made them vulnerable to exploitation.
How, and why, did you develop the idea of the cine-ecology?
I wasn’t interested in framing this as a story about a handful of male pioneers, or of legendary studios. Rather, I was fascinated by the ways in which a place and a film form became totally enmeshed. How did the film industry grow in a city that is lashed by the monsoon for three months every year? Where did this volatile and capital-intensive enterprise find finances at a time when neither banks nor the colonial government would touch films? Compared to “systems” and “industries”, “ecology” gave me a way to understand the terrain of film production as a flexible, organic space. In this view of the city as a factory floor, cineworkers are joined by other entities such as the weather and topography and equipment and other nonhuman forces. This entire assemblage is what I term a cineecology. A cine-ecology is bigger than a studio building or a neighbourhood; it is the entire field within which cine-workers move, breathe, live, wait, and dream.