Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

      It’s hard to know precisely where author Debashree Mukherjee is going to examine the 1930s Bollywood movie business in her book, Bombay Hustle.

      She starts by writing, “I frame Bombay cinema as an ecology of practices and practitioners, generating new insights into the relationship between a modernizing city in the throes of political agitation and a film industry struggling to craft a viable cultural and commercial form.”

      She goes on, “Bombay Hustle zooms in on the years of India’s talkie transition…years in which sound technologies…infused film making practices with an altered aural imagination.” She defines her focus years as being between 1929-42.

      So she frames, zooms in, and in a fit of virtual contortionism, she says, “keeping my ears to the ground and my gaze at street level, I show how practices of film making were critical to the production of variegated visions of the individual, the modern, the freedom and unfreedom in a moment of high nationalism.”

      Mukherjee, however, never demonstrates Bollywood’s connection to the Indian independence movement. She alludes admiringly to Mahatma Gandhi’s hunger strikes but mostly connected with the hunger strike of actress Shanta Apte, to whose complaints about management practices the author devotes more than an entire chapter. She mentions only in passing M.A. Jinnah, who lived in 1930s Bombay, as an attorney for a movie company, and Jawaharlal Nehru for an emotional address to the Congress party that had nothing to do with movies. It would have been interesting to know how these political giants viewed or even used Indian films.

      As for the talkies, the release of India’s first talkie feature movie, Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, on March 14, 1931, gets one line that introduces a discussion of the secret hanging a week later by the British colonial government of revolutionary Bhagat Singh. Throughout India, the execution set off a wave of passionate oratory that Mukherjee tries to relate to talking pictures. But Bollywood pretty much ignored Singh, despite his post-mortem state as a popular folk hero, until a movie based on his life, Shaheed-e-Azad Bhagat Singh, was released in 1954, outside Mukherjee’s time frame.

      The proximity of the debut of Alam Ara and the Singh hanging, she writes, “leads us, speculatively, toward another significant mediatic configuration that has a bearing on the form and power of the early talkie film — passionate oratory.”

      Oddly, the appearance of Alam Ara apparently did not immediately shake up the Bombay movie industry; She reports producers continued to make silent movies for at least five years after its debut. What we do not learn is the impact talkies had on the Indian audience.

      Otherwise, the role of Irani in Indian movies is largely overlooked. He produced more than 150 feature movies, including the first Indian color feature movie in 1937, and is considered by some critics as a legend.

      To her credit, Mukherjee seeks to include the role of those behind the camera as well as the unsung movie extras and stunt performers, including the case of three stunt performers who drowned during one filming and the actress who almost drowned because the production people who could have rushed to save her thought she was doing a splendid job of acting.  She deals with the low pay of some and the often primitive, hazardous studio facilities.

      Mukherjee too often inflicts on the reader a multi-syllabic academic discourse that drains the color from the industry. As an example, she writes, “I want to emphasize the rhizomatic nature of the cine-ecology wherein multiple intensities are constantly on the move, joining and recombining in different assemblages sometimes to produce coherent zones of emergence or nodes of production named ‘studios.'”

       There is a great deal to be learned in this book about the Bombay movie business as it has matured and grown away from movies like 1936’s Jeevan Lata, in which the hero is saved by a dancing girl who happens to have a law degree from Oxford. What is missed is an opportunity to bring to life an industry that, with its unique Indian flavor and rakish ingenuity of planting a Busby Berkeley-like musical episode in even the most serious dramas, has captured the imagination not only of the Indian viewer but of audiences throughout the world.