Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City 9780231551670

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B O M B AY H U ST L E

Film and Culture

F I L M A N D C U LT U R E A series of Columbia University Press Edited by John Belton For a complete list of titles, see page 421

Bombay Hustle

Making Movies in a Colonial City

Debashree Mukherjee

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mukherjee, Debashree (Film historian), author. Title: Bombay hustle : making movies in a colonial city / Debashree Mukherjee. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020004387 (print) | LCCN 2020004388 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231196147 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231196154 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231551670 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture industry—India—Mumbai—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.I8 M844 2020 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.I8 (ebook) | DDC 791.430954/792—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004387 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004388

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover image: Production still from the sets of Achhut Kanya (Untouchable Girl, Franz Osten, 1936). Image courtesy of the Josef Wirsching Archive and the Alkazi Collection of Photography.

For Ma, Baba, and Enid

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction | Mapping a Cine-Ecology

xi 1

PA RT O N E Elasticity: Infrastructural Maneuvers CHAPTER ONE

Speculative Futures | Teji-Mandi

45

CHAPTER TWO

Scientific Desires | Jadu Ghar

98

CHAPTER THREE

Voice | Awaaz

143

PA RT T W O Energy: Intimate Struggles CHAPTER FOUR

Vitality | Josh

185

CHAPTER FIVE

Exhaustion | Thakaan

229

CHAPTER SIX

Short Circuit | Struggle

269

Epilogue

313

Notes Bibliography Index

325 381 401

viii C ont e n t s

figure 0.0 Map of Bombay city by Carmen Cheung indicating key locations that feature in this book.

Acknowledgments

This is a book about cinema as an ecology of practices. An ecological view of film production acknowledges that all acts of creation happen within a network of relations. Books, like films, are products of different forces—people, ideas, technologies, and places—and it is impossible for me to recount each force that has shaped Bombay Hustle. But allow me to make a small start by thanking the following individuals and institutions. Three stellar public universities contributed vitally to my thinking and the shape of my research, and I gratefully acknowledge them at a time when higher education in India is under systematic threat: Delhi University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Jawaharlal Nehru University. First and foremost I thank Ranjani Mazumdar, for whom I am grateful daily. Ranjani encouraged me at every step of my journey, from when I was working in Mumbai to when I decided to reenter the academy. Thank you for teaching me the meanings of materiality, but also of academic generosity. Ira Bhaskar has inspired this book not only with her knowledge of cinema but with her commitment to screening films as a mode of public scholarship. At Delhi University, I first understood that feminism is a practice, and at Jamia, Sabeena Gadihoke and Shohini Ghosh showed me that feminist filmmaking is an urgent and possible thing.

Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram have inspired my thinking about cinema and media through their pathbreaking research and their vital work at Sarai-CSDS. Ravikant, also at CSDS, was the only person who could translate the word pharai for me, and my digressive approach to film historiography stems from this critical moment of translation. In Bombay, Paresh Kamdar and Vishal Bhardwaj were the best filmmakers and teachers I could have dreamed of working with. Ankur Khanna joined me on my Bombay journey and encouraged me to explore the history of the film industry. At New York University, Zhen Zhang taught me much more than I had already learned from her wonderful Amorous History of the Silver Screen. Tejaswini Ganti is a cherished ally and a walking encyclopedia on Bombay films. Vipul Agrawal, Saahir, and Siddharth helped make New York feel like home. Anna McCarthy, Richard Allen, and Antonia Lant believed in my work at a critical stage. Seminars with Ann Laura Stoler and Orit Halpern at the New School were catalysts for new modes of reading. And I thank my beautiful comrades at NYU GSOC who built a strong community of organizers and thinkers during the Occupy movement and continue in their struggles for the rights of graduate student employees. This book started to take its current shape at Columbia University, and I thank my colleagues at MESAAS for supporting a junior scholar through the revisions of her first monograph. Gil Anidjar, Partha Chatterjee, Gil Hochberg, Sudipta Kaviraj, Mana Kia, Timothy Mitchell, Sheldon Pollock, Jennifer Wenzel, and Syed Akbar Zaidi enthusiastically engaged with my scholarship and provided sharp insights on papers. Outside MESAAS, Brian Larkin has been a comrade and an intellectual beacon. Jane Gaines is the best of mentors and the most formidable of interlocutors. At the Center for Comparative Media, Stefan Andriopoulos, Noam Elcott, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Reinhold Martin, and Felicity Scott provided me with a second intellectual home on campus. My colleagues at BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies— Lotte Hoek, S. V. Srinivas, Rosie Thomas, and Ravi Vasudevan—have a knack for transforming mundane meetings into scholarly riches, and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with them. A heartfelt thanks to all the sparkling women scholars who have inspired me with their intellectual brilliance and lifted me up with their solidarity—Allison Busch, Mana Kia, Gil Hochberg, Anupama Rao, and xii Ack nowl e dg m e n t s

Jennifer Wenzel at MESAAS; Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqui, and Ying Qian at Columbia; Jennifer  M. Bean, Ranita Chatterjee, Manishita Dass, Christine Gledhill, Sangita Gopal, Lalitha Gopalan, Usha Iyer, Priya Jaikumar, Anupama Kapse, Neepa Majumdar, Rochona Majumdar, Bindu Menon, Shelley Stamp, and Kuhu Tanvir from overlapping circuits of film studies. A very special thanks to those who read early drafts and chapters: Ritu Birla, Thomas Elsaesser, Christine Gledhill, Priya Jaikumar, David Lelyveld, Neepa Majumdar, Vicki Mayer, Aswin Punathambekar, and Bindu Menon offered timely and stellar feedback. Kaushik Bhaumik, Moinak Biswas, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha have always been generous with their ideas and support. Nitin Govil has seen this project unfold over the years and helped me hone what, to my mind, became its best bits. This book would have been impossible without the contributions of those who shared their personal memories and family archives with me. My sincerest thanks to Peter Dietze, who is passionate about building public knowledge about the pioneers of Indian cinema; Georg, Peter Wolfgang, Roseamma, and Joe Wirsching, who have worked tirelessly to preserve their family legacy; Joyojeet Pal and Deep Pal; Naina Apte; Shanti Mahendroo; Ram Tipnis; Mitzi Bhavnani; Roy Wadia; and Shankar Mukherjee. I am ever grateful for the scores of committed cinephiles, bloggers, and researchers who lovingly document oral and textual histories of Indian cinema. Thank you Michael Barnum, Atul Besra, Subhash Chheda, Arunkumar Deshmukh, Har Mandir Singh “Hamraaz,” Greta Kaemmer “Memsaab,” Ummer Siddique of Cineplot, Professor Surjit Singh, and Girdharilal Vishwakarma. Several languages have found their way into this text, and through them I have found a truly transnational group of allies: Aftab Ahmed, Sucharita Apte, Bilal Hashmi, Alexander Holt, Linnea Hussain, Julian Katz, Pasha Mohamad Khan, Madhura Lohokare, Ali Mir, and Maike Neuhaus. A warm shout-out to Wandana Sonalkar for translating Shanta Apte’s text into English, and to Juned Shaikh for sharing his book manuscript at a critical time. Sucharita Apte and Frederick Noronha have unfailingly responded to my research queries. For their research assistance I thank Carmen Cheung, Prashant Iyengar, and Koyel Lahiri. I am grateful to Anita O’Brien for her painstaking work of copyediting. Ack n owle dg men t s

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As anyone will attest, you cannot spend years writing a book unless you have some very indulgent and loving friends who ignore your long absences and still show up when you need them most: Anita Abraham, Ankur Ahuja, Mahima Mehta Anand, Manu Anand, Khadeeja Arif, Sandipto Dasgupta, Subasri Krishnan, Lawrence Liang, Parul Nath, Fathima Nizaruddin, Jawahar Raja, Poulami Roychowdhry, Rina Roychowdhury, Aditi Saraf, Abhik Sarkar, Konkona Sensharma, Sonja Simonyi, Paulina Suarez, and Mayur Suresh, thank you for being there for me through it all. Research for this book was supported by the following grants: the Andrew Sauter Summer Fellowship and Mainzer Summer Fellowship (NYU); the American Institute for Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship; the Padma Research Fellowship; and the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant and Provost’s Diversity Grant (Columbia). I also thank the following research institutions and their knowledgeable librarians and staff: National Film Archive of India and Dhananjay Rao Gadgil Library (Pune); National Archives of India and Nehru Memorial Library (Delhi); Asiatic Society, V. Shantaram Library, Osianama, Maharashtra State Archives, Sparrow Archives (Mumbai); British Film Institute (London); Deutsch Kinemathek and Bundesarchiv (Berlin); National Library (Kolkata); Library of Congress (Washington, DC); Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Butler Library, New York Public Library, and MoMA (New York). At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal has been the kindest and speediest of editors, offering insight and encouragement through the whole process, and Monique Briones patiently held my hand through many logistical quandaries. A condensed version of chapter 5 appears in Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 3 (University of California Press). My parents, Jayashree and Debashis Mukherjee, have always believed in me, and that is the most precious of gifts. I am inspired by the way they have confronted challenges in their lives and am proud of them for raising two strong and independent-minded daughters. The Showlers—Deborah, Phyllis, and Gerald—warmly welcomed me into their family in the United States, while Sandeep Shanbhag and Hannah Milam continue to patiently suffer my many eccentricities. Tanya “Baby Boo” Shanbhag reminds me that playtime is important too. Iram Ghufran, Kartik Nair, Dwaipayan Banerjee, Josheen Oberoi, and Laliv xiv

Ack n owl e dg m e n t s

Melamed make it possible to laugh in the darkest of times; I love you guys. Anthony Miler is a true humsafar and an inspiration. Thank you, Anthony for your love, your ideals, and your art. Finally, I want to acknowledge my sister, Tanushree Mukherjee Shanbhag, aka Enid, who, by simply being, shows me how to be a better person.

Ack n owle dg men t s

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B O M B AY H U ST L E

figure  0.1 A light boy on the sets of Jawani ki Hawa (Franz Osten, 1935) at Bombay Talkies studio. (Image courtesy of Josef Wirsching Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

Introduction Mapping a Cine-Ecology

A young man stands looking out onto a film set. We cannot see his face, and his name has disappeared into the back rooms of history. But this silhouetted figure is the protagonist of an entire world of meaning contained inside the photographic frame. With the camera positioned just behind him, we are invited to gaze on the scene from his point of view. Who is he? What does he see? The man stands straight but at ease, one hand in his pocket, waiting. Another man in trousers and shoes hurriedly blurs out of the right edge of the photograph. Our protagonist is wearing shorts and might be barefoot. These are clues that help us speculate about his identity. Judging by the shorts and his location within this spatial field, our anonymous hero is most probably a “light boy,” a below-the-line film worker whose job is to carry and position lights during a shoot.1 He stands amid a thick tangle of lines and edges, objects and currents: electric cables, freshly sawed partitions for a new set, lights, furniture, scaffolding, and other humans, each waiting in the shadows to be called on for the next spurt of filmmaking activity. Peering over the shoulder of this anonymous light boy, Bombay Hustle presents a practitioner’s eye view of filmmaking activity in late colonial Bombay (1920s–1940s).2 I frame Bombay cinema as an ecology of practices and practitioners, generating new insights into the relation between a modernizing city in the throes of political agitation and a

film industry struggling to craft a viable cultural and commercial form. It is through a whirlpool of synchronous and incommensurable material practices generated by diverse film workers that cinema was forged as a distinctive and nameable medium for the modern age. Cinema, in this account, exceeds the content on the film screen and embraces a density of embodied techniques that are predicated on a future image but take place long before the final film product reaches the screen. Thus the work of ideating, acting, writing, dancing, stitching, lighting, and simply waiting on the sets in preparation for a shot are equal parts of the history of cinema and should be central to our understanding of local productions of modernity. By keeping my ears to the ground and my gaze at street level, I show how practices of filmmaking were critical to the production of variegated visions of the individual, the modern, freedom, and unfreedom in a moment of high nationalism. Animating the book are two basic questions: What does it mean to do film work, and what can a history of film practice tell us about the life of cinema in India? Each chapter focuses on a different kind of practice—from financial speculation and screenwriting to dialogue delivery and stunt work—demonstrating cinema’s inextricable ties with Bombay’s indigenous credit networks, colonial science, industrial struggle, urbanization, political oratory, and local geography. The historical figure of the film practitioner, in my account, could just as easily be a producer as a background dancer, showing us that filmmaking has historically been a dispersed and collaborative enterprise. Taking this idea a step further, I frame the terrain of film production in Bombay as a cine-ecology wherein bodies, institutions, technologies, and environments collectively shape the production and circulation of cinematic meaning. The term cine-ecology describes a material reality as well as a method for a processual and nondualist approach to film. I offer it as a provisional analytical tool rather than a grand system of explanation. If the older “media ecology” debates that took center stage in North America in the 1960s were focused on how a technological form can produce a sensory-perceptual environment, cine-ecology positions technology as only one among a plural, though unequal, field of actors.3 Cine-ecologies emerge out of the energetic entanglement of practices, symbols, infrastructures, ideologies, actors, and climates that swirl around the film 2

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image in locations where filmmaking and film consumption are prominent aspects of everyday life. Bombay, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Lagos, Tokyo, and Paris constitute just a handful of locations where the work of film production has produced continually mutating cine-ecologies. A cine-ecology is tied to its time and place, even as it is imbricated within translocal material and affective relations. Cinema, which has always been a transnational force, comes to mean very different things as it settles into a specific cine-ecology in Istanbul or Sydney. A tropical place under colonial rule, a modernizing city that becomes the site of a talkie industry, Bombay with all its peculiarities of infrastructure, weather, and social politics—these are the contours of the talkie cineecology that I describe in this book. Bombay Hustle zooms in on the years of India’s talkie transition, that is, the years in which sound technologies took over India’s silent film landscape and infused filmmaking practices with an altered aural imagination. The wholesale embrace of synchronized sound in 1930s India was momentous. “All talking, singing, dancing films” introduced new aesthetic practices and production techniques, contributed to the consolidation of regional production centers in a land with striking linguistic diversity, reconfigured the landscape of film distribution and exhibition, and enabled new hierarchies of film finance and labor. Whereas in Hollywood the period between 1908 and 1915 is considered critical to the consolidation of cinema as culture, industry, and “respectable” entertainment, in India it was during the talkie transition, roughly between 1931 and 1936, that cinema started to unfold as the preeminent mass cultural form of twentieth-century South Asia.4 I look at the period roughly between 1929 and 1942, starting a little before and ending a little after the main technological transition to sound, in order to understand the multiple transmedial and transindustrial forces that converged to create India’s cinema century.5 Ever since the first film screening in Bombay in 1896, cinema and the city hurtled into the future on parallel tracks. In the early nineteenth century Bombay solidified its position as the urbs prima in Indis, the most spectacularly legible engine of modernity in South Asia. A magnet for merchants, politicians, sailors, poets, gamblers, princes, millworkers, sex workers, revolutionaries, and smugglers, Bombay city exuded an edgy aura as a city of hustle, evading the disciplinary In tr o du ction

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authority of colonial-imperial capitals such as Delhi and Calcutta, and built by wresting land over centuries from the mighty Indian Ocean. In 1896 the city was almost destroyed by the bubonic plague, but the same year also saw the cinematograph enter into a crowded terrain of urban entertainment forms. This inchoate technological form called cinema intervened in—or shall we say mediated—local processes of industrial modernization, financial speculation, cultural production, anticolonial resistance, and social reform. By the 1930s Bombay was synonymous with stock exchange thrills, art deco architecture, industrial strikes, the sweeping vistas of the reclaimed Marine Drive promenade, electrified suburban trains, nationalist rallies, and, yes, urban poverty. This was a city momentous, and cinema both gathered together and spewed out the many different energies and emotions that spelled “Bombay.” Unlike most emerging film production centers of the world, Bombay’s production ecology established itself without structured support either from the state or from local financial institutions. As I discuss in chapter 1, this financial abandonment positioned cinema in India as a decidedly speculative space of opportunity as well as crisis. Speculative extrapolations permeated the cine-ecology in its monetary, infrastructural, technological, and industrial practices, and film practitioners wagered daily on their profits, dreams, and lives. Precarity, risk, and danger marked cinema as a space of hustle. To hustle means to move swiftly and hurriedly, or to compel another to move rapidly, to jostle and push. Taken further, hustle can also mean to work desperately, sell aggressively, or to persuade duplicitously. The velocity implied in hustle lies somewhere between desperation and deception (even self-deception) and speaks to the speculative underpinnings of Bombay’s cine-ecology. Hustle is a form of speculative action, a gamble on the future from a site of immediate precarity. Embodied in the nervous energy of corporeal tactics of survival and materialized in the transformation of hope and calculation into short-term gains, hustle is emblematic of every high-speed migrant city in the world but takes on different valences in a colonial city like 1930s Bombay.6 Bombay Hustle asks what is to be gained when we think of colonial and urban modernity via cinematic practice. Indeed, how can we avoid the connection? Whether we look at film producers who actively courted colonial favor, muscular action stars who displayed a collective wish for 4

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national-corporeal strength, or impassioned film dialogues that reiterated the discourse of freedom, Bombay cinema in this period is unmistakably marked by its urban colonial condition.7 The talkie transition closely paralleled the final intensification of India’s freedom movement and was caught between the competing claims of the colonial state and nationalist audiences. In 1927 a colonial inquiry commission—the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC)— was instituted to survey the local film trade, including its infrastructure, methods, and audiences. One of its main tasks was to assess the state of film censorship across British India. Even though the commission’s final recommendations in 1928 were for greater state support for local filmmaking, the colonial gaze was fixed on disciplining film content rather than supporting an indigenous industry. Indian cinema was legible to the colonial state only as an unruly entertainment form that could serve as a propaganda machine for supposedly susceptible natives. Priya Jaikumar notes that “colonial Indian cinema was a survivalist cinema,” battling the financial neglect of the colonial state.8 Crucially, this very neglect prodded different factions in India’s film trade to band together as coherent “industries” with centralized associations that actively maneuvered for state and commercial leverage (more in chapter 2). But the imbrication of Indian cinema and the colonial condition went beyond either state intervention or neglect and seeped into the everyday textures of life and work. The very fact of colonial occupation created an ambivalent space for cinematic representations of modernity. Filmic protagonists in the trendy “social films” of the 1930s were required to prove their continuity with global icons of fashion and progress as a measure of national worthiness, even as they had to indicate some level of local resistance to foreign influences. This led to interesting on-screen contradictions. If heterosocial college education, freespirited working women, and motor cars were emblems of positive modernity in films like Hunterwali (Homi Wadia, 1936) and Nirmala (Franz Osten, 1938), they could easily be deployed as perilous imported evils in films like Dr. Madhurika (Sarvottam Badami, 1935) and Madam Fashion (Jaddan Bai, 1936) (fig. 0.2). This ambivalence, born of a pressure to be modern and traditional, global and local at the same time, defined the modern as an episteme predicated on asserting ontological binaries.9 It also created one of the most vexing problems of India’s film In tr o du ction

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figures  0.2a and 0.2b Song booklet covers for Dr.  Madhurika (Sarvottam Badami, 1935) and Madam Fashion (Jaddan Bai, 1936) convey contemporaneous excitement about the modern woman. (Images courtesy of National Film Archive of India)

figure 0.2a and 0.2b (continued)

industries: how to be modern and “respectable” at the same time; how to showcase cosmopolitan progressiveness and demure Indianness simultaneously. Obsessively focused on the female body, public concerns about cinema as contagion were founded on salacious extrapolations from scenes of on-screen intimacy, the participation of women In tr o du ction

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from traditional performing backgrounds, and the late hours necessary in studio work. Female film professionals thus had to hustle hard for their right to work in a profession that offered unprecedented earning possibilities for women.10 At least since the late 1920s, Bombay was a regular site of religious riots, a situation that worsened in the 1930s and 1940s.11 Film industry stakeholders viewed the growing Hindu-Muslim conflict with great anxiety as riots led to stricter policing and the imposition of curfews, which meant that paying audiences could not go to the movies after sundown. In 1941 the Indian Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association declared: While any other business under the Sun can be transacted from sunrise to sunset, the business of entertaining people by means of the cinema, which provides 90% of the entertainment in India, must remain mostly a nocturnal business, which must needs be suspended in compliance with the curfew orders. During the current riots in all parts of India the cinemas have not collected even one-third their normal collections, while the usual expenses have had to be met nevertheless.12

The commercially motivated panic of producers and distributors gives us a glimpse of the everyday impact of communal violence on individuals’ relationship to the city and their sense of freedom and safety in accessing spaces of pleasure and leisure. As Prem Chowdhry notes, “the lack of alternative kinds of entertainment in the urban centers resulted in the cinema emerging as a popular and comparatively cheap form of entertainment for the lower classes, whose only other form of relaxation was roaming the streets of Bombay.”13 Cinema not only took a hit for tense social conditions but had also become an arena for political mobilization. Apart from routine petitions to colonial censors about films that were perceived as offensive to religious sentiments, Bombay’s film audiences started taking to the streets in the 1930s to picket foreign films that stereotyped and denigrated Indians.14 The stubborn unpredictability of film as business combined with the everyday contingencies of the colonial city. Class, gender, religion, and caste precarities braided with financial market volatility and 8

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political turmoil to render film workers as intensely vulnerable and peculiarly mobile. This precarious mobility will be on prominent display in the following chapters as we journey through Bombay with young fans who achieve spectacular stardom against the obstacles of middle-class gendered morality and producers who meet with spectacular ruin despite the advantages of community-based finance networks. These itineraries narrate the career of cinema in Bombay as acutely speculative; a history of hustle at every level. What we mean when we say “cinema” today is a long distance away from what cinema meant to its participants in the 1930s. The word cinema variously connoted the built space of a theater, the shared experience of a darkened auditorium, a frisson of illicitness, a vision of modernity, the incarnation of technological advancement. Cinema was the entire affective and material ecology that cradled and enabled practices of film going and filmmaking. Its meanings were hotly contested and repeatedly redefined to suit the agendas of an array of stakeholders. To echo Brian Larkin, “Debates about what media are, and what they might do, are particularly intense at moments when these technologies are introduced and when the semiotic economies that accompany them are not stable but in the process of being established.”15 By focusing on a history of practices that emerged around the new technological assemblage of the talkie feature film, I highlight the material and epistemic instability of cinema, its continual coming-into-being, and its relations with other media, things, and bodies. C I N E M A A S P R AC T I C E

Life itself changes form, as cinema inflects the conditions of being, seeping through into the very textures of everyday practice. —Ravi Vasudevan, “In the Centrifuge of History”

From 2004 to 2007 I worked full-time in Mumbai’s film and television industries. Those four years packed a lifetime’s worth of experiences as I freelanced from job to job and moved from one apartment to another, struggling to keep up with rent increases. I worked as a producer for a television serial, an assistant director for films, and a cameraperson for a reality TV show. Mumbai was not new for me as I had spent many In tr o du ction

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high school years in the city. But navigating urban space as a media professional was quite different. My journeys through the city involved work inside studios and on film sets, shooting on streets and from rooftops, typing on computers and sourcing costumes, keeping track of the 180-degree axis and controlling spontaneous crowds gathered to watch their favorite film stars. During these years I frequently had the intuition that my work and my city were uncannily intertwined. As I returned home in an auto rickshaw late at night, a street corner awash in yellow tungsten light suddenly felt like a film set; a chai break in a paan-stained, draughty stairwell during postproduction felt like the definition of Mumbai. Driving along Marine Drive or waiting at Churchgate Station for the Borivili fast train, I would find myself humming songs like “Rim jhim gire saawan” or “Bawra mann,” where memories of cinema articulated my subconscious emotions. In moments like these, cinema and the city merged into one and bodily affects seamlessly traversed the worlds of film and life. Thinking with lived experiences such as these, I view Bombay cinema as a set of cultural practices entangled with the lifeworld of the city. I add my own embodied experience of film work to scores of other experiences that are registered, whether in bold or in faint lines, in the archives of Indian cinema in order to foreground certain resonances between past and present and to complicate any easy historicism. By placing the “I” in the text, my hope is that worlds both inside and outside the archive can stay in dialogue through absence and uncanny presence. As affect, the “cinematic” in late colonial Bombay describes an emergent sensory intuition quite like my own, an intuition of the modern world as deeply enwrapped with a techno-industrial assemblage dedicated to creating fictional representations of the world. The practices that produced Bombay cinema and helped reproduce its social, cultural, and financial power included corporeal-cultural techniques such as positioning an electric arc lamp, writing a continuity script, and holding a boom microphone steady.16 As different bodies pushed a camera trolley, adjusted the focus on a lens, or mixed pigment powders to match an actress’s skin tone, they also crafted fresh imaginations of who they were and what they could be. In the process, cinema altered the city and a new historical figure came into being—the cine-worker. 10

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I describe the cine-worker as any person involved in the production of films, irrespective of pay scale. While important legislation in India provides a wage-based definition of the term in order to afford legal protections to vulnerable below-the-line workers, I extend the term to embrace all levels of the industrial hierarchy, recognizing that it is a bodily orientation toward cinema and an understanding of cinema as vocation that binds all cine-workers, even as multiple class (and other) differences divide them.17 Work, as performed by the cine-worker, comprises the set of daily gestures she uses as she interacts with the technical objects and geographical particularities of her cine-ecology. These gestures take place within overlapping regimes of value that commercially appraise the significance of work along parameters such as productivity, utility, and human creativity. The repetitive doing of work produces the worker. Such a somatic intuition was felt by the celebrated writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto when he worked as a screenwriter in the 1940s: I was in Bombay at the time. On regular days I would take the electric train from Filmistan and reach home by 6pm. But on that particular day, I got a little late. The heated discussions over Shikari had gone on endlessly. When I got off at Bombay Central station I noticed a girl who had just emerged from the third class compartment. She was dark. Her features were good. Young. She had an unusual gait. It looked as though she were writing the scenario of a film.18

At the time described, Manto was employed at Filmistan Studio in Goregaon and working on the film Shikari (Savak Vacha, 1946). He was also an ethnographer of the city and its film industry. In several of his Bombay stories we meet Manto himself as a chronicler of the everyday, making keen observations on the city’s myriad spaces of darkness and shadow, of which the world of film production was an intimate part. There is much to return to in Manto’s Bombay work, but I want to pause here on the intriguing meaning of the sentence “It looked as though she were writing the scenario of a film.” As an erstwhile screenwriter and script supervisor, I have puzzled over this very odd simile. After a long day of writing and script discussions, perhaps the whole world starts to In tr o du ction

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look like a movie? Why else would you compare a stranger’s gait with the act of writing a screenplay? Maybe because one’s own body becomes so saturated with an acquired film technique that other people’s bodies also take on a cinematic resonance? In producing this comparison, Manto produces screenwriting as a distinct bodily attitude that can be used as a referent for other routine activities. In the moment that Manto-the-literary-writer uses his film practice as a reference for the world, Manto-the-screenwriter reflexively comes into being. Cinema shows itself as more than a finished film or text, but rather, a set of practices through which media and subjects are mutually constituted in an ongoing process of individuation. Practice is repetitive activity oriented to a future, the rehearsal of a task and the rehearsal of the self as produced by the task. As a set of learned habits of the body, practice is tethered to a specific time and place, as also to specific objects. A film actress practices her craft at the intersection of her body, her institutional location, costumes, makeup, and props; as also coactors, directors, cameras, and lights. In practicing her craft, the actress shows herself as continually becoming-actress, trying to change, adapt, and improve, or just struggling to stay relevant. Practice may be aimed at perfecting a skill or stabilizing an operational procedure, but it cannot shed the indeterminacy intrinsic to its processual and relational nature. A technology like the motion picture camera can work most efficiently when it articulates with a camera operator within an energy grid that can power the machine, supported by controlled light, color, and noise conditions. The cinematographer and the camera are defined by their relation to each other but are also dependent on a network of uncredited and often unobserved actors such as gaffers, light stands, light boys, camera assistants, reflectors, steady voltage, and film stock. This network of actors, once recognized, reveals that filmmaking is a complex and collaborative set of operations and that creative agency is dispersed across a film set, capable of surprises at multiple nodes of contact (fig. 0.3). Precisely because filmmaking involves complex, hierarchical, and intricately networked relays between numerous people, objects, and machines, cinematic practice is a slippery object of study. What should we study when we study the making of movies? For a long time the answer to that question was that we should study the practices that 12

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figure  0.3 A film crew preps to move to the next location. Bombay, circa 1938. (Josef Wirsching Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

seem most particular to the medium of cinema—the work of acting, directing, camerawork, or editing. The neo-Marxist interventions of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson introduced a turn to studies of “mode of production” in cinema industries, connecting economic imperatives with aesthetic decisions.19 More recently, the rise of media industry studies signals a different structural approach to contemporary film production. Filmmaking is viewed as a large-scale corporate enterprise, and questions of infrastructure, finance, distribution networks, institutional policy, and transnational collaborations are of paramount concern here.20 The role of the practitioner, however, can get obscured in these investigations. This is mainly due to a political economy emphasis that can abstract practices and processes into structures and patterns. Alongside these macrostudies we also have explorations of the micropractices of creative labor or “production cultures.” Notable work in this model of production studies uses ethnographic questions and methods to explore the “cultural practices and belief systems” of anonymous, behind-the-scenes media workers or the “identity work” done by invisible media practitioners that reproduces the very notions In tr o du ction

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of industry that keeps their labor hidden.21 A third approach to production comes out of a renewed turn to materiality in film studies, which has yielded substantive new research on mise-en-scène as a vital part of the stuff of cinema.22 Each of these emphases can be noted in Indian film studies as well, with a burgeoning body of work that considers the institutional, discursive, financial, technical, representational, and transnational frames of film production using a range of methods, including ethnography, social theory, political economy, and film and media theory.23 In Bombay Hustle I attempt something allied but different. I join existing work on industries and practices in their attempts to expand the sites and objects of media production but take the archival route to visit a past moment in cinematic practice, separated from today by almost a hundred years. I approach the archive with a mixed bag of tools, dialogically considering the sensuousness of labor and its imbrication in logics of structure. What would it mean to narrate an ecology of practices that bridges the particular and the pattern, the embodied and the institutional, contingency and convention? I am quite conscious of my location in the present and its urgencies and also aware that one can never fully capture the ephemerality of practice, especially when combined with temporal distance. Instead of capture, I choose conjugation as a reflexive method committed to the libidinal coupling of texts, images, data, and memories, as I will discuss further in this introduction. The work of conjugation is resolutely not a flattening of sources or of historical actors, and I pay attention to the lived textures of power. The new materialisms of today are increasingly turning to inanimate things in a move to displace the human subject as the hubristic center of societies, ecologies, and imaginations.24 Indeed, this is an urgent critical and ethical move, but it comes at a time when calls to decenter Western and Northern approaches to media, culture, and technology are finally gaining momentum. Therefore it becomes imperative to recognize the simultaneity of differential human depletion alongside planetary exhaustion, of the exacerbated precarity of some human lives at the same time as the extinction of water, forest, and animal lives. The historical film worker engaged in the practice of making movies is not a unified, stable subject but an unfolding figure gradually 14

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moving toward individuation. Here I draw on the concept of individuation as theorized by Gilbert Simondon, whose emphasis was on the processual and the emergent, on ontogenesis rather than ontology.25 Individuation is the process of becoming-subject, of continually coming into being in relation to other individuals and things. The individual, or the becoming-individual, is a set of potentialities that are energized through specific couplings. Building on these ideas, I approach filmmaking as a processual and relational activity that emerges within a networked ecology of heterogeneous embodied practices. I draw insights from theories of assemblages and actor-networks to view creative production as a dispersed process involving distributed agency.26 There is also a durational temporality to individuation-as-process. In this book you will meet the singing star, the freelance director, the background dancer, the film financier—each at once a historical actor and an unfolding category of work. At the same time, struggles for individuation are deeply situated practices that foreground corporealaffective vulnerability. Some of these actors are also silhouetted characters, like the anonymous light attendant at the start of this book, located on the edges of the historical record and public memory. It is a symptom of their extreme marginality that they ceaselessly strive toward selfdefinition, resisting the erasure of their singularity. For that is the real struggle in a world marked by power asymmetries—the fight to retain a sense of self, to make oneself legible to structures of power. What would it mean to rethink historicity via embodied practice? Cinema in the early twentieth century was not only a device that could speed up still images into life-like motion, nor was it solely a medium that could arrest a real moment in time and capture it on celluloid. It was not only an archive with definite temporal limits, vulnerable to the ravages of weather, fire, and wear and tear, nor was it simply a technology that could transport the viewer across wide gaps of space and time. The daily hustle of filmmaking in late colonial Bombay shows us that cinema was also an affective site of pleasure, thrill, and fulfilment for hundreds of cine-workers who actively embraced its industrial and economic contingencies. Cinema as production experience invited workers, then and now, to imagine new horizons for the self, marking the labor of filmmaking with a particular futurity. Indeed, in the fragmented archive of Indian film history, as well as in twenty-first-century In tr o du ction

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accounts of film production, there are two aspects to the experience of filmmaking that cine-workers continue to cite as distinctive: waiting and recursive operations. Both aspects depend on duration, that is, the time in which things happen, to mark out the singularity of the experience. The durational experience of waiting combines with the recursivity of filmmaking to make production experience a particular temporal orientation of the body. Waiting for a break, waiting on set, waiting for box office results combine with the repetitive gestures of rehearsals and retakes (even remakes), giving rise to a bodily consciousness of film as work and the self as cine-worker.27 S PAC E A N D T I M E I N T H E C I N E - E C O L O G Y

After working as a media professional for a few years in the mid-2000s, I decided to research the history of film production in Bombay. I had heard that one of the most legendary film studios of the 1930s, Bombay Talkies Ltd., was still around, perhaps in ruins. In the summer of 2008 I set out to look for the remains of this early talkie studio based on an archival address and Google maps. I told the auto rickshaw driver to take me to the intersection of Nanabhai Bhuleshwar Road and Chincholi Bunder Road, that we would find a police post and a little temple along the way. We drove in circles for a while but could not find the landmarks I had suggested. Then a friend called me on my cell phone and I told him I was going to give up on looking for Bombay Talkies.28 When I hung up, the auto driver turned around exasperatedly and asked, “So you want to go to Bombay Talkies? Why didn’t you say so before?” It turned out that even though the studio buildings had been destroyed decades ago, the place where the studio once stood continues to be called “Bombay Talkies” by its daily users and inhabitants. I realized that 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 (fig. 0.4). Even when a built form such as a film studio disappears, the frenetic skein of practices that cohered around it generate a spatial meaning in its place that endures. During the years of the talkie transition in India, practices of film production, distribution, circulation, and viewership permeated and marked the urban landscape. Such a spatial dispersal of 16

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figure  0.4 Ruins of Bombay Talkies studio in 2008, Malad. (Photograph by the author)

meanings urges us to probe the boundaries of the cine-ecology: What constitutes its inside and where does its outside begin? Is the cineecology coterminous with the city limits? The answer lies in how we conceive of the city itself. The city served as a powerful emblem of modernity in the influential urban writings of early twentieth-century thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, and Siegfried Kracauer. The city in their work is both a material site of experience and a mobile sign-system encoding new social affects, such as anonymity, alienation, ephemerality, consumerist pleasure, hyperstimulus, shock, and dysphoria. Late colonial Bombay, too, was at once a physical place and a symbolic container of  the urban experience. Ranjani Mazumdar’s monograph Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) marks one of the most sustained academic studies of the modern Indian city as a space for cultural imagining. She makes a compelling case for Bombay as a truly “cinematic city,” both real and represented, material and imagined. In this sense, the cine-ecology is imbricated with the physical as well as imaginative In tr o du ction

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limits of Bombay city, pulsating with ideas, identities, and techniques that can cross territorial borders.29 A cine-ecology is also not limited to a clutch of dominant studios or a dominant economic model; it is fundamentally entangled in the myriad contradictions of the city. Informality exists in Mumbai’s contemporary cine-ecology right next to corporatization. Just walk through Andheri West and you will see that multimillion-dollar corporate studios can exist cheek-by-jowl with numerous one-room production companies and editing studios, while a surplus of freelance and wage labor drives all forms of media production. These workers crisscross through thousands of urban sites and mark residential neighborhoods, bazaars, malls, coffee shops, studios, and workshops with their daily practices of living and working. Such is the landscape of cinematic practice that I seek to portray in this book, and I have selected the capacious meanings of ecology to pursue it. I arrived at “ecology” after a long time thinking with “studio systems” and then “industries.” The systems approach felt inadequate, first because we have never had a classical Hollywood-style studio system in India; a monopolistic and vertically integrated corporate system has simply been historically untenable. Moreover, a systems approach can lead to the recanonization of dominant studios, isolating the work of film creation within self-contained studio silos, and attributing studio identity to the owner-producer. The three studios I examine in most detail in this book—Ranjit, Sagar, and Bombay Talkies—were definitely prolific and commercially successful ones with more infrastructural assets at their disposal than many of their contemporaries. My interest, however, is in their deep roots within broader ecologies of media production and finance in India and abroad. Rather than measure their success against scale of production or longevity, I prefer to frame them as energies that coalesced for an amount of time and then dispersed to create new configurations of film activity. Thus a range of other production companies, such as Imperial, Wadia, Mohan, Circo, New Theatres, Bhavnani, National, Sudama, and Filmistan, make frequent appearances in Bombay Hustle, highlighting interstudio and interregional relations. Increasingly, the category of industry too has felt a bit limiting, mainly due to the fact that it has come to represent a stable and 18

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self-explanatory site of study. As Nitin Govil points out in an important article, “One of the entrenched yet underexamined presumptions of Media Industry Studies . . . is the obviousness of its object.”30 By paying close attention to the practices and self-articulations of assorted archival protagonists, I realized that they simultaneously inhabited, produced, and contested the idea of filmmaking as industry. Their agendas were multiple and put pressure on any predetermined idea of industry through contradictory desires: the desire to constitute a new industrial form and to mark it as industry; the desire to define the self in relation to professional work; the desire to exceed the systematization of bodies under an emerging capitalist mode of production; and the desire to stay unfixable and free from the surveillance of definitional rigidities.31 As against conventional notions of systems and industries, an ecology is not a bounded place or a stable thing. It is an organic, dynamic assemblage with permeable boundaries, dependent on the continuous exchange of energies between its constituents; a necessarily mixed environment wherein rational agentive decisions oriented to the future run parallel with adaptive choices based on immediate constraints and exigencies of circumstance. Thus I take seriously an observation from 1940 claiming that “the Indian motion picture industry is a living and growing organism.”32 Such a stance goes a long way toward understanding something of the power of Bollywood today, and its various local, regional, and international offshoots and counterforms. The temporal structure of this book is nonlinear. We will move back and forth in time, often privileging dates such as 1929 or 1939 that are on the cusp of calendrical transitions. In the first two chapters I examine three of Bombay’s most iconic and successful talkie studios— Ranjit Movitone, Sagar Movietone, and Bombay Talkies—tracking their histories to the years before they were formally instituted. It is in the temporal space before legendary beginnings that the grounds for the future are prepared. I do not mean to indicate an inevitability of the future here; rather, 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 to sometimes produce coherent zones of emergence or nodes of production named “studios.” Bombay’s early talkie studios did not simply appear on the horizon, heroically propelled by the single-handed efforts of their In tr o du ction

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producer-entrepreneurs. Instead, I suggest that these successful studios were already imbricated within financial, social, and cultural currents that steadily flowed into Bombay’s film ecology in the 1920s. These flows were temporarily diverted into particular studios by the combined energy of individual entrepreneurs, film workers, local financial interests, and some luck. The early talkie industry in Bombay was a loose conglomeration of production concerns with no standardized production norms, a mix of imported and locally improvised sound recording technologies, dispersed across multiple neighborhoods in the city, and dependent on a variety of traditional and corporate sources of finance. It is in the years between 1929 and 1942 that certain techniques like continuity, genres like the social, specialist profiles such as assistant directors, and film industry associations started to stabilize. This was a time marked by financial, material, and industrial precarity—open, therefore, to intense speculative and entrepreneurial excitement. Although the studios and independent concerns of this period soon collapsed or disintegrated, their productive potentialities continued in the form of personnel and shifting networks of opportunity. Ranjit, Sagar, and Bombay Talkies had finite studio lives, but their human and technical resources continued to feed Bombay’s cine-ecology for years to come. Similarly, while the first Indian talkie film, Alam Ara, was released in 1931, I begin my exploration of talkie cinema’s acoustic ecology with a study of cross-platform media technologies in the years immediately preceding Alam Ara. Technologies such as the paper-based continuity script and other “deep texts of production” that emerged in the silent period were pressed into urgent service with the increased rationalization of talkie studios.33 The ecological mode allows me to move freely across a wide constellation of other media and consider the industrial, financial, and aesthetic genealogies from which sound film appeared as a new medium for modern consumption and sensory excitement. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we might look back and declare that the twentieth century was the “century of cinema.” Indeed, as many scholars point out, cinema altered the experience of modern urban life, changed our perceptual habits, and suffused our everyday with new images, sensations, and velocities. But cinema did not enter the world as a fully formed and named entity. It is during the talkie transition that cinema in India started to coalesce as a distinctive 20

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and dominant media form amid a heady group of audiovisual, textual, and sensory regimes. Cinema drew on the visual, sonic, and affective modes of photography, telephony, gramophone, radio, newspapers, theater, advertising, and architecture and was fundamentally indebted to their existing infrastructural advantages. A cine-ecological approach privileges historical specificity over medium specificity, locational specificity over a desire for some impossibly fixed, transhistorical, and universal ontological essence called cinema. The important thing is to ask when is cinema, where is cinema, and how is cinema.34 These questions point to the fact that cinema is a fluctuating, transnational form that has borrowed blithely from multiple contexts. To think of the talkie industry as a cine-ecology is to accommodate multisensory histories marked by medial overlaps, divergences, and intensifications within a period defined by the cultural dominance of sound cinema. The emphasis here is not on continuity/discontinuity but on simultaneity; as particular mediatic forms gain precedence in a particular time and place, so does the cine-ecology of that place change in its defining features.35 S TO R I E S O F A R R I VA L

Hey, hey! Let’s go to Bombay It’s a big grand city With many spectacles to see. —Kirti song booklet, 1942

One of the historical promises of cinema has been to provide a ringside view of modernity. And Bombay cinema has excelled at providing images of modernity-in-process, worlds and characters that we recognize as uniquely modern, and which seem to be moving toward the future at a pace faster than the rest of us.36 The increasing profitability of the Bombay film industry was substantially aided by the emergence of the genre of the social film, the genre par excellence for representing urban modernity. In 1938 the well-known writer and film critic Khwaja Ahmad Abbas attempted to define the social film, stating that “it is definitely of indigenous manufacture. Whatever its original implications were, today in the parlance of Indian film journalism it means a film In tr o du ction

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dealing with modern times as distinguished from mythological and historical pictures.”37 The social drew on popular literature in Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, and Marathi, which was set in modern milieus and dealt with the anxieties and delights of modern life. What is important to note is that as these themes migrated to the audiovisual medium of sound cinema, it was Bombay city itself that came to represent all the heady contradictions of modern living. The spaces of the cinematic city were exposed with glee by the social film’s lens; from architectural highlights such as Hanging Gardens and Victoria Terminus, to the engineering marvel of the recently reclaimed promenade of Marine Drive (fig.  0.5). These spaces, repeatedly recorded in the early talkies, continue to be used even today as iconic referents for Bombay and maintain its status as a city of arrival. For decades, Bombay has been a place for imminent arrival, and thousands of people have sought to arrive in Bombay with idiosyncratic visions of what that means. Arrival can mean physically reaching a

figure 0.5 Bombay, circa 1935. (Getty Images) 22

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destination, but it can also mean reaching a symbolic place that has been long wished-for. Arriving in the big city, arriving in the film industry, the arrival of the talkies, arriving as modern, arriving as politically sovereign—these are some of the kinds of arrivals implicated in the term. The question of timely arrival is central to debates on modernity and geopolitical location. South Asian postcolonial historians have contested ideas of developmental “time lag” in the supposedly linear march of modernity within the “homogeneous empty time” of Western historicist thought.38 The traditional view held that modernity happened “first in Europe, then elsewhere,” and the rest of the world was consigned to an “imaginary waiting room of history,” waiting to properly enter into the modern.39 Postcolonial theory has worked hard to dismantle these tendencies of negative comparison by reconsidering the very category of “modernity” itself; be it multiple, contested, or contradictory. In this book I demonstrate that comparisons with the Hollywood studio system, for example, are not so much inaccurate as they are inadequate. It’s not wrong to compare Bombay with Hollywood, it’s simply not enough. Bombay’s producer-entrepreneurs, film workers, financiers, and journalists pursued diverse strategies of becomingmodern, many of which were directly influenced by successful precedents in other parts of the film-producing world—from Los Angeles to Berlin to Moscow. Far from being an untranslatable indigenous peculiarity, Bombay’s cine-ecology enthusiastically borrowed from, appropriated, responded to, and rejected competing strategies of production that were transmedial as well as transnational. Bombay’s film critics compared the best films of the year to the “polished finish” of London’s Elstree Studios, while trade journals regularly reported the activities of German film concerns such as Bavaria Film AG, Emelka, and the Ufa studios.40 Indian film technicians with training at the Phototone Studios in Neuilly or photography institutes in New York collaborated with set designers from Marathi theater and screenwriters from the Urdu modernist movement, who in turn relied on singers from Calcutta’s courtesan economy and bodybuilders from Java, to concoct something we now consider Bombay cinema. That Bombay would “arrive” as the leading center of film production in India was far from obvious. Bombay was a young town compared to In tr o du ction

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cities such as Lahore, Delhi, Madras, and Calcutta. These cities had each enjoyed centuries of political, commercial, and cultural significance.41 Bombay, on the other hand, lay unplanned and unspectacular, an unremarkable archipelago of seven minor islands right up to the eighteenth century. It was only after a major land reclamation project that connected the seven islands that Bombay emerged as the vibrant port city and commercial center that it is today. The British East India Company, and later the British Crown itself, approached the city mainly as a commercial port town, a convenient access route to the eastern ports of Africa and later the Suez Canal. While the colonial “white town,” at the southern tip of Bombay, was built along modern lines of city planning, the “native town” remained in such disarray and squalor that it took a series of plague epidemics to finally begin urban planning and rehabilitation of working-class Indian residents. This is the moment at which cinema entered the city. The year 1896 was when Bombay’s topography was radically altered by the bubonic plague. It was that same year that the first Lumiere Brothers short films were exhibited to a “whites-only” audience at the Watson Hotel. These connections, between a growing urban working class, colonial neglect, and racial prejudice, played a major role in the rapid growth of Bombay’s cine-ecology from the 1910s onward. The earliest indigenous experiments with cinema technology took place at multiple sites—Pune, Madras, Kolhapur, Lahore, Calcutta, and Bombay (fig. 0.6). Some of these cities had substantial resources at their disposal. The Kolhapur film industry was directly aided by the local maharaja, “one of the wealthiest of Indian potentates and a budding motion-picture magnate,” who actively funded local film companies, actors, and musicians.42 Pune was a historic city with rich literary and performative traditions to support a new cultural form, and it also boasted a year-round temperate climate quite unlike Bombay’s extremely humid summers and monsoon season that brought many urban activities to a standstill. Madras was a colonial port city akin to Bombay, with a shared dependence on cotton processing and trade, but with its own artistic and cultural traditions. And Lahore was famous for its thriving music industries populated by talented singers, dancers, courtesans, and gramophone stars. It is often stated that Bombay’s choice of Hindi-Urdu as the language of its talkies helped it capture an all-India market.43 The 24

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figure 0.6 Important film production centers in 1930s India. (Map by the author)

historical picture is a bit more complicated. Not only was there no fixed concept of an “all-India” language in 1930s India, but Bombay city itself was a migrant city built by linguistically diverse communities who added their own histories of literature, colloquial idioms, and rhythms of everyday expression to the quilted fabric that constituted Bombay’s local culture.44 Besides, Hindi-Urdu films were made in Lahore too, while Calcutta also made dual-language versions for a while. Several interconnected factors contributed to the emergence of Bombay as the site for the most powerful film industry in early twentieth-century South Asia. These factors draw on the full scope of Bombay’s cine-ecology, from the particularities of the Bombay region’s agricultural and commercial infrastructures to its industrial politics and cosmopolitan urban texture. Bombay in the 1930s was the In tr o du ction

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subcontinental center for modern finance capital, anti-imperialism, gender transformations, and cultural experimentation. The late colonial city elicited multifarious and paradoxical responses to urban modernity. Technology, science, a dynamic public sphere, and notions of civic equality made for dreams of individual and collective progress. At the same time, the imbrication of technological modernity with industrial capitalism proved treacherous, and these decades saw mass labor unrest due to poor working conditions and growing proletarian solidarity. Influenced by American and European cultures via films and books, and witness to years of British society, young Bombayites struggled to forge their own meanings of the modern. From its art deco high-rises and jazz bands to its teeming factories and stock exchange, late colonial Bombay exuded all the creative energies of a dynamic metropolis. One of the key markers of Bombay’s modernity was the public woman. The woman who went about her business in the public domain was no longer confined to the factories, bazaars, or red-light districts of the city. Evidenced in newspapers, novels, and films of the time was a palpable excitement about a new breed of white-collar woman worker, encompassing a new range of profiles such as typist, telephone operator, novelist, nurse, journalist, photographer, or even anti-imperial political activist.45 The period between the two world wars (1919–1939) was marked by increased global traffic in ideas, commodities, and ideological affinities. Cinema was a key player in this international circuit of exchange as it transported imaginations, producers, technology, and finances across regional boundaries. The American Depression had severe repercussions on Bombay’s trade and finance networks, especially in cotton and bullion. These networks were crucial to financing the local film industry during these early decades of talkie consolidation. The depression also led to an unemployment crisis, and cinema provided a ready avenue for hundreds of wage and salary workers. At the same time, the anticolonial movement was quickening in intensity. Gandhi launched the epic Dandi March, or Salt March, in 1930, a nonviolent protest against the colonial salt tax, which led to a much wider civil disobedience movement. Bombay was at the epicenter of nationalist politics, and all major nationalist leaders either were stationed in Bombay or frequently staged demonstrations and meetings in the city. 26

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The city’s cotton industry emerged as the leading indigenous industry in the country. With the growth of this major industry, thousands of workers entered and reshaped the city. While Bombay’s cotton capitalists sought to manage the labor force using modern methods of rationalization, labor grew increasingly restless with poor working conditions and low wages. Massive strikes in Bombay’s textile sector expressed rage against capitalist extraction and demonstrated worker solidarity. The organizing activities of the Communist Party of India, headquartered in Bombay, combined with local and community-based trade organizations to create India’s largest group of radicalized and organized workers unions. Politically progressive newspapers regularly covered stories about labor conditions, millworkers’ wages, and union activities. Social reformers wrote reports on the abysmal living conditions of the urban working classes. The mazdoor (worker) became a symbol of subaltern agency and revolutionary potential in daily discussion and cultural production. The urban proletariat constituted a major chunk of Bombay cinema’s viewer constituency. Bombay had the largest number of theaters that showed Indian silent pictures, and by the time of the talkies the city was its own biggest market.46 In 1933 the popular Wadia Movietone talkie film Lal-E-Yaman gathered 47 percent of its revenues from the Bombay Presidency area, with the remaining 53 percent earned in the Central Provinces, Lahore, Calcutta, Madras, Punjab, and Delhi.47 Already being referred to as “India’s little Hollywood” in the foreign press, Bombay city itself had eight large film studios, apart from some smaller concerns, and was turning out twelve to fifteen films a month.48 In comparison, Bombay’s closest competitor in 1930, Calcutta, had three major film studios. With the coming of sound, Bombay and Calcutta continued as the two most prominent film production centers and produced films in multiple regional languages, including Tamil. Madras had not yet made the talkie transition, and hence up until 1934 studios like Imperial Film Company and Sagar Movietone in Bombay, New Theatres and East India Film Company in Calcutta, and Prabhat in Poona made Tamil-language films.49 In a 1939 survey of the film industry, film producer and equipment dealer Y. A. Fazalbhoy observed that film production in India was dispersed across various cities, such as “Kolhapur, Poona, Jubbulpore, Calcutta, Bezwada, Vizagapatam, Rajahmundry, Madras, Coimbatore In tr o du ction

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and Salem.” He also stated that though Delhi and Lahore had once been centers of film production, “the studios operating in those cities have now ceased to exist.”50 Bombay now attracted a new historical protagonist: the cine-worker. By 1939 about forty thousand skilled workers were employed across India’s film centers.51 Many thousands more worked as uncounted below-the-line, informal, and freelance labor. These cultural workers constitute the absolute outer limits of the Indian film archive, and we can recuperate their histories only through faint traces and liminal clues. WOM AN A S C INE-WOR K E R

Let us return to the quote about Manto and the woman on the train platform. The reader might have noticed that Manto lingers on the features of the anonymous woman on the train and appraises her looks. Soon however, his appreciation turns to anxiety as the woman turns to him and smiles. “I got very anxious—she was smiling. The kulfi in my hands started to melt,” he recalls.52 The woman follows Manto to the horse carriage stand outside the station and climbs into his carriage. Manto provides us with his train of thought during this unexpected turn of events: “I understood what kind of girl she was . . . I could not figure how to get rid of her. If I pushed her off the Victoria, there was bound to be a scandal. I also thought that she was a woman—she might exploit this fact and claim that I had tried to act funny with her.”53 These excerpts are from a story titled, “Shikari Auratein” or “Huntresses,” in which Manto places himself within the story as an author-protagonist and describes two strange incidents that took place in Bombay in the 1940s. In both cases, young women who were completely unknown to the author accost him in full public view on the streets of Bombay and pretend familiarity. The women insist on walking or riding with the author-narrator as if they had a history of intimacy. Manto surmises that their intention was to fleece “respectable” middle-class men who would not want a public scandal. Faced with such blackmailing tactics, he was expected to tamely give up his money. Manto manages to give them the slip, but the memory of these encounters stays with him. Who

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are these women? Are they aberrations of city life or a figment of a writer’s imagination? In either case, what might they signify? Newspapers, autobiographies, literature, and movies of the 1930s and 1940s reveal a Bombay that was consciously trying to modernize itself. One of the key protagonists in this process of modernization was the working woman. The changing demographic of the working woman now included middle-class and/or educated girls who wanted to earn their own keep. It isn’t surprising that this excitement was laced with nervousness about the changing social roles of women. The modern city’s gifts of mass consumerism, public transport technologies, and social mobility made it increasingly difficult to discern an individual’s class, caste, or religious background simply via visual markers. Films themselves played a major role in making the lifestyles, behavioral patterns, and fashions of the upper classes readily accessible to a motley mix of audiences. The fact that a woman on the local train, dressed in a smart cotton sari with a matching handbag, could have just as easily been a journalist, a hairdresser or a sex worker was a new and disconcerting realization.54 Who was and who was not a prostitute? What kind of girl was she, the woman who “wandered about aimlessly,” with “mischief in her eyes” behaving like a “vagrant”?55 The figure of the woman works as a powerful symbol of both the dangers and the promises of the modern age. In Sphinx in the City, Elizabeth Wilson goes to the heart of the matter: “The city offers untrammeled sexual experience; in the city the forbidden—what is most feared and desired—becomes possible.” Wilson goes on to describe how several writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and America “clearly posed the presence of women as a problem of order, partly because their presence symbolized the promise of sexual adventure. This promise was converted into a general moral and political threat.”56 Manto, in the mold of Baudelaire’s flâneur, feels entitled to look.57 He looks at the unknown woman, even assessing her physically and whimsically. But this pleasure in looking quickly turns into the threat of public shame and scandal. The shikari aurat returns the flâneur’s gaze, shaking him out of his detached reverie of the city and presenting us with a new allegory of a parallel, gendered experience of urban modernity in India. Manto’s shikari aurat directly speaks to the

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disturbing newness in social relations in the late colonial city and becomes a site of threat, a predator, a low “vagrant” who habitually strays/preys into the spaces of the visible urban. Where the flâneur represents an elite, dislocated experience of the city, the huntress walks the city with a sharp and invested gaze, aligned more with the gendered idea of the flâneuse as streetwalker, discussed by Giuliana Bruno.58 For her the city is harsh but yields financial opportunity, an opportunity predicated on a performance of the self. Manto’s huntress can be read as a metaphor for the strange case of the urban, single, working girl who often had (has) to performatively exploit traditional female roles in order to survive in the impersonal city. While the flâneur could never be a man of the crowd but always stood apart, the working girl was part of a new public, a community of working women who had a canny understanding of the new requirements of gender and the tenuous distinction between the public and the private.59 The film actress is a recurring figure in this book and starkly illustrates contemporaneous anxieties about women’s work in the cineecology (fig. 0.7). As is well known, acting work in Indian cinema was initially regarded as taboo for women.60 The earliest silent films in the subcontinent featured male actors in female roles. Gradually, women who belonged to parallel performance traditions, such as courtesans, nautch girls, and stage actresses, started to enter the film trade. The participation of Muslim professional singers and Anglo-Indian actresses in the film industry’s workforce created a different frisson.61 Women’s sexuality has historically been the locus for waging politico-religious battles in South Asia. As political decolonization became a future certainty and talks of a faith-based “Partition” exacerbated communal tensions, actresses’ bodies became contested territory in India. Studio bosses and celebrity journalists advocated a drive to recruit educated Hindu actresses who were tasked with changing the reputation of the industry and better embodying the nationalist ideal of the Indian woman on screen, as opposed to the nation’s “others,” such as Muslim, Anglo-Indian, and Dalit actresses.62 The meanings of actress, however, were multiple and could often override the nationalist pressure toward “improvement.” The industry needed talented actresses, singers, and dancers to showcase the possibilities of talkie technology and create a new palette of listening aesthetics. Where was this ready-made talent to 30

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figure 0.7 Song booklet cover for Actress, or Bambai ki Mohini (Balwant Bhatt, 1934), starring Miss Panna. (Image courtesy of National Film Archive of India)

be found, if not in already-existing aural and performative cultures? The late colonial film industry was caught up in complex negotiations with nationalist discourse, the uncertainty of commercial success, the need for talkie-specific talent, and the desire for middle-class audiences. It was the film actress who was called on to mediate these competing demands. The film actress was the leading symbol of the glamor of cinema since the silent days, with actresses such as Sulochana and Zubeida ruling the marquee. On screen, the heroine was the modern commodity incarnate, as her body became a display window for a never-ending parade of clothes, jewelry, shoes, handbags, makeup, and accessories. Whether covered in glittering products or coquettishly revealing the soft pleasures of the female form itself, the actress’s desirable body also moved through a mobile arcade of purchasable pleasures. Sleek automobiles, lavish bedrooms, up-to-date apartments, opulent mansions, and fashionable movie palaces were some of the modern built spaces of the social film within which the film heroine was regularly located. This phenomenon was not restricted to India alone; indeed, Bombay cinema drew on a globally circulating repertoire of “modern girl” images to aid its own attempts at creating industrial stardom.63 Be it Tokyo or Mexico City, the 1920s actress-as-star came to epitomize the dispersed pleasures of cinema itself. In the Indian context, few genres allowed the actress to be conflated with modern commodity culture as wholly as the social film. Connections between the actress and modern consumption continued off-screen as well. As a hypervisible icon of female earning power, the actress-as-star could possess many of the objects associated with her on screen. Fanzine interviews highlighted an actress’s luxury possessions from chiffon sarees to French perfumes. Salaries of actresses soon became a matter of urban folklore. Judging from a variety of comparative sources, it is evident that cinema acting was a highly lucrative profession for India’s women. Not only were star-actresses earning higher salaries than their male counterparts, but a range of background dancers and character artistes also found a viable new profession. Bombay Hustle foregrounds the experience and significance of gendered work in the city. In each chapter we meet a motley group of women who posed a perplexing challenge to Indian society in their 32

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newfound role as film professionals and cine-workers. Female cineworkers in late colonial Bombay cut across divisions of class, caste, and religion. Star-actresses were the engine of commercial success and laid the foundations of the film industry as we know it. Many actresses also directed and produced films, setting up their own companies and taking control of their financial futures. In chapter 1 we see how men and women played equal roles in this energetic period of transition. Whether as studio owner, business partner, or star-actress, women such as Gohar Mamajiwala, Sabita Devi (née Iris Gasper), and Devika Rani were critical to the economic, organizational, and social futures of Bombay studios. But still, much like Manto’s shikari aurat, the female film professional walked the thin line of public and private, her work ending in the form of cinematic spectacle and her life open to public discussion. On the other hand, traces of women’s nonacting work in this period are fragile, which is in why some of the following chapters it has been possible to keep women front and center while in others it has not. The levels of embodied precarity across classes of female cineworkers were undoubtedly incommensurable, as were their salaries and wages. Nevertheless, slender clues in the fractured archives of Indian cinema reveal the shared vulnerability of all women in the cine-ecology. Ermeline Cardozo, a star of silent cinema, registered a police complaint in 1926 against two of her male colleagues for sexual assault during an outdoor film shoot in Matheran. After several hearings, the case was summarily dismissed, but not before Ermeline’s moral character was thoroughly questioned and she was ordered to pay the accused a compensatory fine of Rs. 100 each.64 In 1945 an “extra” actress, Nalini, was raped on her way back from a film studio by her casting agent. As we will see in chapter 6, this time the judge was very harsh in his indictment of the accused and the film producers. Separated by a period of twenty years, these two incidents illustrate the continued precarity of women in Bombay’s cine-ecology, registered as violence. These are experiences that remain submerged in the history and the continuing present of film industries worldwide. By applying a somatic and ethnographic lens to available archival traces such as news reports about Ermeline and Nalini, I revive histories of women’s work and vulnerability in cinema, alongside the precarity of several other working bodies. In tr o du ction

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ARCHIVES AND SOURCES

It was Queen’s Road eternally. The car crushed the bare slender night-shadows of the palms that lined the road on the left. A narrow footpath separated the palms from the parallel track of the electric suburban railway. A train just then raced by, unpuffingly. Walls of advertisements flanked the road on the opposite side— patent medicines, talkies, talkies and talkies. —Wilfrid David, Monsoon: A Novel

Talkies, talkies, and talkies . . . talking films were everywhere in the late colonial city. Approximately 2,126 Hindi-Urdu talkie films were made in Bombay between 1931 and 1949.65 It is only reasonable to expect that this surfeit of film production would make its mark on the city. Film posters plastered the walls of the city, film advertisements occupied print space in newspapers, film magazines added color to the city’s newsstands, stylish theater buildings and bright marquees were a fixture of the city’s sights, and film songs played on gramophones and radios in bazaars and streets. But if one were to look at the official archives of Indian cinema today, one would catch barely a glimpse of this textured everyday presence of the talkies. Of the 2,126 talkie films, only 110 are listed in the catalog of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI).66 In other words, less than 5 percent of the Bombay film industry’s output from two decades is available to us for research and scholarship. Film prints have been lost in accidental studio fires, through industry neglect and deterioration, or by deliberate recycling to extract silver from the nitrate base. There is a slim chance that some of these lost films have survived in archives and distribution offices in East Africa or other parts of the world where diasporic audiences made early transnational film commerce possible. But for all practical purposes we have to contend with irreversible material loss as we write our histories. Bombay Hustle joins a vibrant community of film historians in collectively reconsidering what an archive of Indian cinema might constitute. Rosie Thomas’s innovative interrogations of lost Arabian Nights films that could supplant the Hindu mythologicals that currently count as India’s “first films”; Ravi Vasudevan and Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s 34 In t ro du c t i o n | M ap p i n g a C i n e - E co l o g y

pioneering analyses of the industrial, social, technological, and aesthetic significance of early cinema in India; Stephen P. Hughes’s detailed histories of urbanism and movie going in Madras; Priya Jaikumar’s critical reassessment of British colonial policies on Indian cinema and the racial-spatial imaginations of India on film; Neepa Majumdar’s problematization of the mechanics of female stardom in the specific context of India; and Kaushik Bhaumik’s exhaustive history of the emergence of the Bombay film industry carefully examine a range of evidentiary genres and mobilize interdisciplinary methods to demonstrate that film historiography remains a generative site for asking new questions about cinema. Similarly, Sudhir Mahadevan’s and Manishita Dass’s recent monographs revisit early histories and prehistories of cinema in India and lay out a wide landscape of transmedial encounters between cinema, photography, literature, and theater, complicating the origin narratives of Indian film and showing that film histories from India are critical to a robust practice of film studies in the global academy.67 Speaking to the challenges of researching Indian cinema, S. Theodore Baskaran has urged the film historian to “fight the temptation to write about the content of the film, based on what is gleaned from the available print material.”68 In this book, however, there are numerous references to lost films, even plot analyses based on extant synopses gleaned from a variety of paratexts. Surviving print sources such as newspapers, posters, and song booklets provide a surfeit of textual and visual clues in the absence of films.69 These parallel archives of paper remind us that cinema has never existed simply as celluloid but as a many-textured and dispersed material phenomenon. Given the archival absences we face, it becomes incumbent on us not to replicate archival silences in our own scholarly choices. In fact, the very absence of the film text must be taken as a warning against canon and corpus formation that celebrates a few films and filmmakers based mainly on the politics of archival presence. The film historian cannot abdicate analysis in the face of absence. Archival conjugation follows the logic of cross-cutting or parallel editing in film, a mode of juxtaposition that makes connections between disparate primary sources and subjects that are usually kept separate. It is the choice to “play [multiple] texts off against one another in an endless process of coaxing up images of the real.”70 For example, in In tr o du ction

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chapter  3 I join atmospheric descriptions of Bombay’s soundscape in novels and memoirs with radio broadcast timetables, colonial surveillance of public speechmaking, and court cases against actresses to stitch together a narrative of the tense acoustic battles being fought over cinema in this period. Song booklets, film reviews, production and publicity stills, advertisements, fragments of screenplays, autobiographies and memoirs, colonial reports, even police and legal files provide us with a density of information about lost films and past film cultures. The method of archival conjugation is also meant to demonstrate that representation, its material conditions, and its consequences are all connected. I think of the image as the material trace of practice, rather than a free-floating signifier untethered from the ground in which it was imagined. Therefore in chapter  1 images of speculative crisis in films document the role of finance in the cine-ecology and record the affective density of a historical moment charged by speculative frenzy. Then there are other forms of absence I wish to discuss. Given the fact that so many films themselves are lost, how do we even begin to search for histories of labor and forgotten cine-workers? Even the simplest of biographies in this book are compiled from multiple partial sites, such as memoirs, regional-language magazines, and obituaries. Documented histories of material practice and industrial records are practically nonexistent. This erasure, which is both ideological and logistical, has pushed me to locate alternative sources of historiography and ask new kinds of questions. Interspersed across the chapters are original archival materials placed alongside rereadings of popular and readily available texts. I position many of these materials, such as Manto’s ethnographic fiction and Shanta Apte’s extraordinary political writing, not only as historical records of ephemeral production experience but also as theory from the Global South. Photographs from the Joseph Wirsching Archive (Goa), studio papers from the Dietze Family Archive (Melbourne), censorship files, publicity materials, court cases, and oral interviews with surviving film practitioners are accorded equal attention. These sources tell unexpected tales of human creativity, collaboration, and heartbreak in the service of cinema. They give us mediated access to a sensual and visceral history of film as work. Court trials and police cases form a significant archive of irruptive presence in Bombay Hustle—testifying to the 36

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fact that some lives are registered only in moments of desperation and crisis. Life-threatening accidents, lost children, hunger strikes, and criminal proceedings make repeated appearances in part 2. Lost films and lost people, irretrievable time and inaccessible sensations—we could think of these as missing and mournable, or we could think of them as those that got away, that evaded the archive. Bombay Hustle is not a project of recovery, of filling in the gaps with a certain, triumphant knowledge. Rather, this book is an attempt to put together an archive of practices (from the rubble and the riches of the past) that offers new imaginations and possibilities for future thought and practice.71 At the end of it, you will not know the whole history of Bombay cinema but will have seen some glimpses of an ongoing struggle, a hustle to become. I borrow research methods and insights from a number of disciplines, including film and media studies, anthropology, technology studies, history, cultural studies, and infrastructure studies. I also employ various visual techniques from the use of maps to the interpretation of archival photographs. Chapter 1 visually maps the dense networks of relations that constitute film studios, while chapter 6 retraces the landscape of Bombay using itineraries of bodily risk. Using network analysis software, QGIS mapping, and Google maps overlaid with handdrawn routes, I attempt intimate, diachronic, and living histories of a city that resonates with forgotten relationships. My affinity with ethnographic practice will be most obvious in the places where I introduce myself as a direct participant-observer in Mumbai’s contemporary cine-ecology, but my engagement with the ethnographic mode extends into the archive. My toughest challenge in this book is also its main subject—how to narrate an intimate account of cinema as lived experience—located as I am almost a century apart from the people and practices I seek. I have reflected on my own firsthand experience of film work as a sensory route into the past, committed to voices from the past that linger in forms and silences that are as much theirs as mine. Parallel to this ethical and affective engagement with primary sources, I have worked with the writings of several scholars and philosophers interested in materiality, experience, processes and flows, labor and embodiment, and urban space, which seemed most amenable for the kind of bottom-up, material-first, and disciplinarily heterodox analysis I prefer. In tr o du ction

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Lest readers lose their way through this book (though being lost has its own charms), I have laid out a dense skein of recurring characters who will guide them through the book: neighborhoods, trains, studios, people, and the rains in Bombay. PL AN OF THE BOOK

This book is divided into two parts based on two views of Bombay’s talkie cine-ecology. The first is a wide-angle view of the financial, technical, and acoustic practices that enabled the consolidation of Bombay’s talkie film landscape. These three chapters look at networks, infrastructures, and industrial maneuvers that highlight the elastic and highly adaptive nature of the cine-ecology. The second view is a close-up of the bodies and energies that flow through the world of film production. These three chapters showcase cinema as an embodied space activated by practices of production, be they practices of making, waiting, or desiring. Together, both parts of the book highlight the value of thinking of film industries as dynamic organisms coterminous with their local environments and with material links that go beyond. Each chapter examines a specific site of cinematic practice wherein ideas of modern industry, finance, voice, energy, body, and selfhood were being transformed. Specific archival events, artefacts, and protagonists anchor each chapter—such as an ambitious film exhibition in 1939 or an insolvency court case from 1941—or incipient historical figures such as the film speculator, the technical specialist, and the movie aspirant. Chapters are also given shadow titles from the local linguistic repertoire (Hindi, Urdu, or street-use English) to keep an alternative aural-semantic imagination alive for readers who can choose it. Part 1, “Elasticity: Infrastructural Maneuvers,” names and describes some prominent tendencies in the expanding talkie ecology of late colonial Bombay. The elasticity of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition—with its porosity of borders, openness to influence, and resistance to systematization—was a response to dominant attitudes of institutional and sociocultural skepticism that confronted cinema in India. As Bombay’s cine-industrial assemblage took a recognizable shape, this elasticity also acquired internal mechanisms of control that sought to discipline specific types of practices, bodies, and entrepreneurial 38

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entities. Thus the tension between control and contingency that is central to filmmaking took on a specific charge in Bombay. In chapter 1 I lay out a history of cinema and finance that helps us understand the deeply speculative nature of the cine-ecology. From the proliferation of films on gambling and stock trading to a High Court judgment in 1941 that framed film production itself as speculative activity, I trace a range of imaginations and practices that fused the careers of cinema and capital in Bombay. I argue that one of the reasons for Bombay’s meteoric rise as a film production center was its openness to both traditional (cotton futures markets) and corporate financial practices premised on speculation, an openness that attracted a nascent group of entrepreneurs who were sensitive to increasing colonial scrutiny and attuned to the productivity of risk. In the second half of the chapter I present business histories of some the most iconic studios of pre-Partition India—Ranjit Movitone, Sagar Movietone, and Bombay Talkies. These studio histories constitute three distinct models of speculative financial modernity activated along intersecting lines of caste, class, gender, and region. Futurity and its fallouts serve as the running theme here. Chapter  2 investigates a series of technical practices that were mobilized in the early talkie decades to counter Bombay cinema’s dubious social reputation and reposition it as an efficient swadeshi industry, owned and managed by Indians.72 I look at the strategic deployment of science as the performative register for a concerted industrial project toward respectability. From the use of exhibitions as sites for the spectacular display of cinema-as-science to technical practices of continuity writing and double-unit shooting, I identify a range of strategies deployed by a young talkie industry to rationalize production and establish a national presence. I question the usefulness of comparisons with the Hollywood studio system in light of transnational influences from other film centers and local transindustrial work conventions. Colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism come together in this chapter under the sign of science to shape the discursive and productive future of cinema in India. A technical history of cinema thus gestures to the ways in which film practitioners and publics found new horizons for defining the self and work through the infrastructural impulse of scientificindustrial transformations of the cine-ecology. In tr o du ction

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Chapter 3 looks at the drive for industrial legitimacy from the perspective of the synchronized cinematic voice, available for the first time with the coming of talkie technology. This was a time marked by tense acoustic battles between modern, “scientific” voices and traditional, “tainted” voices. I show how much-maligned courtesan actresses, who were critical to the consolidation of the Bombay film industry, were implicitly championed through filmic scenes of impassioned speech. Films featuring heroines playing performers and “lady barristers” served as a performative arena for the historical actress to argue for her right to work. By mapping the presence of multiple technologically mediated vocal practices in late colonial India, I situate the actress’s voice within a resonant speech ecology and draw attention to dialogue and speechmaking, seriously underresearched aspects of film aesthetics and form in South Asian film studies, where the “aural” is assumed to mean song and music. The talkie transition offered new technological thrills not only to the listening spectator but also to the voicing actor. There was nervousness about voice tests, and new affective and gestural exertions were required to act before a microphone. These emerging machinic encounters produced energies of their own. Part 2, “Energy: Intimate Struggles,” zooms in on the circulation and transfers of energy within the elastic ecology as I track the experience of everyday, durational film work. An ecology is a web of energy relations. Over three chapters I discuss the significance of cinematic energy transfers across human and nonhuman, on-screen and off-screen, and question the epistemic and social meanings of these binaries. If in part 1 we see an industrial will to modernize, in part 2 we see the corporeal consequences of this will. The late colonial public imagination was preoccupied with somatic battles between energy and weakness, vitality and depletion. From newspaper advertisements for “nerve tonics” to civic associations promoting physical culture, the dominant drive of the period was toward a physical and psychic dynamism that could demonstrate the native body’s capabilities for modern living, leadership, and self-governance. Cinema responded to these prevalent concerns not only through the obvious genre of the stunt film but also through a more pervasive aesthetics of vitality. In chapter 4 I read the recurrence of bodily attitudes, postures, and narratives of vitality in 1930s cinema as an attempt to 40 Int ro du c t i o n | M ap p i n g a C i n e - E co l o g y

position cinema as an “innervating” technology that coupled visions of corporeal energy with fantasies of a machinic apparatus premised on indefatigable, continuous motion. My aim here is to describe and theorize the place of energy in film history as a relational force that joins the space of the image, the body, and the machine. I bookend this chapter with a short story titled “Mera Naam Radha Hai” (My name is Radha), in which Manto teaches us something valuable about work relations and power hierarchies in the cine-ecology by hinting at multispecies exhaustion. Chapter  5 traces itineraries of exhaustion, of bodily depletion and diminution, in order to revisit a critical period in the history of commercial image-making in India. A key protagonist in this chapter is the staractress Shanta Apte, whose career and activism allow us an unprecedented understanding of the material relations, symbolic values, and discursive struggles that marked the consolidation of the Bombay film industry. In 1940 Apte wrote and published an extraordinary text titled Jaau Mi Cinemaant? (Should I join the movies?). This Marathi-language monograph, long out of print, is a loud critique of the extractive practices of Bombay’s film studios. Apte insists on a boundary between the unique potentialities and vulnerabilities of the human body and the supposedly unchanging properties of inanimate film machinery. How do we understand Apte’s defensive insistence on maintaining ontological and agential boundaries between human and nonhuman participants of the film ecology? I unpack this insistence within a broader industrial ecology in Bombay city preoccupied with machinic definitions of worker productivity and scientific measurements of fatigue. Chapter  6 is the only chapter that has a shadow title in English, “Struggle.” The word struggle means something so specific to Bombay that it has ceased to be recognized as an English-language word. To struggle in Bombay is to hustle for that elusive “big break” in the movies, and strugglers are those who do the daily exhausting work of struggle. In this chapter we meet fans whose definitions of the self are premised on projections of future stardom, stunt artistes whose labor value is predicated on the immediacy of bodily risk, and a female extra for whom the durational anxiety of “waiting” becomes also a vector of violence. As the show goes on, certain bodies bear the violent force of temporal incommensurability. We encounter historical figures who In tr o du ction

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continue to dominate contemporary Mumbai’s film landscape—fans, extras, background dancers, stunt artistes—albeit as shadow imaginaries that are only legible in moments of crisis. This chapter draws on fragile archival clues of electrocutions, drownings, explosions, and other “accidents” to present an expansive spatial understanding of industry and the flows of power within the cine-ecology. The epilogue revisits the main themes of the book and summarizes its core concerns. What scales of reference are most apposite to a study of film production? The local, the urban, the national, and the transnational provide different frames of geographic and ideological analysis and alter our orientations to time and history. I have tried to move between scales in the writing of this book by using the logics of archival conjugation, parallel editing, and the insertion of myself as an occasional character in the book. The epilogue discusses some of these methods and their relation to historical temporality. Those readers who are familiar with the contemporary media industries in Mumbai, or perhaps elsewhere, will find many resonances between what I describe here and what they know. To think of the present and the future through stories of the past might help us shake off some old habits of the mind, some assumptions about what constitutes creativity, art, or progress. I therefore end the book with reflections on contemporary analyses of precarity, gig economies, and creative industries. Together the two parts of the book demonstrate that to understand the life and meaning of cinema in a colonial city, one must take into account an expanded view of cinema that embraces storytelling, labor, state policy, industrial experimentation, urban expansion, legal negotiation, the technological apparatus, and financial circuits of exchange. The ecological method highlights processual and reciprocal creative relations across the traditional human/nonhuman divide. Not only are we compelled to study below-the-line labor and workers, but we are also reminded of the role of climate, topography, equipment, and built environments in the production of narrative media and enduring imaginaries of the modern self. Bombay Hustle invites you to enter a fragmented, multivocal archive of the past with the hope that together we will intuit something of what it meant to be making movies in colonial India.

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CH APTER ONE

Speculative Futures | Teji-Mandi The wireless crackled, cables flashed inwards, telegraph boys rushed through the city, telephones were never on their hooks, and out in the streets thousands of the public, which had to be protected against itself, gambled their ten-rupee notes or their four-anna pieces in the hope of gain, while hundreds of printing presses reeled off thousands of news sheets which were eagerly bought by gamblers because they contained the latest figures. —“Night Life in Bombay,” Times of India, 1935

A “vivid but true story of a night in Bombay” was conjured by Indian speakers in the Bombay Legislative Council on July 22, 1935, to make a case to amend the Gambling Act of 1887. Their chief object of attack was “the ruinous and alarming spread of gambling, known as American futures or cotton numbers, which ha[d] taken a firm hold in Bombay and other cities in the Presidency.” The speakers characterized cotton futures trading as an “evil” so widespread that it could even be considered “one of the biggest industries in Bombay” at the time.1 This portrait of a night in Bombay, as painted by politicians, is notable for its emphasis on a frenzied form of communications activity reliant on technological mediation. In the early twentieth century, speculative trading in cotton or jute futures and other commodity derivatives was hardly new in South Asia, but a newly electrified communications sphere, populated by a range of long-distance technologies such as wireless, telegraph, and telephone, revolutionized the international stakes of Bombay’s futures trade. The speed of information travel was of the essence here, and Bombay had

been steadily incorporated into an expanding global information network since 1870, when the Eastern Telegraph Company successfully laid a cable from Suez to the city. Bombay’s cotton speculators could now trade in derivatives based on prices set by the globally dominant New York Cotton Exchange in a matter of minutes. Speculators depended on wireless information relayed from Liverpool, cables sent from Calcutta and Ahmedabad, phone calls from local clients and brokers, or massprinted betting news sheets (which were to be deemed illegal in 1936) (fig.  1.1). The opening and closing rates at the Liverpool, Bombay, and New York cotton markets were broadcast on the local Bombay radio station.2 So central was the role of media infrastructures to the futures gambling scene that in 1935 the Bombay police commissioner asked for special privileges to listen in on telephonic conversations in the city to apprehend betting transactions.3 Into this densely transmedial and technologized economy of speculation and speculative anxiety entered the indigenously produced talkie film in 1931, the latest technological marvel to enthrall the Indian populace, and an aesthetic form deeply invested in speculative futures. The fact that these mediatic activities were also economic activities is crucial to the premise of this chapter: that the reality of everyday media practices confounds the colonial-modern separation of culture and economy. The separation of culture from economy is one of the foundations of modern capitalist life, one that media scholars have persistently tried to dismantle at least since the 1930s, when Frankfurt School thinkers pointed to the “culture industry’s” role in producing passive, drone-like workers for capitalist needs.4 The colonial government in the early twentieth century sought to disembed culture from economy by demarcating indigenous capitalist practices as traditional and hence part of native “culture,” while corporate capitalism was deemed modern and universal. Cinema in this period was affected by what Ritu Birla calls “the central modernizing protocol of capitalist development: the distinction between community and capital, or more broadly, culture and economy.”5 But cinema also confounded these distinctions in the very shape of its being. The entire morphology of Bombay’s talkie cine-ecology, embracing content, form, community, and capital, embodied the inseparability of culture and economy, private and public. 46

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figure  1.1 A broker makes a hand signal while receiving updates on the telephone. From the Bombay Stock and Cotton Exchange series by Margaret BourkeWhite, 1946. (Getty Images)

Cinema’s simultaneous status as commodity, art, technology, and business troubles our need for boundaries between spheres of everyday experience. As Gyan Prakash points out, however, “it is precisely through spillovers and transgressions that modernity penetrates the fabric of social life.”6 Bombay’s cine-ecology gathered the city’s speculative energies into itself and created resonant speculative images of its own. In what follows I look at the thick entanglements of an increasingly financialized social realm, film fictions, and a penchant for wagering in late colonial Bombay. The colonial government’s treatment of cinema as culture rather than economy created a transgressive space of opportunity for film practitioners who infused the new talkie form with a speculative momentum that was critical to its consolidation. The imaginative and material economy of film in late colonial Bombay was thus an economy of speculation. Speculation, in economics, is the active pursuit of risk with the hope of major financial gain. It involves the calculation of probable outcomes based on parameters relevant to the particular industry in question. Speculation is commonly theorized as a late capitalist activity premised on rapacious acquisitiveness resulting in mass inequality and environmental degradation. More recently, postcolonial scholars have tried to revive the term as a philosophical concept that allows us to think of the productive potentials of precarious times and places.7 Speculation, as a “practice of anticipation,” is critical to strategies of survival and resistance.8 Revolutionary struggles, too, in this sense, are speculations toward utopian futures in the face of a dire present. Etymologically, speculation refers to a mode of seeing, adding another layer to the implantation of cinema as a technologized scopic regime in twentieth century India. The Latin specula refers to a watchtower; from such a vantage point one can look down at governable bodies, like the guard in the panopticon’s tower; one can look up at the inscrutable designs of the gods in the sky; or one can look straight ahead into the horizon. Bombay cinema’s modes of speculative looking embraced a range of viewing positions—from the labor and time-management calculations of producers to daily wage workers’ anxieties about landing the next temporary film gig. Each of these historical players demonstrated “a willingness to entertain ideas that cannot yet be empirically established.”9 48

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In this chapter I lay out a history of cinema and finance that has much to tell us about the many lives of cash and credit in a colonial city. Bringing together insights from critical finance studies, Indian business history, film historiography, and political economy alongside rare studio papers and a variety of extant primary sources, I present an ecology of speculative infrastructures and practices that helped consolidate a fundamentally futures-oriented industry. A key insight in this chapter is that, unlike in Hollywood, which shifted from private and familial structures of finance and ownership to a definitively corporate media structure by the mid-1930s, Bombay’s film companies resisted corporatization, largely owing to the unavailability of structured funding from financial institutions.10 Rather than see this as an evolutionary failing, I view the recalcitrance of corporate financial institutions as an agent and evidence of the Bombay film industry’s unique resilience. The historical hesitation of institutional and corporate financial players to invest in India’s early film industries has long been touted as a bugbear. At the time of the inquiries of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (1928), Bombay’s producers had said that “it is not possible for the Producers to obtain loans from banks or private concerns at present, even on security of films.”11 A decade later producer and rental magnate Y. A. Fazalbhoy diagnosed the Indian film industry as being in an anachronistic “pioneer stage,” by which he meant that practitioners were still operating as if it were the early days of cinema in India, when producers could get by with a “pioneer” attitude of improvised methods, low capital, minimal technology, and almost zero permanent assets.12 After Independence, another government report, the Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (1951), was still in agreement with this basic complaint about the lack of capital. What I would like to stress here is that film finance can come in varied forms. Despite frequent complaints of acute undercapitalization, the number of films produced in India exponentially increased during the early talkie years, from 28 sound features in 1931 (and 209 silent films) to 233 talkies in 1935 (no silent features).13 These numbers gesture toward the large amounts of short-term, highinterest finances that have historically supported India’s multiple film ecologies. I propose a historiographic reframing of financial “lack” as an opportunity that created the very conditions of possibility for a resoundingly decentralized, diverse, and dynamic cine-ecology that drew on Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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alternative sources of finance and survived several economic, social, and political challenges through the decades. Later chapters build on this portrait of financial hustle, and I discuss technical, acoustic, and corporeal struggles against a speculative infrastructure predicated on risk and its management. I begin this chapter by describing the proliferation of a speculative imagination in Bombay in the early twentieth century, as seen in films, gambling activities, and public debates on speculation. I pose a continuum between filmic fictions and material practices geared toward conjuring capital in a colonial economy. Next I analyze a court case that frames film production itself as speculative activity. A number of strategies for film funding come into view here, ranging from the minimum guarantee system of distributors to the performative use of corporate forms to impose an aura of stability and transparency on a fundamentally volatile production economy. I consider the role of speculative cotton finance, which opportunistically entered into the funding vacuum created by local financial institutions and the colonial state, both of which viewed cinema with circumspection. In the final section I examine three prominent talkie studios of the day as they mobilized different modes of speculative modernity in the moment of their emergence. Futurity and its fallouts serve as the running theme in this chapter. Futures trading in commodities like cotton refers to the trade in financial instruments or contracts to buy or sell commodities at a prefixed price, with a delivery date set in the future. Futures contracts emerged as an effective risk-management tool to protect agricultural merchants from price fluctuations in commodities that are seasonal and dependent on a variety of environmental and infrastructural factors. Soon, however, futures markets, or what is colloquially referred to as the satta bazaar, emerged as prime venues for speculators uninterested in the actual delivery of the physical commodities but keen on the game of predicting future price fluctuations, where futures contracts as well as options on underlying contracts (teji-mandi) could be bought or sold before the final date of delivery.14 The cotton futures market was thus based on a special kind of commodity—one that didn’t yet exist. From a Marxian perspective, options trading on futures would comprise “fictitious” commodity forms, financial contracts based on notional values that are less real as compared to physical goods produced by 50 El a s t i c i t y

human labor. Fictitious though they seem, I approach futures contracts and a range of speculative practices allied with these financial instruments as among the material realities that shaped Bombay city and its cine-ecology. Further, I expand the repertoire of speculative financial practices common in the early decades of film production in Bombay to include not just cash flowing in from risky gambits in stock and cotton markets but also other modes of conjuring cash flows, such as diversified commodity production, use of the film star as capital, and trustbased social networks for capital generation. These financial practices were geographically rooted, linked with the exigencies of war, agriculture, community networks, and colonial structures of patronage and surveillance. The term teji-mandi (literally fast-slow, or rise-fall), which serves as the shadow title for this chapter, thus refers not only to a specific type of financial instrument but the very logic of a cine-ecology premised on the ebb and flow of life in a late colonial port city. S P E C U L AT I V E M O D E R N I T Y

It’s a page from the story of a man thrown and tossed like sea waves in this “Passing Show” of the world and really this world is nothing but a “Passing Show.” —Passing Show song booklet, 1936

As Bombay hurtled into the twentieth century, the idea that life was “nothing but a passing show” took on new meanings. Fittingly, the contingencies of daily life in the commercial capital of South Asia were most dramatically recorded in the realm of finance. For what is the ebb and flow of life if not the same as teji-mandi in the bazaar? Films of the late colonial period turn repeatedly to questions of speculative finance that underlined the complexities of a rapidly transforming credit economy. Synopses and reviews of lost films of the era present fictitious capital as a site of opportunity as well as calamity. Economic historians of Bombay have studied the timeline of capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization, with a special focus on industrial labor, mercantile networks, and interwar financial circuits.15 Nevertheless, the increasing financialization of everyday life in the early twentieth century remains to be adequately parsed.16 An important Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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corrective is to be found in Asiya Siddiqui’s Bombay’s People (2017), where she provides rich examples of the centrality of cash and credit in the lives of the city’s “people”—not just businesspeople and entrepreneurs but dancing girls, sailors, mill hands, bidi-makers, milk vendors, carpenters, clerks, and petty itinerant traders.17 Fears of insolvency and legal retribution were a looming presence that cut across a wide swathe of Bombay’s population, across sex, occupation, and class. For a cinema that depended heavily on local audiences, Bombay’s concerns were the logical subject of its films.18 Bombay cinema provided a sharp distillation of the everyday aspirations and anxieties engendered by rapid financialization. Not only were story lines motivated by stock market rhythms, but characters were valued in terms of their financial potential. These filmic imaginaries tapped into the messy vitality of the city’s bazaar economy, now expanding to include a new imagination of corporate finance. New research in the growing field of critical finance studies makes exciting connections between speculative fiction and speculative finance.19 These connections build on arguments about the performativity and social nature of finance capital, which needs to narrate trajectories of the future in order to solicit investments in the present. In a special dossier on speculation, the editors suggest that speculative practices in India today are “often driven by the dreamscape of media imaginaries. This makes public culture not just a distraction from economic inequality, but one of its key infrastructures. This contemporary empire of speculation has its own aesthetic forms, material artifacts, and predictive practices.”20 The imaginaries that circulated across film and finance in late colonial Bombay also had their own aesthetic forms and genres, from the social problem picture to the stunt film to the sci-fi action thriller. These different genres produced distinct attitudes toward indigenous credit and corporate speculative finance, ranging from optimism about a democratizing financial sphere to finger-wagging moralizing about the evil of gambling (fig. 1.2). In this manner, Bombay cinema not only instructed audiences about the vagaries and possibilities of market speculation but also normalized speculative risk as thrilling entertainment, feeding the city’s notorious passion for gambling. While gambling with cards was a part of festive occasions such as Diwali, by the turn of the century “gambling formed a part of the world of entertainment” for Bombay’s mercantile community “in spectacularly 52

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figure  1.2 Literal finger-wagging in Always Tell Your Wife or Miya-Biwi (Franz Osten, 1936). (Image courtesy of National Film Archive of India)

public ways.”21 Quite like the betting scene in colonial Calcutta documented by Ritu Birla, Bombay’s merchants too wagered on dog and horse races, cotton and opium market prices, and even the quantity of monsoon rainfall. “Gaming,” though, was not limited to mercantile elites, and all manner of middle- and working-class men and women traded at local pedhis, street corners, betting stalls, and gaming houses. Gambling, a source of much public agitation in these years, became a privileged site of filmic crisis during Bombay cinema’s consolidation. In the film Baap Kamai (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1925), the profligate son of a wealthy merchant loses his entire family wealth to gambling, while in Ghar ki Laj (V. M. Vyas, 1941), the married, England-educated hero similarly loses his inheritance. Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929), an IndoBritish silent coproduction, was loosely inspired by the central episode of the mythological dice game between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, reminding viewers that the gambling imagination in South Asia went as Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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far back as the epic Mahabharata, where it figured both as entertainment and as a spectacular venue for deception. Do Ghadi ki Mouj (Homi Master, 1935) modernized the motif; its engineer protagonist gambles away his life at the racecourse and later faces colonial-legal punishment under embezzlement charges. The detective thriller Red Signal (Nari Ghadiali, 1941) begins with Pratap, who “once rolling in luxuries now finds himself in utter poverty and heavy debts of moneylender [sic].”22 When Pratap is unable to pay back his gambling debts to a mafia ring, his baby daughter, Radha, is kidnapped by goons. Radha grows up to become a masked avenger named “Red Signal,” whose mission is to protect future victims of the gambling mafia. And in Always Tell Your Wife (Franz Osten, 1936), the gambling problem is treated humorously as we follow a gaming addict, Rupchand, who stages an elaborate charade to keep his wife in the dark about his gambling obsession. Modern technologies such as the telephone, telegram, steamer, and airplane are mobilized, this time to maintain the illusion that Rupchand is away on a business trip while he is actually gambling onboard a ship in the middle of the Arabian Sea. Many of these films critiqued the hubris of the merchant classes, whose wealth-based arrogance is punished by sudden reversals of fortune. Loss of wealth is attributed to ineptitude, villainy, and addiction, apart from pure chance. It is important to note here that the definitional lines between speculation, wagering, and gambling were hotly contested in Bombay’s law courts ever since the Prevention of Gambling Act (1887). Was betting on the rain the same as gambling with cards? If a speculative activity depended purely on chance, could it be deemed as undesirable as a game of skill and manipulation? Was gambling in private the same as in public? Could the stock exchange, the race course, a Diwali card party, and a rooftop for monitoring rainfall all be equated as sites of iniquity? In Stages of Capital, Birla highlights British juridical efforts to criminalize wagering (based on chance) in Bombay State as a means to discourage indigenous forms of speculative trading, including commodity futures markets. Creating a tenuous distinction between indigenous modes of “gambling,” such as monsoon speculation, and “modern” speculative practices, such as shares trading, the colonial government sought to eliminate the economic threat posed by native speculators. My research shows that colonial discrimination against certain forms of wagering continued right 54

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through the interwar period. Despite the best efforts of the Bombay Cotton Exchange (1893) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (1875), the colonial government treated any form of futures trading on commodities that were important to the colonial economy with the highest degree of circumspection, finally banning cotton futures trading during World War II. Indeed, much like the film industry, the cotton futures market also suffered from negative characterizations in the minds of the lay public, and commentators on both sides sought to reform opinions through frequent newspaper op-eds. As one cotton enthusiast put it, “those who are against futures trading differ from those who are in favor solely on a misunderstanding of the word speculation and the extent to which, in terms of futures trading, some sort of speculation is vice or virtue.”23 It is thus possible to see how a former commissioner of the Bombay Police, S. M. Edwardes, could conflate gambling, share trading, and speculation: “the uncontrolled habit of speculation has always distinguished the City of Bombay. Few persons now remain who can remember the famous Share Mania of the early ’sixties: but the spirit of gambling which underlay that colossal financial fiasco is still alive and manifests itself from time to time in wild speculation in the cotton and share market.”24 Speculative trading as gambling took on a specific charge in films like Double Cross (Mohan Bhavnani, 1938), a “detective-drama” or “detective-thriller,” with its central emphasis on stockbrokers, bankruptcy fears, and evil market manipulators who orchestrate a stock market crash.25 In a story line as convoluted as the intricacies of the stock exchange, Double Cross featured a scientist, Professor Mukherji, who discovers a formula for manufacturing synthetic diamonds. His stockbroker uncle, Seth Romesh Chandra, has a large shareholding in the Orient Diamond Mines, which is located in the princely state of Panipur. The villain, Sirdar Mulkraj, attempts to destabilize the government of Panipur by causing a major fall in stock values of the mines, leading Seth Romesh Chandra to the verge of bankruptcy. A tussle now ensues to get a hold of Professor Mukherji’s diamond formula. Despite its abundant twists and turns, Double Cross cleverly brought together political economy and science fiction to craft a suspenseful detective story. Adhuri Kahani (Chaturbhuj Doshi, 1939) chose tragedy as its main aesthetic register. Seth Gopaldas, a cotton merchant, loses all his wealth in the satta bazaar, an event that sets off a chain of tragic Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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reactions, including suicide. The Rise / Tumhari Jeet (Ranjeet Sen, 1939) is a comic-romantic film that tells a sophisticated tale of the stock exchange, even titled after the rise and fall rhythms of the share bazaar. Unlike most films of the day, The Rise features a businessman hero, Prafulla, who has made a name in the stock market. His chief rival, Milapchand, tries to create an artificial crash in order to scoop up low-priced shares but is stymied when Prafulla uses the power of rumor to adversely impact Milapchand’s own stock values. The intricacies of such plots drew on routine news reports of stock market panics, lawsuits, scandals, and suicides. News stories themselves used sensationalist rhetoric, selfreflexively drawing on fictive genres such as comedy, tragedy, and the thriller. From stockbrokers suing maharajas, to film producers accused of murdering share brokers, to stories of forged checks, Bombay’s newspapers were inflamed with tales that strained standard distinctions between the real and representational, news and narrative.26 Films centered on financial risk were firmly grounded in the socioeconomic realities of their immediate context. They produced an inventory of emergent social actors who dominated the urban imagination of the times—figures such as gamblers, stockbrokers, insurance agents, teji-mandi speculators, race bettors, and bankers. The link between these diverse actors is the fact that they dealt in financial futures that had proven to be high-risk in recent years. Film antagonists during the talkie transition were frequently named “crooks,” “swindlers,” “forgers,” “blackmailers,” and “fraudsters,” indicating their criminal appropriation of ill-gotten funds but also signaling the fact that economic crimes were overtaking other fictive modes of villainy. Time and again, villains in the trendy social films of the 1920s and 1930s were shown to be finance and paperwork savvy, their chief object of greed being signed bonds of trust, wills, shares, promissory notes, insurance policies, and checks. The litany of financial crimes portrayed in these films tapped into the circulation of sensational police cases since the turn of the century, involving stolen checks, forged certificates, embezzlement of funds, misappropriation of funds by bank managers, dummy corporations, and prominent suicides driven by insolvency. Several films portrayed bankruptcy as an imminent urban tragedy, leading either to punishment within the colonial-legal system and humiliation within the community or to suicide.27 “Creditors” are therefore a constant irritant 56

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in New Searchlight (Homi Master, 1937) and Matlabi Dunia (Jayant Desai, 1936), both films premised on sick loans, debt, and desperation. In 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, C. F. C. De Sousa of Colaba published a book dedicated to The Indian Investor advocating “scientific investment.” For De Sousa, who had traveled across India to consult on investment matters, there were “few [speculator] fellows on earth so clever as the Bombay fellows.”28 Bombay cinema did not limit “speculator fellows” to street-level hustlers and stereotypical crooks. The immensely wealthy were also regarded with suspicion. Master Man (G. K. Mehta, 1938) fleshed out contemporary perceptions by creating an antagonist who leads a double life. Sir Gordhandas is the governor of a big bank and a prominent philanthropist. But he is also “Master Man,” a dreaded underworld don who runs a vast crime organization. For every act of charity by Sir Gordhandas, Master Man recoups ten times the amount from “Society” at large. The conflation of the respectable banker with an underworld crook literalized the common-sense idea that high finance was simply a glamorized form of highway robbery. It also highlighted the uneven and unequal nature of financial mobility enabled by the culture of credit. Finance capitalism offered a plausible way for the middle classes to participate in finance markets and prosper, but it also encouraged powerful financial institutions to redistribute their wealth among a handful of elite agents and middlemen, key stockholders such as managers and directors, rather than lower-rung workers or even salaried employees. Filmic fictions about finance, much like speculative writing about science and technology, drew on popular perceptions that financial matters were obscurantist and opaque, and further, that the experts who were trained in these esoteric knowledge systems, such as brokers, insurance agents, and corporate lawyers, could just as easily use their expertise for good as for evil. F I L M A S WAG E R : C . I . R .C .O . V. U N K N OW N , N O V E M B E R   24 , 19 41

Films are not commodities in the ordinary sense of the term which have a marketable value. They depend for their success or failure upon how the public appreciate their merit. —C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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In 1941 a shareholder implored the Bombay High Court to declare the Circo Film Company insolvent. The petition was dismissed as the judge noted that Circo had three films under production and it was impossible to ascertain whether those films would create profits or losses. The judge refused to be “tempted” into pronouncing a “judicial decision as to the probable success or non-success of this company as a commercial speculation.”29 This case offers us several insights into the role of speculation in film production, as well as measures commonly adopted to manage risk. Circo, or the Cine Industries and Recording Company, was registered in April 1937 as a public limited company under the Indian Companies Act. The petitioner of the case held a mere 5 shares out of a total 2,500 shares that were issued. This small holding did not disqualify the petition, but the court’s decision had to rest on the majority shareholder view as to the company’s future prospects. After considering all arguments, Justice Chagla refused to “speculate” and stated that the prosecution lawyer, Mr. Daphtary, had failed “to satisfy me that there is no reasonable hope, as far as this company is concerned, that the object of trading at a profit, with a view to which the company was formed, can be attained.” At the heart of the matter was whether Circo could claim a “reasonable hope” of profits. The question of probability was paramount to the case, as Circo had not displayed any consistent pattern of profit making over its brief four-year career. Commercial volatility defines the object at the core of the cineecology—film as a commodity form. From the earliest moment of the emergence of cinema as commerce, it was recognized that predicting profits or losses was a tricky matter, at best involving the law of probable outcomes. In its review of the film industry through the silent era, a newspaper summed up the profitability issue thus: “As far as the profit and loss side of the business is concerned, it appears that although it is possible generally to anticipate the preferences of Indian audiences, there is at the same time an element of uncertainty; and sometimes it may happen, for instance, that an elaborately produced film may bring indifferent results, while one produced at lower cost may have a very profitable run.”30 In the interwar period the Bombay cine-ecology’s relation with the future was marked by extreme contingency. Be it in terms of an acute 58

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shortage of low-interest steady finance, the increasing independence of stars and other technical specialists, or the material volatility created by the Great Depression and the impending Second World War, this was a period of enormous unpredictability. By 1936 Bombay cinema’s embrace of sound was complete, but the industry also saw the closure of several studios from 1936 to 1939. Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Film Company, the oldest producing studio in Bombay, was forced to shut down in July 1938, affecting the livelihoods of at least three hundred workers. Soon thereafter another company, Saroj Movietone, “stopped their own productions and its financiers [were] bent on hiring out the studio, perhaps as they would hire out a buffalo stable.”31 As if this were not enough, the Fazalbhoy brothers’ General Films also announced its decision to discontinue production activities despite showing great commercial promise after the success of their debut film, Chanderrao More (Arolkar, 1938). Y. A. Fazalbhoy, director of General Films and owner of Film City studio, singled out the lack of adequate capital as the main factor that made the film industry an extremely precarious entity, with producers “permanently on the verge of a business breakdown.”32 During the silent period, a minimum profit was guaranteed on almost all film ventures due to the novelty of the form and the relatively small number of films in the market at any given point. By 1935, not only was competition at an all-time high, but audiences had also become more discerning in their viewing tastes, as was evidenced in the growing interest in social films of a realist strain. A talkie film also cost far more to produce: if the average cost of a silent film in 1928 was Rs. 20,000, a talkie film cost an average of Rs. 60,000 in the mid- to late 1930s, basically tripling production expenses.33 Add to this the bigger capital investments needed to reconfigure studio and theatrical infrastructures to accommodate sound. Where was this money to come from? Despite several petitions and proposals to set up a “Film Fund,” the colonial government was singularly apathetic to the idea of investment in the film trade. Further, banks were unwilling to fund a high-risk and low-status enterprise such as cinema.34 This is a radically different scenario from Hollywood in the same period. According to Lee Grieveson, Hollywood appeared as a “productive site for investment,” and “capital swept through the industry” in the mid-1920s, allowing studios to Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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accumulate fixed assets and invest in real estate (theater chains and rental properties). Banks recognized Hollywood studios’ increasingly sophisticated distribution networks as “infrastructural power integral to the profitability of film businesses.”35 In China, film studios were initially established with modest funds raised by “founders and prospective shareholders,” says Xuelei Huang, and “this feature was characteristic of the financial situation of the early Chinese film industry.”36 The situation changed after 1927, when capital was available through government banks under a nationalist leadership keen to encourage propaganda filmmaking. In the case of Bombay, the situation was different and complex. From personal and family finances diverted by studio owners from existing business concerns, to surplus and untaxed incomes from speculative trading, to high-interest loans pulled from the Bombay region’s traditional credit markets, films were financed by multiple, often unstable sources. The most forthcoming of all the funding routes was through distributors who stepped in with advance (speculative) payments on films still under production. For example, a firm called the House of Kapurchand appeared as a film financier around 1930, buoyed by profits from film distribution and exhibition.37 The financing thus available was short-term and high-interest, providing superficial aid rather than enabling long-term stability. In his characteristic acerbic style, Baburao Patel describes the distribution-speculation nexus thus: In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional film distributor thrives. . . . He comes with a fortune made in share and cotton gambling, advances money to the producer at a killing rate of interest plus a big slice of royalty and recovers his investment by blackmailing the exhibitors into giving heavy and uneconomic minimum guarantees. His only aim in life is to multiply his rupee and in prosecuting this aim he does not worry about the future of the industry or about the existence of the producer or exhibitor.38

Bombay’s fledgling film industry depended on the opportunistic aid of speculative investors who were driven by the possibility of high returns with minimal regulation. Owing to the huge financial costs and labor time required to produce a single picture, the risk potential of film 60

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as business is singularly high. Nevertheless, profits, when generated, could be to the tune of “several hundred percent,” a temptation that had led “capitalists and businessmen, who have little appreciation for art and ennobling effects” to “rush into this industry.”39 A film that cost Rs. 60,000 to produce could be expected to bring in returns of Rs. 100,000 to Rs. 500,000.40 These ratios made film production a lucrative venture for speculative investors who were attracted to the high stakes of the film game. Notwithstanding its predatory logics, speculative interest in cinema generated material resources for an industry infamously bereft of state or institutional support. By the mid-1930s Bombay cinema’s hearty embrace of speculative finance had become a problem. In a cyclical fashion, it undercut attempts to invite corporate finance. Social reputation was crucial to raising capital, and the invocation of “corporate methods” now became a way to remake cinema’s social status.41 New studios such as Bombay Talkies (BT) made aggressive efforts to attract corporate finance from local industrialists who commanded both monetary and social capital. By the late 1930s debutant film concerns increasingly elected to register as public limited companies so that they could generate the bulk of initial capital through public subscription and also promise financial transparency and good governance.42 The limited liability company became the favored model for undercapitalized start-up companies as well as existing concerns that sought to redistribute their risks and rejuvenate their business. This is how Circo came into being. Circo was started by a Bombay-based board of principal shareholders, headed by the writer Chimanlal Trivedi, in partnership with the prestigious Calcutta-based New Theatres Studios, which managed all production until 1939.43 Circo was set up with an issued capital of Rs. 250,000 while its nominal capital was Rs. 500,000, standard at the time. Each year the company shared its balance sheet with shareholders and held annual general body meetings. Nonetheless, one shareholder moved to declare his trust deficit in the management of Circo. The two main grounds for their petition were the alleged mismanagement of company funds by the managing director Chimanlal Trivedi, and skepticism about the future profitability of the company. The mismanagement of funds could not be proved. Further, the defense counsel presented three reasons to justify Circo’s “high hopes of not only meeting all the Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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liabilities but of making considerable profits out of [forthcoming] films”— exclusive contracts with stars, good film stories, and double version pictures shot in two languages. The parameters on which these high hopes were pinned are highly illuminating. Three films were under production in Bombay at the time of the petition—Apna Ghar (Devki Bose, 1942), Mahatma Vidur (P. Y. Altekar, 1943), and Nai Duniya (A. R. Kardar, 1942). The company directors claimed that the films would yield at least Rs. 1,100,000 “in view of the attractive cast and the stories which are of first rate character.”44 Contracts had already been negotiated with “well-known and famous artists whom they had secured with great difficulty and influence.”45 Citing the importance of the “monopoly” that Circo had secured over the labor of the stars, as well as the “earning possibilities of the subjects which had been selected for films,” the directors were confident that “they would make good profits within a few years.”46 The prosecution counsel, Mr.  Daphtary, agreed that three films were indeed being produced, and with the help of an attractive cast. The point of dispute was whether this would result in a profit and, more important, how profits were measured in the film industry. Daphtary’s main contention was with the manner in which Circo had written up its profit-and-loss account for the year ended March 31, 1940. On the credit side, the company showed revenues of Rs. 160,000 in respect of “realizations from distributors and estimated revenue in respect of pictures under distribution.” Daphtary argued that “this item could by no stretch of imagination find its place in a profit and loss account.” The defense argument is worth quoting at length: This is the usual manner in which film companies prepare their profit and loss account. A film takes a long time to prepare, sometimes two or three years. Large sums are spent on the preparation and the returns begin to come in after a film starts being exploited. If revenue was only to be shown when a film was being exploited, the result would be that for two or three years the company would have to show a large loss due to monies being spent on the preparation of films. Therefore in the profit and loss account the film companies as a rule show estimates of the revenue they expect to get from exploitation of their films. 62

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What the defense counsel is saying here is that films are peculiar commodities; strange not only in terms of their unpredictable futures but also because of the elastic duration of profit accrual. This creates a flexible timeline of one to three years during which the film is “exploited” to its maximum capacity. Owing to this temporal delay between production of the commodity and its full commercial exploitation, the actual numbers entered in a company’s balance sheet might have no indexical relation with actual profits accrued. This is a remarkable idea. The anticipatory logic by which virtual profits can be recorded even before they materialize is the very definition of speculation.47 The principal reason for the temporal elasticity of profit generation was that distribution networks in colonial India were limited, and a film would move through the distribution and exhibition landscape at a slow, staggered pace. From first-run theaters in the big cities, a handful of prints would move to second- and third-tier markets in secondrun theaters, mofussil towns, and villages over a period of several months, until all venues and the celluloid print itself were exhausted.48 In his statement to the ICC in 1927, filmmaker Mohan Bhavnani highlighted the slow rhythm of returns as one of the factors that kept investors away from cinema: “Capitalists in India are generally fond of investing in speculative lines, and if they invest something this month, they want an immediate return on it, but in this industry, as I have told you, you will have to wait for at least two years before you can get your return.”49 But without profits in hand, how was a studio to continue production? Producers could not afford to keep their production and staff suspended in the interim. Some studios borrowed money against permanent equipment, and some rented out their facilities to other companies. The dominant form of finance was the system of “minimum guarantee,” where distributors offered producers a basic minimum return on their films in exchange for distribution rights. Studios used this advance payment from the distributor to start shooting their next film. Of course this was, and remains until today, a form of futures trading: negotiating a price for a commodity based on a prediction of the profits it might earn in the future. The Circo court case shows that despite the official “corporatization” of a film company, older financial practices continued unabated. Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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Even though the Companies Act deemed that a concern could not borrow an amount greater than its issued capital, Rs. 250,000 in this case, Circo’s directors had run up a debt of Rs. 600,000, borrowing from traditional networks of distributors, exhibitors, and miscellaneous, unnamed creditors. Most interestingly, owing to the public promise of profitability that a company such as Circo was premised on, annual dividends were paid out to shareholders in order to maintain the company’s reputation on the stock market. According to the petitioner, Circo’s dividends were often paid out by the directors against loans taken on the local credit market, thus demonstrating that even share dividends could not be read as a reliable indicator of a film company’s financial health. The corporate form of Circo was primarily performative. To a distant observer, such as a judge who refused to “speculate,” the corporate façade propped up by stock options, boards of directors, transparent accounts, and annual dividends seemed to absorb all the volatility of the trade. However, the institutional forms that were meant to negate the risky, futures-based image of the film business were infused with all the unpredictability inherent to the trade. Although the form of the enterprise seemed stable, its internal practices remained unsteady, revealing the public limited corporate entity to be just another speculative trading firm. C O T TO N F U T U R E S

Q: Can you tell me why there is not a single film studio in the United Provinces, the home of the Hindi language? A: Because that province has no official gambling dens like the Share Market and the Cotton Exchange where easy money can be made and invested in films. As yet film making has not become a real industry in India. It is still an adventure run with pirated capital. —“Editor’s Mail,” filmindia, 1941

A cheaply printed Hindi weekly film magazine called Cinema Sansar (Cinema world) started circulating in Bombay in 1932. It regularly 64

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published weekly rates for American cotton futures alongside film advertisements and news. This casual juxtaposition of cotton futures trading and cinema prods us to think about their interconnections (fig. 1.3). Both cotton and cinema were pivotal to the emergence of Bombay as South Asia’s foremost industrial metropolis. The first cotton mills were built in the city in the 1850s, and cotton rapidly became India’s most important industry, controlled in large part by indigenous capital, and propelling Bombay’s business and labor concerns to the national stage.50 Cinema entered the scene at the very end of the nineteenth century, but it too played a major role in consolidating and confirming Bombay’s status as a modern metropolis with a sway over the late colonial “national” imagination. These synchronically twinned trajectories of cotton and cinema have more material connections than one might assume at first glance. In his latest book, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, Lee Grieveson situates the rise of Hollywood within a complex matrix of “interlocking relations among telecommunications, media corporations, and finance capital.”51 He argues that Hollywood’s much-touted system of vertical integration was not invented by studios but prompted by a longer history of the American corporate form and its drive toward oligopoly. This is an important point as it suggests that in order to understand the form of a film industry, one must look sideways at the dominant models of business that surround it. Bombay’s cine-ecology had deep roots in regional networks of speculative trading, and it sourced much of its capital from Gujarati and Marwari credit and cotton merchants located in the city and its hinterland. Indian capitalists were a “rising group, socially as well as economically” in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their two main constraints were the dominance of British capital over most of the modern sector and the predominantly precapitalist structures of the agrarian sector.52 The Indian film industry was wholly indigenous in its finance and executive control, producing home-grown content for home-grown audiences. Cotton trading was closely monitored by the Indian Cotton Committee of the Textile Control Board, but cinema, still struggling to gain industrial and social recognition, was outside  the purview of colonial economic regulation. As I will detail in chapter 2, Indian cinema’s most prominent nodes of growth (studios, Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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figures  1.3a and 1.3b Cinema Sansar, January  7, 1933. The right column says “American Cotton Futures, January  7–13.” (Image courtesy of National Film Archive of India)

figures 1.3a and 1.3b (continued)

laboratories, technicians, actors) were also actively trying to remake themselves as modern, scientific, and corporate. Thus the in-between industrial status of cinema—as indigenous, modernizing, and governmentally undervalued—made it a prime location for multiple financial interests to converge. Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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The commodity derivatives market in Bombay was thriving since at least the mid-1850s, with cotton futures trading getting an unprecedented boost during the 1860s with the American Civil War. As  U.S. cotton exports declined, England turned to India to supply its textile factories with raw cotton. Bombay’s rise as the foremost industrial and financial center of South Asia is closely linked with the “Cotton Mania” of the 1860s when “the phenomenal flow of gold into the Presidency, accruing from the abnormal prices of cotton induced by the American Civil War, sent the city temporarily mad. It is estimated that the five years brought Bombay profit on its cotton trade worth eighty-one million pounds more than it would have received in ordinary times.”53 Record profits entered Bombay in the form of gold and were redistributed along channels of real estate, the textile industry, philanthropic civic infrastructural development, and the credit economy. Scores of new banks, financial institutions, and businesses sprang up at this time, and so high was the cotton euphoria that, reportedly, “four thousand rupee shares of the Back Bay Company were forced up to twenty-four thousand rupees—a premium of 600%.”54 In 1865, however, when the war ended, Bombay’s speculative mania abruptly terminated in a “ruinous panic” where “in a few weeks the whole mass of paper wealth [shares] became unsaleable” making the “Bombay crash one of the severest disasters which ever fell upon a mercantile community.”55 Still, the city’s appetite for speculation soon revived, and Bombay witnessed periodic booms during World War I, 1925, 1935, and World War II, alongside global aftershocks of the Great Depression (1929–1939). The speculative finance that flooded Bombay in these years found another exciting redistribution outlet with the emergence of a local film industry. One of Bombay’s oldest film studios, Kohinoor Film Company (1919–1932), was started by a local cotton mill owner, Dwarkadas Sampat. Similarly, Ishwarlal Umedbhai Patel moved profits from his family’s ginning factories in Gujarat and Bombay into film, financing “about half a dozen petty producing concerns” before entering film distribution and then production with the concerns Gujerat Film Circuit and Jay-Bharat Movietone. 56 Mayashanker Bhatt, proprietor of Sharda Film Company and President of the Motion Picture Society of India (1933–34), maintained a parallel business in textile

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production.57 The earliest avatar of Bombay Talkies, the “Indian Players,” received financial backing from the cotton merchantturned-Theosophist Jamnadas Dwarkadas in 1923 for its proposed film, Light of Asia. Dwarkadas was also a member of the Legislative Assembly and offered a 3,000-pound guarantee against a 30 percent share of profits.58 When the Indian Players started Bombay Talkies, their studio was built on the property of F. E. Dinshaw, a member of the BT Board of Directors who had made his fortunes partly from the Bombay cotton industry and offered the use of his large Malad summer bungalow and sprawling estate. 59 Sir Phiroze Sethna, later president of the Motion Picture Society, had begun his career as a cotton supplier and mill owner before moving into insurance and banking.60 Apart from capital investments put forward by cotton magnates, Bombay cinema was increasingly financed by short-term profits from cotton speculation. The most routine form of finance available for film production was through local moneylenders who charged exorbitant rates of monthly interest. Next came regional and community-based networks of credit and investment that were connected to global economic currents in cotton and bullion. These mercantile networks seized on film as an avenue for offloading unreported and untaxed incomes from speculative and other trade.61 Owing to the intense colonial scrutiny of locally established commodities futures markets, the economically inconspicuous film industry became a logical venue for a new kind of futures trading.62 Driven by the extrapolations of distributors, short-term investors approached film as a commodity derivatives market, moving money into and out of the film economy without concern for the quality or even delivery of the film commodity. Film was not considered a national commodity that deserved special attention, nor was it regarded as an essential wartime resource. This was one reason that many of Bombay’s early film concerns were directly funded by profits from the cotton trade. The 1940s saw the rapid mushrooming of scores of independent and fly-by-night film production companies in Bombay, a fact that has been attributed to the increased circulation of cash in a wartime economy. The extreme precarity of cotton futures markets during the war years must be

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considered as another key factor in the proliferation of intrepid, shortlived film concerns during this time. Speculative finance had become so naturalized by the 1940s that film journalist Baburao Patel felt obliged to remind readers that “in the course of thirty years, through the routine evolution of mortgages, the early speculating financiers came to be known as the studio-owners and incidentally as the producers. Though now they produce pictures on their own, their profit motive remains paramount.”63 Clearly, the cinema-cotton relationship was mutually beneficial. If cinema needed finances from Bombay cotton, then cotton futures trading also needed Bombay cinema to reroute investments. Spatially, too, cotton and cinema made parallel claims on the city. Cotton mill districts, the residential neighborhoods inhabited by millworkers, and the earliest theaters to screen exclusively Indian films were spatially connected. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar tells us that “from the late nineteenth century onwards . . . the city’s poor began to drift away from the high rents of the native town to the villages of Parel, to Mazgaon and Tarwadi, Sewri and Kamathipura.” The city’s cotton mills were increasingly concentrated in these same areas and “90  percent of the city’s millworkers lived within fifteen minutes’ walking distance of their place of work.”64 The high concentration of working-class populations led to the increased demand for theaters, and “from the mid-1920s, a new exhibition locale was developing to the north of Grant Road.”65 These northern neighborhoods included the millworker districts of Parel and Sewri. A history of such neighborhood links shows us that the local cotton industry not only supplied finance but also provided the earliest audiences for Indian cinema. In turn, cinema offered Bombay’s overworked and underpaid factory workers an escape from everyday drudgery, fantasies of alternate worlds, and a place to relax for three or more hours, thus providing the sociophysical conditions for the reproduction of labor power. Overlapping these spatial concentrations of urban labor, production, and film exhibition were the city’s infamous red-light neighborhoods, zones of sex work such as Kamathipura, Khetwadi, Phunuswaree, Girgaon, and Tardeo, many of which had a high concentration of millworkers.66 Entertainment and extraction, labor and leisure, worked symbiotically in these social zones of contact, contributing to the consolidation of the talkie cine-ecology. 70

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A PA RT I C U L A R K I N D O F AC T I V I T Y

The profounder kind of happiness is only got by taking risks, by gambling with life, by having hopes and ideals. The aim of such a man is not the attainment of a particular thing, post, or honor but a particular kind of activity. —Unattributed, 1930

Every creative act is a speculative act, a gesture toward a future where the labor of today will be acknowledged and valued. In this final section I track some of the gambles that resulted in the creation of three of Bombay’s most iconic talkie studios of the 1930s—Ranjit Movitone, Sagar Movietone, and Bombay Talkies. I have chosen these three studio case studies in order to display the sheer variety of financial and speculative practices in play during the talkie transition in Bombay. Where Ranjit was built on merchant capital and revenues from the stock market, Sagar grew out of ties with film distribution and an overdependence on stars, while Bombay Talkies leaned on social contacts who were tapped for corporate capital. These three case studies are at once business histories, studio histories, and tales of speculative hustle that reveal the place of a local film industry within wider histories of business and the circulation of capital. By following the money, so to speak, I examine the conditions of possibility for these studios’ formation. Ranjit, Sagar, and Bombay Talkies unfolded out of a congeries of preexisting cultural and financial networks that converged in Bombay in the 1930s, cohering around the new technological form of sound cinema. Intercity and interregional connections across Bombay, Surat, Pune, Calcutta, London, and Lahore; infrastructural negotiations with borrowed equipment, rented studios, and gambled film reels; and contractual tussles over actors poached from other studios are just some of the manifestations of the Bombay film industry’s processual form.

Ranjit Movitone (1929–1960s): Cotton Kings and the Wager on Cinema Partnership concern: Mr. Chandulal J. Shah and Miss Gohar Kayoum Mamajiwala Studio location: 119, Main Road, Dadar (East) Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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While all Bombay film studios were out to amass profits, none managed to rake in box-office riches like Ranjit Movitone. Transitioning successfully from silent to talkie film production, Ranjit was churning out approximately six feature films a year by 1935. With capable inhouse specialists and a galaxy of salaried stars, the studio was undoubtedly one of the most successful production ventures of the time. Set up by local Gujarati entrepreneurs with funding from Gujarati businessmen and one maharaja, Ranjit epitomized the commercial dynamism of a film-as-business attitude that owed much to the Bombay region’s community-based bazaar economies. A partnership concern managed by filmmaker Chandulal Shah and the star-actress Gohar Mamajiwala, Ranjit was also one of the longest-running studios in Bombay and produced films under the same banner right until the 1960s. The Ranjit story is densely woven into a tapestry of interlinking industrial narratives that were specific to Bombay’s cine-ecology (fig. 1.4). Chandulal J Shah (1898–1975) was a typical “movie-mad” teenager who regularly frequented the cinema theater. His initial career plans, however, revolved around the stock market, and Shah apprenticed in the share markets of Bombay, Calcutta, and Rangoon.67 Shah’s older brother, Dayaram, managed the publicity department of Ardeshir Irani’s Majestic Cinema, and Chandulal met several local film producers through him. Around 1924 Chandulal landed a job as a storywriter at

figure 1.4 Network map of Ranjit Movitone. 72

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Lakshmi Film Company. As luck would have it, when one of the directorproducers of the company, Manilal Joshi, unexpectedly got taken ill, Chandulal was called on to direct the scheduled film. This first film was Vimala Bahu (1925). As Lighthouse magazine explains, “The risk [to get a novice to direct the film] had to be taken because the financial condition of the studios then could brook no break in production activities. But the speculative gamble proved an unqualified success.”68 After directing three films for Lakshmi Film Company at a meager salary, Chandulal Shah returned to the stock market. By this time Amarchand Shroff, solicitor at Lakshmi, had migrated to Kohinoor Film Company, founded by the cotton merchant Dwarkadas Sampat. Shroff invited Chandulal to join Kohinoor. Chandulal collaborated on the scenario for Samrat Shiladitya (M. Bhavnani, 1926), starring Sulochana and Gohar Mamajiwala. This first encounter with Gohar proved fortuitous and was to lead to a long partnership that resulted in scores of super-hit films, a joint studio venture, and the creation of an “all-India” star— Glorious Gohar. Their next film together was Typist Girl / Why I Became a Christian? (Chandulal Shah, 1926), the highest-grossing film of the last three years. Produced at a cost of Rs. 25,000, the film made Rs. 150,000. Such high profit margins reaffirmed the value of film as a lucrative investment option for risk-agreeable indigenous capitalists, those whom the colonial establishment could label “gamblers” rather than “shy” capitalists.69 Despite making a money-spinner, Chandulal received a directorial fee of only Rs. 300 for the “super film” Typist Girl.70 This film was followed by a string of successes, including Gunsundari / Why Husbands go Astray? (Chandulal Shah, 1927), which again starred Gohar and is widely considered to have ushered in the era of social films.71 Chandulal now gained a reputation in the industry as being a successful and fast director who could also write his own films. Gohar was crowned the undisputed “Mistress of Emotions,” whose acting style was a leading exemplar of the so-called natural and realistic style of acting that was inaugurated with the introduction of sound in cinema. Frustrated by their low salaries at Kohinoor, Chandulal and Gohar joined a new film concern, Jagdish Film Company, financed by the real estate magnate Madhavdas Goculdas Pasta. Once again, though, as the company gained solidity, Chandulal’s and Gohar’s salaries stagnated. These were the Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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decades when all actors and technicians worked on a salary basis, a practice that was to disintegrate as celebrity employees gained a sharper understanding of their market value. Gohar and Chandulal now recast themselves as producer-entrepreneurs. The star-actress’s growing power as a capital resource must be highlighted here. When Chandulal and Gohar agreed to be partners in a new film venture, they knew that already they had at least one major business asset—the actress herself.72 Gohar Kayoum Mamajiwala (1910–1985) was born in Lahore on November 19, 1910. Her father was a businessman and her mother a stage artiste.73 Gohar made her film debut at the age of fifteen, and during her collaboration with Chandulal Shah her capacity to portray intense emotions became her hallmark. She especially exceled in tragic roles. In later years Gohar claimed that she “had really nothing to do with” the founding of Ranjit Movitone, but not only did Gohar’s star power provide a bankable production asset, she also participated in the everyday creative and business decisions of the studio.74 Together, Gohar and Chandulal started Shree Ranjit Film Company in 1929, financed by the bullion businessman Vithaldas Thakordas with an initial capital of Rs. 125,000. According to some sources, the Maharaja of Jamnagar, renowned cricketer Ranjitsinghji, also provided financial aid for setting up the studio, which is why the studio was named “Ranjit” in his honor.75 Gohar and Chandulal pitched their joint venture at an ambitious level, based as much on ephemeral circuits of goodwill and talent as on tangible sources of capital. They managed to rope in an impressive ensemble of stars and colleagues from their previous projects—Sulochana and Madhuri, Sultana and Zubeida—actresses who became decisive catalysts for success during the final years of silent cinema and the gradual conversion to sound. From 1929 to 1932 Ranjit produced approximately thirty-seven silent films, most of them socials. This prolificacy was to become one of the chief characteristics of the Ranjit brand. With the coming of sound, Ranjit Film Company morphed into Ranjit Movitone. In November 1930 the studio’s main financier, Thakordas, passed away and the studio was unable to raise enough capital to buy talkie equipment in time to compete for the coveted “first sound film in India” title. The company’s first talkie film, the mythological Devi Devyani, was recorded on a hired Audio-Camex recorder and released 74

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in June  1931, three months after Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani). In the meantime, with help from the House of Kapurchand, Ranjit Movitone made heavy investments in the sound conversion, aggressively wooing and poaching talented theatrical artistes from drama companies. The Urdu-Hindi playwright Narayan Prasad Betab was successfully hired at a fabulous salary. Ustad Jhande Khan, a famous music composer from the Parsi theater, was also hired from the Alfred Theatrical Company. Staking everything on the sound conversion, Ranjit invested considerable capital into the two foreseeable highlights of the Indian talkie film—songs and dialogues.76 For a production duo known for delivering quick box-office successes, it is surprising that Gohar and Chandulal did not have the capital to buy sound equipment in 1931. Yet the studio spent large sums in hiring new talent and survived the extreme financial volatility of the 1930s cine-ecology. Through the 1930s Ranjit maintained an average of 350 employees on its monthly payroll, and this number went up to 650 by the early 1940s.77 Ranjit Movitone also earned a reputation for making regular salary payments without the kind of delays common elsewhere.78 Moreover, when the House of Kapurchand abruptly withdrew from the film financing business, Ranjit started its own financing concern alongside a new distribution company called Supreme Distributors, averting “a great crisis” in the film industry.79 These details don’t add up, unless we consider that finances were constantly on the move at Ranjit, going out almost as rapidly as they came in. Ranjit Movitone was nurtured on speculative finance. Chandulal Shah was known as “King Cotton” in the late 1930s and early 1940s, legendary for his large-scale stock investments and gambler’s luck. “I am no longer a film magnate,” he said in 1941 at the second Motion Picture Congress. “I have become a cotton magnate. I can tell you today that cotton is being quoted at Rs. 202–8, yesterday it was Rs. 213, and whether it will go up or down.”80 Chandulal’s speculative habit explains Ranjit Movitone’s continual cash turnover as opposed to limited immovable assets, dependent as the studio was on stock market vicissitudes. Chandulal was not exceptional in his gambling habits; Bombay’s most prosperous film producer-entrepreneurs displayed similar proclivities for risky trading. Among the many anecdotal tales about Ranjit Movitone’s stupendous career is one involving Chimanlal Desai of Sagar Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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figures  1.5a and 1.5b Ranjit Movitone acquired these premises from another film company in 1936, as reported in Ranjit Bulletin, May  9, 1936. (Author’s collection)

Movietone and Chandulal Shah, both “great gamblers who made and lost fortunes at cards, on the race-tracks and wherever else gambling occurred.”81 Apparently at one such game of cards during a long train ride from Surat to Bombay, Shah upped the stakes for a losing Desai. It is significant that the two men, both Gujaratis, were returning from the traditional hub of Gujarati credit and trade—Surat. Sagar Movietone had just finished shooting Mehboob Khan’s latest film, Ali Baba (1940), an ambitious bilingual film that was set to revive the studio’s fortunes. Shah asked Desai to stake the distribution rights to Ali Baba, and within seconds the film was his.82 Desai had lost the gamble. The film was released as Sagar’s final film, but all its profits are rumored to have gone to Ranjit Movitone. Between 1931 and 1938 Ranjit studio released forty-four sound pictures at an average output of six films per year. Ranjit made shrewd use of the tiered structures of exhibition and distribution across the country. Its main first-run theater was West End Talkies in Bombay, but great care was taken to show films on staggered timelines in second- and third-run theaters across the country.83 To hedge their bets as strongly as possible, the studio produced films in multiple languages during the years of talkie market expansion and linguistic experimentation.84 In 1938 Gohar and Chandulal inaugurated a new soundproof studio and a new phase in Ranjit’s history. They now had four sound stages at their disposal, surpassing even Bombay Talkies, and six motion picture cameras for simultaneous indoor and outdoor shoots.85 Gohar retired as an actress in 1939, the tenth anniversary of the studio, and concentrated on Ranjit’s business affairs for the next three decades. Despite its factory model of formulaic filmmaking, its emphasis on song and music, and its enviable roster of stars, by the end of the Second World War Ranjit Movitone was moving into decline. The studio’s annual releases deteriorated in quality and box-office viability. The company continued to produce films in the 1950s, with Shah making a final directorial effort with the Raj Kapoor-starrer Paapi (The Sinner, 1953). None of these films could revive the studio’s former glory or fortunes. Critical to this turn of events was a dramatic incident of melodramatic proportions that occurred around 1945. Call it cinematic justice if you will, but Chandulal Shah lost a reported 12.5 million rupees in an epic gamble on the cotton-trading market.86 Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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The speculative fortunes of Chandulal Shah remind us of that other Cotton King, Premchand Roychund, who spectacularly lost a fortune in the cotton mania of the 1860s, after a long run of alchemical luck where he turned “handfuls of scrips into fabulous fortunes.”87 Again and again, the city’s indigenous industries and entrepreneurs tied their fortunes to the city’s cotton. Ranjit Movitone never recovered from Chandulal’s final gamble, and the company’s proprietors mortgaged the studio in 1950 to the Asian Insurance Company. Gohar Mamajiwala is said to have sold all her assets to tide over the crisis.88 It is worth noting that in the decidedly gendered histories of film work and enterprise, a woman such as Gohar is rarely described as a studio owner or a producer, and it becomes historiographically difficult to pull out a woman’s entrepreneurial history, submerged as it might be under the tragic-romantic narrative of the heroic gambler. Shah himself encouraged such mythmaking in his later years, in statements like this one: “I have speculated for incredible stakes on the stock exchange. I have won and lost fortunes on the racecourse. And in between these two obsessions, the stock exchange and the races, I have managed to fit a quarter-century of filmmaking.”89

Sagar Movietone (1929–1940): Star as Speculative Commodity Partnership concern: Mr.  Chimanlal Desai and Mr.  Ambalal Patel. Desai becomes sole proprietor after 1936. Studio location: Hashmat Mahal, Chowpatty Seaface. Moves later to Nepean Sea Road. The career of Sagar Movietone records every nuance of the turbulent years between the fade-out of the silent era and slow fade-in of the post– World War II production landscape. The consolidation of the star system and the transition from salaried work to freelancing is believed to have contributed greatly to the “demise” of the studios. Sagar Movietone employed some of the most famous stars of the 1930s and 1940s: Master Vithal, Jal Merchant, Yakub, Sabita Devi, Motilal, Surendra, Bibbo, Maya Banerjee, Rose, Jaddan Bai, Sitara, Shobhana Samarth, Sheikh Mukhtar, and Sardar Akhtar. In later years the studio’s proprietor, Chimanlal Desai, claimed that it was the very same stars, once recast as 78

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freelancers, who were to blame for the studio’s misfortunes. His retrospective analysis is notable for its clarity: “After the last great war, the star system came into being. The stars asked fabulous prices and on top of it, did not agree to work exclusively. So no other course was left to us but to close down and so we did.”90 In this second case study I look at the role of stars in the film production economy. As we saw in the Circo court case, stars served as an important stabilizing mechanism in a highly volatile speculative economy. Stars were invoked as guarantors of future film success based on their past record at the box office. In their capacity as indices of a time to come, star actors and actresses served as speculative capital. Sagar Movietone was established on a frantic tussle to acquire star capital, the only hope available to studios transitioning into the talkie age with no other guide to the future. Thus the star system, cast in Indian film history as the single-handed cause for the failure of the pre-Independence studio, was a deliberate response to the volatility of speculative film finance. In 1938 journalist Baburao Patel singled out Sagar Movietone in this regard, characterizing Chimanlal Desai’s tactics for star retention as “ ‘dieting’ with the lower staff to feed the ‘stars,’ ” that is, underpaying all other studio employees in order to hold on to a star fretting to migrate.91 The overvaluation of stars at this time resulted in longenduring imbalances in work compensation and, as we shall see in chapter 2, catalyzed breakaway production units often spearheaded by directors and studio executives rather than stars themselves.92 Sagar Film Company, like Ranjit, was a silent film studio before it converted to sound. Also like Ranjit, Sagar used borrowed equipment to film its first talkie feature, Meri Jaan (P. Ghosh, 1931). In fact, Sagar used the very same Tanar sound recorder that recorded India’s first talkie feature, Alam Ara. Chimanlal Desai notes that “Ardeshir would complete his recording in the daytime and hand it [the Tanar machine] over to us to work over the night. Meri Jaan hit the floors soon after the release of Alam Ara.”93 Why would two production companies share resources in such an amicable manner in the middle of Bombay’s heated talkie race? The answer to this lies in the circumstances under which Sagar Film Company was created. There are two versions of the Sagar story. The first version, narrated in a popular history of Sagar studios, privileges film distributors as key Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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players in film production and studio control, a phenomenon we have already acknowledged in this chapter. In 1925 Chimanlal Desai and Dr. Ambalal Patel took over a film distribution company called Select Pictures Circuit in Bangalore. The two were friends and had management experience in varied industrial sectors before they decided on film distribution. Desai had dabbled in the coal, textile, and printing industries, while Patel came from cycle distribution and was based in Bangalore.94 Under their management, Select Pictures is said to have become the foremost film distribution company in India’s “South circuit,” a distribution territory that included Madras and Rangoon. The South circuit depended heavily on silent films from Bombay and abroad, as Madras had not yet emerged as a significant film production center. Select Pictures almost exclusively distributed Bombay films, and Imperial Film Company was one of their major suppliers. In 1929, timed with the onset of the Great Depression, Imperial’s production output drastically dropped. Running low on Bombay films, Chimanlal Desai hurried to Bombay to see what had transpired. In recompense for the diminished supply of films, Ardeshir Irani offered Desai and Patel a partnership in his new film concern, Sagar Film Company.95 Thus Sagar Film Company was started as a partnership concern by Desai, Irani, and Patel. The next year, in 1930, Irani withdrew from the partnership to produce Alam Ara under his preexisting banner, Imperial Film Company. Presumably, the two concerns continued to share amicable relations and audio recorders. There are other, more circulated and archivally verifiable, factors that played a role in the complex history of Sagar’s emergence (fig. 1.6). While continuities between distribution and production are definitely important to consider, we must also consider two other factors pertinent to the study of speculative financial practices: the high speculative value of stars-as-capital, and the industrial strategy of horizontal integration as a way to hedge production bets. The 1920s saw the rise of a handful of prominent male and female actors who became nationally recognizable and proved profitable for the film companies that employed them. Studios’ attempts to modernize their business practices often meant a stricter control of their star assets through legal means such as binding contracts and punitive litigation (more in chapters 3 and 5). The popular stunt actor Master Vithal, 80

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figure 1.6 Network map of Sagar Movietone.

known in the 1920s as the Indian Douglas Fairbanks, was key to Sagar and Imperial’s initial negotiations. At the time, Vithal was employed at Sharda Film Company. As we have seen, ascertaining the lucrativeness of a film product has always been a speculative enterprise, but stars seem to add direct value to the film commodity. Ardeshir Irani, eager to consolidate Imperial’s market position, tried hard to get Vithal out of Sharda. Vithal signed a contract with Imperial, but this agreement was contested by Sharda, which took the actor to court.96 In an interview, Vithal himself described the thick intrigue around his recruitment, which included an attempted kidnapping and a high-profile court case between Sharda Film Company and Imperial Film Company. Imperial was represented by none other than M. A. Jinnah, the future Quaid-eAzam (Great Leader) of Pakistan, and they won the case after agreeing to increase Vithal’s salary severalfold.97 The principal victor in this contest was Vithal, who was able to join the studio of his choice and also received a further salary increment. During this same conjuncture Ardeshir Irani, an intrepid entrepreneur who began his film career as an exhibitor, was making aggressive attempts toward horizontal integration by way of starting up, partnering, or investing in production companies. Horizontal integration refers to the creation or acquisition of multiple production units to Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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produce similar commodities, in this case, films. This business practice is geared toward a monopolization of the existing market for a particular commodity by buying up either competing companies that are making the same type of product (e.g., social films) or companies that offer a competing type of product (e.g., stunt films). Such horizontal integration was strategically necessary for Irani’s exhibitiondistribution business to maintain a steady supply of lucrative products. Sagar Film Company was started in the spirit of horizontal integration, to diversify the range of film products available for exhibition. Even before the company’s official inauguration in December  1929, Irani announced that Vithal would be one of Sagar’s first star-employees. Vithal acted in films by both companies. Irani was thus able to spread his distribution risks across two production concerns, but he could also maximally exploit the talent of his most expensive star under the supervision of two different production units. After starring in several silent films for both Imperial and Sagar, Vithal starred in India’s first talkie film, Alam Ara, produced by Imperial Film Company. With the splendid success of Alam Ara, Irani withdrew completely from Sagar Movietone, but the two companies continued their resource sharing. Irani’s expansionist drive opens up a larger landscape of interdependencies between production and distribution, actors and producers, older and newer film companies, which illustrates that in the case of Bombay the openness of the industrial ecology allowed expansion and investment along multiple axes. Still, stars remained the central channel for speculative investments (fig. 1.7). In 1938 Bombay’s cine-ecology was badly shaken by the closure of Imperial Film Company. Sagar, too, felt the adverse currents of the time, and efforts were made to renew the scope and vision of the company. The studio attempted a series of experiments with outside actresses, specially hired directors (e.g., Modhu Bose), and bilingual productions (Ali Baba in Punjabi and Kumkum the Dancer in Bengali). Alongside these speculative strategies for revitalization, Sagar also tried a significant experiment under the supervision of the director Mehboob Khan—to produce a film with a no-star cast. Ek Hi Raasta (also titled The Only Way) was released with newcomers Arun, Sheikh Mukhtar, Anuradha, Jyoti, and Kanaiyalal. Though this project was posed as an exciting innovation, it can also be read as a desperate attempt to hit 82

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figure  1.7 Cast and crew of Sagar Movietone during the shooting of Zarina (Ezra Mir, 1932). Seated in the middle are Zubeida and Ezra Mir, with Jal Merchant on left, reading a script. (Osianama Archive & Library Collection)

back at the stars that producers had themselves created through wranglings such as in the case of Vithal. Stars could hit back, too, and throughout the 1930s we see recurring “breach of contract” cases filed against stars who sought to break out of rigid contractual obligations at the height of their popularity. In 1939 Sagar’s most dependable star, Sabita Devi, left the studio to form her own production concern, Sudama Pictures, along with the director Sarvottam Badami. On August 2, 1939, Chimanlal Desai and Y. A. Fazalbhoy formally registered a new company—National Studios Limited. Sagar Movietone was to be unofficially merged with, or rather subsumed into, Fazalbhoy’s Sound Studio and General Films. Sagar, which had been formed as a branch company in a drive to integrate horizontally, was now attempting its own form of horizontal integration. National Studios was established as a public limited liability company, designed to be an innovative experiment with Hollywood-style corporate structures of finance Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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and organization.98 The newly formed Investment Corporation of India, run by the Tatas, stepped into film financing for the first time by underwriting the issued capital of National Studios. Chimanlal Desai and Y. A. Fazalbhoy were on the illustrious eight-member board of directors and served as the company’s managing directors. National Studios was to produce films under its own banner while availing itself of the human resources, studio facilities, and equipment of Sagar Movietone, Sound Studio, and General Films. Supreme Film Distributors, the all-India distribution agency started by Ranjit Movitone, would handle all National Studio products. The overall design of this enterprise followed both horizontal and vertical integration efforts made possible by the centralized corporate control of the Tatas.99 All these efforts notwithstanding, neither Sagar nor National could counter the effects of years of heavy dependence on star power at the cost of other, undervalued studio employees. Chimanlal Desai himself acknowledged the salary disparity, though unwittingly: “Even if stars were employees, we recognized their merit for if on one hand Sabita Devi was paid Rs. 3,000 a month, there were others who received only Rs. 60 a month.”100 Mehboob Khan, Sagar’s most enterprising director, made multiple attempts to break away from Sagar. Though Mehboob joined National with his entire production unit, he finally left after disagreements over creative control, forming Mehboob Productions in 1942 with partial finances from V. Shantaram’s new distribution concern, Silver Screen Exchange.101 National Studios was auctioned off that same year. Among its bidders were Messrs. Kapurchand, Shantaram, and Chandulal Shah.102

Bombay Talkies (1934–1954): Social Credit and Narratives of Futurity Joint stock concern. Managing agents—Himansu Rai Indo-International Talkies Studio location: Dadishet Road, Malad Unlike Ranjit and Sagar, Bombay Talkies did not have preexisting stakes in Bombay’s silent film economy. Its principal players settled in Bombay after varied experiences across the world. Bombay Talkies was set up by 84 El a s t i c i t y

actor-producers Himansu Rai and Devika Rani Chaudhuri in 1934. This bourgeois Bengali couple met and married in London in the late 1920s, moved to Germany to work at the UFA Studios, collaborated on a couple of international coproductions, and finally inaugurated their own talkie studio in Bombay. With a state-of-the-art studio and laboratory in Malad, a joint stock company with an authorized capital of Rs. 2.5 million, and a board of directors composed of some of the most eminent businessmen and barristers in Bombay, the studio seemed destined for success. In this third and final case study I examine the forgotten prehistory of Bombay Talkies (henceforth, BT) in order to rethink the history of the legendary studio. Today, the very name “Bombay Talkies” brings to mind a modern and corporate film enterprise whose location in Bombay was inevitable. In fact, the BT story highlights Bombay city’s connectedness with transnational economies of culture and finance, linked via colonial ports and global centers of artistic production. Thanks to the unprecedented archival data now available in the Dietze Family Archive (Melbourne), which holds the papers of Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, I look back at the critical years between 1931 and 1933 when Bombay Talkies was still being envisioned. Business correspondence from these years presents a fascinating picture of long-distance relations of friendship and disappointment, promise and anxiety, as a motley group of men and women hustled to bring a film studio into being. Transcontinental letters, telegrams, and promissory notes exchanged in a time of passenger ships and mail steamers reveal the affective entanglement of credit cultures, entrepreneurial collaboration, and circulatory capital. Another speculative infrastructure comes into view— social networks based on trust and futurity. Letter after letter in the Dietze Archive—from London to Lahore to Berlin to Bombay—speaks of the material contexts and virtual finances required to imagine the not-yet-studio. The wheels of BT’s fortunes started to turn several years before the studio was formally inaugurated (fig. 1.8). In the early 1920s Himansu Rai was studying law in England when he caught the acting bug. He started a theatrical company, the Indian Players, with the writer Niranjan Pal, another young Bengali student eager to make a career in the creative arts. Rai and Pal quickly grasped the possibilities of the Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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figure 1.8 Network map of Bombay Talkies.

new medium of cinema and set about writing Indian subjects for foreign coproducers. After many energetic negotiations with potential financiers and film producers, Rai and Pal successfully made three silent feature films that were lavish in design, financed by British and German collaborators, and shot in India.103 During these years, Himansu Rai met Devika Rani and they joined the famous UFA Studios in Babelsburg, hoping for another German coproduction. By 1929 Rai was mired in financial difficulties and threatening to sue UFA on nuanced contractual grounds.104 That same year, in a land further east, a young man named Chuni Lall found himself stranded with a big colonial medal of service but no job.105 Chuni Lall had resigned from his illustrious post in British Iraq as financial assistant and accounts officer to the inspector general of police.106 He now returned to his native Punjab to look for business opportunities. Significantly, he chose to start his prospecting in Bombay. During one of his railway journeys to the city, around 1931, Chuni Lall serendipitously met Dewan Sharar, an early collaborator of Himansu Rai and a founder-director of Himansu Rai IndoInternational Talkies (HRIIT) which was established after their UFA stint, circa 1931.107 Himansu Rai Indo-International Talkies was partnered by three men: Himansu Rai, who was the managing director and soul of the 86

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concern; Sir Chimanlal H. Setalvad, a prominent Bombay barrister with personal funds and considerable political clout, who was chairman, and Dewan Sharar, a peripatetic writer and film journalist, who was based in Europe at the time. Together they wrote and began filming Karma (J. L. Freer-Hunt, 1933), a bilingual talkie feature coproduced with a British film company, with additional help from sections of the Indian princely class, who had previously provided lavish locations, extras, costumes, and animals for some of Rai’s silent films. Karma was begun with great hope, but the Great Depression hit England with harsh severity, and the film ran into serious financial troubles in its postproduction phase. The British coproducers, withdrew from the project. The HRIIT team was now stuck with a film they could not complete or release.108 Dewan Sharar was sent to Bombay to arrange for emergency finances, and that is when he met Chuni Lall on a train from Lahore. Sharar made a verbal pact with Chuni Lall: if Chuni Lall could invest a refundable sum of Rs. 90,000 in Karma, HRIIT would invite him to join their company as a partner. HRIIT was also planning a new India-based company, as the talkies had changed the global market for films and the economic depression had dried up foreign finances for Indian film ventures. Chuni Lall’s loan could save Karma, and the future of HRIIT as an Indian film production company promised Chuni Lall a new career. Chuni Lall agreed to this bargain and borrowed Rs. 90,000 from his wife’s family in Punjab.109 The serendipity of this spontaneous financial agreement emphasizes the social and human undergirding of supposedly abstract speculative finance. Sir Setalvad, the chairman of HRIIT, had to be treated with kid gloves when it came to the routine gaps between promise and reality that are common to high-risk businesses. Letters flew thick and fast between Lt. Col. Sir Richard Temple, HRIIT’s unofficial manager in London, and Setalvad in which Temple tried every rhetorical strategy to explain delays in shooting and the ever-increasing need for funds.110 Exaggeration and narrative performativity are standard practices for start-up companies who “must dramatize their dreams in order to attract the capital they need to operate and expand.”111 Aware that he was writing to a barrister with great interest in politics, Temple reassured Setalvad of the historical importance of investing in Indian film: “Here is a work which can go on in spite of almost any vicissitudes: White Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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Papers may come and go; Constitutions may arise, fail or succeed; Independence may come, or not come, or partially come in almost any degree—but here is a work which can still go on, and still prosecute its mission of bringing people nearer together, by spreading a truer knowledge of each other, and therefore sympathy for each other, throughout the world.”112 Thus futurity, or a particular construction of the future, undergirds Richard Temple’s linking of Indian Independence with the Indian film industry, where the difference is only one of degrees of uncertainty. Chuni Lall, eager to embark on his own cinematic flight into the future, emerges in the Dietzes’ epistolary archive as an optimistic investor, ready to extrapolate virtual financial gains from statistical data. From 1931 to 1933 Himansu Rai and Devika Rai were based in London and had little idea about the rapid changes taking place on the Indian film scene. As the new Lahore-based “manager for Northern India” for the HRIIT, Rai Sahib Chuni Lall actively shaped their collective priorities for what BT could be. In a rapid flurry of letters, Chuni Lall provided a survey of India-wide efforts to expand distribution, convert theaters, build new cinemas, and establish new talkie production companies, all buoyed by the fact that “Indian pictures are having a very good market much more than most of the first class American and English pictures.”113 Chuni Lall strived to convey the excitement of a swiftly expanding market, providing statistics whenever possible to show “how the number of cinemas is increasing and all of them require Indian Films.”114 For a period of three years, Chuni Lall sent detailed reports to London about recent talkie releases in India and their theatrical success in an attempt to assess which genres of films were proving most popular with India’s nascent talkie audiences. Alongside this market research on genre popularity, Chuni Lall also sent infrastructural reports on the state of the talkie exhibition circuit in India, numbers of theaters by city, the population of those cities, whether the theater was equipped with sound, the chief modes of conveyance to that town, and whether this transport access was seasonal.115 Such probabilistic surveys helped the geographically dispersed HRIIT team sharpen their ideas about the perfect venue for their proposed studio. Karma was almost ready for release, and it served as the perfect vehicle for testing the Indian market and its film infrastructure. The buzz around the HRIIT’s most visible 88

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figure  1.9 Himansu Rai and Devika Rani in a publicity still from Karma by J. L. Freer-Hunt, 1933). (Dietze Family Archive)

personalities, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, led to several inquiries from permanent as well as touring talkie cinemas, and Chuni Lall identified the main first-run cities to focus on (Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad, Lucknow, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta, Madras), also scoping the current percentages that exhibitors demanded (25– 50 percent). Chuni Lall further made an assessment of the “important towns and Indian States where there are no Cinemas but are worth visiting” in order to promote Karma in uncharted territories.116 In mid1932 several cinemas were still not outfitted with sound equipment, and producers had to supply portable touring talkie sets as well as dynamo generators to provide electricity.117 The tasks for the new talkie producer were onerous: the truly ambitious players had to try and expand the existing market rather than restrict themselves to the limited existing distribution and exhibition networks. Between 1931, when Chuni Lall first invested in Karma, and 1933, HRIIT’s first talkie feature film and the highly anticipated new Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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production concern took on the aura of speculative commodities.118 There was no sign that a good Hindustani-language version of Karma would ever be ready for the Indian market, or if the proposed Indian film company would ever materialize. “I shall be grateful to know as to when your Company is going to be registered, as my partner L. Hem Raj is very anxious on this point,” writes Chuni Lall in 1931, already chafing at delays and frustrated by the distance between Lahore and London.119 He strongly advises that “it is not advisable to delay the release of the Picture as several motives are being imputed against us in various quarters in Calcutta and Bombay which I will only explain when we meet.”120 Mysterious rumors are mentioned repeatedly, and Chuni Lall makes plain the fact that anticipated funds can dissipate with social reputations: “several wild rumors are afloat in Calcutta and Bombay. I have been contradicting all these rumors and have so far succeeded in maintaining the prestige of the Company (which means yours).”121 All manner of planning and preparation could be undone by vague rumors designed to ruin the credit-worthiness of an organization. Rumor and speculation go hand in hand; both are predictive instruments that have the power to produce that which they speak of. At the same time, personal equations based on trust, faith, and friendship could also be strained. Chuni Lall made desperate appeals to friendship, underlining his own loyalty to Himansu Rai and his vision for a new talkie cinema for India. Sulking from neglect, he says in a letter, “It is very easy to let one’s friends down because he believes in him, if he let an outsider down, things would have been different.”122 Such a statement contends that social and affective bonds of insider networks are paramount to any speculative business venture, also insinuating that without a social connection, futures can be easily dismantled. In the same letter, Chuni Lall asserts: “Ever since I returned from Bombay, people in Lahore have been telling me and Hem Raj that our money was not safe and that later on Pillai and others told us so many things against you but my faith in you remained unshaken and the proofs of this are not wanting as to what I did for you and the Company at great personal risk.” The textual assertion of faith here, paradoxically intimates a crisis of faith, thereby laying bare the affective sociality that enables the speculative enterprise.123 90

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The Dietze Archive holds several anguished, desperate, and panicked letters such as this one, all written during the years 1930–1933 by individuals who wanted to partner in HRIIT’s dream of a modern commercial venture that also promised artistic fulfillment. We have the case of Jagad Bhanu, a cinematographer who met with Dewan Sharar and sought employment in HRIIT. In 1932 Bhanu bought one share in HRIIT and was subsequently invited to Berlin by Himansu Rai, who was trying to arrange finances for Karma. After being stalled on a low monthly stipend, salary delays, and with no sign of shooting on the horizon, a frustrated Bhanu returned to India. Several emotional letters were written to Himansu Rai, such as one in which Bhanu says, “As I have received neither my salary nor any intimation from you for the last three months, I am quite at a loss to understand your intentions about me.” A few years later Bhanu’s name appeared in the credits of producerdirector Jaddan Bai’s Madam Fashion (1936), as cameraman.124 Behind the legendary success of Bombay Talkies lies this genre of epistolary promise and distress. These letters must be seen as a genre of “financial writing,” documents that become financial instruments, with the explicit aim of raising cash by cashing in on sentiment.125 Affect-laden letters of monetary faith and fiscal complaint provide us with unprecedented insight into the everyday practices, emotions, and beliefs that underpinned HRIIT’s grand vision for commercialinstitutional success. These intertwined biographical and institutional details from Bombay Talkie’s prehistory also give us a sense of the geographical sweep of finances, resources, and contacts that were slowly converging into Bombay’s cine-ecology. From Sir Setalvad in Bombay, to Chuni Lall in Lahore, to Himansu Rai in London, the foundermembers of BT cast a wide net across India and Europe to gather the speculative intensities required to give their new company a head start in the swiftly materializing talkie scene. After several false starts, financial and legal setbacks, and a few betrayals, Bombay Talkies was finally registered as a private limited company on June  22, 1934. The entire studio construction of Bombay Talkies (located, as we know, on the property of F. E. Dinshaw), import of technology and equipment, and first phase of hiring of technicians and artistes was completed within nine months. By May 1935 BT was ready for operations.126 The business plan was carefully worked out Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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according to the imperatives of exploiting maximum value from this large-scale production infrastructure. Not only did the studio immediately begin production on its first feature film, Jawani-ki-Hawa (Franz Osten, 1935), but it also started on an experimental double-bill program of two short features, Mother (1936) and Always Tell Your Wife (1936). The company planned to use its laboratory to process films from other local studios as well as European producers. A second production unit was formed with the express purpose of shooting commissioned “Educational, Propaganda, and Publicity Films.”127 These elaborate plans were designed to make maximum use of the fixed assets of the studio, such as sound stages and the laboratory, as well as the salaried in-house staff of technicians and actors. None of this would have been possible without the extensive insider networks of social capital that speculative finance relies on even today. Status, lineage, and symbiotic business friendships are the conditions of possibility for a corporate enterprise relying on venture capital. BT’s financial statement for the year ending October 31, 1935, began with an elaborate list of its entire board of directors, bankers (Central Bank of India, Bank of India, P&O Banking Corporation), solicitors (Messrs. Merwanji Kola & Co.), auditors (SB Billimoria & Co.), and managing agents (HRIIT). Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall was the chief representative of the managing agents. Sir Chimanlal H. Setalvad was chairman of the board of directors. Others directors included F. E. Dinshaw; Sir Richard Temple; Raj Rajendra MN Shitole Sahib, who belonged to the royal family of Gwalior; Chunilal B. Mehta, president of the Bombay Bullion Exchange; Jamnadas Morarji, a respected investment broker; Nizamuddeen Hyder, director of agriculture in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s Princely State; and Rai Bahadur Narsingdas Kasturchand Daga, who was from an esteemed family of bankers and textile merchants.128 These were all men of elite class privilege with long-standing business interests in Bombay’s local-global finance markets. Dinshaw, in particular, had the unique distinction of holding the largest number of directorships in Bombay; that is, being on the largest number of boards of directors, at least from 1924 to 1932.129 Business historian Claude Markovits tells us that “multiple directorships were an indication of a high status in the [Bombay] business world,” and conversely also boosted the prestige of the company that the director participated in.130 Dinshaw’s 92

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multiple directorships also indicate the gradual closing of ranks among India’s elite Indian business class, a fact that can be seen either as a sign of “growing integration” or as an incestuous insider culture.131 The new directorship model was performatively positioned against speculative concerns, but its aura of transparency rested on the reputation of a small group of overemployed directors. Truth be told, this reliance on the abstract value of an individual’s business reputation is not unlike Sagar Movietone’s dependence on stars as guarantors of success. BT’s illustrious roster of directors was the culmination of long years of building a social infrastructure of trust and anticipation. Be it Chuni Lall, who borrowed money from his in-laws, or Dinshaw, whose local clout conferred credit-worthiness on the studio, intangible forms of social capital were mobilized to produce material filmmaking infrastructures during India’s volatile talkie transition. All the biggest studios of the time—from New Theatres in Calcutta, with its ties to the Viceroy’s Executive Council, to Central Studios in Coimbatore, with its familial links with the administration of the princely state of Cochin— drew on a range of political, social, and economic networks of prestige and power.132 The prehistory of BT shows us how unpredictable forces, such as rumor and trust, played a vital role in the local and global networks of credit that supported the early business ventures of India’s film entrepreneurs. As in the case of Circo, a corporate form could not dispel the uncertainties of personal relations or the exigencies of context and circumstance. Richard Temple summed it up best in a letter soliciting goodwill: “As it is, we have no money, and must use the ammunition we have, namely, considerably more than average pull in influence.”133 C O N C LU S I O N : S P E C U L AT I V E B E C O M I N G

A newly registered film company, Navyug Chitrapat Ltd., invited public subscription to the tune of Rs. 800,000 in 1939: The Cinema Industry has progressed with rapid strides during the last twenty-five years and has now come to occupy a prominent position among the National Industries of this country. More than twenty crores of rupees have been invested in this industry. About 40,000 persons are employed in the actual production work and Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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there are over 700 cinema houses spread all over the country. These figures clearly show that the industry is steadily growing and it has undoubtedly a great future before it.134

The dramatic narrative of progress described here must end in a telescopic view of the future as “undoubtedly” great. What I have tried to describe in this chapter is that far from being an industry destined for greatness, Bombay cinema’s future during the talkie transition was a big gamble. The ambiguous location of the film business as somewhere between “illegal” vernacular gambling practices, on the one hand, and modernizing corporate structures, on the other, drew a wide range of financiers and entrepreneurs into its fold. And it was their embrace of risk and uncertainty that kept the industry going. This proclivity to risk continued to be a productive force for the industry in decades to come. As the Film Enquiry Committee pointed out in 1951, “by and large production is now a wild gamble, where any one who can scrape together a few thousands of rupees enters the field in the hope of winning big stakes, but ultimately finds himself badly burnt. Nevertheless, the craze persists and apparently feeds on each failure.”135 While investment in the railways, telegraph, and undersea cables was seen as an infrastructural commitment vital to the imperial economy, cinema was viewed as a wholly indigenous industry with little foreseeably to offer except cheap entertainment for the natives. But Bombay’s cine-ecology was inseparable from all the rest of it, and the enthusiastic practitioners of the talkie trade embodied these connections quite clearly. As a distinctive cine-ecology emerged in 1930s Bombay, speculative infrastructures of finance, affect, and business organization were developed to aid the growth of a popular film economy. The conjectural practices described in this chapter were also infrastructural because they served as the underlying networks for facilitating the circulation of finance and financial imaginaries so crucial to a media industry struggling to come into being. Tejaswini Ganti notes that “for much of its history, the Hindi film industry has been characterized by porous boundaries and very few barriers to entry. The most striking feature of the Hindi film industry has been its exceedingly entrepreneurial and decentralized nature, consisting of hundreds of independent producers, distributors, exhibitors, 94

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and financiers.”136 It is important to note here that the talkie cineecology, owing to its fluid structure, volatile commodities, and uncertain future, depended on and invited speculative investments in order to consolidate its present. Ranjit Movitone was built on the speculative finance of Bombay’s cotton market; Sagar Movietone mobilized the star and the technical celebrity as speculative instruments—“options on futures” as it were; and Bombay Talkies, arguably the most “scientifically” planned of studios, shows us the paradoxical power of an economy based on trust and good faith. These studios represent a multiplicity of local, regional, and global circuits of financial capital, cultural production, and social influence. Funding from maharajas coexisted with loans from newly established indigenous financial agencies; Gujarati modernist writing jostled for cultural space with the melodramatic training of Parsi theater; and colonial favor was sought with as much fervor as nationalist support. What this processual terrain of coexisting film practices signifies is important both for a history of Bombay cinema and for a history of late colonial modernity in India. By the end of the 1930s, investment by the Tatas and Fazalbhoys, and tentative attempts at establishing umbrella organizations such as the Cine Finance and Banking Corporation of India (1939), indicate a Hollywood-style move toward corporatization. The Tatas supplied electric power to the Bombay Suburban Electric Supply Co. (BSES), which sold electricity to film studios and laboratories, while the Fazalbhoys dealt in a diversified portfolio of electrical goods, film pedagogical concerns, and studio rental services, facts that indicate the kind of convergence of media, technology, and infrastructure that Grieveson contends was foundational to the corporatization of 1920s Hollywood. Unlike in Hollywood, however, Bombay’s film companies never relinquished production control to their corporate partners. Studios such as BT, National Studios, and Circo followed the managing agency model that was dominant in Indian business across urban industrial centers, wherein control was largely divorced from ownership.137 Shareholders and directors provided more social power than money, and the functioning of studios was in the hands of the managing agents who were studio executives and practitioners, such as Himansu Rai, Devika Rani, Chimanlal Trivedi, and Mehboob Khan. On the other end, studios with horizontal stakes in subsidiary companies and distribution, such as Ranjit Movitone, set Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di

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themselves up as financiers, often bailing out or integrating smaller companies. If Hollywood was effectively corporatized by the 1930s, the German film industry was effectively nationalized under the Nazi regime. Soviet Russia and France had state support for educational and propaganda filmmaking. Japanese cinema, too, showed tendencies toward nationalization, especially with the passing of the Film Law in 1939.138 Both Japan and China, unlike India, saw the early involvement of banks in financing film studios in the 1920s and early 1930s, with Japan’s biggest studios, such as Toho, taking the route of vertical integration.139 Bombay cinema, in contrast, neither was a corporate media form nor did it count as “public” or “national” media. Through the 1930s and 1940s the cine-ecology remained stubbornly messy, inchoate, and decentralized, despite energetic moves by the biggest studios toward corporatization and creation of a narrow field of production players. Sound itself encouraged many film industries across the world to take on a national form with the standardization of linguistic and musical tropes. In India, sound unleashed a multilingual film production landscape of a hundred voices. Bombay’s overwhelming choice of Hindustani as the language for its films translated into a wide audience of Hindi and Urdu speakers in northern and central India, but Bombay was not able to suppress or contain the energies of Calcutta and Madras. Not only have these film industries continued to thrive alongside the rise and rise of global Bollywood, but several smaller, low-budget industries catering to the B and C circuit have multiplied. I contend that the very existence of multiple film industries, aided by sound, added another vector of productive volatility to Bombay’s cine-ecology. Personnel moved across cities in this period and beyond, continually shifting the power balance within and across cities. Circo, for example, was a collaborative venture across two cities, joining New Theaters’ production infrastructure with Bombay money, and Sagar Movietone and Imperial Film Company produced talkies in Tamil for Madras film companies. The early years of talkie cinema in India set the tone for decades to come, when Bombay cinema would morph into “Bollywood,” a gigantic aesthetic-industrial form with no fixed center or model for finance, organization, production, or even location.140 This ecology of shifting borders was nonetheless recognizable, even in the 1930s, as an individuating 96

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entity, an assemblage of energies, desires, activities, and techniques that sought to establish itself as distinctive. The cine-ecology, which is always more than its technical parts, is at its most potent when it is most fluid, having moved not linearly into an inevitable “greatness” but rhizomatically into unpredictable territories of sentiment and speculation. Despite the organizational and ideological differences between the three film companies and their visions of a modern studio system, linguistic, cultural and regional ties made a material contribution to the kinds of stories and personnel each studio gathered together. Local mercantile credit networks as well as community and regional affiliations were vital to the lateral spread of Bombay’s cine-ecology. Sagar and Ranjit saw a dominance of Gujarati managers, directors, and technicians, while even the avowedly cosmopolitan BT studio saw a rapid increase in the numbers of Bengali employees on its rolls. Tendencies such as these indicate that parochial attitudes did not simply dissipate in the face of rapid modernization. They also point to the reliance of small-scale industries such as film on immediate social connections and improvised recruitment processes. From serendipitous encounters on moving trains, to the systematic pursuit of celebrity writers, to wordof-mouth, an assortment of practices were at work in Bombay’s early talkie industry. To view the 1930s–1940s film industry as an open ecology is to acknowledge the processual flux of practices, influences, and protagonists. Although production structures collapsed or disintegrated, productive potentialities continued in the form of personnel and networks of opportunity that were constantly shifting. Ranjit, Sagar, and Bombay Talkies had finite lives, but their human, technical, and imaginative energies continued to charge the cine-ecology.

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CH APTER T WO

Scientific Desires | Jadu Ghar No art becomes respectable until its principles are acknowledged, methodized and housed in a system. —Cinema, 1931

It is 2004. Nasir bhai and I are riffling through contents of the costume trunk, which is full of clothes and accessories neatly packed in labeled plastic sleeves. The labels are numbered to indicate whether that costume is the second, third, or fourth “dress change” for the character in the film’s timeline. We are frantically looking for Johnny’s T-shirt from the day he visits Dattatreya Working Men’s Lodge with his papa. We need to shoot some continuity shots in a cheat location, and that T-shirt is essential. I am holding a clipboard with two different types of costumes lists and marked-up copies of the scenes at Dattatreya Lodge. T-shirt G7 cannot be found. The work of filmmaking requires surprising amounts of paperwork. Lists for costumes, props, locations, vehicles, equipment, hotels; scheduling sheets for actors’ dates, location shoots, indoor or outdoor scenes, day or night shoots . . . the paperwork proliferates rapidly to create the preproduction arsenal that is necessary to prepare for the battle of shooting. In Mumbai we like to think that this reliance on paper is new. Or that it started in the early 2000s with the entry of corporate financing that brought corporate methods of productivity with it. These assumptions matter because they serve to solidify the reputation of the Bombay film industry as an eccentric form, historically deficient in basic techniques of organizational planning. In this chapter I discuss Bombay cinema’s long history of experimentation with techniques of

industrial modernization. In doing so, my purpose is not to valorize an industrial form but to make it available for serious scrutiny. The conversion to sound required a significant amount of capital outlay in terms of imported sound recorders, blimped cameras, soundproofed studios, and new processing costs. As seen in chapter 1, the cost of film production tripled between 1928 and 1934, from approximately Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 60,000. These costs were matched by the human costs of training and hiring sound recordists, singers, dialogue writers, lyricists, and dialogue coaches. In the midst of these techno-economic transitions, Bombay, like many film production centers across the world, strived toward a “scientific” production model in the 1930s. Discourses about industrial rationalization along parameters developed in Europe and America had a decisive impact on the shape and status of Bombay’s emerging cine-ecology. Starting with recommendations of the Indian Cinematograph Committee in 1928, the film industry was repeatedly exhorted to rationalize, systematize, streamline, and modernize by powerful state interests, industry stakeholders, and trade observers. These exhortations were based on a variety of contradictory observations, making a statement such as “the Indian film industry is disorganized” akin to naming a mythic ailment with multiple diagnoses. The notable point is that, contrary to long-standing popular and academic belief, Bombay’s cine-ecology responded to the challenge of industrial modernization with gusto. In the 1930s and 1940s, responses to the call for scientific modernization ranged from the symbolic to the technical, including the formation of professional associations, staging of spectacular industrial displays, and growing adoption of Euro-American techniques for production efficiency centered on the continuity script. Uncertainty, we know, is the flip side of control, and the speculative underpinnings of Bombay’s cine-ecology demanded a set of tools to manage volatility. The move from silent cinema to the talkies exacerbated industrial and financial anxieties about sheer survival, alongside definitional anxieties about what cinema was and what it could be. The new, cost-intensive talkie form struggled to establish its social, aesthetic, and commercial viability. Scientistic faith in technical expertise aided the emergence of new film production tools and specialist work profiles that not only streamlined production but steadily engineered a vision of talkie cinema’s mediatic difference from other industries and S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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art forms. Cinema’s myriad stakeholders struggled to articulate this difference according to their own immediate concerns. I frame these definitional struggles as attempts toward industrial and mediatic individuation, energetic attempts to stabilize a dynamic cine-ecology that eluded determinacy. Through various techniques of work specialization and discourse around the technological uniqueness of cinema, by the 1940s the sound film had been normalized as the supposedly natural form of cinema. This, despite the fact that the cine-ecology drew on a range of infrastructural practices that were already in use in large-scale industry, assorted entertainment media, political tactics of publicity, and urban planning. I consider the entanglement of these multisited material practices within an ideological field determined by political visions of science. In what follows, I pair a series of undiscussed archival sources with insights from postcolonial historiography, paperwork studies, and materialist studies of media to present a history of technical-industrial film practice.1 I begin by examining the strategic positioning of India’s multiple filmmaking initiatives as a “national industry” run along scientific parameters. Next, I discuss two major manifestations of the drive toward industrial coherence—performative displays of technological progress and material experiments in managing labor and maximizing productivity. I end with a description and analysis of three emerging techniques of scientific work management: the continuity script, differentiation and hierarchization of technical expertise, and double-unit shooting systems. Together these techniques produce infrastructure as a form of sensory-technical becoming in the cine-ecology. As Brian Larkin points out, “the materials of infrastructure,” in our case, celluloid, cameras, paper, “bring about a sensory apprehension of existence.”2 A technical history of cinema thus gestures to the ways in which film practitioners and publics found new horizons for defining the self and work through the scientific-industrial transformations of Bombay cinema. A pursuit of the technical illuminates the imbrication of Bombay’s talkie production practices with prevailing ideas of science and industrial organization. Further, it opens up a transmedial history of knowledge practices, cultural techniques, rhetorical devices, and paper-based technologies that were critical to the productivity and meaning of 100 El a s t i c i t y

Bombay cinema. In application, Bombay’s use of these methods was cannily attuned to the grandiose abstractions subsumed under the aegis of “science.” Theaters, studios, and laboratories of the time therefore practiced a mix of technological mastery and mystification. The Englishlanguage title of this chapter—Scientific Desires—references the contemporaneous excitement about technology and aspirations of industrial transformation, while the shadow title—Jadu Ghar (House of magic)— gestures toward the capacity of science to be popularly seized on as a modern form of magic.3 The film I was working on in 2004 was an independent production with uncertain funds and a diverse crew who had come to commercial film work either from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) or from years of apprenticeship and experience in Mumbai’s media industries. The methods we employed to streamline the production process manifested the full range of these career itineraries, and there was no centralized model for the different paperwork formats being used in the camera, costume, casting, or art departments. Despite our decentralized methods, we still had an overall system that worked by the same logics deployed at more structured, corporate studios, such as Yashraj Films or Dharma Productions. At the same time, my search for T-shirt G7 with Nasir bhai taught me that methods of work systematization can coexist with the daily unruliness of things. Objects, like people, can go missing just when you need them. Scientific desires have their limits, even as they point to real cultural struggles over power and meaning. INDUSTRIAL SCIENCE

The Indian film industry celebrated the year 1939 with great fanfare. That year marked the silver jubilee year of the film industry, being twenty-five years since Dadasaheb Phalke directed the silent feature film Raja Harishchandra (1913). The self-appointed leaders of the film industry, as represented by the Motion Picture Society of India (MPSI), planned a series of commemorative events in Bombay. These included an industrial exhibition representing the technological achievements of the film world; an elaborate edition of the annual Indian Motion Picture Congress; and several teas and luncheons with colonial administrators S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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and local politicians. For example, on December  19, 1938, the Indian Motion Picture Congress invited members of the National Planning Committee to tea. The hosts laid out their vision of the “role the films would play in the industrialization of the country,” pointing out that the Indian film industry “ranked 8th in importance as a key industry.”4 The main agenda behind such efforts was to characterize the assortment of Indian film entrepreneurial efforts as a cohesive national industry. Data and statistics were strategically deployed; industry observers repeatedly noted that Rs. 170 million worth of capital was invested in the film industry, and that over forty thousand employees were formally engaged.5 There was much to be gained by positioning cinema as an important national industry. Producers were apprehensive about an increased duty on raw films after the expiry of the Ottawa Agreement (1932).6 A second world war was looming on the horizon, and lessons from the last war were still fresh. War meant added restrictions on imports, new taxes and custom duties, special permits and licenses, and limitations on railway transportation of people and goods. If the colonial government were to continue its “step-motherly” treatment of cinema, the impending war would have a stifling impact on the expanding film business.7 The MPSI therefore tried to convince the colonial government of the valuable contributions of Indian cinema to the exchequer. In 1936 the MPSI made a forceful representation to Sir Frank Noyce, member for industries and labor, in which it noted that broadcasting and aviation, both important industries, are receiving the fullest attention and support of Government while the Indian film industry which is equally important and which pays directly about 14 lakhs of rupees [1.4 million] annually to the Central Exchequer by way of import duty on exposed and unexposed films and indirectly also a large amount from income tax, entertainment tax and other taxes, does not obtain, in spite of yielding such large revenues, a single farthing for encouragement or improvement of the industry.8

The “national industry” argument also had an appeal for a very different audience—urban film-going publics with increasingly nationalist 102

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politics. Gandhi’s renewed call for swadeshi was being embraced by patriotic publics across the subcontinent who believed in the vision of national sovereignty achieved through economic self-sufficiency.9 Indian industry, owned and managed wholly by Indians, was key to this vision of the future. As a business that was entirely indigenous in its finance and management, India’s multisited film industries were perfectly placed to respond to the swadeshi calls of the day. The MPSI and a loose coalition of journalists and film commentators vociferously argued that cinema was to be considered on a continuum with emerging swadeshi industries such as steel and cement. But first the social and organizational notoriety of cinema had to be managed. In 1928 the ICC had declared that “without better organization and better information, there is little hope of progress” for Indian cinema.10 The road to respectability and rationalization was to be paved with discursive maneuvers as well as material strategies during the long decade of the 1930s. The sign of science became critical to this project. The centrality of science to colonial modernity and the imagination of an independent nation state has been laid out by postcolonial historians of science and technology.11 Unfurling under the direction of the colonial apparatus, a muscular vision of science “as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress”12 gradually solidified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that there was a unified vision of what science could do, and Shiv Visvanathan points to the intense negotiations between imperialism and nationalism that were dramatized in the career of science in colonial India. Charting the development of industrial research from the establishment of orientalist amateur societies to the institution of universities and centralized governmental departments, Visvanathan delineates tense debates on what science could achieve in a colony that had long been exploited for its resources and deprived of the benefits of indigenous industry. These debates demonstrate a growing consciousness of the tight imbrication of science, technology, economy, and politics, and Visvanathan shows us how a prominent group of nationalist elites, scientists, and colonial administrators ultimately came to agree that the way forward lay in scientific planning, rationalization, and heavy industrialization.13 Looking back at this history in 1932, scientist P. C. Ray summed up the scenario thus: “In the days of the [swadeshi movement] S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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we threatened to go back to the charkha to be satisfied with coarse cloth rather than try foreign cloth. In the end we relied on the mills of Bombay.”14 Y. A. Fazalbhoy’s manual for Indian filmmakers, Indian Film (1939), encapsulates the dominant industrial anxieties and hopes of the decade with its emphasis on efficiency, organization, economy, and standardization. For Fazalbhoy, “The recurring failure of producing companies, that has been a feature of the Industry for the past few years, would not probably have occurred if it had been organized on more scientific principles.” The only solution to the many ailments of the film industry, “as in every other industry,” was large-scale organization.15 Even so, it is important to note, as Gyan Prakash does, that science came to mean “not only what scientists did” but also “what science stood for, the dazzling range of meanings and functions it represented.”16 Prakash is alert to the representational and discursive lives of science and emphasizes the dazzling status of science as a symbol of authority. In its simultaneous functions as authoritative sign and ambivalent reality, science colored the talkie transition in significant ways. Contemporaneous discourse on science offered a path to reorient the film industry’s perceived status from a bazaar form to a modern industrial form managed along scientific lines. A congeries of industrial tactics came together to create an image of the industry as a unified space for a modern swadeshi enterprise with good housekeeping skills. Two broad trends can be identified in this project: scientific display and scientific management, premised on the ideas of performative address to an external public alongside internal norms for industrial governance. S I LV E R J U B I L E E E X H I B I T I O N O F 1939 A N D S C I E N T I F I C D I S P L AY

It was a colonial commission, the Indian Cinematograph Committee, that first interpellated the “Indian film industry” as a unified assemblage. To present an ordered house before the ICC’s oral and written investigations, the Bombay Cinema and Theatres Trade Association and the Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association were “hastily convened” in 1927.17 Following from this singular experience of intensive data gathering and colonial scrutiny, India’s producers, distributors, and 104

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exhibitors tried to organize themselves into official coalitions of business interests that could negotiate as a consolidated body with state players. The Motion Picture Society of India was formally registered in 1932, followed by the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association (IMPPA) in 1937. IMPPA’s membership criteria were fairly broad—any individual or firm that had either produced one Indian feature film or was the owner or lessee of a studio was eligible for membership. Parallel with these initiatives were industrial conferences such as the Indian Motion Picture Congress (IMPC), which was an annual gathering of allIndia film producers, exhibitors, distributors, artistes, and technicians that started in 1935. In 1935 the IMPC hosted India’s first “Photo-Cine-Radio Exhibition,” where audiences were invited to marvel at equipment and technologies that were the “most modern development in modern science.”18 The exhibition, qua exhibition, constituted its own media form while also displaying the transmedial overlaps between photography, radio, and cinema. It was inaugurated by Sir M. Visvesvaraya, an Indian engineer, statesman, and author of the agenda-setting book Planned Economy for India (1934). In his inaugural speech, Visvesvaraya affirmed that “the film industry as at present practiced in this country is essentially an Indian industry. The capital is Indian, the management is Indian, and the production, distribution and exhibition are mostly in Indian hands.”19 As a concerted propaganda effort to equate indigenous cinema with industrial progress and nationalist self-reliance, the exhibition had already done the trick. For its grand silver jubilee celebrations in May 1939, the MPSI once again adopted the form of the industrial exhibition. The exhibition was an extravagant testament to spectacular modernity mounted across an area of eight acres in the Backbay Reclamation grounds behind Churchgate station (fig. 2.1). It was designed by the architects Sykes, Patkar, and Divecha, who had designed the famous art deco Swastik Court building in Backbay and the East India Cotton exchange building on Kalbadevi Road (the tallest building in 1937), during the “first flush of modern architecture in Bombay.”20 The layout comprised ten north-and-south streets along which two hundred exhibition stalls were accommodated. The “streets” were named after ten prominent film companies: Bombay Talkies Street, Sagar Street, Wadia Street, Minerva Street, S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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figure 2.1 A bird’s-eye view of the silver jubilee exhibition grounds, with the sea visible in the background. filmindia, June  30, 1939. (Sushila Rani-Baburao Patel Trust)

Prakash Street, Mohan Street, New Theatres Street, Prabhat Street, Huns Street, and Film Corporation of India Street. An emphasis on aural and visual display was evident in the curation of daily events: there were demonstrations of “modern filming work,” “history stalls” that displayed vintage shooting equipment from the early silent years, large murals of the different stages of film production, and daily radio broadcasts from a special air-conditioned “baby” broadcast station. The exhibition demonstrated the transmedial denseness of a cine-ecology that drew on the cultural status, technological base, and human resources of radio, photography, print, architecture, and urban design. Celebrities from the world of film and radio made daily broadcasts that were relayed across the exhibition grounds on Phillips loudspeakers.21 Exhibition attendees could observe the recording process through large glass windows and see how “stars do their ‘stuff’ before the ‘mike,’ ” the quotation marks underlining the fact that “scientific seeing” can render a process more fascinating than banal.22 Alongside these displays of the recorded human voice were live performances by film orchestras that made visible the human-instrument articulation that was normally relegated to the off-screen space of the filmic frame. Leading equipment and stock companies (Fazalbhoy, Eastern Electric Engineering Co., Agfa, Kodak, Famous Cine Laboratory, RCA Photophone, and International Talkie Equipment Co.), film journalists, dress and makeup suppliers (Maganlal, Max Factor, E. S. Patanwalla), and about two hundred exhibitors participated in the jubilee extravaganza. Lightweight cement (Feathercrete), electric bulbs (Philips, Bijlee), fire-proof steel equipment (Allwyn, Noble, Godrej, Yahya), and 106

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high-speed, noiseless electric fans (India Electric Works) all jostled for space to illustrate that this twenty-five-year-old industry relied on multiple technological innovations suited to an energy-intensive, heatproducing, noise-sensitive, and inflammable medium. As an exhilarating mix of art, science, commerce, and entertainment, the exhibition successfully mapped the intricate network of services and infrastructures that supported the cine-ecology. The exhibitionary form, as an evidentiary site of propaganda, has an overdetermined place in the history of imperialism. The famous Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, in London, produced a “powerfully ordered vision of empire, and in particular expose[d] the way that knowledge was reorganized to underwrite colonial expansionism.”23 This was a site for the maintenance of colonial difference rather than pedagogy, made shockingly obvious in the use of human exhibits of native artisans shipped in from the colonies as living ethnological displays. In a mode that was similar-but-different, colonial exhibitions in British India were used as vehicles for “the staging of science as a sign of colonial power/knowledge.”24 From visualizing the might and superior technical wisdom of the colonizer to instructing the natives in efficient methods of production, exhibitions were a regular tool for colonial pedagogy since the nineteenth century. As a flexible medium of display, the exhibitionary form was used to instruct and “improve” the native mind, but it could also serve nationalist pedagogy. In 1901 the Indian National Congress organized an industrial exhibition in conjunction with its annual meeting, and Gandhi himself was an advocate for the efficacy of exhibitions as a mass tool to popularize the khadi movement.25 Be it as a tool for imperialist or nationalist messaging, exhibitions were perceived as scientific sites for visual pedagogy. Gandhi was clear that as a visual genre, the exhibition was “not a cinema,” “not a mere ocular demonstration to be dismissed out of our minds immediately.” For him, cinema was a medium that encouraged distraction rather than attention, a transitory address to the eyes rather than a durational cognitive appeal to the mind. On the other hand, the exhibition was an embodied evidentiary form where the viewer-as-student “may come and see things for himself,” absorbing the lessons on display in an attentive mode.26 Postcolonial historians of science and art have argued that the intended evidentiary visuality of colonial exhibitions cut against itself S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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as science was remade into a site of wonder in the colony.27 The colonial staging of science found its local purchase mainly as a site of spectacular display, rather than a place for sober learning. So much so that lay visitors often referred to the colonial museum as a jadu ghar or house of magic, frustrating the rational-pedagogic intentions of administrators and museum officials. Scholars have seized on this lived history to invest native museum spectatorship with agency and to claim that the colony was able to “reconfigure rational knowledge, where the classification and function of objects can generate curiosity and even magical enjoyment.”28 But as historians of modern vision point out, evidentiary forms that seek to equate seeing with knowing have always had ambivalent relations with reason, be it in the metropole or the colony. From the exotic objects displayed in private European wunderkammen to medical photographs of female “hysterics,” the gap between excited vision and cool objectivity runs shallow.29 Which is to say that the performative cannot be sundered from the visual economy of display-oriented forms. The colonial exhibition and the nationalist lantern slide may intend objective instruction, but they also rely on performative modes that often invite attention through the faculties of curiosity and wonder. Early cinema theorists describe this well when they show how cinema was not predestined to be a coherent narrative form bent on seamlessly integrating the viewer into a unified (conservative) worldview. Rather, early cinema in Hollywood (as in India), often engaged an aesthetics of astonishment where the viewer was encouraged to reflexively take pleasure in the sensory-technological novelties of the medium itself.30 Such a perspective aligns the film viewer with the fairground attendee as a selfconscious consumer of thrilling attractions. The exhibitionary mode, premised on display, is thus formally aligned with the pleasures of cinema. Further, an exhibition designed to demonstrate the industrial nature of film and allied technological media mobilizes sensory affects while recognizing the everyday sensational appeal of science-as-idea. Mohan Sinha’s film Industrial India (1938) helps us untangle this knot further (fig. 2.2). In the Hindi title of the film—Nirala Hindustan— the descriptor nirala refers to that which is strange and wondrous, something that may be tangible but still leaves you shaking your head in slight disbelief.31 The choice of the word nirala thus confers on the industry-technology assemblage an affective aura that is premised on 108

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figure  2.2 Handbill for Industrial India, or Nirala Hindustan (Mohan Sinha, 1938). (Osianama Archive & Library Collection)

wonder. This wonder leapt off the page in Industrial India’s prerelease publicity blitz in the Times of India. A five-page special supplement highlighted the real factory locations used during the filming: swadeshi enterprises that were locally owned and used Indian labor and materials, such as Godrej Steel Works, E. S. Patanwalla’s “modern perfume laboratory” where the famous Afghan Snow was made, Madhu Canning Co., and Golden Tobacco Co. The sales pitch here was that just like the modern steel almirah, face cream, or tin of tobacco, “the modern film is a work not only of art but of applied science.”32 At the same time, the real wonder derived not simply from the factories’ modernity but from their indigeneity. Spectators were invited to “come and see” the production methods used in “younger Indian industries” that “prove the film,” that is, support its breathless faith in “Village industry! City industry!! National industry!”33 In this vision, cinema not only was an allied modern industrial form but had a significant role in documenting, displaying, and thus promoting the new nirala Hindustan. This was cinema itself as an exhibitionary form. The new audiences that Industrial India sought to attract were the same as those hailed by the jubilee exhibition of 1939: nationalist S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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consumers enthralled as much by films as by the wonder of high-tech local film production. Technology, dramatized through display, was evidence of the power and future of Indian film entrepreneurship and capital. Bombay city’s electrification, its conquest of the sea through land reclamation projects, and its capacity to attract foreign manufacturers were on display at the exhibition grounds as markers of a uniquely local urban energy rather than the consequences of colonial governance.34 This was what distinguished Bombay from the rest of India, and cinema was a decisive part of the aura of “Bombay.” Staged as a wondrous testament to scientific modernity, the silver jubilee exhibition of 1939 was simultaneously set up as a grand entertainment form with ticketed entry and daily film screenings, dance shows, and music recitals. Advertisements announced the heady juxtaposition of stalls demonstrating “how movie pictures are made,” next door to “the globe of death” and “the motorcycle jump” underlining the concept of the exhibition-as-fairground.35 The binaries between science and sensory pleasure, education and entertainment, that were so necessary to the colonial exhibition became irrelevant as cinema revealed its nirala twin existence—as both technics and magic. The silver jubilee exhibition of 1939 was therefore one giant jadu ghar of cinema that was neither masquerading (as science) nor misrepresenting itself; it was only laying bare the imaginative grip of science on modern audiences whose relation to urban modernity was increasingly premised on consumption. The exhibition of 1939 mobilized the elevated status of science in colonial India to confer a weighty legitimacy to cinema and its practitioners, while the immense popularity of cinema injected lightness into the esoteric image of science. A heady industrial modernity was performed also in the use and display of electric lights. The exhibition grounds were open only in the evenings from 5:00 p.m. to midnight and provided the perfect setting for “a brilliant scheme of illumination for the ‘streets’ of this little show village” (fig. 2.3).36 The history of electricity is closely tied to the life of cinema in ways that span the technical to the sociocultural to the sensory. Electricity accelerated a leisure economy premised on the consumption of commodities such as cinema. Cinema and electricity were also responsible for the sensory-perceptual shifts that are considered emblematic of technological modernity, producing an altered relation 110

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figure  2.3 Entrance to the silver jubilee exhibition, as seen at night. filmindia, June 30, 1939. (Sushila Rani-Baburao Patel Trust)

to time and temporality.37 Just as cinema and the railways changed notions of space and time by bridging vast distances at unthinkable speeds, cinema and electricity expanded the possibilities of the twentyfour-hour day and recalibrated the meaning of darkness.38 It is worth noting that though the Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways Company came into being in 1905 and the first cotton mills switched to electric power in 1915, most film studios in Bombay were not outfitted with electric carbon arc lamps until the 1930s and continued to rely on daylight, lime light, kerosene, gas, and generators. In their statement before the ICC in November  1927, N. G. Deware and Dwarkadas Sampat of Bombay’s leading silent film company, Kohinoor, reiterate one desire for the studio of the future—that it should have electric lights. The obstacles to this future were many, from the unavailability of steady electric supply or constant voltage to the difficulty of procuring expensive imported arc lights and electricians who knew how to work them.39 By 1939, however, not only were Bombay’s suburban streets and neighborhoods electrified, but so were its film studios. The radiant electrification of the jubilee exhibition asserted Indian cinema’s firm membership within the electric age. The MPSI’s industrial exhibitions magnified an older performative practice of display—the studio tour—which was a recognizable form since the early 1930s. Students, government officials, journalists, political leaders, and visiting foreign celebrities were regularly invited to tour S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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established film studios such as Ranjit, Prabhat (Pune), Wadia, Minerva, New Theatres (Calcutta), and Bombay Talkies. These were carefully orchestrated tours that invited the spectatorial gaze in the display mode and demonstrated technology, starry glamor, and the “health of the home.” Studio tours were a form of voluntary inspection, if you will, premised on the canny understanding of the attractions-based power of technology. On the one hand, the tour was meant to lay bare the mechanics of filmmaking; on the other, it underlined the glamorous strangeness of everything on view. Contemporaneous accounts of visits to Hollywood studios exemplify this trend: “to those who live and work outside the walls [of the studio] there is something much more amazing about a visit to a film studio than the pictures that come out of them.”40 Bombay Talkies’ studio papers contain a typed letter from 1944 in which a group of first-year medical students from Parel request to see the studio premises. On receiving this request, Devika Rani writes a quick note to her secretary: “Yes, answer using the word Jwar Bhata [their upcoming film]—and arrange for suitable time—have some tea for them— good Publicity.”41 A visit such as this, invited as publicity, could result in a gushing testimony like the one sent in by Dharamdas Tekchand, B.A., to the editor of Cinema in 1933: “A few days back, I had the pleasure to visit Ajanta Cinetone Ltd.’s recently erected Studio, in Parel, Bombay. I confess that uptil now I have been very skeptical about the progress of the Cinema Industry in India. But my visit to Ajanta Studio has altogether changed my views on the subject.”42 The ocular proof that changed Mr.  Tekchand’s mind included a large soundproof shooting stage and brand-new electric arc lamps (both of which were uncommon in Bombay at the time), a laboratory, and technical staff who were “men of experience and ability,” all adding up to the impression that “order and system reign[ed] everywhere.” Even the invitations to the colonial apparatus that were held out by the IMPPA and the MPSI in the 1930s and 1940s appear to have worked in this display mode. In the most voluble trade manuals of these decades—reports of the MPSI and silver jubilee souvenirs—we glimpse carefully curated state-industry interactions. Film premieres, special screenings, and invitations to luncheons during industry conferences and congresses were not simply meant to invite positive intervention in

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the shape of raw stock and licenses but were also designed as displays of a well-oiled organizational machine that conformed to colonial standards of scientific hygiene and hence did not need further supervision. The display mode could invite a certain kind of attention while deflecting unwanted intervention. S C I E N T I F I C M A N AG E M E N T

What ails the Bombay film industry? This has to be one of the most frequently asked questions in the history of Bombay cinema. The “ailment” often has vague symptoms—a feeling of unease, nervousness about the future, or paranoia about competing media technologies. In the first decades of talkie production, there were at least three diagnoses that were commonly aired: lack of finance, inconstant employees, and haphazard production methods. Film producers blamed the unavailability of capital and the unreliability of labor as the main factors preventing Bombay from becoming a global hub for quality film products, while film industry observers blamed industrial inefficiency. The ICC report of 1928 noted that the Indian film business was profitable but sadly lacking in “efficient business management.”43 By the time of the next governmental inquiry of 1951, however, the surveyors were satisfied that, at the very least, there was “a perceptible desire for rationalizing production.”44 Colonial enthusiasm for industrial surveys had previously brought Indian textile industries into its purview, and it is instructive to comparatively note that the Textile Tariff Board “prescribed rationalization as the cure for the industry’s problems” in 1927.45 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar has shown how rationalization “became, at least rhetorically, the yardstick by which the colonial state measured how much [the textile industry] deserved protection.”46 The discourse of rationalization drew on ideas of “scientific management” made popular by Frederick Winslow Taylor, ideas that had fired the imagination and consternation of employers and workers across the industrialized world.47 Taylorism’s main claim to science appeared to rest on a dispassionate view of human work potential as a calculable and predictable quantity that could be maximized and regularized. Chandavarkar cautions us not to mistake

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the popularity of Taylorist discourse with direct implementation, but it is important to understand the discursive and ideological field within which cinema was trying to reposition itself. Film studios adopted new organizational work flows, attempted to standardize technical formats such as the continuity script, and embraced new forms of time management in order to maximize productivity. As we will see in part 2, however, there was also pushback from cine-workers who objected to the equation of the human worker with the machine. The ICC refused to posit Hollywood (the British film industry’s chief rival) as a comparative model yet struggled to characterize the local film industry in any other terms. From having an “unorganized” and “inefficient” character to being “undeveloped” and “still in its infancy,” India’s film industries were invariably judged as per a comparative developmentalist logic against Hollywood.48 Hollywood’s legendary efficiency rests on narratives of its studio system. The Hollywood studio system developed its recognizable features in the 1920s and is believed to have reached the zenith of its power and stability during the 1930s and 1940s. Its central characteristics were a strict division of labor, emphasis on rapid production turnarounds with an assembly-line logic, and a monopolistic control of the entire film economy in the hands of a few companies. This “mature-oligopoly” was effected through active “vertical integration.”49 Vertical integration refers to an economic model in which a single manufacturing company controls the entire supply chain of the commodity; in the case of film, from production to distribution to exhibition. Some elements of a classical studio system were in evidence in Bombay since the 1920s, but these coexisted alongside adhoc and improvisational methods of production, often within the same studio. A few silent film companies such as Kohinoor and Madan even managed to vertically integrate owing to the limited scope of distribution and theatrical implantation in the 1920s. However, at least 45 percent of silent film production was attributable to minor concerns and short-term business interests.50 Multiple modes of operation continued to prevail through the sound transition, a multiplicity that grew with the consolidation of film as a legitimate and profitable commercial enterprise.51 As we have seen in chapter 1, there was no one type of studio, nor was there any single business model that characterized Bombay in the “heyday of the studio system.”52 114

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A systems approach to understanding the link between Hollywood’s aesthetic output and structural organization was popularized by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson in the 1980s. Their neo-Marxist framework linked a “mode of production” and a technological form with a historically specific aesthetic style, allowing future film historians to embed formal film analysis within a wide matrix of synchronic material forces. At the same time, it also promoted an epistemic investment in “systems” that can be readily distinguished, named, and considered stable. An ecological approach allows us to move away from the teleologies of systems. We start to see that although Bombay’s cine-ecology clearly differed from the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s, that doesn’t mean that we must characterize it as an immature industry or an example of “backward capitalism.”53 To understand it seriously, we must abandon the temptation to rely on Hollywood as the sole point of reference and look instead for the multiplicity of influences, logics, and techniques at work in a diverse ecology of practices. Organizational practices, filmmaking techniques, and aesthetic forms were liberally borrowed, adapted, and repurposed at this time—from film industries in Germany, France, and England, as well as other Indian media configurations such as theater, radio, and gramophone. The cine-ecology of this formative period may best be described as an ensemble of transmedial and transindustrial practices that continually strived toward the standardization of cinema. To claim more would not only be a historiographic overstatement but also a fallacious characterization of dynamic practices of becoming as evidence of a stable identity. So what, then, qualified as a “studio” in talkie Bombay? Infrastructurally, Bombay’s biggest talkie studios were physical buildings with one or more sound stages; multiple cameras; sound, lighting, and editing equipment; preview theaters; and even processing laboratories in some cases. The average studio of the 1930s was run with one sound stage, one camera, and one recording unit, set up with a limited capital investment of approximately Rs. 200,000, which was spent on machinery and equipment.54 A greater number of production concerns relied on a thriving rental economy and hired sound stages, equipment, and labs on a shift basis. Of the thirty-four Bombay-based production companies listed in the Indian Cinematograph Year Book of 1938, only sixteen S c ie n t if i c D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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qualified as “studios,” and only five studios had processing laboratories.55 Many film companies had arrangements with specific theaters to ensure guaranteed first-run releases, but vertical integration was not a reality in talkie Bombay. In fact, India’s film producers lobbied hard against vertical integration in the case of Calcutta’s Madan Company, which was heavily criticized in the ICC interviews as a dangerous precedent that ought to be controlled.56 Instead, film industry leaders pushed for greater governmental aid, citing examples such as Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Soviet Russia, Czechoslovakia, England, and Japan as countries providing benefits and state financing to their local film industries.57 Horizontal integration, on the other hand, had more success, as seen in chapter 1. Overall, Indian studio owners were unable to single-handedly generate the amount of capital required for integrated operations. From the continued presence of so-called independent companies, to the lack of stable sources of capital for holistic vertical integration, to the mixed motivations of film entrepreneurs themselves, a variety of factors kept the film industry diffuse and decentralized. The point I would like to emphasize is that this rendered Bombay’s film industry an elastic ecology where diverse strategies of production, an array of film genres, and a mixed group of players could loosely coalesce and recombine. Joint stock companies and family-run businesses, credit networks and cash flows, rental studios and private studios with exclusive access were equal contributors to the suppleness that characterized Bombay’s film production landscape. Some of the industry’s most powerful players sought to counter this elasticity through competitive efforts such as the formation of producers’ associations or by petitioning the colonial government about the negative impact of “fly-by-night” producers. These concerted efforts changed little on the ground, except the discursive construction of a value-laden binary between big studios and independents, respectable solidity and unreliability, commitment to Indian industry versus shortsighted financial opportunism. On the whole, contemporaneous accusations of “disorganization” nudge us to misread the dynamism of an industrial ecology as an ailment to be cured rather than a generative force to be interpreted on its own terms. We might do better by examining

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particular production techniques that tried to infuse the openness of the cine-ecology with a tentative determinacy.

Continuity Script as Production Technology, Diegesis as Data Tejaswini Ganti opens a discussion of work culture in the contemporary Hindi film industry with insider complaints about “bound scripts.”58 Her informants mourn the nonexistence of completed screenplays as a key symptom of the chaotic and unprofessional work ethic supposedly prevalent in Bollywood. Ganti identifies such narrativizing as a form of “boundary-work” that filmmakers use to distance themselves from the disdain-worthy norm. She usefully points to the “tremendous discursive emphasis on the ‘bound script’ ”— by which is meant the completed screenplay—and how it is a “highly fetishized object within the Hindi film industry.”59 The purported absence of this object has also become fetishized over the past few decades to characterize Bollywood as a culturally curious, messy, cottage industry. While Ganti rightly labels such self-narrativizing as an industry-manufactured “production fiction,” it would seem that this fiction has been normalized in both academic and popular writing. As I will demonstrate, the object that is missing is not the script itself but rather historical memory of script practices. The continuity script, commonly referred to as the “scenario” in early talkie Bombay, is part of the forgotten media histories of South Asia, histories that can significantly reshape our beliefs about cinema, industry, technology, and their interconnections. It also belongs within the history of documents as an epistemic object that participated in a modern scientific culture that had a variegated presence in late colonial India. According to Janet Staiger, in the classical Hollywood mode of production “the continuity script [was] a blueprint for production.”60 To put it differently, a continuity script is, even today, a technical-textual genre that helps a production team convert a film’s diegesis into data. It is essentially a screenplay with a numbered division of scenes, clear indication of location, time of day, characters, and other critical scene information. These details allow the crew to generate a vast collection of other paper tools, such as cast, costume, and prop lists, shooting

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schedules, and shot breakdowns. As a technology for rationalized production, one of the continuity script’s main functions is the centrifugal proliferation of paperwork, producing a seriality of tasks suited to a range of specialized skills. It is widely believed that the practice of creating and using a continuity script became a reality in Bombay only in the 1990s, with economic liberalization and the steady corporatization of hitherto messy work structures. The best-known theorization of this view is by M. Madhava Prasad, who tries to establish the specificity of Indian cinema by pitting it against David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s formula of “the Hollywood mode of production.”61 Prasad contends that historically (specifically, 1950s–1970s), “The Hindi film industry has adopted what Marx calls the ‘heterogeneous form of manufacture’ in which the whole is assembled from parts produced separately by specialists, rather than being centralized around the processing of a given [raw] material.” He contrasts Bombay’s supposed heterogeneous mode of manufacture to the Hollywood model as characterized by Staiger in terms of “serial manufacture,” which “although far removed from the ‘assembly-line rigidity’ of large industry” involves “a detailed division of labor.” Prasad claims that “while the Hollywood production process is structured around the primary operation of transforming a given raw material, the story/scenario, into film” in Bombay the “written script . . . is conspicuous by its absence.”62 By disavowing the historical existence of the film script, Prasad disavows all attempts toward a division of labor and the interconnected labor relations that are characteristic of serial manufacture. Several questions immediately arise. What does Prasad mean when he talks of the “written script”? Why does Prasad compare 1950s Indian cinema with the heyday of the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s? Doesn’t this solidify the belief that Indian cinema was a lateblooming, “not-yet” cinema, unable to adapt to Hollywood’s model of industrial efficiency (contrary to Prasad’s avowed intentions to dismantle problematic theories of cultural lag)? And finally, what is at stake here? First of all, Prasad interprets “script” to mean a coherent “story,” whereas Staiger, on whose theory he depends, is referring to the “continuity script,” which is a techno-documentary tool for organizing production. So Prasad’s well-received contentions rest on a possible 118

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misunderstanding of terms. Second, as I have already discussed, it is historically inadequate to frame Hollywood as the only horizon for Bombay’s film industrial imagination. Third, as we shall see, extant archival sources belie the absence narrative. The stakes here are significant: to believe in the heterogeneous mode of manufacture is also to believe in independent specialists who have “control over their own means of production.”63 Prasad cites poet-lyricists as independent players, preventing us from understanding the labor hierarchies and technologies of control that have governed Bombay’s film writers over decades of commercial filmmaking. During the early talkie years, the continuity script was an important technological actor in the network of industrial practices that translated writing techniques from one medium, such as literature, theater, or silent film, into the new medium of sound cinema. What we call a continuity script today was referred to as a “scenario” (interchangeably “book work,” “shooting script,” and “working script”) in 1930s India. Industry observers and practitioners recognized the importance of the scenario and made regular recommendations for its wider use. In 1930 the prolific screenwriter Niranjan Pal proclaimed that “pictorial development” of the story is the most intricate task of a screenwriter. “To be able to write a successful scenario or continuity one must have a first rate knowledge of studio technique. It is in the scenario that the author tells the director, the artistes, the cameramen, the art director and the property master what he means and what he wants. It is while writing the continuity that the author has to visualize every action, every scene, every minute detail through the eye of the camera.”64 In 1931 K. T. Dalvi, proprietor of the International Pictures Corporation, wrote a manual for film aspirants in which he explained the terms “continuity script” and “scenario”: “Continuity is the fully developed scenario with copious notes for the Director and Cameraman. . . . A scenario is the ‘shooting script.’ It is the manuscript for the use of the director, when he is actually directing the film. The scenario contains a number of technical terms. The scenario is the whole film produced on paper—later to be translated on the celluloid.”65 Dalvi uses all three terms—scenario, shooting script, and continuity script—to refer to the same object, and this indeed was the usage of the terms in the 1930s. What needs to be stressed is that no matter what it was labeled, there was a definite S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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figure  2.4 Typed shooting script of Savitri (Franz Osten, 1937), as found in the surviving papers of Devika Rani Choudhari. (Dietze Family Archive)

awareness of the practice and significance of the allegedly “missing” Bombay script. Our next concern is to understand how a paper-based technology could generate a division of labor. Figure  2.4 shows a page from the typed continuity script or scenario for Savitri (Franz Osten, 1937) with

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temporary English dialogues. Note the scene numbers, shot transitions, and time of day, all of which allow efficient scheduling and nonchronological shooting. To date, such preparatory paperwork is used to ensure minimal wastage of time and labor during shooting. Numbered scenes allow the script to be broken up into discrete departmental work lists, such as cast, props, costumes, and locations (fig. 2.5). An exterior or outdoor location list is used to plan shooting for days when sound stages are busy or keeping the monsoons in mind; prop and costume lists help the costume designer, “tailor master,” and assistant directors to research and procure the appropriate clothing and get the fittings done well before shooting commences. The disaggregation of the script into logistical information and practices produces a need for specialized departments that can deal with these separate aspects of filmmaking. Paper-directed efficiency of this sort could be deployed as an item of scientific display for skeptical outsiders. In 1944, during severe wartime restrictions on imported raw stock and production licenses, Devika Rani wrote to the Department of Industries and Civil Supplies asking for an expedited raw stock license for Bombay Talkies’ next feature, citing their thorough paperwork as evidence of their efficiency: We start book work on our next production as soon as some progress has been made in the shooting of the current production and the stage has been reached when our shooting programme can be made final so that it can proceed according to a fixed schedule. By this time our Scenario Dept. has completed its work on the current production and is free to go on with the next one. We can also take out-door shots that might be necessary for the next production while the studio is engaged for the current production.66

The survival and preservation of Bombay Talkie’s studio papers makes it possible for us to examine the logic of rationalized productivity that manifested itself in the proliferation of paperwork. At the same time, the absence of similar records from other talkie studios of the time should not lead us to view Bombay Talkies as an exception to the rule.

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figure  2.5 Savitri shooting program for Monday, May 17, 1935, indicating locations, scene numbers, cast, costume changes, and special props. (Dietze Family Archive)

For example, J. B. H. Wadia recounts in his memoirs the detailed “book work” that was involved in the planning of Wadia Movietone’s debut talkie feature, Lal-e-Yaman (1933). This preproduction planning paid off when the unit had to work round-the-clock to maximize night shifts on the sound stage they had rented at Mohan Bhavnani’s Ajanta studio. Each day the Lal-e-Yaman team shot outdoors during the day and then indoor scenes from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.67 Similarly, Durga Khote, who worked with a number of film companies, recalls that “one of the most important features about the early Talkies was that almost every picture was shot according to a fixed time-table,” “scripts were completely ready,” and many companies followed preproduction “planning of the paperwork.”68 Even though there was little need for complex continuity scripts when films were shorter in length and silent, as early as in 1920 Englishlanguage newspapers in Bombay were carrying articles explaining how an “original plot . . . must be turned into a ‘scenario’ ” by a “scenario writer” or a “continuity writer.”69 In 1921 we have articles describing the specialized term continuity as “a studio term for the scenario as prepared for the director. It gives the story in terms of scenes or shots.”70 By 1927, classified columns in Bombay newspapers were carrying advertisements looking for “scenario-writers.”71 An advertisement by the renowned Kohinoor United Artists in September 1930 sought “brilliant cinema stories,” which “must be put strictly in accordance with the Scenario form,” and that same year Ranjit’s Mohanlal G. Dave was named the “Century Scenario Writer of India” for his prolific output.72 On the basis of mainstream advertisements, classifieds, and training manuals, we can assume a fairly wide interest in and knowledge of basic screenwriting and continuity script conventions (more in the next section). These archival traces also indicate an appreciation of the fact that scenario-writing for films was a distinct technical skill requiring comprehension of lensing and shot magnification, optical transitions and editing. Another recent archival discovery corroborates this view. A shooting script for the silent film Gul-e-Bakavali (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1924) was recently translated and published in the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Part of the personal collection of film historian Virchand Dharamsey, this script consists of a bound S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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notebook, 20 x 15.5 cm, with approximately 160 pages of Gujarati script handwritten by the screenwriter Mohanlal Dave. It gives the location, characters, scene description, shot size, shot length, and dialog intertitles in separate columns for each scene (fig. 2.6). This complete artifact is equivalent to a continuity script. Even before the shooting script section begins, there are pages in the notebook dedicated to cast and costume lists.73 This suggests that professional screenwriting was an increasingly technical role and resulted not simply in the story of the film but the plan of the entire film. This is similar to the situation in England in the 1920s where, as Ian Macdonald has pointed out, “the script was expected to reflect both narrative construction and technical detail.”74 The discovery of the Gul-e-Bakavali script is historic because, as Kaushik Bhaumik emphasizes, “Not only is it the first (and so far only) film script available for the silent film era in India, it also proves that, contrary to the opinions of respondents to the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928, at least some silent films had detailed scripts.”75 Scripts and scriptwriting practices were part of an elaborate textual economy in the early twentieth century, circulating freely within a fundamentally transmedial cine-ecology. A mythology of disavowal not only erases the history of the continuity script but also obliterates other modes of scriptwriting and production management that predated talkie cinema or coexisted alongside it. The practice of maintaining a continuity script may have been inconsistent and irregular, but it is impossible to deny its existence. By taking archival paperwork and historical fragments seriously, we can assert that the productivity, commercial success, and formal influence of Bombay’s early talkie studios were enabled by an array of technologies, including the continuity script. The ephemeral successes of smaller, independent concerns that rented studios and equipment would not be possible were it not for a paper technology that could facilitate tight scheduling of shifts as per location, actor, and equipment availability. From an aesthetic standpoint, the sheer complexity of plots in the 1930s, with multiple subplots, flashbacks, and dream sequences, gestures toward script practices that could accommodate nonchronological shooting. The continuity script, in its varied iterations, was a vital paper technology that aided the sprawling cinematic visions of the day. 124

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figure  2.6 Shooting script for Gul-e-Bakavali (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1924), reproduced from the translated version by Ananya Parikh, BioScope 3, no. 2 (2012): 205. (Courtesy of Virchand Dharamsey)

Rise of the Technical Specialist Cornelia Vismann and Lisa Gitelman have forcefully demonstrated the value of approaching documents such as files, lists, and typescripts as media technologies. Their insights show that paper technologies are not passive artifacts that simply move along predetermined paths. Rather, they play a role in actively generating the channels and nodal destinations required for their movement. The continuity script, as an industrial tool, participated in the compartmentalization of practices that reconverged on the studio floor. This drive to compartmentalization further created the need for a variety of technical specialists. As the film industry developed an understanding of the differences between film and other representational forms, the film technical specialist emerged as an important historical figure. This emergence ran parallel to a growing discussion of cinema’s unique qualities and the industry’s techno-scientific repositioning. I historicize these moves toward medium specificity and technical differentiation, agreeing with Mary Ann Doane that, “despite its essentialist connotations, medium specificity is a resolutely historical notion, its definition incessantly mutating in various sociohistorical contexts.”76 Experiments with the continuity script led to an altered understanding of the screenplay as a complex technology produced by professionals. With the arrival of sound, new specialist profiles like dialogue writers and lyric writers were created, and screenwriting came to include a series of practices often performed by different individuals: stories, treatments, step outlines, dialogues, dialogue translations into Hindi-Urdu, and continuity scripts. For a while the boundaries between many of these tasks were blurred, and separate categories of work had yet to be named or credited in opening titles and publicity materials. By 1936, as the talkie film settled into its distinct formal identity, many of these ambiguities were clarified, and separate credits for “Story,” “Dialogues,” and “Songs” started to appear. Despite its longer history in the public imagination, the category of “Scenario” as a separate specialist task was officially introduced in film credits only in the mid-1930s by studios such as Kolhapur Cinetone (Akashwani, 1934), Wadia Movietone (Hunterwali, 1935), Bhavnani Productions (Jagran, 1936), and Sangeet Film Company (Jeevan Swapna, 1937). On the other hand, while we 126

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figure  2.7 This diagram by K. S. Hirlekar, technical adviser to Agfa Photo Co. and author of The Place of Film in National Planning (1930), provides a “graphical demonstration of the various factors involved in the production of silent and sound pictures.” filmindia, May 1939, 69. (Sushila Rani-Baburao Patel Trust)

have extant continuity script fragments from Bombay Talkies, the studio did not credit scenario writers, alerting us to the fact that actually existing practices may not always find an evidentiary basis in the most obvious textual records.77 In the absence of film schools, film magazines and trade papers played a defining pedagogical role in imparting technical knowledge and information.78 Writing in the Madras magazine Sound & Shadow in 1933, A. Sundaram, B.A., explains that “technique is to film production what life is to a human body. The scenario is the skeleton, direction flesh and blood, and technique the life of any picture. No film should as a rule be produced without the aid of an expert technician.”79 Niranjan Pal published “A Few Hints on Scenario Writing” in 1930. The article carried an excerpt from what appears to be an Indian film script, outlining scene numbers, locations, shot descriptions, shot sizes, dialogue intertitles, and transitions.80 From 1930 to 1931 the trade journal Cinema published serialized “Scenarios” by one Tarit Kumar Basu, who demonstrated an understanding of the particularities of the film script as a genre, with details about shot size and transitions. These serialized scenarios also established the genre as a readable form:

Ti t l e : W H E R E G O E S T T H O U M R .   C I V I L I Z AT I O N ? SCENE 1

Exterior: War devastated area: Europe. Time: Sun-set Close: The “Marching-Steps” of soldiers (Mixes to Scene 2) SCENE 2

(The same as Scene 1) Long: The Marching Brigades advance; on their one side the procession of the armored cars, while on the other “War-Tanks” etc. These are followed by a band of cavalry and soldiers with Louis [sic] and Machine guns. (Mixes to Scene 3)81 128 El a s t i c i t y

Continuity editing in filmmaking is designed to create a sense of seamless transition between different diegetic times and spaces. A continuity script or scenario therefore had two dimensions to it—a logistical dimension that made industrial efficiency possible and an aesthetic dimension in which filmic time and space could be manipulated. By indicating that a close-up of soldiers’ feet could be followed by a long shot of a military convoy, Basu illustrates how editing can guide a viewer’s gradual spatial understanding of a scene as it unfolds with the change of shot magnification. K. T. Dalvi’s Manual of Indian Talkies (1931) introduced readers to the basic departments and techniques of filmmaking, encouraging a specialist imagination. A chapter titled “How to Write a Scenario” outlines the different “stages of development” of the film story, including Themes, Synopsis, Treatment by Sequences, Scenario, and Continuity. Dalvi goes into considerable detail about the difference between shots, scenes, and sequences; how to adapt a novel into a screenplay; “distance denominations” (shot magnification); and shot transitions (fade, iris, cut, dissolve). He even reproduces the scenario of a silent film.82

TH E BR I EFLESS BA R R ISTER (S C E N A R I O B Y M R .   K . P. M O DY )

Sequence No. 1 Scene—Hanging Gardens. Location No. 1. Time—Day. Weather—Fine. Players—Miss Sulochana and Sandow. Action—Through. Shots 1 to 15. Estimated Length: 300 feet.

Fade in— Title: Barrister Prabhakar had no briefs in court so he would find time to go about with Miss Nalini every afternoon. Fade out. S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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2. Exterior: Long Shot 10 feet, fade in—Prabhakar and Nalini are sitting on the swing taking swings. Mix to.

3. Ext.: Medium Long Shot, 20 feet—Both taking swings with Prabhakar’s hand around Nalini’s neck. Cut.

The writer, K. P. Mody, seeks to portray a durational sense of the intimacy between the film’s protagonists, who meet “every afternoon.” Apart from using an intertitle, Mody visually focuses on a single romantic encounter but slows it down by dividing the simple act of riding a swing into shots of increasing duration. Dalvi exhorts the reader that it is through a well-timed scenario that different scenes and shots can be rhythmically planned so as to produce specific sensations in the viewer.83 The scenario was thus increasingly framed as a specialized genre that required technical expertise as well as creative acumen. A separation now emerged between the storywriter and the scenario writer, where the former could be a playwright, novelist, or brilliant ideas person who supplied an innovative story, while the latter was the technical specialist who converted the story into a cinematic technology.84 As operators of conspicuous technological devices, cinematographers, sound engineers, and editors were most eligible for the status of technical specialists, but in an industry that was staffed primarily by personnel who had learned on the job through an informal apprenticeship model, the parameters for expert status were flexible. Until the establishment of the Film Institute of India in 1960, there were no state-run or state-accredited film schools in the country. At Bombay Talkies, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani were determined that their ideal studio would also serve as a training institute for young Indians. They invited a team of European personnel, old colleagues from their UFA-Emelka days, to head the main departments at the studio. Joseph Wirsching was the head of the Camera Department, Franz Osten ran Direction, Karl 130 El a s t i c i t y

von Spreti did Production Design, and Hartley recorded Sound.85 In an interview Devika Rani recalled that BT had a contract with the foreign technicians to “train our own people within five years.”86 Given the real need for trained technicians in an industry that was scrambling to convert to sound, those who could demonstrate credentials of scientific training claimed a superior status in the film hierarchy and commanded larger paychecks. The markers of technical mastery were varied and could include a background in allied media such radio or photography, college degrees in science, foreign diplomas in sound and photography, or practical experience in a foreign studio. Those who, like Savak Vacha, Suchet Singh, and Mohan Bhavnani, had worked at film studios abroad (France, the United States, Germany) or had foreign diplomas like Haribhai Desai, who studied at the New York Institute of Photography (circa 1931), and M. L. Tandon, who is believed to have graduated from the University of Southern California’s film school, entered the film industry at a higher pay grade.87 With the growing need to demonstrate professional specialization, there arose a new problem of the “self-styled ‘Foreign Qualified Technician,’ ” a canny figure who understood the aura of the foreign.88 To counter this phenomenon, and to assert vocational legitimacy, longtime industry assistants, apprentices, and others with practical experience applied for membership in international technical organizations such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) in America. In 1931 the SMPE had 14 members from India with numbers increasing every year as contracted and freelance sound, camera and projection technicians applied for membership.89 Other specialist profiles, such as director and production manager, or hyphenated categories, such as writer-director and director-producer, embodied the limits of the drive toward specialization by insisting on overlaps and multitasking. Pasupati Chattopadhyay, a Bengali film director of the 1940s and 1950s, tried to explain this at the Film Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi (a public institution dedicated to the performing arts) in Delhi in 1955. His speech is worth quoting at length: The word “Technician” is derived from Technic or Technique, one meaning of which is the science or study of art or arts, especially of the mechanical or industrial arts. . . . And so the film technician S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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is one who is skilled in the technique or mechanical part of the art of films. Of course, a mere knowledge of the mechanical side of the art of films without any artistic background does not make a technician worthy of his name. A cameraman is appreciated not so much because of his sound knowledge in the mechanical side of his job, but more for his artistic sense of composition and lighting of his shots, close, mid and long. . . . On the other hand, it may pertinently be asked what mechanical skill a film director possesses to call himself a technician. Of course, it is not necessary for a director to be able to light a scene or to record a song, but he is expected to have a thorough understanding of what the picture or sound camera is capable of doing and be able to convey to the technicians what effect he wishes them to produce and how it is related to the whole structure of the film.90

The work of the film director as perceived in 1955 poses a knotty problem for Chattopadhyay as the drive toward generality of technical experience runs counter to the logics of specialization. Direction, of course, is one of the most complex of film specializations to define, as it could require a panoply of technical skills in the best qualified. In the late silent era the forms of expertise that were necessary to attain the status of a professional director ranged from still photography to the ability to invent interesting stories.91 Nevertheless, as consciousness about the specific properties of film grew, writers such as S. C. Gupta started to build a discursive aura around the film director as the one who could “eliminate all unnecessary points of interval, thus creating his own filmic time and space.”92 The director emerged as a veritable renaissance man, an “expert technician” who brought together a “thorough study of literature with particular attention to drama and poetry together with an unquestionable knowledge in history, geography and the classics of his own country.”93 A widening dissemination of expert notes on film making and articles on film aesthetics further accentuated the director’s status as the principal creative on a film, a status that led to the occlusion of other specialist profiles under the reign of “M’Lord the Director.”94 The growing public and industrial insistence on medium specificity paradoxically also loosened the boundaries of technical specialization. 132

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figure 2.8 Bombay Talkies studio layout drawn from memory by Wolfgang Peter Wirsching, son of BT cinematographer Josef Wirsching, 2013. (Josef Wirsching Archive)

Because it was often scenario writers who best understood how to manipulate filmic time and space, screenwriting was seen as a direct path to becoming a director. The writer-cum-director model of production was viewed as a system that enabled efficient and streamlined production since the same individual carried the project through from conceptualization to the editing table. Chimanlal Desai pointed out in an interview in 1956 that “there were no trained directors in the line as today who worked as freelancers. So we depended upon the writers to direct their subjects as well. We believed a story writer understood the intricacies of the subject more than anybody else.”95 Ranjit Movitone and Sagar Movietone actively encouraged a writer-director model of production wherein each director was responsible for sourcing, adapting, or writing his own film.96 Some writers who were promoted to the level of writer-directors include Chaturbhuj Desai, Jayant Desai, Ezra Mir, Sarvottam Badami, Mehboob Khan, Nandlal Jaswantlal, Chimanlal Luhar, Modhu Bose, and Zia Sarhadi. Interestingly, in 1939 a future S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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partner of Sagar strongly called out this method of production as a costsaving tactic that resulted in overworked directors, thin plots, and “miserable” films: Most Indian studios . . . adopt tactics which obviate the necessity of having any system at all. As soon as they select their Director they consider their work finished. Thereafter the Director has to do the thing himself; he has to produce a story or select one, and he has to write the scenario which also serves as the shooting script. Instances are not uncommon where Directors have gone further. Often, when the credit titles are flashed on the screen we find that the story, direction, dialogues and even songs are all by the Director.97

A logical fallout of creating specialist and hyphenated industrial profiles was that successful and talented writer-directors started to realize the market value of their unique form of labor, especially when approached by producers eager to find shortcuts to film success. According to trade reports in 1940, Mehboob Khan was offered a monthly salary of Rs. 3000 and a Rs.15,000 annual bonus by the company India Artists, and A. R. Kardar, also a director, was poached by none other than Circo on an annual salary of Rs. 50,000.98

Double-Unit Shooting System Over and over again in this book, one element of the film production trade will repeatedly shadow us: the temporal tyranny of production turnovers and the resulting imperative that “the studio may not remain idle.” We see this at Sagar Movietone, where production turnover and consistent utilization of costly human resources were of the essence. Chimanlal Desai, in the tone of a benevolent patriarch, claimed that “since we employed a lot of stars, directors and other technicians, we had to provide engagement for all of them. So we managed to produce at least three pictures a year. This schedule was adhered to very rigidly and proved to be very economical. For the studio, labor was never idle.”99 Speed, too, was a major factor in keeping studios competitive in an overpopulated industry. Recalling the intense competition of the early 134

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silent years, Chandulal Shah claimed that “it is on record that one successful silent picture in Bombay was scripted, the cast chosen for it and the film shot, all in a single day! It was edited, censored and released within a week in order to be ahead of another producer who was picturizing the same subject!”100 There was a similar scramble in the early talkie years, but it was not as easy to shoot with a brand-new technology that needed highly controlled sound environments and complex editing plans. On the other hand, advances in lighting technology enabled increased and more flexible shooting hours as the dependence on daylight reduced.101 With the continuity script as a preproduction tool for scheduling, and in-house flexible specialists available at a moment’s notice, studios could maximize their working hours and speed of production. In her letter to the Department of Industries in 1944, Devika Rani had to explain why Bombay Talkies needed raw stock for new films even before the last film was completed. D. S. Benegal, assistant secretary to the department, had fears that the studio was stockpiling film in a time of acute shortage. To reassure Benegal, Devika Rani tried to explicate exactly how raw stock was constantly on the move in the studio: We work on a double unit system in our studio which enables us to begin work on our next production before the previous one has been fully completed and censored. . . . we started Production No. 26 (Jwar Bhata) long before production No. 25 [Char Ankhen] had been fully completed. There was, therefore, no likelihood of stock being held up unnecessarily. This can be verified by reference to our monthly returns for consumption of stock. This system of two units working has obvious advantages. . . . In the circumstances it is necessary to point out that the programme of work in our studio will be completely upset unless we get the licence for the next picture in time to enable us to begin shooting by the middle of September. If we are to wait for the next licence till the current production is ready for censoring, it will slow down work very considerably and would mean enforced idleness for our studio staff and equipments entailing huge financial loss.102

Studios that had more than one sound stage or camera adopted what was termed the “double-unit” system of shooting. This entailed two S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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independent production units headed by separate directors and staffed by their own technicians and actors. A simple concept, the double-unit system was premised on a studio’s ability to invest in more than one set of equipment, studio space, lead actors, and technicians. Even small studios could attempt simultaneous shooting if they had enough human resources. A small outdoor unit, for example, could film exterior shots or scenes without dialogue on nonblimped silent era cameras while an indoor talkie scene was shot on set. All three studios discussed in chapter 1—Sagar, Ranjit, and Bombay Talkies—practiced the double-unit system with ease.103 In 1935 Chimanlal Desai and Ambalal Patel divided up the shooting activities of Sagar Movietone into two units or “divisions” to streamline their rate of production.104 These units were headed by their in-house writerdirectors, Sarvottam Badami and Chimanlal Luhar. Equipment, such as cameras, tracks, and lights, was separately allotted to each unit. Thus, while Badami directed Jeevan Lata in December 1935, Luhar shot Gay Birds. These units soon crystallized around certain stars and technical specialists—Badami’s films invariably featured Sabita Devi, while Luhar worked with Maya Banerjee or Shobhna Samarth.105 At Ranjit Movitone all the films directed by Chandulal Shah starred Gohar, while the second-unit director, Jayant Desai, worked with Madhuri. Tightly controlled production units also served as a laboratory for training future specialists through apprenticeship and assistantship. The seamless regularity of Ranjit’s simultaneous productions is indicated in this snippet from Ranjit Bulletin (1936): “Mr. Jayant Desai [director] is stepping out of the editing room, leaving behind Matlabi Dunia to find its own way, and walks straight to the set of Lahari Lala where Madhuri, E Billimoria, Khatton, Ishwerlal [actors] and others anticipate his august arrival.”106 On another occasion the star actor E. Billimoria thanks his fans for their letters: “I thank them all once more through these columns as it is impossible for me to reply to these letters individually, as I am working in two pictures simultaneously.”107 From an annual production of four talkie features a year in 1935, Sagar increased production to seven films in 1939, and by 1935 Ranjit Movitone was producing a steady turnover of four to six films a year. The magazine filmindia celebrated the record release of Ranjit’s hundredth talkie feature in 1946 (an average of five films per year since 1929) and noted that such a record “is not 136

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attained without strict principles of business or without shrewd and careful planning.”108 In 1935, after the release of Bombay Talkie’s first film, Jawani ki Hawa, Chimanlal Setalvad mentioned in his Director’s Report to shareholders that “the second programme of the Company will take less time to complete than the Company’s first production and it is believed that with smoother running of the various departments of the studio and the organization, the production of each picture will not take more than two months and that the cost of production will also be reduced.”109 Nevertheless, despite three sound stages, an in-house laboratory, and multiple motion picture cameras and lights, BT was unable to shoot with multiple units until the 1940s. The studio’s average turnover was three films a year. This is mainly due to its limited pool of technical specialists. Ranjit and Sagar had deep roots in Bombay’s cine-ecology from even before the studios were established and could recruit actors and specialists from preexisting resource networks in publicity, literature, and theater. In contrast, though BT had an enviable number of local businessmen and politicians to back it up, the studio did not have similar social ties to local technicians and artistes. BT actively hired fresh talent and trained young, midlevel employees for specialized film careers. These “students” were encouraged to learn multiple aspects of film craft so that they could multitask, actively interchange work profiles, and, eventually become well-rounded directors familiar with different aspects of filmmaking. Devika Rani herself designed costumes, supervised set decoration, starred in films, and later served as production controller of the studio. This fluidity of specialized practices indicates a mixed mode of production where specialization and division of labor went hand in hand with a degree of profile flexibility. It is important, in this regard, to refer back to the place where the core BT team first received their film training: the Universum FilmAktien Gesellschaft (UFA) studios. Klaus Kremeier notes that the UFA producer-unit system in the 1930s was highly corporatized but not as rigid a model as Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson suggest for Hollywood.110 He dismantles the “one mode” argument for UFA and says that in successful units like Eric Pommer’s—the very unit where BT’s chief personnel were trained—work was collaborative as well as compartmentalized, and an inflexible separation of labor was neither possible S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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nor desired. BT’s newly trained Indian cine-workers often substituted for each other. This flexibility stood up to an unforeseen challenge when the entire German crew was interned during the Second World War in camps for enemy aliens. Production came to a standstill, but only briefly. One of the films under production, Kangan, was jointly completed by the production manager, N. R. Acharya, and assistant director Najam Naqvi. After Himansu Rai’s death in 1940, BT was managed by Devika Rani, and she soon split the studio into two production units. One was managed by Amiya Chakrabarty, who was a director-producer, and the other was supervised by Sashadhar Mukherjee, a producer who had risen through the ranks of various departments at BT. This combination of specialization with multitasking was also seen in the hyphenated roles at Ranjit and Sagar, studios that had no direct German connection, a fact that suggests that the mixed mode of production owed more to necessity and a lack of specialist training schools than to European film conventions. Horizontal distribution of production control was vital to the impressive productivity and variety of these studios, but it had its fallouts. Writer-directors and technician-producers who managed their own units developed close personal and professional ties with key film technicians and stars. The films of Ranjit’s director-producers would be advertised under their name as “A Raja Sandow Production” or “A Jayant Desai Production,” acknowledging their brand value as distinct film celebrities in their own right. With increased public recognition and acknowledgment as valued specialists, “breakaway units” became the norm. Sashadhar Mukherjee started Filmistan Ltd. with BT’s oldest allies—Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall (executive manager), Ashok Kumar (actor), Savak Vacha (sound), and Gyan Mukherjee (writer-director). In 1939 three of Sagar’s most lucrative employees quit to form their own partnership concern. Sarvottam Badami, the ace writer-director who had delivered a string of hits for Sagar (Dr.  Madhurika, Ladies Only, Jeevan Lata); Sabita Devi, Sagar’s reigning star-actress; and Motilal, an upcoming and charismatic actor, together launched Sudama Productions and demonstrated the increasing might of discrete production units. Benefiting from the 1930s rental economy, Badami, Sabita Devi, and Motilal bypassed the time and capital needed to set up their own studio and instead hired a sound stage at Ranjit Movitone. Sudama 138

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Pictures’ debut film, Aap ki Marzi or As You Please (1939), was released the very same year that the group exited Sagar Movietone, and it was a hit. The company survived for another five years. In 1935 Mehboob Khan, upset with Sagar’s proprietors over the question of hiring freelance actors, tried to break away with his unit from Al Hilal or Judgement of Allah.111 The group included cameraperson Faredoon Irani and unit sound recordist Dharamsi. Rival studios such as Bombay Talkies and Jaddan Bai’s Sangeet Movietone quickly lined up to poach on this group, but no concrete deals could be worked out. In 1936, after a year of being unemployed, the rebel group returned to the Sagar fold, where Mehboob was assigned Deccan Queen as a peace offering.112 Mehboob tried to break away again in 1940, with writer Babubhai Mehta, cameraperson Faredoon Irani, and music director Anil Biswas, finally ending up in National Studios, a subsidiary of Sagar. Competition between Ranjit and National quickly accelerated when the Ranjit star, Rose, joined National Studios. These industrial negotiations provide us a new understanding of the changing dynamics of the talkie cine-ecology and the factors that caused early talkie studios to break up or recombine. It is conventional wisdom today to explain the decline of the big talkie studios as a result of a few established causes, most significantly the rise of the star system and the start of an era of freelance acting. This explanation is provided retroactively by producers themselves, who claim that they went “out of business due to [sic] star system.”113 A careful interpretation of archival materials shows that there were other connected factors, such as the increased prominence of a new class of expert film professionals. The double-unit system was initiated with an eye to maximize productivity and profits, and it proved immensely successful in its immediate goals. It also highlighted, however, the power and value of specialist profiles such as the director, writer, cinematographer, unit producer, and the star, who could no longer be placated by steady but low salaries. In the face of intense competition and contingency, studio bosses knowingly and strategically raised star salaries, the direct fallout being that all other studio staff took the hit for these expensive salary negotiations, receiving disproportionately lower salaries than stars.114 Therefore, while a new class of salaried experts and hyphenated, multitasking film professionals like the writer-director and the director-producer was S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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coming into view, studio proprietors were too slow to recognize their value in monetary terms. As late as in 1948 Baburao Patel claimed that “assistant directors and assistant cameramen who are expected to possess educational and technical qualifications are paid LESS than municipal sweepers or millhands.”115 C O N C LU S I O N : “ I ’ L L D O I T M Y WAY ”

What makes a film successful? Is it scientific management? Does the secret lie in paperwork? No one has yet found a way to make the surefire hit film, but several methods have been established to ensure that costs are recovered and basic profits generated. Today film studios make revenues off a whole platform of goods, services, and marketing rights that are ancillary to the film itself and have little to do with box-office returns. The speculative undergirding of Bombay’s early talkie ecology produced a specific set of problems for film producers who were perpetually undercapitalized, reliant on volatile finance markets, subject to colonial tariffs and taxes, and wholly dependent on expensive imported equipment and raw stock. Science, as an authoritative cultural force and the newest darling of industrial research, presented an avenue for managing financial risk through increased productivity. Scientific modernization was the banner under which the leading lights of the Motion Picture Society of India launched drives to reform the workforce, modernize studio infrastructures, rationalize workflows, corporatize financial systems, and attract new supporters. That said, not only were these measures implemented inconsistently, but they also produced mixed results. The human factor proved to be the most unpredictable element in the cine-ecology. Studios bosses were confounded when faced with issues of labor management. The biggest studio owners and producers of the 1930s regularly referred to their business outfits as a “family.” For example, Chandulal Shah reminded viewers in later years that “the artistes belonged to one concern and the studios worked like the familysystem.”116 This rhetoric has become part of the romantic mythology of the studio era.117 The invocation of family suggests a hierarchization of duty over compensation, thus justifying low salaries and pressuring individual workers to take on multiple uncredited roles. The fuzzy 140

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affects implied by the family, such as loyalty, trust, and gratitude toward the employer-patriarch, were firmly contradicted by the eager defection of the most prominent employees of the studios I have studied. Ultimately, that is what differentiated the post–Second World War film industry from the prewar industry—an increased recognition of their own industrial worth by individual film practitioners who had hitherto been denied stakes in production profits. Ranjit, Sagar, and Bombay Talkies reaped the benefits of double units run by efficient and talented directors such as Gyan Mukherjee, Jayant Desai and Sarvottam Badami. All three studios, however, also saw these same directors break away to establish their own companies, taking their unit crews with them. The emergence of the scenario as a valuable industrial tool, the rise of the technical specialist, and the formation of discrete and simultaneous production units were all interconnected processes that accelerated the productivity of the cine-ecology but also exacerbated the instability of Bombay’s studios. Consider National Studios, a subsidiary company of Sagar Movietone that was financed by the Tatas. The Tatas invited a “production specialist from London, named Alexander” to monitor the day-to-day operations of National Studios. Mehboob Khan was apparently offended by the Tata’s attempts to safeguard their investment: “This neophyte [Alexander] has come down all the way here to teach us the cautious approach of film production. Perhaps he knows to safeguard the films, but I doubt he can make them. All he knows is the learned and preached methods. But I hardly care. I am here to make films. And I shall do it my way.”118 A strict cleavage between creative and executive roles was not going to work, and Mehboob correctly read the specialist status of Alexander as a “hidden transcript for articulating power relations” between cine-workers and management.119 Despite taking all the possible precautions against financial risk (capital, stars, experienced technicians, rationalized work flows), National Studios shut down within a couple of years. At Bombay Talkies, arguably the most “scientific” of all film companies functioning in the 1930s, the labor question proved quite complex. “It was our aim,” stated Devika Rani, “to attract the best element in Indian society, with an educated and cultured background, to produce the highest type of art.”120 This entailed that their staff must have S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar

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college degrees and be connected to “decent families,” which can be decoded to mean either middle-class or middle-caste affiliations. To quote Rani herself, “In Bombay Talkies we were all one class of people– all our recruits were from those sent by the Vice-Chancellors of various universities.”121 The real test lay in finding appropriate female labor. True to plan, Rai and Rani hired two cultured Parsi women for BT’s debut film, Jawani ki Hawa—the musically accomplished, classically trained Homji sisters. Khorshed Homji was to be BT’s music director and Manek Homji was to play character parts that involved singing. Far from being hailed as a progressive and modern recruitment decision, the hiring of the two Parsi sisters became occasion for a scandal that briefly rocked Bombay city. The Parsi community erupted in protest over the participation of “their women” in such a dubious enterprise as film production. The very category that was crucial to their being hired—respectability—had now become the reason for public outrage. Khorshed and Manek Homji continued in the film business, albeit under assumed Hinduized names (Saraswati Devi and Chandraprabha). Their right to work cost them their birth names and also cost BT the loss of three Parsi board members who subsequently resigned. This incident reminds us of the messiness of culture, a messiness that cannot be obliterated even by the most scientific plans.122 These cases highlight the contradictions specific to the medium of cinematic representation in India, in which questions of social respectability, cultural value, moral contagion, newness, and financial instability cohered in an uneasy equilibrium. Questions of community and class, gender and caste played a major part in the way talent and cultural resources were configured. At the heart of the cine-ecology lay the intractability of the social, which could not be controlled by science, technology, or rationalization. Cinema, as a house of scientific magic, thrust the technical together with the social, rendering both slightly muddled from the encounter.

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CH APTER THREE

Voice | Awaaz Awaaz means the voice. Whether in this picture they hear the voice of the much maligned yet much thought-after film world, or that of the undying affection of a father’s heart or that of the ever-present motherly instinct inherent in every female, we respectfully leave it to the discerning cine-going public, to decide. —Awaaz song booklet, 1941

On a clear Sunday morning in 1992 my parents parked their car on Kennedy Bridge in Mumbai and started to make their way down a side stairway toward Queen Mary School. I was a sixth-grader at the time, and my parents were there for Annual Day functions. After that long day of serial events, my parents remembered one detail most vividly— the sound of rhythmic clapping produced by hundreds of young girls, audible even as they approached the school from the bridge. The sound swelled in the air around the school, 1-2-123, clap-clap-clapclapclap, 1-2123, impressing my parents with the synchronized discipline of the young students. Cut to interior, school auditorium. A short musical skit by the girls of class 6A has just ended, and before the rhythmic clapping could begin, the “big girls” of class 10 shouted their appreciation from their balcony seats. “Chaangla, chaangla!” they shouted in Marathi, and all the junior students in the “stalls” below answered their call with “Lai chaangla!”1 This too was a proud school tradition, but one that signaled spontaneity rather than control; it expressed the will of the students rather than the school administration. We don’t know exactly when the boisterous calls first originated, but they drew on urban memory of local rituals of appreciation at mass cultural entertainments that were

at odds with the practiced discipline taught at the school. It is the difference between and interaction of these two conspicuous sonic events that this chapter is concerned with. Queen Mary School is located in the heart of the historic Grant Road neighborhood of Mumbai, a hothouse of popular entertainments from the turn of the century and a working-class neighborhood that saw a proliferation of theatrical playhouses and movie theaters in the 1930s.2 In the early twentieth century this neighborhood grew in notoriety as the home of “nautch girls,” of workers and bourgeoisie thronging (some boldly and others furtively) to the movie houses and kothas (courtesans’ salons) that sprang up here. In urban sensationalist lore, “Grant Road” was “the concentrated essence of the Night Side of Bombay.”3 Even in 1992 one sometimes heard sounds of kathak practice, ghungroos gyrating on unseen ankles, and young imaginations would be fired up with thrill and anxiety. None of the grown-ups ever acknowledged this acoustic environment or its multiple ironies, and it is only in recent years that I have come to understand the meaning of the rhythmic clapping. It was a reply to the neighborhood and an attempt to contain its transgressive histories. The mixed entertainment cultures of Grant Road were variously understood as illicit, dangerous, and regressive. The disciplined, almost militaristic applause drill taught to the QMS girls asserted a desire to claim it as respectable, ordered, and modern on an aural battlefield. And yet this exercise was ritually interrupted by a rowdy form of throaty appreciation by senior students, one that owed its lineage to the very publics and practices the clapping was meant to disavow. These competing strains in the sonic history of a place have a bearing on the tense acoustic transitions that the Bombay film industry was negotiating in the early talkie years. Film sound, specifically the synchronized human voice, was the great promise of a new era of “talkie” cinema. It was also an occasion for industrial, technological, and social anxiety. Sound transformed the career of cinema in India. From its novel status as a locally produced entertainment form available alongside Hollywood stunt serials and urban theater, cinema became the reigning cultural imaginary of twentieth-century India. Bombay cinema benefited most materially from this change, rapidly establishing itself as a dominant film industrial and aesthetic form in the subcontinent with 144

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wide audience reach and commercial power. While Bombay had a polyglot culture, with Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, and Konkani being some of the prominent languages spoken in the city, the choice to adopt Hindi-Urdu as the main language for Bombay cinema allowed the industry to reach a wide, already-existing film viewership dispersed across northern and central India. In this chapter I move beyond the language question to locate the transformative energy of the talkie transition in a range of vocal and acoustic practices. I examine the status of speech and the voicing body in early talkie cinema from the perspective of the technical and social reorientations demanded of cine-workers. Further, I make note of the aesthetics of passionate oration that defined this first phase of sound cinema. A noticeable declamatory emphasis emerges in films of this period that helps us understand the continuing reliance on dialogue in mainstream Bombay films.4 I connect this declamatory drive to a thriving public culture of political and pedagogical speechmaking, arguing that the talkie transition must be heard from a transmedial perspective. Sonic imaginations are fundamentally relational. Sound in cinema is a sonic phenomenon that draws on conjunctural acoustic practices and is thus not a discrete thing-in-itself.5 In 1931 the “all talking, singing, and dancing” Indian film did not enter an empty space of silence but a densely mediated space of sound technologies such as the gramophone, radio, telephone, and, indeed, Hollywood cinema. Moreover, it is not as though after the release of India’s first talkie film, Alam Ara (Light of the world, 1931), India’s cinemas suddenly burst into speech. As Neepa Majumdar drily points out, “The year 1931 is a particularly unremarkable dividing line between silent and sound film in Indian cinema.”6 From 1931 to 1935 film companies continued to produce silent films, unsure of the future of the sound film or unable to make the switch to new infrastructures, techniques, personnel, and equipment. Therefore I begin this chapter by mapping a milieu of aural practices that informed the talkie film and its listeners, going on to interrogate what it was that the talkie film added to an existing and dynamic acoustic ecology. I propose that the newness of the talkies relied on the representation of the embodied voice, that is, the picturization of affective vocality. While the early talkie in South Asia is credited with the consolidation of the musical song-dance format of Bollywood, the rapturous Voice | Aw aa z

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excitement of the talkie age was about the broader phenomenology of affective vocality experienced across song, speech, and vocal gestures. Speech in cinema, specifically impassioned speech, was critical to the consolidation of Bombay’s cine-ecology. Based on a study of extant as well as lost films of the period, it is evident that early talkie films prominently featured dramatic scenes of energetic oration, be it in the form of principled speeches, melodramatic monologues by lovers, or arguments in law courts. The coming of sync sound enabled a new order of spectacular modernity, not simply a visual modern but an audible and declamatory modern that participated in the production of new subjectivities and agonistic publics. Cinematic visions of the spectacular speaking subject promised far more than the mediated voice—they presented a visual of the voicing body, adding a different kind of fleshy and ocular frisson to concurrent practices of acousmatic listening. What is particularly intriguing is that while public speechmaking was a realm presided over by men, filmic scenes of passionate argumentation were predominantly enacted by women. The corporeality of the cinematic voice was heightened by its location in the charged social body of the film actress. Indian film scholars, most prominently Neepa Majumdar, have rigorously addressed the respectability question with respect to the early singing actress and, for a later period, the female playback singer.7 In this chapter I add another facet to our understanding of the industrial contestations of the era by coupling the gendered cultural history of film song in India with the inauguration of a new mode of affective vocality that was overwhelmingly filmed on the bodies of women. In the years of silent cinema, Bombay’s emerging film industry tried hard to distance itself from the “tainted” female dancers and singers who were among the pioneers of Indian cinema. With the turn to the talkies, a newfound industrial need for attractive and trained voices announced the entry of the baiji, who threatened the public space of cinema with a new kind of embodied acoustic charge.8 Performers from the technoaesthetic industries of salon singing, urban theater, and the gramophone business provided a readymade workforce for this transition. If we retrain our ears to speculatively hear sonic histories of speech and dialogue in the films of this period, we will be able to understand the singing actress and her industrial-social status anew.9 This is why I do 146

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not oppose the history of film song to the history of speech; instead, I consider their entanglements in a broader history of the gendered voice in Bombay cinema. In subsequent sections of this chapter I lay out the concept of “acousmatic attunement” to claim that public concerns about the actress’s singing voice were confronted, and her right to work reclaimed, through filmic speechmaking by fictional female characters. A rhetorical-oratorial alignment with the respectability politics of the nationalist movement became a public argument against the moral surveillance of female cine-workers. The female voice now properly steps into our story of cinematic hustle, asserting the centrality of the talkie film actress as the flag-bearer of cinema’s ambivalent promises of modernity. A R E S O N A N T AC O U S T I C E C O L O G Y A N D G R O W I N G AC O U S M AT I C AT T U N E M E N T

In his exotic-romantic novel Night in Bombay (1940), Louis Bromfield describes the dense urban soundscape of early twentieth-century Bombay through the ears of his American protagonist, Bill Wainwright. Traveling in a taxi through the streets of Bombay, Bill hears the clanging of the electric train that went to Juhu and the ringing of the cinema bells announcing a new performance, and the music of the band at Government House where there must be a dance under way, and over it all the sound of the waters of the Arabian Sea lapping on the flat beach, and the murmur of thousands of people, increasing as the taxi bore him towards the center of the city and the whining music and cries of a religious procession as it crossed the road before the taxi on its way to the water. Once or twice he opened his eyes.10

Even as this passage points to multiple aural histories of the city, it foregrounds the embodied listening subject. What practices of urban spatiality allowed Bill to connect the sound of bells to the announcement of a new film show? And why was the music of the religious procession “whining”? Bill’s auditory perception of a variety of sounds, his recognition of their source, and his naming of their meaning demonstrate the Voice | Aw aa z

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fundamental contingency of sensory perception, which is dependent on ideas of personal memory and cultural hierarchy. Bromfield’s protagonist can connect the sound of bells with a specific cinema theater, the sound of a band with its only possible location at the Government House, because he is familiar with this spatial context. Bill’s description of whining music, however, is not about familiarity but about a conflict of cultural expectations about musicality. It is a form of audile racism further delineated in Bill’s impatience with Bombay radio—“The only music was Indian music. He didn’t understand it and he didn’t like it, any more than he understood the voice of the announcer speaking Hindustani with a finicky diction.”11 Bill’s inability to connect with the sound of “Indian music” or a voice that spoke Hindustani altered his relation to the radio itself, and he stayed away from it. Histories of sonic media, if told as histories of practice, can narrate accounts of listening and interpretation that reveal situated configurations of power. The acoustic ecology of a place multiplies in meaning when we examine the sonic practices that constitute it. Diverse acoustic ecologies proliferated in late 1920s and early 1930s South Asia, inhabited by multiple communities of listeners and heterogeneous practices of listening. Growing up in Peshawar in the 1920s, the legendary actor A. K. Hangal recalls an urban environment saturated with multilingual entertainment forms that bypassed the popular-elite cultural divide. While his father’s friends frequently hired professional singers for collective listening sessions, Hangal himself spent hours listening to dramatic dialogues at Parsi theater shows put up by traveling troupes.12 Song and speech, entertainments that relied on feudal and urban economies of patronage or consumption, coexist in Hangal’s memory of Peshawar, with premonitions of an Indian talkie cinema to come that would draw on each of these forms. Further south, in Bombay, mill workers’ “sense of hearing” was getting “permanently dulled by the constant rattle and clatter of the machinery at which they labor[ed] during the greater part of the day,” and nationalist activists were being arrested for singing “revolutionary songs” in early morning prabhat pheri processions.13 Meanwhile, patrons of the Excelsior Theatre (Fort) discussed the finer points of the latest talking films imported from Hollywood, appreciating the role of speech in a film like Give and Take (William Beaudine, 1928), “a sparkling comedy drama which is eighty 148

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per cent dialogue,” and hence a refreshing change from Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928), which “was synchronized throughout for sound effects but contained only a few talking sequences.”14 Technological mediations of the human voice multiplied during this time. In 1924, more than a decade before All India Radio’s (AIR) Bombay station was consolidated (1936), an intrepid group of radio, telegraphy, and telephony enthusiasts set up the Bombay Radio Club at Apollo Bunder.15 The club was dedicated to “stimulating interest and fostering the study of radio communication and allied arts” and started with a thrice-weekly program of Western music.16 Though received with enthusiasm by Bombay residents, the idea of a sound source completely disconnected from the original scene of the production of live sound, took some getting used to. For example, when a radio dance program was proposed as the main entertainment at the Grand Hotel in June 1924, it created a stir as patrons and “dancers were somewhat shy of the ‘hidden band’ idea.”17 The dancers were unable to dance to a band they could not see. This “shyness” toward disembodied sound emanating from a metal contraption was a repeat phenomenon across the subcontinent as access to gramophones and radios slowly grew.18 But gradually, listeners learned new aural techniques and attuned themselves to imagine the voicing body beyond the machine. This is a history of what I call “acousmatic attunement,” and it allows us to revisit the cultural significance and affective pleasures of the talkie film in India. Theorized in depth by Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion, the acousmatic is a sound whose source remains unseen, such as off-stage voices used in theater and off-screen sound in film (fig. 3.1).19 The radio, telephone, and gramophone can be considered acousmatic technologies because they transmit voices separated from images of sounding bodies; in the twentieth century you could not see your friend’s face when you called her on the phone, nor could you see Nur Jehan when you played her record.20 Regular use and enjoyment of these acousmatic media normalized the separation of sound from image as listeners no longer required a unified sounding object, be it a human or a musical instrument, visibly present in front of them. Acousmatic attunement thus emerged as a cultural technique—a learned ability to be alive to the hidden source of sound and simultaneously discount its ocular absence. In urban India, the systematization of acousmatic attunement Voice | Aw aa z

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figure 3.1 Listening with the body: Saroj Borkar listens for an off-screen sound in Nirmala, 1938. (Dietze Family Archive)

was accelerated during the historical and technological juncture when media such as the radio, telephone, and public address system started to overlap. On February 6, 1925, a large crowd gathered at the Victoria Terminus station to witness the inauguration of the electrified harbor train line. Three of the inaugural speeches were amplified via loudspeakers so that the entire crowd could hear them as they were being delivered. Though spoken in a shared space, the speeches heard by the crowds had an uneven relation to the bodies of the speakers. Some listeners could directly see the dignitaries while most others could only hear their words via the distortions of loudspeakers. Moreover, the Bombay Radio Club transmitted the speeches via telephonic landline to their studio from where they were rebroadcast over the radio, further widening their address and multiplying the collectivities that were joined by their mediated access to a voice.21 As a media event, the multiple relays of these inaugural speeches mark a potent social-perceptual shift in attitudes toward liveness, immediacy, and acousmatic listening. To ventriloquize Chion, “something new made its entry with modern technologies, and whatever the difficulties in naming and defining it, we cannot say that things are ‘like they were before.’ ”22 Distant listening and speaking from afar were defining experiences of life in the city. Transmission, communication, and representational media inaugurated different registers of address and affective encounter. The telephone was at once a medium for speedy transactions in the realm of speculative business (see chapter  1) and a venue for intimate private speech. Talkie cinema picked up on the romantic possibilities of telephony, framing it as a modern device that could help lovers transcend social codes of rectitude. A song from Industrial India (Mohan Sinha, 1938) explains this: “Come my love, come, let us say something into the phone! . . . Why do you shy from saying what is in your heart? I am not by your side so there’s no reason to blush. Let us speak from afar!”23 The speaker’s persuasion strategy depends on the assumption that the voice on the telephone is “disembodied,” dislocated from the body of the one who speaks and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of social and moral propriety. Nevertheless, his shy lover intuits that the mediated voice carries something corporeal with it wherever it goes. Roland Barthes called this the “grain” of the voice or “the body in the voice.”24 The corporeality Voice | Aw aa z

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of the voice cannot be disavowed. It sticks to the mediated voice despite physical and temporal distance and viscerally affects the listener. You listen not only with your ears but with your whole body; your favorite songs “return[ing] to your lips over and over again.”25 To hear, therefore, is to feel. This persistent corporeality complicates the idea of acousmatic attunement and reminds us that the mere separation of image from voice cannot erase the body and affective meaning. This is why a telephonic exchange can become the site of erotic drama. By the end of the decade, with the start of the Second World War, Bombay’s acoustic atmosphere was overwhelmed by distant but palpable radio voices: “Voices there were plenty. Voices from all over the world. Painful voices telling the story of the war in so many different languages. Monotonous voices. Bold voices. Threatening voices.”26 These voices brought battlefields in Dunkirk and Singapore right into the homes and consciousness of Bombay residents. Acousmatic listening often requires the active imagining of the voicing body and its context at the time of recording. It can produce a space for fantasy as well as empathy. Acousmatic attunement signaled an altered aesthetic regime wherein listeners were sensitized to the sensuality of the human voice that lingered even in the gap between sound and image, listener and source. And it is precisely this gap that makes acousmatic attunement a speculative technique, one among a range of speculative practices that characterized the talkie cine-ecology of Bombay. P U B L I C S P E E C H E S A N D P L AT F O R M P R O M I S C U I T Y

On March 14, 1931, Ardeshir Irani released South Asia’s first talkie feature film, Alam Ara. The very next week, on March 23, the young anarchist revolutionary Bhagat Singh was secretly hanged along with his comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru.27 The proximity of these two events leads us, speculatively, toward another significant mediatic configuration that has a bearing on the form and power of the early talkie film— passionate oratory. The evening before the hurried executions of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, public meetings and processions were organized in Lahore and Bombay’s Chowpatty beach.28 By the end of the month so-called seditious speeches were being delivered across the country, urging the youth of India to avenge the execution. These calls 152

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to mass action, labeled by the colonial administration as “inflammatory,” led to immediate denouncements and arrests.29 Even the Congress Party, staunchly opposed to violent political action, witnessed “excited” speeches at its plenary session where a resolution dealing with Bhagat Singh’s execution was passed. “Quivering with excitement from head to foot and in a voice full of emotion, the Pandit [Nehru] appealed to the House” to pass the resolution.30 Political oratory and the more extended field of seditious speech in late colonial India offer an exemplary case to study the construction of the split between sound and noise, elaborated on by sound theorists such as Jonathan Sterne.31 The same speech forms that were heard by sympathetic listeners as rousing, sincere, and fundamental to the nationalist imaginary were configured as noisy, dangerous, and unlawful by the colonial authorities. Once this sonic split was in place, the colonial apparatus could further categorize populations into regulated subjects versus unruly mobs. Tracking this emerging media platform of public oratory opens up the study of filmic speech genres in the early talkie years to new and charged valences. It also shows up peculiar transmedial crossovers between speech and text that brought together diverse publics in the moment of their historical becoming. An increasingly nervous British government responded to the proliferation of nationalist, communist, and anarchist revolutionary speech by intensifying censorship and bringing in charges of seditious speech against public leaders. To cite an example from the year that Alam Ara was released: the Bombay labor leader Lalji  M. Pendse was tried in November 1931 for making a “seditious speech” on the occasion of Jatin Das Day, and details of his speech, originally delivered in Marathi, were read out in detail in court. The prosecution’s case depended on examining the contents of the speech and establishing the accuracy of the transcription.32 Bernard Bate has shown how the focus on “exact words” to incriminate critics of the colonial administration led to the development of shorthand as a mode of recording and surveillance.33 Such a transfer of sound to text was already encoded in Isaac Pitman’s early descriptions of shorthand (1837), which was first advertised as “soundhand,” “phonography,” and “writing by sound.”34 But something elusive was always missing from these shorthand transcriptions and courtroom revocalizations. The performativity of the voice, the affective registers of tone, timber, volume, and speed, the clearing of throats and the Voice | Aw aa z

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raising of the voice, pauses and emphatic exclamations—none of this could be accurately transcribed in the textual evidence-making of the police, rendering the affect of oratory unavailable for colonial surveillance. The sensory meanings of a live speech act were inaudible to the disciplinary apparatus. On the other hand, newspaper reportage of sedition trials, whether in Marathi-, Gujarati-, Tamil-, Bengali-, or English-language newspapers, created an interested reading public for the consumption of speeches. Even defense statements, such as Bhagat Singh’s own statement in front of the Lahore High Court, were published for sale and circulation.35 If the colonial disciplinary ear couldn’t tune in to the affective charge of the embodied speech performance, perhaps enthusiastic readers of printed speeches heard something else? Acousmatic attunement allowed readers to imagine the body behind the textual inscription, the speaker behind the screen. The body spectrally hovers over the page, inflaming the words and the imagination. Speeches and lectures not only were a recognizable genre in early twentieth-century urban India but also traversed mediatic boundaries and were flexible in their address to listeners. The mass relay of speeches and lectures was a fixed feature of radio broadcasting. And why not, since lectures were a familiar genre in Bombay’s wide-ranging public events calendar.36 David Lelyveld writes of the “genre” of the Urdu Ispīchas o laikcharz (Speeches and lectures) wherein public orations by prominent speakers on important topics were published in newspapers and as discrete pamphlets.37 This indicates a reading public for a spoken form, thereby gesturing to the existence of reading practices that were attuned to the performativity and personality of a speech. For how could one enjoy the force and authority of a specialist lecture or a political speech without imagining the “grain of the voice”? Theater too, be it folk or urban, relied on passionate declamation. Bombay’s Urdu-language Parsi theater, a highly successful urban entertainment form, was premised on oratory and exaggerated speech performance.38 Parsi theater popularized an embodied declamatory style that influenced the acting repertoires of silent cinema and the dialogue experiments of a nascent talkie film culture. From 1931 to 1937 ambitious film producers aggressively poached writers from Parsi theater to fulfill the new need for dialogue writers. Some of the first talkie films were written by Parsi theater playwrights; Joseph David wrote Alam 154

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Ara for Imperial Film Company and also penned Wadia Movietone’s first talkie feature, Lal-e-Yaman (1933); Ranjit Movitone hired Pandit Narayan Prasad Betab at a handsome salary to write Devi Devyani (1931); while New Theatres in Calcutta hired Agha Hashr Kashmiri. Almost immediately however, film reviewers started to complain about the “theatricality” of dialogues and the need for simpler language and shorter sentences.39 Promiscuous platform crossovers, premised on the speech form, were heightened with the consolidation of the radio, gramophone, and film economies. In the early 1930s popular Marathi plays from the Royal Opera House were adapted for radio listening.40 Early in 1931, a few months before the release of Alam Ara, Imperial Film released a short reel of a Bengali speech by the actor-director I. A. Hafizji in Calcutta.41 “Speech films” of this sort were also produced by Madan, another film company competing to win the talkie race, and were part of omnibus attractions in theaters, sandwiched between live dances and silent films. Political speeches were also recorded and circulated on gramophone records by the indigenously owned Young India label. These forms of speech-based platform promiscuities reached an appropriate crystallization when in 1934 it was reported that the nationalist leader Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya would be writing the Hindi dialogue for a Kolhapur Cinetone film titled Akash-Wani (Voice from the sky).42 By all accounts, the early 1930s were gripped by the fever of filmic verbosity: The new innovation used to be advertised as 100% talkies, and the films in the new medium did everything to literally live up to the promise the description carried. The characters were made to talk almost incessantly, as it came to be believed that the more talkative a film was, the better were its impressions on our amazed perceptivity and its prospects at the box-office. The talking picture arrived here from the West against this background of its own. As a result, talk predominated everything else in the early talkies that were produced in this country.43

The preponderance of talk in the Indian sound film led many critics to lament the trend and seek explanations for why local audiences were Voice | Aw aa z

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so partial to “prolonged conversation and soliloquies.”44 Calcutta critics of Filmland magazine claimed that the practice of “stuffing the film with talks” came from “West India,” where regional “conservatism” prevented viewers from appreciating cinema’s fresh potentialities, addicted as they were to “old world opera techniques.”45 Such criticisms were part of the initial wave of distrust of the talking medium, and commentators skeptically wondered if sound had brought something unique to the movies or corrupted a form in which silence had come to speak volumes. It would take a few years for the talkie to be reassessed. At the height of the popularity of social films, in 1939, an observer pointed out that the opportunity for realistic everyday conversation made “it possible to deal with other sides of life than thrills and sermons. The social comedy undoubtedly does need talk to help it over.”46 The emphasis on talk was also evident in media forms that spiraled out of the talkie film. Notable here are film booklets that were sold as independent entertainment collectibles. These paper artifacts were recognized in the Bombay Presidency government’s “Catalogue of Books” and described as books carrying film songs and dialogues. A representative entry from the catalog in 1935 reads: “Dukhtar-e-Hind. India’s Daughter. Being a collection of songs and dialogues contained in a talking film of that name . . . pp. 15 . . . Anna 1 . . . Muzaffari Press, Bombay. 2,000 copies.”47 Scores of such film “books” are listed in the catalogs, available in multiple languages, including Urdu, Hindi, and Gujarati. They gesture to cinema’s reading publics and film’s transmedial presence across a wide acoustic ecology constituted by speech, text, and image; voice, paper, and celluloid.48 L E A R N I N G TO FAC E T H E M I C R O P H O N E

I was made to stand in front of a gadget called microphone. It seemed to make all the difference between the old epoch of movies and the new sound film age! —Jairaj, Indian Talkie 1931–’56

Through the 1930s sound in Indian film was recorded in live synchronization, that is, on set or on location. Playback singing, dubbing, elaborate background scores, and foley design, which have become 156

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synonymous with mainstream Indian film production today, came into use only from the 1940s onward.49 Early talkie actors had to sing their own songs and speak their own dialogues; even music orchestras were recorded live on set either as part of the diegesis or hidden off-frame. Sync sound technology altered the relations of the human body with the filmmaking apparatus and produced a new repertoire of cultural techniques. Directors and assistants learned to amplify their voices over megaphones to communicate with a larger group of workers, actors learned voice modulation and oral expressivity, and off-screen jobbers learned to stay silent during a take. Bombay city in the early twentieth century not only was a city of mediated speech, it was also a city of noise. The transition to talking cinema necessitated a heightened awareness of the acoustic environment of production. For the first time, “the buzz of an aeroplane passing overhead, the distant hooting of a motor horn, or even the coughing and sneezing of a man” could ruin a shot and add to the time and expense of the shooting process.50 The history of the talkies in Bombay is a portrait of a city sweeping outward. Proximity to train stations, working-class neighborhoods, and the bustle of bazaar economies and consumers had made Dadar a prime locality for Bombay’s silent film companies. A new need for silence now pushed Bombay’s talkie studios further north to

figure  3.2 Artwork from the weekly in-house publication of Ranjit Movitone, Ranjit Bulletin, January 11, 1936. (Author’s collection) Voice | Aw aa z

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sparsely populated suburbs like Andheri, Goregaon, and Malad. Alongside attempts to control their exterior environments, film studios also had to manage interior environments with soundproofing techniques such as heavy roofs and noise-absorbent furnishings, blimped cameras, and light indicators for live recording. Improvisation was the order of the day, given the severe lack of resources in Indian studios. Sound recordist Bani Dutt describes that “The studio stage or ‘floor’ looked somewhat like a jute or rice godown. Thirty or thirty-five feet high brick walls on four sides with one or two big doors and a corrugated iron roof over it— that is what studio floor was [sic]. Hessian cloth was used to minimize echo and reverberation of the stages.” It was almost impossible to record “clean” sound in such circumstances, and “a sound engineer was congratulated if only 80% of the dialogues were clear and distinct.”51 Apart from making structural changes, filmmakers also had to recalibrate their technical knowledge practices. The presence of the microphone brought unfamiliar constraints on framing, composition, and camera movement. Editing and shot division presented another set of challenges. How to cut from a wide shot of two characters speaking to a close-up of one character continuing a sentence? In the singlesystem recording process, sound and image were recorded on the same strip of film and could not be disarticulated. One could not take sound from one part of the film and use it over image from another part. Would every dialogue scene have to be shot in its entirety for each different camera set-up? Silent cinema in India had come a long way from the static wide frames used for shooting theatrical plays in the 1910s. In 1931 talkie films momentarily threatened a return to long static shots because “when to say ‘cut’ was found in itself [to be] a big problem.”52 Actors, too, were forced to rethink acting in terms of embodied vocality. Theater artistes and gramophone singers, whose vocations depended on the use of the voice, now joined the talkie industry, while film actors from the silent period retrained themselves in Hindustani speech, precise enunciation, voice modulation, dialogue delivery, and basic singing skills. Film reviewers increasingly agreed that there was something different about the voice on film and that a new set of competencies were required to speak to this difference. One critic noted that “the artistes have been imported almost wholesale from the stage. They have not acquitted themselves badly. But, I think, producers would 158

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do well to free their concerns from the apron-strings of the theatre, because by doing so they will make room for newer talents who are better-suited to face the camera and the microphone than present incumbents.”53 Thus, even as film commentators acknowledged the cross-platform links between cinema and theater, there was a strong push to define and individuate cinema via technology. Sulochana, a silent era star who successfully made the talkie transition, remembers the thrilling changes of the time: I vividly remember my first “Vocal” shot. It was a novel experience to face the mike while doing one’s bit of acting. The presence of the recording set seemed to have a new element of responsibility in the voiceless world of screen-pantomime. . . . No doubt, the responsibility of delivering the lines in correct intonation before the camera added extra strain in those days to our histrionic repertoire but personally I enjoyed the thrill with great enthusiasm.54

Sulochana was somewhat prepared for this new technological era thanks to her early training as a “telephone girl” in Bombay. The convent-educated Sulochana, née Ruby Myers, worked as a typist and telephone operator before she entered films. Educated Jewish, AngloIndian, and Christian girls were among the first white-collar female workers in the city, often taking up secretarial and stenographic posts. Telephone girls were required in the era of the manual switchboard, and their tasks included operating the switchboard, connecting customers to their telephonic destinations, providing information about the time, and relaying messages. The Bombay Telephone Company’s operating staff was overwhelmingly female and “Christian”—identified as “AngloIndians,” “Goans,” and “Europeans.”55 In 1924 nearly 150 telephone girls lost their jobs as the Telephone Company took up the automatic switchboard. These were modern urban women, living in working women’s hostels and independent lodgings, often supporting larger families on their sole income. It is plausible to imagine that cinema provided some of them an avenue for work, particularly with the advent of a technological form—the talkies—predicated on the voice. Not all actresses fared as well as Sulochana. The “voice test” became a dreaded new hurdle for debutante film actresses, with some Voice | Aw aa z

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figures  3.3a and 3.3b In publicity materials, the talkie actress was often pictured as an audio-genic assemblage, posing with telephones rather than microphones. Above: Gohar Mamajiwala, 1933; right: Meera, 1939. (Author’s collection)

“actually breaking down and weeping under the nervous strain of these tests.”56 For actresses, parameters for cinematic suitability had shifted from the photogenic face to the “mike-suiting” voice.57 A manual published at the cusp of the talkie transition declared that “lowpitched voices are better suited to Talkies than high tones which may  create a shrill [sic],” and even a “naturally” pleasant voice might “undergo a change in the recording apparatus.”58 Confronted with such unfamiliar and urgent techno-industrial pressures, it becomes understandable that the actress Tara Sundari felt so outraged by a request for a voice audition that she outright refused. The studio dragged her to court for insubordination.59 160

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figures 3.3a and 3.3b (continued)

To be clear, the new on-screen human voice was not direct but mediated; just as ephemeral and mass reproduced as the actor’s onscreen body. The synchronization of voice and body did not yield the real but the represented body. Even though the talkie actress spoke her own words and could be seen speaking on screen, her voice was nonetheless processed by the microphone and transferred onto film. An acousmatically attuned audience, already oriented to the slippages between machines and bodies, now had to negotiate the simultaneity and difference emanating from the synchronized cinematic body. The acousmatic voice “hovers: it exists both within and outside the diegetic space,” as does film practice. To frame voice and vocality as Voice | Aw aa z

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material practice is critical here because it renders the speaking and listening self as contingent and voice as something that is produced through techniques of the body, encounters with technology, and the production of space. The voice in cinema, particularly in Indian cinema with its emphasis on melodrama and musicality, has always been simultaneously embodied and disembodied, passionate and political. While it is possible to characterize the early talkie phase of sync sound recording as the era of the embodied voice and oppose it to the playback decades, which have been characterized as the era of the disembodied voice, I prefer to highlight the actually existing acousmatic practices that confound these divisions.60 In a similar vein, Neepa Majumdar has recently argued that “the connection between sound and its source is less naturalized in Hindi cinema than in other mainstream cinemas such as Hollywood, despite the fact that the soundtrack of films from the first three decades of film sound is, for the most part, dominated by sync sound.” In “Beyond the Song Sequence,” Majumdar studies the recurring presence of the radio in early Hindi talkie films and suggests that diegetic use of the on-screen radio serves to train the viewer in specific modes of acousmatic and playful listening by “stretching of the relationship of sound and image in Indian cinema, redefining their relation by withholding, confusing and then revealing the source of sound.”61 Ultimately, voice itself is a notoriously elusive entity to define, with an ambivalent ontological status. The human voice possesses an “ambiguous materiality,” says Ana Maria Ochoa, because “the voice is materially constituted simultaneously through the body (by means of vibrating vocal chords) and the world (by means of air that makes the chords move) yet does not fully belong to either.”62 In highlighting the inbetween status of the human voice and the in-between status of the acousmatic voice in cinema, I want to stress that the voice in cinema was the site of a speculative modernity that enabled new imaginations of the self and one’s relation to the world. F I L M I C G E N R E S O F I N D U S T R I A L A R G U M E N TAT I O N

One of the fundamental paradoxes of the popularity of sound cinema in India had to do with the body of the singing, speaking film actress. How do we reconcile the immense popularity and industrial-commercial 162

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power of film actresses in the 1930s with raging social anxieties about female respectability? Talkie cinema needed the actress, talkie audiences were obsessed with the actress, but, just as in Hindi melodramas, “society” was unable to accept her vocation. In this section I look at two aesthetic modes through which the film industry both acknowledged and managed this paradox—a cinematic genre that I call the “abhinetri film” or films about actresses and female performers, and the recurring figure of the fictive “lady barrister” in endless scenes of courtroom argumentation. Both aesthetic modes can be understood as industrial modes of argumentation that sought to validate the role of the film actress in the changing cine-ecology and her right to work. Both genres locate the “problem” of a vocal, female talent pool in the actress’ singing voice but use speech as the preferred register to address, and possibly resolve, the problem. Together they highlight the complex claims made on talkie actresses who were at once “real women” playing fictional characters, “Indian women” performing tropes of ideal femininity, and “modern women” embodying the technological and social promises of the cinematic age. This entire ecology of discourse, spectacle, moral anxiety, and industrial necessity was marked by myriad contradictions. Films about actresses, singers, dancing girls, and sex workers highlighted the social taint associated with the female performer’s body, but they also offered actresses and their employers a performative way out of the respectability conundrum through impassioned speech. Differential and gendered values were accorded to song and speech, aligned with the historical hierarchization of song as feminine and embodied, and speech as masculine and rational. Notably, both abhinetris and lady barristers muddled these hierarchies by presenting viewers with remixed imaginaries such as the disciplined singing professional and the emotional legal professional.

The Abhinetri Film: Gendered Voices, Audible Bodies The human voice carries intimations of the whole body with it. A female voice conjures up the whole woman. In India, acousmatically attuned listeners were culturally trained to detect inflections of caste, class, regional, and even religious identity in the voice of the singer, making culturally conditioned assumptions on the basis of nasal tonality, pitch, Voice | Aw aa z

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throatiness, and pronunciation. While the voice of the gramophone singer held a sensual appeal for the listener, talkie cinema’s logics became thicker and fleshier. Synchronized sound allowed the moving image of a particular woman to be tenuously joined with the voice of that specific woman. The erotic charge of this audiovisual coupling, infused with its precarious fixity, was key to the status of the actress in 1930s India and the specific appeal of cinema itself in this era before playback. Because female singers and stage actresses had such a negative social status in colonial India, the filmic female voice took on a moral edge that became apparent in the first months of talkie production. A symbol of glamor and erotic modernity since the 1920s, the film actress embodied all the tensions of the social space of mass entertainment in India. The need for “respectable” female employees collided with the need for musical talent, and an uneasy compromise was reached. In June 1932 the Lahore-based Elephanta Movietone started shooting the talkie film Pakdaman Raqasa, or Innocent Dancing Girl, starring Miss Shirin Bai, Miss Farhat Jehan, Miss Naz Begum, and a host of other “well-known singers, musicians and dancers of Northern India.”63 That same month, Miss Nalini Tarkhud, B.A., shot Sacred Ganges for a Lahore-based director. Over the years Tarkhud would try to position herself as a “modern Indian girl” who was breaking the taboo in “Hindu Society” of joining the film industry and who believed that “good birth alone counts in the choices of actors and singers.”64 As the daughter of a judge and an educated, upper-class woman of “good birth,” Tarkhud sought to distance herself from the baiji actresses and consolidate her own industrial position on the basis of religious and caste pedigree. In this light, the title and purported content of Pakdaman Raqasa performs a public rebuttal of such ideas, a defensive argument for the “innocence” and unsullied reputation (pakdaman) not only of the fictive dancing girl heroine but also of the real-life actresses Shirin Bai, Naz Begum, and Farhat Jehan. Such legitimizing mechanisms, at both the narrative and the publicity levels, were becoming increasingly urgent in a public sphere that resounded with anxieties about the morals of professional female dancers and singers. Industrial strategies to contain public concerns of “immorality” were fraught with contradictions. Film magazines

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stirred audience expectations by labeling debutante actresses as a “wellknown songstress of Kashi” or “well-known HMV Gramophone Records singers.”65 At the same time, editorials decried the influx of songstresses into the film industry. In letters to magazine editors, readers frequently asked about the religion and community of film celebrities, and editors responded by profiling actresses in terms of ethnicity, religion, and education to cater to this speculative curiosity. Thus it was common for journalists to observe that Nalini Tarkhud or Enakshi Rama Rau were university-educated Hindu women while Sunita Devi, Ramola, and Zebunissa were European, Jewish, Anglo-Indian, or Muslim women from professional performing backgrounds.66 In 1930 B. R. Oberai, editor of Cinema magazine, authoritatively noted that “Nayampalli is a Madrasi, Prithviraj is a Punjabi Hindu, Jal Merchant is a Parsi, Shantakumari is a Hindu girl, Kumudini is Christian, Rajkumari is Muslim by birth and belongs to the Punjab.”67 Of course, performers were able to use social knowledge and frustrate its aims by manipulating vocal codes or masquerading under an assumed vocal identity. This led to another peculiar situation as some actresses tried to perform oral respectability rather too enthusiastically. The inaugural issue of the Hindi film magazine Rangbhumi dedicated substantive editorial space to the clash of social mores, technological change, and the age-old industrial reliance on romance narratives: A new problem has suddenly appeared with regard to Indian talkie pictures. Nalini Tarkhud, who belongs to a very respectable family from Bombay has refused to use words such as “beloved” or “dearest” [priya, praan-priya] during her scenes. The film producer is in a real dilemma due to this. Silent pictures never resulted in a situation such as this. It is only with the coming of the talkies that such difficulties have arisen. We doubt whether any lady from an upper class family could address any man in such terms, unless he be her husband, but nevertheless, from the point of view of art it is not inappropriate to utter such terms of address. We hope that Nalini Tarkhud herself is able to resolve this problem. In the twentieth century, problems such as these only indicate our ancient narrow-mindedness.68

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These comments attempted to reconcile deeply entrenched ideas about ideal femininity, rooted in class expectations, with the urgency of artistic progress. While the editor of Rangbhumi left it to the individual actress to resolve the “dilemma,” films like Pakdaman Raqasa confronted the dilemma through plot and dialogue. Abhinetri films contributed to the consolidation of the film actress’s social and commercial value while also addressing the recurring question posed to stars such as Shanta Apte, Sulochana, Gohar, or Devika Rani: Why did you become an actress? This historical question can be read as the defining rhetorical question of 1930s cinema.69 I use the term abhinetri film or actress film to discuss films centered on cinema stars, theater actresses, and women who pursued public performative professions such as radio and stage singing. A subset of the social film, the abhinetri film had transnational purchase with resonances across global filmmaking contexts of the 1920s and 1930s. An example of the “lives of a star” genre can be seen in the Warner Brothers film Secrets of an Actress (W. Keighley, 1938), which played in Bombay theaters in 1939. The film tells the typical tale of what happens “when a successful actress seeks fame and finds romance.”70 Mexican cabaretera films of the 1940s and Chinese women’s melodramas of the 1930s circulate similar images of the modern woman as public performer, a glamorous and enticing emblem of modernity as a double-edged movement of economic ascent and moral descent. The Indian abhinetri film was invariably a tale of romance and marriage, except that the main challenge to the formation of the heterosexual couple was not wealth or religion but the heroine’s profession. Though part of a transnationally circulating cycle of images and tropes, the abhinetri film took on some of the particularities of the actress’s condition in India. Its meanings also shifted with time. The popularity of abhinetri films in the 1920s is evident in recurring film titles such as Cinema Queen (Cinema ni Rani, M. Bhavnani, 1925) and Cinema Girl (B. P. Mishra, 1930). Indian cinema’s fascination with the actress resurfaced in the mid-1930s, announced by a new talkie version of Cinema Queen (Cinema ki Rani, R. R. Gaur, 1934). The historical resurfacing of the actress film was a symptom of the industrial dependence on a certain class of female performers and the

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cinematic dependence on the female body as the chief sounding spectacle of the 1930s. Abhinetri films of the 1930s and 1940s invested the figure of the actress with new meanings located in the female voice and the persuasive power of affective speech. These films often featured two prototypes for the actress: the good heroine who is pushed into a stage/film career due to life’s exigencies; and the promiscuous diva who thrives on her fame and the adoration of male publics. The dangerous seductive power of the actress-image is thus explicitly quarantined into the figure of the “vamp,” while her positive capacities to earn and entertain remain with the virtuous heroine. This moral division is well represented in Bombay Talkies’ Basant (Gyan Mukherjee, 1942).71 Mumtaz Shanti plays Uma, an orphaned young woman who must support herself and a younger brother. She finds fame, wealth, and a husband when she takes up an offer to become a stage actress. Uma enjoys all the perks of stardom, exactly as promised by the popular image of the film star. But the film makes a point to underline Uma’s talent and professionalism by contrasting her with Meena, the petulant and flirtatious stage diva whom Uma replaces. Basant responds to all the contemporary anxieties surrounding the actress—from sexual promiscuity to avarice to coldhearted ambition—and resolves them by making a distinction between two models of professional acting work. The film ends with Uma, still a famous actress and singer, being reunited with her mistrusting husband and estranged daughter. As the song booklet describes it, “The mother’s love and the wife’s loyalty in Uma had their ultimate triumph, which makes her history in essence the story of Indian Womanhood.” 72 The family is reunited on stage, with the mother still an actress and the daughter a budding singing star on the radio.73 Hence, while virtues such as maternal affection, womanly modesty, and wifely duty are privileged, the actress retains her right to work, even passing it on to the next generation. This is Bombay cinema’s way of addressing social anxieties about the actress and can be read as an industrial argument in favor of actresses and their careers. Several lost films similarly indicate a textual drive toward industrial argumentation and the construction of the actress as an honorable professional. Actress (Balwant Bhatt, 1934) revolves around a fictional

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figures 3.4a and 3.4b Song booklet covers from two actress films or abhinetri films a decade apart: Actress (Najam Naqvi, 1948) and Actress Kyon Bani (Why I became an actress) (G. R. Sethi, 1939). (National Film Archive of India; Osianama Archive and Library Collection)

figures 3.4a and 3.4b (continued)

Bombay film company, Ideal Movitone, and two actresses who work there. The “good actress,” Sarla, is cultured and educated and “had regards for the art of acting.”74 In God’s Beloved (Chandulal Shah, 1936), when a millionaire is jailed for fraud his daughter bails him out by joining the stage. And in Mr. X (Dwarka Khosla, 1938), the heroine, Hemlata, becomes an actress after her jealous husband throws her out on the streets. When Prem recognizes his wife on stage one day he is traumatized— “the word Actress pinches him,” says the song booklet, “the word Actress brings him nearer to something vulgar.”75 In the climax, Prem publicly reclaims Hemlata after she boldly saves her son from the clutches of a vile criminal. The actress is socially validated after demonstrating her maternal fearlessness. Gramophone Singer (V. C. Desai and R. Thakur, 1938) participates in augmenting the cultural attractiveness of the female performer. The film features a “radio rani” (radio queen), Miss Tilottama who “was a Radio artiste of International reputation and had just returned to India after a Continental Tour. She was quite young and beautiful. She earned a lot and was happy and contented.”76 Each of these films plays up the notoriety attached to the figure of the film actress, creating a frisson of cinematic taboo while showcasing the audiovisual spectacle of the female body. Voice | Aw aa z

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The double address of the abhinetri film—a sensationalist invocation of the female performer’s sexualized body and, at the same time, an argument for the modern actress’s career—underlines the impossibility of fixing an identity on an embodied mediated voice. Acousmatic listening presumes that meaning is unstable and identities are performative. The film actress, in all her glorious polyphonous social presence, was central to the consolidation of Bombay’s talkie industry. She was met halfway by India’s canny audiences, who intuited the altered possibilities for the self in a mediated and technologized modernity. A culture of acousmatic attunement accounts for the excitement of seeing the synchronized voicing body on screen and, at the same time, creates a fantasy space where mediated female bodies could offer multiple visions of performative becoming.

Lady Barristers and Female Defendants Film after film in the 1930s features heroines advocating for themselves or their loved ones through impassioned speech. From Shanta Apte’s fiery monologues in Duniya Na Mane / The Unexpected (V. Shantaram, 1937) to Fearless Nadia preaching to villain, father, and lover alike in Diamond Queen (Homi Wadia, 1940), the consolidation of female talkie stardom was premised not only on song but also on speech. Of particular interest is the recurrence of the courtroom as a space for agonistic dialogue and excited speech in the 1930s, like this one from Mamata / Mother (Franz Osten, 1936), in which Manika defends Devika Rani in a trial: Laila (Lady Barrister): Honorable Judge and members of the jury. The accused is said to have murdered her lover. . . . I agree with that statement. However, my claim is that she did what was right. That she killed a man is not a crime, but had she not killed him, then that would have been a crime. It is every mother’s duty to safeguard her child’s life . . . and under such circumstances the accused has done what any mother would do . . . Voices: No no . . . lies . . . this is wrong . . . complete lies.77 England-educated barrister heroines, tyrannical judges, and wronged mothers recur with an insistent filmic regularity at this time. 170

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In films such as Miss 1933 (Chandulal Shah, 1933) where Gohar pleads her own case in court (murder in self-defense); Bharat ki Beti (Premankor Atorthy, 1935), where Ratan Bai masquerades as a man to depose in the courtroom; or Jeevan Lata (Sarvottam Badami, 1936), where Sabita Devi defends her lover in court, actresses often played criminal defendants as well as legal defenders, whose narrative role within the films’ epistemic worlds was to volubly contest societal and colonial-legal ideas of morality and justice. As with the abhinetri film, the very ground for argumentation in lady barrister films is social stigma versus moral value, with the courtroom being judged incapable of dealing with questions of motives and ethics.78 During this period films that depended on the climactic courtroom scene in any substantial manner tended to be heroine-centric star vehicles. It was often the heroine herself who commits a murder, but, significantly, she defends her actions on moral grounds as the crimes are committed in self-defense—either to fend off rapists or to protect her children, both highly laudable justifications within the diegetic universe. Criminalized heroines in these films contest the rational-liberal logics of Western juridical thinking, asking instead for emotional and social justice. Their appeals rest on an affective vocality, evident in the centrality of dialogic performance, oral testimony, auditory evidence, and finally the very notion of “having a voice.” To understand the force of words in cinema, we must consider the affective place of words in the late colonial acoustic ecology. The evolution of impassioned “dialogue delivery” took place within a moment of acute nationalist mass politics. As a genre of speech, passionate oration relied on, indeed produced, a specific imagination of publics and selves in a period of intensified anticolonial struggle.79 In the world outside filmic representation, the presence of women in Indian courtrooms was recorded rather differently. The Legal Practitioners (Women) Act of 1923 permitted women to practice law in England and British India, but even India’s first female advocate, Cornelia Sorabjee, who had fought a long battle to study and practice law, was repeatedly pressured to restrict herself to office work rather than plead in court. Lectures on legal matters addressed to women’s groups were accompanied with the caveat that “the life of a busy barrister was too strenuous for women.”80 When newspapers reported on female Voice | Aw aa z

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presence in courtrooms, it was mainly an opportunity to reiterate gendered stereotypes of feminine bodily excess. During the Lahore trials of Bhagat Singh and his companions, much ado was made of the “hysterical” behavior of a woman, who apparently “screamed and shouted” when she saw the emaciated body of Batukeshwar Dutt brought into the courtroom on a stretcher. “Pouring abuse upon magistrate, police, Government, and ‘all their generation,’ ” the unnamed woman also called for the destruction of the government and “cried ‘Mahatma Gandhi-ki-jai.’ Her cries continued for a fairly long time.”81 She was forcibly removed from the courtroom, and for a time all women were barred from the trial proceedings.82 Though not in a position of power in the courtroom, this young woman made sure her voice intervened in the proceedings. Her impassioned cries were quickly rendered illegible through reportage and disciplinary measures. Such gendered discursive treatment of a politically active young woman may be read as a strategic response by the government and establishment newspapers to the emergence of the educated middle-class woman as a visible and dangerous actor in the independence movement from the 1920s onward.83 How do we then think about cinema’s embrace of the declaiming, argumentative female voice? Cinema often provides the space for that which is contemporaneously considered socially impossible; practices that nonetheless have intimations of materializing in a near future. There are several ways to think of this question, especially if we concentrate on the technological promise, aesthetic meaning, and industrial agendas of embodied speaking and acousmatic listening in the 1930s. As an abstract element of selfhood, “voice” has a gendered history, serving as an emblem of the rational democratic male agent in European modernity. The grainy, corporeal voice and material vocality, on the other hand, have been historically rendered feminine. Women’s vocality is characterized as inarticulate, bodily, and excessive rather than scientific or reasoned.84 In this context, courtroom films of the 1930s deliberately confuse entrenched binaries; female speaking subjects present impassioned arguments in the language of the law. Speaking in high-flown Persianized Urdu (the official language of colonial law courts since the nineteenth century), cinema’s lady barrister invokes the full weight of ornate legalese. Dialogue fragments in figure 3.5 from scene 5 of an extant Bombay Talkies screenplay, transliterated from 172

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figure  3.5 Dialogue fragment in Urdu from Devika Rani’s personal script of Mother or Mamata (Franz Osten, 1936). (Dietze Family Archive)

Urdu and translated into English in the excerpts that follow, give us a glimpse of this speech genre. Laila: Huzoor-e-wala va membraan-e-jury. Mulzima ne apne aashna lal ka khoon kiya . . . ye main maanti hoon. Lekin mera daava ye hai ki isne jo kuchh kiya theek kiya. Mulzima ka khoon karna jurm nahi balki na karna jurm tha. Bacche ki jaan bachaana Ma ka farz hota hai . . . aur aisi haalat mein jo har Ma karti wohi is bechaari ne kiya . . . Voices: Nahi nahi . . . jhootha . . . Yeh galat hai . . . Bilkul jhooth. Judge: Khamosh. Khamosh.85 Laila (Female Barrister): Honorable Judge and members of the jury. The accused is said to have murdered her lover . . . I agree with that statement. However, my claim is that she did what was right. That she killed a man is not a crime, but had she not killed him, then that would have been a crime. It is a mother’s duty to safeguard her child’s life . . . and under such circumstances the accused has done what any mother would do . . . Voices: No no . . . lies . . . this is wrong . . . complete lies. Judge: Silence. Silence. The excessive formality of the Urdu terms used to address the judge, the jury, and the female accused reference a linguistic template that has been used in Indian law courts since the nineteenth century.86 Persian was the official language of the Mughal court, and the British retained some of the established linguistic protocols by adopting Urdu as the official court language. To date, Persianized and archaic Urdu terminology for documents (vakaalatnama, roz namcha) and officials (sarishtedaar) are in daily use in the high courts of Delhi and Bombay. This adaliya zubaan, or “language of the courts,” as it lingers today, is considered a legacy of the novelist Nazeer Ahmed, who translated the Indian Penal Code into Urdu in 1860.87 The best-loved courtroom scenes in Hindi cinema’s history are unimaginable without this Urdu legalese. The material weightiness of this formal legal speech, its theatricality and enunciative gravitas, made it particularly attractive for Hindi film’s talkie melodramas. Scholars of literature and film have pointed to the formal connections between real and fictive courtrooms, insofar as 174

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both are performative spaces for narrative construction and consumption.88 If the actual courtroom is a theater of justice, talkie cinema picks up one of its main characteristics—dramatic dialogue and performative speech. Synchronized sound literally gave films a voice and allowed characters to declaim, sermonize, or serenade at length. Parsi theater, as we have seen, provided much foundational ballast for the fledgling talkie film to steady itself. But filmmakers also tried to carve an identity for cinema that would be separate from the theater. Writers strived to find speech modes that would not simply mimic the Parsi stage and its declamatory styles, as noted by the critics cited earlier. The internal logic of the urban social film also pushed insistently toward conversational realism. The courtroom scene, as an independent attraction inside a film, allowed a way to circumvent this problem. Given the reality of Persianized legalese spoken in the colonial court, trial scenes enabled film writers to reference the decorative Urdu of the Parsi theater while also bringing in the exaggerated performance styles of the stage. Played out on the speaking body of the actress, courtroom scenes brought together the rational and the irrational, the corporeal and the intellectual, the masculine and the feminine, in conspicuous and thrilling ways. Films about lady barristers are also films about the mulzima, or female defendant. They stage, and often resolve, tensions between two regimes of public femininity presented in overtly oppositional terms (old/new, young/old, modern/traditional, progressive/regressive, virtue/ vice). The female voice is central to this contest, and even though we cannot hear most of these films anymore, we can unpack their meaning within a discursive and material history of gendered film practice. In Mother, the heroine is a dancing girl who kills a former lover when he attacks her child. The film is centered on her courtroom trial and scenes of dialogue-heavy argumentation. Both the accused and her female lawyer speak in impassioned terms, not only contesting the court’s logic of impartial, blind justice but disregarding it completely. The lawyer, Laila, argues that the accused can be deemed a criminal only within a system where it is a crime for a mother to protect her child’s life, thereby announcing her own distance from such a system of absolutes. The mother, who remains silent through much of this, speaks out only when Voice | Aw aa z

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figure  3.6 Devika Rani as the defendant and Manika as the lady barrister in Mother (1936).

her maternal love is questioned. In an irruptive speech act that is a familiar moment in courtroom finales, the accused abruptly bursts into spectacular vocality and begs, “In the name of God, do not say that I am incapable of mother-love because I am a prostitute.”89 For her, the court’s skepticism about her maternal feelings is far more objectionable than a legal attribution of crime. Her speech positions the listenerspectator, whether inside the cinematic courtroom or in the movie theater, as the ultimate judge. The appeal is to a public, collective conscience that can hear the cries of the mother rather than a supposedly dispassionate and blind Western legal system. In Barrister’s Wife (1935), Gohar plays both mother and daughter in a double role. The film ends in a classic triangulated courtroom denouement with familial misrecognition at its center. Our heroine, Lily, is a modern college girl with a handsome “college lover” who is compelled to marry an aging barrister to restore her father’s fortunes after a stock market crash. Despite Lily’s sacrificial nature, her barrister husband kicks her out of their home on suspicions of adultery and separates her from her daughter, Indu. Years later Indu returns from England after being trained as a lawyer. In the meantime, Lily has been wrongly accused of murder and is represented in court by—who else?—Indu, her long-lost daughter. “Indu defended her mother not knowing her as such and in so doing she nobly defended the woman before her own father

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seated on the chair of justice, and against her own would-be husband.”90 If the abhinetri film bifurcated the actress into good and bad, courtroom scenes staged the paradoxical status of the actress as a generational divide. Recently, historians of Indian cinema have argued that the film industry’s drive to respectability eventually led to the supplanting of some female bodies by others. By the late 1930s an older generation of courtesans and dancing girls, commonly perceived as sex workers, were marginalized as greater numbers of upper class, college-educated, married, and/or Hindu actresses took over the scene. While it is true that aggressive attempts to recruit cultured actresses met with some success, it is also true that the world of actresses remained diverse and mixed. On the surface, courtroom films seem to confirm the thesis of a clear industrial and historical break with the stigmatized body of the sex worker and the dancer, in favor of the educated and respectable actress/female lawyer. But what is important to note is that films like Mother and Barrister’s Wife use the mother-daughter partnership as a symbol of intergenerational solidarity. A younger generation of women defends a prior generation with restricted employment opportunities and fewer avenues for social mobility. Rather than signaling the erasure of an older actress demographic, the early talkie film struggled to contain competing claims on its actresses. To go a step further, the courtroom became a cinematic platform from where the industry publicly argued the case for hiring stigmatized female bodies and voices. There is an industrial logic that drives this claim to legitimacy. This is most pointedly exemplified in the film Jeevan Lata (Sarvottam Badami, 1936), where a barrister hero disdains the heroine’s love for dance and is disgusted when he sees her at a public performance, but when he is wrongly accused of murder, it is the dancing girl who comes to his defense. It turns out that the infamous dancing girl also has a law degree from Oxford. Taqdeer (Mehboob Khan, 1943) complicates the courtroom film by staging female argumentation outside the courtroom. Nargis plays a stage actress named Shyama in this extant film. After being vigorously wooed by the son of a wealthy judge, Shyama falls in love, only to be challenged by the judge-father about her social and moral status. The

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judge, played by Chandramohan, insults Shyama by baldly stating that actresses have negative social worth and that respectable citizens of society, such as judges and their sons, would lose prestige from the slightest contact with the actress “class.” Shyama makes her own defense and argues that her profession is no indication of her moral standing. She berates the judge for his illogical prejudice and his shoddy treatment of those who belong to a lower social standing. The scenes between Nargis and Chandramohan are remarkable for their strong critical stance and rebuke of elite patriarchal positions.91 This was the standard line of argument seen in the abhinetri films of the 1930s, be it explicitly voiced by the heroine or implicitly argued through the narrative. It is worth noting that Taqdeer does not split the actress into good girl–bad girl stereotypes, nor does it stage the judge-actress arguments in a physical courtroom. Instead, the juridical imagination pervades the home and the family as an artificial construct that can be exposed only through a biological twist. The judge turns out to be Shyama’s biological father. Separated from his little daughter in a religious fair (the notorious Kumbh mela), the judge was compelled to adopt another child for the sake of his wife’s sanity. This filial connection is deployed to make a social argument and simultaneously allow viewer identification: would you judge this good woman so easily if she were your daughter? The film answers the question with a resounding “No!” as the judge repents his prejudiced attitude and accepts the actress as his daughter. The social argument embodied by Taqdeer becomes fully clear only when we consider the biographical and industrial location of its heroine. Nargis was the daughter of a film producer, director, and music composer, Jaddan Bai, who had been a famous courtesan in Kolkata before she turned to the film industry to revive her musical career. Films written by Jaddan invariably centered on the question of stigmatized female labor and the denigrated bodies of performing women.92 Knowledge of Nargis’s maternal lineage, her connections to a matrilineal courtesan tradition, and Jaddan Bai’s struggle for social validation through her directorial efforts add new layers of meaning to the central conflict in Taqdeer. We realize that the recurring figure of the embattled but virtuous actress articulates an ongoing industrial crisis of image for the cine-ecology’s female workforce.

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C O N C LU S I O N : S Y N C H R O N I C I T Y A N D S P E C U L AT I V E L I S T E N I N G

Every high school enjoys rehearsing a list of illustrious alumni. During my time at Queen Mary School I was frequently told that Nargis, the famous screen actress, was also a QMS girl. Nargis had come a long way, from being labeled a “tawaif ’s daughter” to recognition as a national celebrity, Member of Parliament, and emblematic “Mother India” for thousands of film-watching Indians.93 Herein lies the rub. Actresses, as one of most visually available emblems of cinema in the 1930s, were under considerable public scrutiny with regard to their personal and professional pasts. From a socioeconomic point of view, film actresses represented a financial future that was unthinkable for most working women. As I have argued elsewhere, however, scandalous information about an actress’s antecedents often augmented fan appetite, which reveled in stories of transgression and projected contradictory fantasies of virtue and vice onto the actress’s body.94 In the thick of these paradoxical pressures, the 1930s actress-as-worker was enjoined to present her own case. Films premised on litigating female protagonists and testimonies from female defendants served as a clever commercial ploy by filmmakers to capitalize on the provocative reputation of actresses and narrativize their struggles for a vocation. It is important to note that by the 1930s it had become fairly routine to read in the daily newspaper about film actresses embroiled in real-life court cases. From accusations of cheating and breaking contracts (see chapter 5) to divorce and defamation cases, actresses were often defending themselves publicly in the off-screen courtroom. Almost all these cases resulted in the actress being awarded damages or being exonerated. The Indian talkie film unfolded within a variegated ecology of mediated voice and speech. Acousmatic attunement, or an awareness of the gap between image and sound which nonetheless recognizes the corporeality of the voice, has profound implications for a sensory, material, and technical history of sound in Indian cinema. It allows me to recover the actress’s body as laboring body and the viewer’s ear as canny and trained. Because the acousmatic is not limited to film, and because sound cinema in India benefited from the growing presence of

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acousmatic media, the phenomenon of attunement opens up film historiography to the materialities of parallel media practices. Talkie audiences were already accustomed to real bodies singing and speaking in live performances, often inside a cinema theater as part of prefeature entertainment programs. These same audiences were also habituated to watching filmed bodies moving voicelessly across filmed space. Film viewers who had watched silent films with dialogues either printed on screen or improvised by a live commentator were aware that the image and voice could be arbitrarily decoupled and recombined. Notably, by 1935 radio programs were being advertised on the strength of a film or a film actor. For example, radio listings in the newspaper announced that Mehandi Reza, “very well known in the film world will delight listeners with comic songs. He happens to be from Sagar Film Company and there must be many listeners who have seen him in Talkies.” Similarly, “Indira Wadkar will be the principal artiste on Saturday 9th at 9.30 p.m. She happens to be featuring now in a film running in Bombay, and it is very probable that she will sing one of the numbers from that film.”95 The listener is encouraged to conjure up the image of the radio singer from their memory of a film, to meet the acousmatic voice halfway by providing its complementary image from a repertoire of filmic references. Image and voice here are not only acknowledged to be fragmented but also dispersed transmedially. Film songs also circulated in the gramophone record circuit, with talented singers such as Rajkumari, Akhtaribai Faizabadi, and Shanta Apte moving fluidly across careers in film, radio, and gramophone. Throughout this book I work with the premise that human-machine encounters affect various elements of the interaction. The meeting of the human and the microphone, and the human and the audiovisual screen image, altered popular assumptions of the authentic self. Technology provided another venue for addressing the problematic fleshiness of the female voice. As we saw in chapter 2, the Bombay film industry seized the mantle of science to embark on a project of industrial modernization. The talkies were framed as an obvious advancement of motion picture science, and its most prominent technological objects, such as the sound recorder and microphone, were consequently imbued with the aura of the scientific modern. Sound technology appeared as a new topic for public lectures and expert talks by scientists. Calcutta’s 180

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figure 3.7 Sagar Movietone advertises its upcoming talkie films, boasting “scientific singing,” Cinema, April 1932. (New York Public Library)

Star of India newspaper, for example, reported on a science lecture titled “Indian Research on the ‘Talkies’ ” on its front page in 1932.96 Sagar Movietone advertised its first talkie features as “super talkies” featuring “clear recording—able direction—scientific singing.”97 Scenarios, already considered scientific owing to their ability to streamline production, were now labeled “scenariographs,” and song lyrics could also be deemed scientific.98 The dreaded “mike test” served as a passport to technical prowess, and the actress who passed the test could proudly announce herself a “scientific” singer. Sagar Movietone’s continued boasts of scientific singing must be interpreted as a move to capitalize on the sound recording apparatus and public knowledge about voice tests to relocate female singing from a feudal-traditional to a techno-modern realm of signification.99 This alliance with technology had the potential to mark the talkie actress as decisively modern—far removed from a feudal past dependent on aristocratic patronage, and now part of modern mass culture. The technological and scientific repackaging of the female voice was a way to neutralize the social stigmas attached to particular female bodies. In part 2 I take up the question of the laboring body of the cineworker in greater detail. I consider the many vectors of energy that flow across the cine-ecology: between workers and equipment, landscape and automobiles, stars and spectators, and vitality and depletion. By tracking energy relations I am able to make new connections between representation and labor, image and body. The German director Franz Osten made his observation of the energetic voice a feature of his directorial practice. In her memoirs, the actress Hansa Wadkar recalls working with Osten at Bombay Talkies. Osten, who spoke very little HindiUrdu, would close his eyes during a take just as the clapboard was struck. Puzzled by a director who wouldn’t visually observe his actors’ performance, Hansa Wadkar finally questioned him about this practice. “Photography is the cameraman’s job,” he replied. “How you act is known to me through your articulation. I have already explained the action to you. The force of your words tells me how you are acting.”100 Closing his eyes, Osten focused on Wadkar’s voice, privileging the aural over the visual register in his assessment of cinematic affect and dramatic effect. His reply to Wadkar once again points to the body in the voice, available through enunciation and something else that he terms the “force of words.” It is this sort of force that we follow in part 2. 182

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CH APTER FOUR

Vitality | Josh It has now been recognized far and wide that some cheap entertainment like that offered by the cinema once a week, just as one holiday a week is necessary for the laborer, is indispensable to relieve the drudgery of the worker. —Ram L. Gogtay, “Cinema and the Poor” One evening Veena goes to a picture—something happens which excites Veena into a sudden action. . . . What made Veena wild in the cinema hall? Come and see on the Silver Screen. —Society song booklet, 1942

What is the relation between film and labor, screen and spectator? Is cinema a reliever of exhaustion, a producer of energy, a catalyst for excited action? In this chapter I turn to energy as a material category that helps us reframe the cultural significance of the filmic image, cinematic labor, and technological activity. I describe energy as relational; produced and activated in encounters between a multiplicity of actors. We will travel across Bombay’s early talkie cine-ecology, tracking multiple flows of energy from the bodies of cine-workers to an aesthetics of vitality to the bodies of spectators, encountering energy transfers with the bodies of equipment and objects along the way. This route joins the techniques and technologies of film production with film exhibition, thus revealing continuities between practices of the screen and the studio. Cinema is a powerful assemblage that activates people and things and sets them into motion. The viewer’s body is affected by the screen: she may be moved to tears or laughter or transported into reverie. At

the same time, a vast ecology of off-screen practices also participates in cinema’s web of energy relations. As an employer, cinema has the power to put bodies to work. The cine-ecology is at once energized and consumed by practices required to bring filmed images to a commercial screen. Running a camera motor, transporting imported raw stock, waiting for the next lighting set-up, and writing continuity all depend on energy-intensive encounters between humans, electricity, celluloid, climate, paper, oil, and buildings. These off-screen energies are transmuted, or rematerialized, into on-screen images and box-office revenues. Energy transfers, therefore, undergird the existence of movies in the world and are central to the historical status and significance of cinema and its projects of world making. By tracking energy relations across the cineecology, we not only make connections between the image and the labor that produces it but also can reconceive cinema’s relation to modernity with attention to the specificities of other places in other times, other bodies in other assemblages of power and practice. To think of the talkie cine-ecology in terms of energy practices and relations is to emphasize the temporality of ontogenesis, that is, the continuous struggles toward individuation that constitute the terrain of production: becoming cine-worker, becoming industry, or becoming modern. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, the legendary and controversial Urdu writer, understood this well. Some of his best writing dwells on the everyday meanings of cinema as filmmaking, a durational study of people who co-inhabit a widely dispersed cine-ecology spread across studios, tea stalls, train stations, and bedrooms. Between 1937 and 1948 Manto worked day jobs as a salaried scenarist and dialogue writer at film companies such as Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Film Company and Sashadhar Mukherjee’s Filmistan.1 His keen observations and opinions about the film world are available to us in a series of short stories and biographical accounts in which Manto often features as a narrator-character. These stories are scathing in their presentation of studio malpractices, especially the gendered division of sexual and affective precarity. Take, for example, “Mera Naam Radha Hai” (My name is Radha), which is set in a 1930s Bombay film studio and can be read as fictionalized ethnography. The story outlines the strange, tensely erotic relationship that develops between the studio’s in-house actors, Neelam and Rajkishore. Neelam is a new hire relegated to playing minor parts, while Rajkishore is an 186

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acclaimed star adored by his fans and colleagues alike. By the end of the story, Neelam comes into being as Radha, taking back her birth name and reclaiming her identity as simultaneously woman and cineworker. Rajkishore too, recursively strives to establish his identity as star and as man. This is how Manto first describes Rajkishore: Rajkishore, a native of Rawalpindi, was a handsome and healthy young man. It was widely believed that his body was very manly and had a graceful shape. I thought about his body often. It was certainly athletic and well proportioned, but I found nothing else appealing in it. Maybe that was because I myself am frightfully gangly, looking more dead than alive. . . . Let’s just say that I didn’t care much for the man. The reason will reveal itself as you go along.2

Manto’s intense focus on Rajkishore’s body reminds us that the “healthy” human body has always been at the center of cinematic representation, and hence industrial logics of casting and talent valuation. Early cinema in India, indeed worldwide, was preoccupied with the capacities of the human body. More specifically, cinema, like earlier experiments with photographic motion studies, was fascinated with the reproduction of the human body in motion. Walking, running, blinking, sneezing, fighting, falling, stretching, kissing, wrestling—no animated gesture of the body was without its fascination for the camera. This preoccupation was most evident in film genres such as slapstick, stunt, and thriller, and some mythological films that were premised on the spectacle of the dynamic human body—the body flying, morphing, swallowing; or jumping, punching, registering pain. Perceptions of the human body changed rapidly from the years of cinema’s first emergence (1890s) to the consolidation of the talkie form (1930s). From the penetrable body of science, to the machinic body of thermodynamic productivity, to the genetic body of reproductive manipulation, the human body was seen simultaneously as a site of possibility and a site of intervention.3 The meanings of the cinematic body also differ across spaces and times. On its own, Rajkishore’s muscular body did not bother Manto as much as his extreme self-consciousness and exhibitionist tendencies. “He never lost an opportunity to flaunt his health and his well-proportioned and Vit alit y | Jo sh

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shapely limbs before those less healthy than he was” and “had the nasty habit of exhibiting [his physique] in the crudest fashion, such as by flexing his arm muscles while talking to you; or worse yet, praising them unabashedly himself. Or, in the midst of a discussion on some serious issue, such as swaraj, unbuttoning his khadi kurta and measuring the unusually wide span of his chest.”4 What rankled Manto most of all was Rajkishore’s exaggerated espousal of his beliefs and politics, his work for the Congress party, his simple lifestyle, his devotion to his wife and his mother; and thus “the thought that he didn’t love his country as much as he loved himself never ceased to peck at my heart.” Manto’s negative fascination with Rajkishore’s body continues through the story, intersecting with the arrival of the “new girl,” Neelam, who is soon seduced by Rajkishore’s vitality: Neelam sat quietly on the round cement platform under the maulsiri [tree]. From her elegantly serious face it was apparent that Rajkishore’s words were making no impression on her. She was looking, rather, at his protruding chest. His shirt was open and his dark black hair looked ravishing on his fair chest. . . . For a moment I wondered, “Why is she looking so different?” Suddenly our eyes collided and I found the answer in her distracted glance. She’d fallen in love.5

Manto’s short story, overtly visual in its sensory appeal, can be read as a deceptively casual critique of cinema itself. Rajkishore’s bodily appearance, his performative display of his own vitality, his affectations and gestural repertoire, are synecdochic of the exhibitionary and energetic logics of popular cinema. Rajkishore’s body underlines the centrality of the star as the shiniest showpiece within the shop window of cinematic attractions, with the power to attract and infatuate audiences en masse. But it also exposes the searing gulf between bodies differentiated by caste, class, and gender. As the story develops, Neelam’s desire is defeated by Rajkishore’s vanity, and she abruptly arrives at a disenchanted understanding of Rajkishore’s star text, as we will see at the end of this chapter.6 Neelam’s final epiphany is provoked by a corporeal state of exhaustion, tied to the ebb and flow of human and mechanical energy required to shoot a film. Manto’s own realization that Neelam has fallen in love is an aesthetic-corporeal intuition catalyzed by his distanced 188

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gaze on an unfolding tableau of personal relations. Manto’s short story therefore deftly weaves together the popular late colonial fascination with bodily vigor, swadeshi politics, the dense chronotope of a 1930s Bombay studio, the relation between on-screen and off-screen, and Neelam’s erotic desire. It offers us an intricate roadmap for navigating the routes of energy in the cine-ecology. E N E R G Y R E L AT I O N S I N T H E C I N E M AT I C O F F - S C R E E N

Energy, in physics, “refers to the material source of power needed to perform any activity,” “a force for making things happen.”7 It is a quantifiable resource that can be converted into other forms of energy, such as light, heat, or electricity. It is in this, largely thermodynamic, definition that energy is emerging as a central concern in the social sciences and humanities today. As the academy grapples with the urgencies of climate change, questions about fossil fuels, energy expenditure, carbon emissions, and waste are being critically pondered from the angles of representation and imagery, policy and law, history and political economy, technology and materiality. In conversation with this work, but at a marked tangent to it, I focus on cinematic energy relations in order to critically frame the material practices and experiential meaning of embodiment inside a dispersed, labor-intensive cine-ecology. An obsession with energy and its depletion is fundamental to the experience of industrial modernity. In The Human Motor (1992), Anson Rabinbach traces an energist vision of Western society, where the working body was but an exemplar of that universal process by which energy was converted into mechanical work, a variant of the great engines and dynamos spawned by the industrial age. The protean force of nature, the productive power of industrial machines, and the body in motion were all instances of the same dynamic laws, subject to measurement. The metaphor of the human motor translated revolutionary scientific discoveries about physical nature into a new vision of social modernity.8

The shift from the human as organism to the human as machine pervaded disparate political and social visions—from Taylorism to Vit alit y | Jo sh

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Bolshevism to fascism. In colonial India, where the energetic human body and productivity in indigenous industry were both enlisted in the service of nationalism, energy became a recurring theme in public discourse. Human energy was commodified in the popular medical and nutritional discourse of 1930s India, which capitalized on anxieties of energy depletion. The advertisement from 1939 shown in figure 4.1 utilizes the routine vocabulary of “used-up energy,” “exhaustion,” “enervation,” and lack of stamina that circulated at the time, lamenting the unrelenting workaday rhythms and stresses of urban life. Horlicks, a malted drink mix, was a leading nutritional brand in twentieth-century India. Issued specially for the silver jubilee celebrations of the Indian

figure  4.1 “Night starvation” is an everyday feature of the cine-ecology according to this Horlicks advertisement, Times of India, May 5, 1939. (Proquest LLC) 190

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film industry, this advertisement zooms in on the distinctive forms and experiences of labor inside the new urban industrial workplace of the film studio. The director, surrounded by technology and technicians, experiences a loss of “stamina,” and “vitality.” He is unable to work efficiently, his exhaustion leads to multiple retakes, and his film feels lifeless. Regular use of Horlicks equips him to work industriously even under the harsh glare of hot arc lamps. A graying, suited producer who has been monitoring the director’s progress recognizes this productive transformation and equates his renewed vitality with box office success. Horlicks thus makes for healthy workers and healthy profit margins. The Hindi-Urdu word josh applies pressure on the thermodynamic approach to “energy.” Energy, as abstract potential, is indifferent to ends and goals. As the cultic center of modernity, energy became the emblem of industrial capitalism and its indiscriminate need for movement, growth, and energetic expansion as an end-in-itself. Josh signifies a dynamic and directional potentiality, that is, energy with a sense of purpose. The question of ends opens up a space for critique where the problem is not only one of energy expenditure, but expenditure to what end? It makes visible the uneven social relations that are entangled within a web of energy and unequal access to energy production, consumption, and accumulation. Josh is also energy that can be produced and transferred through contact with an idea, person, or location. Following from this set of inflections, the concept of cinematic energy I explore in this chapter embraces the human and nonhuman and recognizes powergeometries within a space.9 In the past decade media studies has taken an accelerated interest in energy as a material resource that supports mediatic functioning. Ecomedia studies, concerned with questions of energy consumption, environmental impact, and issues of sustainability, often treats energy as a resource or something “out there” mediated by infrastructures and technologies rather than as a force that moves between diverse relational ontologies. The focus has largely been on nonhuman energy sources, forms, and extractive sites such as oil and coal, electricity, and data centers.10 Humans figure mainly as agents of environmental degradation rather than sites of energy that can also get depleted and destroyed.11 In this second part of the book I expand the ambit of a possible “energy studies” in film and media to include the relational and the Vit alit y | Jo sh

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variegated category of the “human.” Recent trends in object-oriented ontology have rightly questioned the centrality of the human in academic inquiry, a centrality that has been at the expense of the world of objects and other living things. At the same time, we need to ask which “human” we are decentering. We have barely begun to understand the complex inequalities between humans and their differential stakes in the current ecological crisis. There is also an urgent need to think of human and nonhuman as collectivities—processual, coconstitutive, and politically necessary. A renewed understanding of energy and its stakeholders could provide the ground for environmental media studies and studies of media industries to come together. Work on affect in anthropology offers another way to conceive of energy, this time as a vital force that can be actualized by the encounter between people and things, thus making energy a relational potentiality that is neither inside nor outside but in-between.12 Within film and media historiography, Weihong Bao’s Fiery Cinema offers a powerful exposition of the role of affective energy in the emergence of cinema as a “mediating environment” that “exploits the continuity between space, affect, and matter while reconnecting body, collectivity and technology.” Cinematic affect, for Bao, is understood as resonance, as burning, as an agitation that can induce audience action and affective transformation, taking us away from an interiorized and privatized conception of affect to a shared and “shareable social experience.”13 Thomas Elsaesser, in Film History as Media Archeology, comes closest to the way I conceive of the fundamental relation between cinema and energy. Elsaesser weaves together theories of thermodynamic energy, capitalist social engineering, and spectatorship to propose a theory of cinema as an “energy exchange system,” a dispostif that animates and sets things into motion.14 My own understanding of energy is processual, not limited to the principles of thermodynamics, and, most critically, extending into the world of film production with all its attendant hierarchies. The realm of the cinematic constitutes the cine-ecology, bringing into its orbit practitioners, film workers, and the places of image making. Relations of energy in the cine-ecology thus connect the inside with the outside, the on-screen and the off-screen, pushing against our very need for such boundaries.

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Itineraries of vitality and exhaustion, energy and depletion not only reframe a critical period in the history of commercial image making in India but also prod us to ask what were the social, cultural, and political meanings invested in the idea of energy in a particular period of time in a specific place. In the context of late colonial India, the concept of energy produced cultural binaries deeply resonant with the anxieties of a colonized and modernizing peoples: the weak versus strong body; industrial productivity versus infrastructural dependency. Parallel to the nationalist imaginary, and often contradicting it, ran other imaginaries of modern self-making and world making. Bombay’s film ecology supported heterogenous visions of the self and the future, among them ardent fantasies of individual choice in love, career, and lifestyle. The varying stakes of the energy concept allow us to revisit the talkie transition in India as an encounter between aspirations of industrial filmmaking, a dominant aesthetics of corporeal vitality, fantasies of selfhood, and a technological utopianism that subordinated certain bodies within the cine-ecology to the machine. In the next sections we look at various energist imaginaries circulating in late colonial films from Bombay. I draw on overlapping histories of filmic representation, visual culture, commodity circulation, and discursive fields such as advertisements, extant films, publicity materials, ethnographic literature, memoirs, colonial reports, and journalistic reportage to argue for the connection between representation and its material conditions. A N A E S T H E T I C S O F V I TA L I T Y, AN ENERGETIC CINE M A

In March 1939 Bombay Talkies studio released Nav Jeevan (New life), a comedy about a “weak, eccentric and uncertain” young man whose life is transformed by a “dream about his forefather’s bravery.”15 This reluctant hero, played by Rama Shukul, has a “manly handsome figure” but suffers “from an illusion of perpetual ill-health.”16 Mahendra’s hypochondria is announced in the opening shot of the film, a sixty-eightsecond-long take that begins with a close-up of a painting that depicts his ancestral fort and ends with Mahendra soliloquizing about the myriad ailments he suspects he will soon contract. In the middle we see

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figure 4.2 Rama Shukul self-medicates in the opening scene of Nav Jeevan (1939).

Mahendra sneeze and then select a bottle of pills from a crowded medicine chest. His performance of imagined physical affliction is counterpointed by the dynamic camera that remains mobile through the take, tracking in and out of paintings, humans, and furniture. Visual comedy is enhanced by the spectacle of a tall, young, broad-shouldered actor deploying gestural codes of diminution and displaying a physique that defies his hypochondriac monologue. In the next scene the family doctor diagnoses Mahendra’s hypochondria and recommends physical exercise as an antidote. The film then presents a series of comic scenes that use outdoor locations of leisure and youth activity as filmic attractions. We follow Mahendra as he visits a popular café, notices young men and women carrying tennis racquets, and then joins a tennis club to hilarious effect. This satire of a weak-spirited bourgeois young man, unused to modern regimes of physical culture, resonated with the popular-nationalist public discourse of the time. At least since the 1850s there was growing faith in physical culture as an important corrective to supposed 194

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“national weakness.” That Indians were a “feeble people” who had to be lifted “from the mire of physical decadence” was the view not only of the British colonizers but also of Indians who had internalized negative stereotypes of racial inferiority over years of orientalist-imperialist historiography, representation, and education.17A physical culture movement swept from Bengal to Maharashtra and could be evidenced in physical-fitness manuals and public lectures, modern revivals of yoga practices, gymnastics in schools and clubs, and bodybuilding contests. Cinema processed these currents into varied on-screen representations, such as a scene from a lost film, The Enemy (1931), produced by Sharda Film Company, where “The King of Amravati holds a great wrestling tournament on the occasion of the Dassera festival. And a wrestler from without the kingdom overthrows all the famous wrestlers of the court and claims the championship. The King bewails the unmanliness of his subjects because a stranger had defeated them all.”18 In a time when cinema was closely surveilled by the British government for any explicit messages of anticolonial resistance, such scenes of feudal benevolence threatened by a manly foreigner held coded political meaning. Wrestling itself had seen a resurgence in the twentieth century as a site for the rejuvenation of the “effete” Indian male, with the akhara coexisting alongside the modern gymnasium. The body of the champion wrestler, his Herculean strength, and impossible consumption became legendary carriers of a native pride that saw its most spectacular outpouring in the wrestling matches of Gama the Great, Ahmad Bux, Gholam Rusom Hind, and K. Ramamurthy.19 Their international victories against world champions from France, Switzerland, and Germany elevated them into “heroic symbol[s] of the Indian freedom struggle.”20 This contextual map provides some clues to the decision by one of India’s earliest filmmakers, H. S. Bhatavdekar, to record a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging Gardens as his debut filmic effort in 1899.21 Apart from narrative endorsements of wrestling and other sport cultures, Indian cinema’s emphasis on casting and showcasing beautiful bodies itself was read as significant by some commentators. R. C. Sawhney claims in the Lahore-based film magazine Cinema that “the screen’s greatest service to humanity” has been a focus on “Thy body beautiful,” and he goes on to suggest that this preoccupation served as “the strongest enchantment for the youths and its propaganda in the cause of Vit alit y | Jo sh

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health, loveliness and personal charm, thus stimulating exercise, sports and other healthy out doors pastimes.”22 The entanglements of film and physical culture thus move beyond the role of cinema as a representation of the world to cinema as an active agent in the world capable of its own mimetic imperative to viewers. This mimetic imperative depended on the visible health of the onscreen body, and film magazines routinely commented on the physicality of film stars in gendered terms. A Filmland commentator laments that “Sulochana of Queen of Love is not the Sulochana of Wild Cat of Bombay and Anarkali. Her graceful form and figure has waned and given place to a bit [sic] flabbiness. Only physical culture will bring back her original radiant beauty. We hope that our warning is not too late.”23 Actresses were required to be “delicate,” “slender,” and “graceful,” like the petite Devika Rani, Sitara, Hansa Wadkar, Padma, Pramilla, and Sabita Devi. Large-framed or bulky actresses such as stunt queen Fearless Nadia, mythological star Durga Khote, and social star Gohar were exceptions to the rules of feminine on-screen beauty.24 Whereas it was precisely physical bulk that was praised in male actors such as Sheikh Mukhtar, who had “molded his body so marvelously that at the age of only fourteen, Sheikh to the wonder of everybody attained six feet and one inch height—a marvelous body-building feat indeed!”25 Film journalists, eager to improve the public reputation of cinema, used health rhetoric to comment on the state of the “body politic” and advocate “better” films for better civic health. Typically, in the May 1932 issue of the Hindi film weekly Rangbhumi, the editor lambasts the “pessimistic youth” of the day as “aged youth” who find hopelessness everywhere when in fact it is they who are “weak” and “frightened by their own weakness,” sorely in need of building “self-confidence and strength.”26 In Nav Jeevan, Mahendra is unable to master sports such as tennis and becomes the laughingstock in smart clubs and fashionable parties. Desperate, he visits a con-man, a fake sadhu peddling hallucinogens in the name of medicinal tonics. The film now initiates a transmedial conversation on vitality in which cinema dialogues with print cultures— Mahendra first learns of the yogi’s tonics in an advertisement in a Hindi-language newspaper. Indeed, as we glimpsed with the Horlicks advertisement, newspapers of the day were overrun with advertisements for revitalizing tonics and pills. Everyday discourses of consumption, 196

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neurasthenia, fatigue, and loss of vitality were recurring anxieties fed by the channels of middle-class advertising as well as bazaar economies. Advertisements by the manufacturers of comprehensive cure “tonics” stressed “vitality” and “vigor” (also “vim”) as the key life capacities that were typically eroded by modern lifestyles. Tonics claimed to cure a range of physical conditions, including lassitude, “brain fag,” debility, exhaustion, nerve shock, neuralgia, mental exhaustion, “and all disorders consequent upon a reduced state of the nervous system.”27 Douglas Haynes has pointed to three sets of interlocking discourses of weakness within the middle-class imagination—popular theories of tropical medicine that centered on the weakness of nerves; orientalist ideas about the sexual degeneracy of natives and male potency; and the widely theorized British colonial construction of Indian elite as effeminate and physically inferior to the white ruling class.28 Nav Jeevan directly taps into these interlocking imaginaries of the native body particularly as they are inflected by class and caste. According to the logic of Nav Jeevan’s plot, Mahendra has two urgent reasons to address his imagined physical debility: domestic disorder produced by his inadequate disciplining of the servants, and his erotic desire for Menaka, a childhood friend. Mahendra must live up to his caste responsibilities and perform the role of a vigorous authoritarian master to his servants while also acquiring a suitable bride to propagate his family line. Menaka, however, has very particular views on her ideal mate, a “heroic knight-errant” only to be found in an imagined chivalric past. At her eighteenth birthday party, Menaka laments the state of India’s youth through sarcastic song, echoing the sentiments of the editor of Rangbhumi: The lady’s love, India’s glory These darling brave young men A cigarette in the mouth, spectacles on the nose Thin and lanky Or big and round With the gait of a rolling drum. They apply hair oil, drench their kerchiefs with perfume The name means “brave,” but the deeds spell “flattery” They bear abuse with toothy wide grins Vit alit y | Jo sh

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Where are those darling brave young men? Who gambled their lives for honor Who gave up their lives for love. Those darling brave young men of yore.29

Menaka’s character reinforces the connection between nervous depletion and masculine debility but turns the burden of contagion onto Westernized and modern consumption practices that marked elite urbanity. Sagar Movietone’s 300 Days (1938) similarly linked physical weakness with class. In a review, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas synopsized the plot thus: “A young millionaire who has been burning the candle at both ends suffers from conceit, sloth, and also, perhaps, indigestion and lack of appetite.” Another filmic doctor prescribes three hundred days of hard work as a cure. Abbas caustically pointed out that “now this may be a good film but it is bad economics and worse social analysis. Capitalists cannot be cured of the weaknesses of their class by 300 days of ‘roughing it!’ ”30 Menaka’s disdain for the weaknesses of contemporary youth leads her to a mythical-martial ideal of male bodily vigor, youth, and bravery. The terms of this vigor match the rhetoric of the fake sadhu who promises Mahendra the “strength of an elephant” and the “bliss of a new bridegroom,” further underlining the popular association of masculine energy with sexual virility. If, as art historian Robin Veder notes, “social modernity demanded people whose bodies moved quickly, with strength and purpose, to serve production,” then Nav Jeevan constructs a fictive urgency to the need for a heroic transformation of bodily energy to serve the needs of social reproduction—the formation of the heterosexual, conjugal couple.31 Historically, the cinematic emphasis on romantic couple formation is largely driven by the promise of modern individuation through the making of a private desiring self. Nav Jeevan’s couple has a decidedly public function. Here, the creation of the ideal couple is designed to serve the incipient nation, indeed, to bring it into being. After Mahendra partakes of the yogi’s hallucinogen he drifts into sleep and enters a reverie wherein he sees himself recast as one of his martial ancestors. The dream sequence is cinematically styled in the representational mode of Bombay’s historical action genre, and Menaka reappears as a damsel-in-distress whom Mahendra valiantly rescues from 198 Ene r g y

the clutches of an evil dacoit. Mahendra awakens from this pleasant reverie to find himself physically and psychologically emboldened to conquer the affections of the real-life Menaka. The film ends with the romantic couple’s wedding and the subsequent establishment of a new disciplinary order within Mahendra’s household. The father of the bride declares, “Bahadur baap-dada ke khoon ne aaj josh dikhaaya,” or “The blood of brave ancestors has shown its potency today.” The political agenda of such a cinematic sequence is quite clear: to rejuvenate the dispirited and lethargic youth of India in the name of a glorious past and recruit them in the service of anticolonial struggle. A similar emphasis on the production and reproduction of the body politic can be seen in the Wadia Brothers’ successful stunt film from 1940, Diamond Queen. The stunt film was the quintessential genre of profilmic vitality, and the reigning star of Wadia Movietone, Fearless Nadia, was the embodiment of the genre. Blonde, broad-shouldered, and blue-eyed, Nadia was a former circus acrobat of mixed ethnicity who ruled the Indian market for stunt films. In Diamond Queen, Nadia returns to her mofussil Diamond Town with a university education in Bombay and physical education in the city’s gymnasiums. She then proceeds to defeat various forces of evil that have been terrorizing her town and its people. While Nadia represents a vital social cleansing agent, a more conventional and decidedly slender female character, the local schoolteacher, represents social reproductive energies. In a fascinating paean to physical culture, Radha Rani leads a group of schoolchildren in a synchronized collective exercise drill. Dressed in a saree but wearing a scout scarf and holding a drill whistle, she sings of the importance of exercise as “the meaning of life.” The music is rousing and anthemic, with song lyrics that assert that “the brave are the glory of the nation, the weak are its enemies.” This song sequence demonstrates a faith in the power of physical regimes of fitness to produce a vibrant nation as embodied in its children. The utopian energy represented here is what queer theorist Lee Edelman would call “reproductive futurism,” a “collective fantasy that invests the social order with meaning” through the futurity of the child.32 Compositionally, we get repeat shots of the students through perspectival framing—from behind arches and other architectural elements that create a distance between the students and the viewer and present a telescopic view of the nation’s future—these Vit alit y | Jo sh

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Figures 4.3a, 4.3b, and 4.3c Radha Rani practices the daily physical drill with her young students in Diamond Queen (Homi Wadia, 1940).

figures 4.3a, 4.3b, and 4.3c (continued)

able-bodied and vigorous children. Shots are composed to give a sense of the oblivious hustle of the everyday world of adults in the background.33 As spectators, we are positioned as astute viewers who can decode the momentous nature of the scene we are witnessing. Though dispersed across two distinct genres, both Diamond Queen and Nav Jeevan reconfigure current discourses of physical fitness as national strength that had to be consolidated in the service of nationalism. From the invention of a mythic martial past in Nav Jeevan to modern techniques of the disciplined and militarized body in Diamond Queen, an aesthetics of vitality as heroic resistance resonates across films from late colonial Bombay. Valentina Vitali has discussed onscreen representations of physical energy in stunt films of this period as part of decolonizing India’s industrialization drive. She selects the “action ingredient” in the stunt genre to ground her critique.34 Widening the scope of “action,” I suggest that we approach such scenes and images as part of a circulating mode, a broader aesthetics of energy that permeates the cinema of this time and cuts across genre boundaries. With vitality as our techno-aesthetic frame, we start to notice Vit alit y | Jo sh

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resonances and patterns: images of synchronized labor in Room No. 9 (1946); military images of armed formations in Rajput Ramani (1936); a young housewife who repeatedly strikes an energetic posture of defiance and voices resistance in Duniya Na Mane (1937); weary factory workers in Roti (1942); joyful attitudes of collective rural reconstruction in Bandhan (1940); or even a singing saint who exudes a beatific energy that ultimately propels him skyward into the heavens in Sant Tukaram (1936). All these energetic postures hold allegorical meaning for a decolonizing, modernizing, and heterogeneous collective. The conventions of mainstream commercial cinema’s a-realist logics demanded an aesthetic of continuous dynamic, exuberant activity. An aesthetics of vitality is surely not unique to Indian cinema at this time; nor are its meanings universal. The particular inflections and implications of vitality in Bombay cinema of its time are layered by context and conjuncture.35 FA N TA S I E S O F M OT I O N A N D T E C H N O - S H O C K ON THE SCREEN

As filmmakers and audiences started to examine the specific advantages of the medium, the movement of the camera and the editing of shots were identified as the key building blocks of cinema that differentiated it from theater, painting, and photography. As we saw in chapter 2, these debates were crucial to the stabilization of a new art form anxious to delineate its formal boundaries. Commentators such as S. C. Gupta declared: “In the early years of its existence, film was merely an interesting invention by which it was possible to record all movements. Films of those days were simple fixations of movements, of a train, crowds passing by on the street and so forth.” Gupta went on to state that a truly cinematic mode of recording would not allow movement to simply take place before an inert camera but would dynamize the camera itself. With changed lenses and movement, “at last the camera received, as if, a charge of life and was transformed from a mere spectator to an active observer.”36 This idea, of the camera as an animated, and animating, vital apparatus, adds another vector to our study of energy in the cine-ecology. The fragmented archive of early talkie cinema bears traces of an emerging consciousness about technological specificity in terms of 202 Ene r g y

formal experimentation with a dynamic camera. In the surviving four minutes of footage from the action film Vantolio/Whirlwind (J. B. H. Wadia, silent, 1933), we see clumsy but clear efforts to dynamize the camera as well as the frame. From rapid pans and indecisive tilts to multiple confident camera placements (high angle, in a moving car, atop a speeding train), the film frame registers every profilmic movement as it quivers and shakes in sync with the human action. Rajput Ramani (Keshavrao Dhaiber, 1936), an extant historical film, opens with a brief scene of intense battle between two opposing armies. Rapid cuts and varying shot magnifications and angles build a sense of on-screen kinetic energy. The next sequence, in which the victorious king enters his court, makes camera mobility a priority, and the scene unfolds in a long tracking shot that underlines the spatial power relations of the court as we follow the movement of the king’s body. This new understanding of the cinematic imbrications of spaces, bodies, and technological motion introduced a new actor into filmic narratives. Modern technology asserted itself as a protagonist or antagonist to reckon with in fictive dramas of human life. Trains, cars, telephones, radios, industrial machinery, airplanes, trucks, gramophone players, and cameras abound in late silent and early talkie films. Interestingly, “technology’s body,” as it were, to borrow a rich concept from Mary Ann Doane, is legible in the cinema only when it encounters the human body.37 Fight sequences are therefore choreographed in or around moving machines such as cargo ships and trains (Passing Show, 1936; Miss Frontier Mail, 1936), lovers mediate their passions through telephone wires (Industrial India, 1938; Jeevan Naiya, 1936), and even human memory is restored when familiar songs are replayed on the gramophone (Jeevan Prabhat, 1937). The recurrence of technological actors referenced utopian desires for machinic futures where the self, the couple, or the collective may find liberation. Bombay Talkies’ debut feature film, Jawani ki Hawa (Franz Osten, 1935), is set almost entirely inside a train. It is a social film that deals with the practice of arranged marriage and the frustrated desires of educated young men and women seeking marital union across class divides.38 The lead couple elope in the first act of the film and board a train that will ostensibly transport them to an independent future. The train serves as the embodiment of modernity and social transformation as it steadily moves the protagonists away from a traditional past and Vit alit y | Jo sh

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the authoritarian father-patriarch into a space of freedom and selffulfillment. Almost 80  percent of the film is situated inside a train, largely inside a long dining car where a series of songs, dances, and cabarets are performed as part of in-train entertainment; the film spectator watches the train passengers watching shows. This technique is a metacinematic articulation of early cinema’s promise of continuous movement and spectacular display. The vitality of the romantic couple is restrained in their acting and the gestural language of their bodies. Instead, their erotic charge is overtaken and reified in the rhythmic motion of the train and the serial entertainments on view. Other bodies, of dancers, singers, and comedians, take on the work of representing the arousal and anticipation of the lead couple even as the train itself embodies a desire for continuously straining forward, away from societal and familial constraints. As we saw in Nav Jeevan and in Diamond Queen, the vital force of the reproductive couple is essential for the construction of a dynamic future. And yet the train’s continuous journey is

figure 4.4 Kamla (Devika Rani) looks out onto the Western ghats from a moving train in a scene from Jawani ki Hawa (The Spirit of youth) (Franz Osten, 1935). 204

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unable to lead the lovers into a seamless future. A man is found dead on board the train and the journey comes to an abrupt halt. The heroine’s father, having followed the couple onto the train, dies of a heart attack. The death of the father and the interruption of the continuous forward motion of the train become necessary for the eloping couple to be reconciled with their families and return into the social fold, with blessings from the mother. Jawani ki Hawa dramatizes discontinuity but also insists on a particular reconciliation between the past and future.39 Apart from the ubiquitous train, fast-moving cars also served as critical agents of self-discovery, even public good, in films of the 1930s. In Miss 1933 (Chandulal Shah, 1933), the romantic couple is first acquainted thanks to the machinations of their automobiles. When Jayant’s car splashes mud all over Kusum and her motorcar, a comic prelude to romance is set off. Passing Show (Dwarka Khosla, 1936) features a modern-day Robin Hood figure called “Passing Show” who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. A climactic car crash offers an opportunity to evade police surveillance as the officials believe the fugitive Passing Show to have died in the accident. Thus begins a new phase in Passing Show’s career in the illegal liberation of ill-gotten funds. Sansar Naiya (Nanubhai Vakil, 1939) takes matters into the realm of the supernatural when the romantic hero dies in a car crash, only to emerge as an ardent ghost intent on reuniting with his college sweetheart. Ghost and car now become the highlight of the film, with several sequences of “driverless” cars and flying vehicles demonstrating the ghost’s freedom of mobility as well as his inability to let go of the trappings of earthly desire. Popular stunt filmmakers Wadia Movietone went so far as to credit a Ford nicknamed “Rolls Royce ki Beti” in their opening credits and publicity materials.40 These are just a few examples of the range of opportunities embodied in human encounters with the motorcar, many of which refer to tropes of personal or social fulfillment. It is worth noting that energetic confrontations with technology in these films often take the shape of physical and psychic shocks with transformative effects. In Jawani ki Hawa, the heroine Kamla’s reintegration into social legibility and productivity is activated by a series of sensory-perceptual shocks. From the initial shock of crowds at the train station, to the erotically charged performances in the train saloon, to the radio broadcast Vit alit y | Jo sh

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of news of her sensational elopement scandal, to the abrupt cessation of the train’s technologic motion and her hopes of escape, and finally to the improvised legal trial in a police station, Kamla suffers multiple psychic shocks relayed by urban crowds, entertainment, mass media, transportation, and criminal investigation. This list of shocks maps readily onto theorizations of modernity and the mediated city by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, and Siegfried Kracauer. Approached through a sensory-perceptual lens, the embodied experience of the European metropolis was marked by speed and mobility effected through technological inventions of mass transit systems, the industrial restructuring of work and leisure hours, increasing emphasis on consumerism, and redefinitions of social relations and gender roles—all driven by the logic of industrial capitalism. The modern city was a phantasmagoric experience of advertising displays, fashion, crime, cinema, and the overwhelming ubiquity of the “crowd”—an experience that is said to have fundamentally altered the modern body’s perceptions of space-time relations. For Kracauer and Benjamin, the instant, the distracted gaze, fleeting encounters, shocks, and surfaces came to underscore the experience of the modern metropolis. As Ben Singer amply demonstrates, modernity as marked by “hyperstimulus” was believed to have had peculiar neurological effects on the human sensorium by presenting a “fundamentally different register of subjective experience, characterized by the physical and perceptual shocks of the modern urban environment.”41 Distraction, as the chief new mode of sensory engagement with the world, could potentially destroy the cultural power of institutionalized “auratic” art, especially the regime of contemplation. But distraction could also lead to an attenuated quality of everyday experience and memory itself. Indeed, shock emerged as the central category for an aesthetic theory of modernity from Benjamin to the Futurists. The human body’s encounters with technology yielded imaginaries that included utopian fantasies of machinic efficiency and dreams of prosthetic enhancement, as also fears of accident, sensory saturation and attenuation, and a bewildering disorientation in the face of a fragmented everyday. Cinema performed a key role in this discursive history—as protagonist, antagonist, as well as deus ex machina. Striking a cautionary note within this debate, Mary Ann Doane reminds us that “the body at issue in these discourses of cine-modernity 206

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as threat, assault, and failure is a sexually and racially unspecified body. Such a configuration always suggests that what one is dealing with is, in fact, the white male body.” Doane argues that “the spectacular deployment of the female body in cinema” is a buffering mechanism that distances the male spectator’s body from the visceral shocks depicted on the screen. Thus some bodies, marked by racial and gendered otherness, “take on what modernity has specified as the burdens of contingency and embodiment.”42 Over and over again, it is the body of the modern Indian woman that serves as the locus of modernity’s dangers in Bombay cinema. Kamla is determined to marry for love but has little experience of the disciplinary gaze of society and state apparatuses. Despite her education, she emerges as a modern subject only when she leaves home and encounters the train, landscape as a passing show, the forensic imagination of the police, the isolating and criminalizing gaze of the courtroom, and the blistering publicity of sensationalist newspapers and radio broadcasts that report on her elopement. Disembodied and distributed across multiple medial platforms, Kamla must rechannel her vital energies toward a reconstitution of the desiring self and provide a reassuring image of the possibility of surviving modernity’s shocks. R E F L E X I V I T Y: E N E R G E T I C E N C O U N T E R S A N D T H E S U B J E C T- I N- H I S TO RY

Walter Benjamin’s intriguing concept of “innervation” offers a way to theorize the radical political possibilities of biocultural energy transfer. For Benjamin, innervation is an “antidote” to sensory alienation caused by the shocks of the modern technological environment; it can “pierce the scar tissue formed to protect the human senses in the adaptation to the regime of capitalist technology” and reawaken sensory experience, affect, and memory.43 Innervation thus becomes a key and underdiscussed third affect in the dialectical tension between distraction and contemplation, aesthetic susceptibility and anesthetic self-protection. In Miriam Hansen’s rereading of this concept, cinematic innervation is a “two-way process or transfer” wherein the psychic energies produced by the screen can be converted into motoric energy and at the same time recover the affective energy that is lost in the workaday cycle.44 Vit alit y | Jo sh

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What is of pertinence to me is the fact that, as Robert Ryder points out, the body for Benjamin is not simply an individual human body but a collective assemblage that is continuous across exterior and interior, screen and viewer, technology and human.45 Innervation, in this form, reminds us of art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy’s discussion of the Pali word samvega, which he describes as “the shock or wonder that may be felt when the perception of a work of art becomes a serious experience.” In an essay in 1943 Coomaraswamy parses the art-theoretical implications of samvega as it unfolds from his study of South Asian classical texts. The word finds varying nuanced usage in Buddhist scripture to indicate the “state of shock, agitation, fear, awe, wonder or delight induced by some physically or mentally poignant experience.” In a beautiful example, the young prince Siddhartha notices dew for the first time and learns that it is an evanescent natural phenomenon, disappearing in a matter of hours. This observation leads to a radical realization of the temporality of human life itself and the prince resolves to “turn to the life of a wandering monk.” Coomaraswamy is keen to pursue this second implication of samvega, as a stimulus to realization, and insists that though this shock is a “state of feeling” it is “always more than a merely physical reaction.”46 In Bombay Hustle I follow an expanded approach to the body, refusing to separate it from consciousness, and hence the concept of samvega becomes important as a South Asian precedent for thinking of the somatic locus of reflexivity. Of course, samvega belongs to a world long before cinema, but it returns us to the body in a way similar to the EuroAmerican media studies concept of shock. Both the Benjaminian concept of innervation and Coomaraswamy’s description of samvega offer us ways to rethink ideological (anticapitalist for Benjamin) and sensoryphilosophical (anti-illusory for Coomaraswamy) reflexivity as rooted in the body and affective encounters.47 In the rest of this chapter I use the term innervation to indicate the juxtaposition of Benjamin with a deeper philosophical genealogy of aesthetic thrill as detailed by Coomaraswamy. A poster for the stunt film Diamond Queen (1940) proclaims: “Films that induce lethargy belong elsewhere, my Diamond Queen is not one of those!”48 The idea that certain types of films could induce lethargy was of a piece with the excitement and simultaneous suspicion 208

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figure 4.5 Fearless Nadia announces that her film will energize audiences in this Diamond Queen poster. (National Film Archive of India)

of technological modernity. Distancing Diamond Queen from such enervating films, the poster suggests that watching thrilling scenes of energetic action and collision could have direct somatic benefits. Far from enervating audiences with a sensory overload, an energetic cinema was considered necessary for the tired viewing publics of an impoverished colony. Much as the filmic content and aesthetic strategies discussed earlier helped visualize an ideal future polity, film-as-tonic could experientially revitalize present-day audiences in the off-screen world. As a circulating imaginary, the idea of cinema “as both symptom of the historical process and sensory-reflexive horizon for dealing with its effects” was pervasive in India since the 1920s and manifested in various forms.49 Nevertheless, there are situated and historical layers to these transnational ideas of the cine-somatic. On December 21, 1927, E. Villiers, a representative of the European Association in Calcutta, testified before the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC). Even though Villiers had never watched an Indian film in an Indian cinema theater, he had some strong opinions on the impression that graphic images could have on the native mind. To push back against his infantilizing assumptions about the supposedly susceptible native spectator, the chairman of the ICC suggested that cinema offered poor native viewers the “benefit of travel [that can] open their eyes,” and hence local audiences should be exposed to all manner of Western film. The chairman, T. Rangachariar, indicated that native viewers not only were capable of discerning between wide sets of visual information but could also actively engage with films as a mode of pedagogy and travel. Nevertheless, Rangachariar replaced one set of racial assumptions for another and continued: “You know our people have got a very poor outlook on life. They adopt a low standard of living and they are very sadly wanting in hygienic methods. If they see scenes like that [Les Folies Bergeres] and other things, that would open their eyes to their own lack of energy.” By his logic, one of the edifying possibilities of cinema was to confront Indian audiences with energetic scenes of Western life which, in turn, would compel them to confront their own lethargic and dispirited existence. Adopting the terms of colonial stereotypes of lazy, sluggish native workers, the Indian chairman recommended the robustness of British and American films. Indeed, Rangachariar believed that “if cinemas are to produce a healthy influence on society, the 210

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spiritual intuition of the East must be harnessed to the energy of the West.”50 What constitutes the “energy of the West”? Rangachariar’s backand-forth with Villiers indicates that he thought scenes from the Folies Bergeres, the fashionable entertainment salon in Paris known for its cabaret revues, acrobatics, and dance performances, would confront Indian audiences with the energetic Western body. This is the body as spectacle, typically the near-nude female body, which posed a scandalous sight for some censors but was an informative, mimetic sight for Rangachariar. For him, such scenes had an “artistic value” and the “best society” of Europe partook of these visual pleasures, demonstrating to Rangachariar a connection between young, athletic, flexible female bodies and the dynamism of industrial Europe.51 The suggestion appears to be that spectacular geometrical displays of the “body beautiful” could rejuvenate local masses into energetic production. To be sure, it is exactly this connection that Kracauer critiqued in his essay on the “mass ornament” in which he suggested that the production culture of the 1920s was starkly embodied in the “indissoluble girl clusters” of revues such as the Tiller Girls, “whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.”52 Kracauer saw the mass ornament as a surface symptom of the alienating, abstracting effects of a capitalist society that demanded a particular physical repertoire of the worker but also kept the worker unaware of the social relations of production. Unsurprisingly, Rangachariar’s cinema beneficiaries were restricted to India’s poor and working classes who had no other access to scenes of Western life. It was this class of (male) viewers that became the focus of film commentators in late colonial India. Taking on the charge that cinema promotes crime, K. T. Dalvi wrote in 1931 that “it has been definitely proved that the Cinema has, on the contrary, helped to decrease crime by keeping the lower strata of the society engaged for a few hours in a cheap and innocent form of amusement.” Dalvi, an exhibitor by trade, was effectively saying that cinema allowed the proletariat to reproduce itself and resist the slide into lumpenism or worse. He illustrated his point by giving the example of a Bombay mill-laborer: The poor man works the whole day in the mill and to keep his spirits up he requires some amusement. He goes to the nearest Vit alit y | Jo sh

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Cinema in Parel and for about two hours sees the film, say, Bhakta Prahlad. The devotion of Prahlad towards God impresses him very much and makes him feel better when he goes to his humble tenement in the Naigam Development chawls imbued with the spirit of devotion to God. He had only to spend three annas to get this better feeling!53

Voila! Cinema rejuvenates the worker and imbues him with “better feelings” that make even the Naigaum chawls seem agreeable. The language of bodily betterment through cinema fits into the rhetoric of national development through indigenous industry discussed in chapter 2. The productive body of a willing proletariat was essential to this vision. Be it foreign images of the Folies Bergère or visual invocations of local religious legends, the movement of images on the screen was said to be doing somatic work on viewers. The cine-somatic desires of the chairman of a colonial fact-finding committee, film producers, and exhibitors sought to validate cinema in the name of bourgeois self-interest and the social reproduction of labor power. There was a gap, however, between discursive constructions of ideal cine-somatic relations of the worker-citizen and screen and the highly differentiated experiences of actually existing viewers. A reflexive understanding of the links between reality and representation was, in fact, promoted by cinema itself. Filmmaking as practice and industry had been a popular subject for films since the 1910s. Dadasaheb Phalke, a pioneer of Indian cinema, popularized the Hindu mythological genre in the silent period. The legendary commercial success of his films, such as Raja Harishchandra (1913), Lanka Dahan (1917), Shree Krishna Janma (1918), and Kaliya Mardan (1919), has contributed to an enduring perception of early Indian audiences as aesthetically naïve image-worshippers. Instead, it serves us well to consider other experiments, such as Phalke’s own short How Films Are Made (1917), to locate a self-reflexive impulse in the earliest years of cinema in India. Placed alongside the opening sequence of Kaliya Mardan, where Phalke’s daughter Mandakini reveals her acting repertoire and her costumedependent transformation into the boy Krishna, Phalke positions cinema as an art-industrial form capable of visual illusionism.

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Such an archival juxtaposition helps us recognize the peculiar coexistence of mythic material with a techno-modern industrial apparatus, where viewers needed only a few sparse signs to enter into a familiar world of mythology while also delighting in the newness of the technology that relayed the signs.54 We recognize a canny audience of religious consumers, used to an economy of darshan at religious sites, now channeled into noisy, dark, bustling cinema theaters marked by the interruption of technological spectacle.55 Willy Haas, a Czech-German writer and scenarist who migrated to Bombay during the Nazi purge of European Jews, notes this heterodox sensorium in his memoirs. Haas recalls an unusual experience of going to a cinema theater in the “Indian Bazar” area of Bombay, “a colossal, old bazaar building filled to capacity with a loud and excitable audience,” where “Europeans never entered.” Of course, this story also features the ubiquitous train: It was a railway tragedy. Many dances and songs—most of them of a religious nature—had extended the plot to a not insignificant extent. At the dramatic climax, the wife of the poor railwayman, plagued by hunger and concern for her children, lay down with them on the tracks to commit suicide. And as the train began to approach, the god Krishna appeared on the screen, brightly colored, his longhaired head topped with a golden diadem. He was entirely covered with jewelry and held a flute in his hand. The audience welcomed his appearance with frenetic applause. First he held up the oncoming express train with a majestic hand gesture. Then he spoke to the desperate woman with mild words and instilled her with newfound optimism and faith in God. She returned home. The audience rejoiced and raved.56

Haas remembers being perplexed by the introduction of the divine into a modern context. As Valentina Vitali notes, however, the films of Phalke and his contemporaries “suggest that Hindu mythology was perceived not in tension with notions of Indian modernization, but as a factor instrumental to its realization.”57 Haas’s description of the film’s plot and structure matches descriptions of Indian cinema as “a cinema of interruptions,” a digressive form with episodic plot structure,

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Figures  4.6a, 4.6b, and 4.6c Miss Mandakini Phalke in Kaliya Mardan (D. G. Phalke, 1917).

figures 4.6a, 4.6b, and 4.6c (continued)

irruptive song sequences, and half-time intermissions.58 The workingclass viewers in the Indian Bazaar neighborhood were quite at ease with the discontinuities of time, place, and affect that so perturbed Haas. These historical viewers in Bombay cannot be fixed as naïve devotees or apathetic spectators. Rather, they routed their religiosity through the invigorating spectacle of cinema with a distinctly modern enthusiasm. The idea of the self as cine-worker generated its own charge and was caught up in similar heterotemporalities. In an anonymized article about shooting on location in Rajputana, a crew member of the Bengalbased British Dominion Films recalls his excitement as they approached the location by train: “There was a sense of pride in us as we watched the approaching land, conscious that we too, in our humble way were engaged in a mission to preserve for posterity a glimpse of that ancient valor, heroism and sacrifice.” He goes on to detail how a local Rajput resident arrived on set one day and gifted them a real sword. This Rajput was offended by the use of fake tin swords in their shooting and reminded them of the historic burden that a film like theirs had to bear. Vit alit y | Jo sh

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In that moment, every crew member, from the actor holding the sword to the actresses, director, cinematographer, and producer, “felt a touch of something else” as reality collided with fiction in a physical place saturated with legend.59 Cinema was enjoined to perpetuate ethnohistory, and an assemblage of film workers articulated with a material place to feel the affective call of Indian antiquity.60 Cinema also had the potential to visibilize the encounter between human and machine as it occurred at the site of spectatorship. This reflexive potential is highlighted in Nav Jeevan, which eschewed the stunt genre and embraced urbane comic satire. In its presentation of an oneiric fantasy that catalyzes a dreamer-viewer into action, Nav Jeevan presents a metacinematic theory of innervating spectatorship. It is only by entering into a movie-like dream that Mahendra is able to visualize a future predicated on bravery and energetic action. He awakens transformed and revitalized. Moreover, by using the conventions of the historical adventure film in the dream sequence, Nav Jeevan distances the main diegesis from the dream narrative through formal contrasts in genre conventions, explicitly calling on the spectator’s knowledge of different filmic genres to produce humor. Cinema, in this instance, is simultaneously a dream-machine and a call to action; it awakens repressed memories of the past archived in the subconscious, even as it announces a canny understanding of a cross-generic fictive enterprise. Mahendra’s drug-induced dream makes a direct comment about the meaning of cinematic history as a utilitarian and innervating force. It helps the hero of the future activate his incipient energy by understanding his role in a national past. By locating the spectator within direct or tangential genealogies of energy, cinematic innervation works here not only as an antidote to the present but as a catalyst of a forgotten (even fictitious) past. Mimetic innervation, initially a way out of the attention-alienation dichotomy, now provides us a way to approach the embodied spectator as a subject-in-history. In chapter 2 we discussed the increasing interest among film commentators and magazine readers in the specificities of the medium. The linearity of the moving image, a serial succession of twenty-four still frames per second, had become a matter of great general interest. In the Euro-American context, theories about “persistence of vision” (the idea that the machinic movement of still images at a fixed speed creates the 216

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Figures  4.7a– f Nav Jeevan’s central dream sequence about an abducted princess locked up in a tower, featuring Rama Shukul and Hansa Wadkar.

Figures 4.7a– f (continued)

Figures 4.7a– f (continued)

illusion of continuous motion) abounded. As Mary Ann Doane suggests, these theories signaled an inscription of the failure of human vision to discern discrete moments, and hence a need for prosthetic compensation for this bodily deficiency.61 In the context of Bombay, however, it appears that the idea of filmic linearity was embraced for its very discreteness rather than for illusions of continuity. A publicity booklet for Naya Sansar (1941) uses the idea of film as a linear series of discrete events to telling effect: “Premchand’s eyes were finally opened, and just like images flashing by on a screen he saw the past sequence of events and realized that his momentary weakness had resulted in such a terrible result. His repressed ideals shouted out . . . his conscience was awakened—and Premchand was once again the old Premchand; devotee of high ideals, embodiment of sacrifice.”62 To be able to see your life as a series of discrete events edited together in continuous and orderly forward motion is to intuit the origins of present failure. Premchand, the formerly principled editor of a daily newspaper, has a cinematic epiphany and recognizes his errors. This recognition enables him to reclaim his former sense of idealism and social purpose. Indeed, it is the moving image as metaphor as well as a mediating force that catalyzes this revelation. In the context of colonial India, the possibilities of the technological encounter went far beyond its psychic-ideological benefits for an individual or a class, the enervated self or the tired proletariat. Nav Jeevan points out how cinema was viewed as a rejuvenating tonic for nothing less than history itself, a revitalizer of subconscious (and mythic) collective memory now repurposed as national history. It is through the encounter with modernity that tradition is reinvented. And thus we come full circle. The cinematic dream in Nav Jeevan activated more than a recovery of manliness and masculine national pride in its hero. It represented the technologically mediated activation of desires for the past, a historiographic revisionism that announced its legitimacy on the terrain of modernity. Early talkie cinema repeatedly addressed its spectator in a sensory-corporeal register that sought to innervate the modern subject into historical awakening and action. Be it invocations of a Hindu mythic past, fantasies of a romantic future, adventures in a fairytale Arabian Orient, dreams of a militarized civic body, or participation in the cine-workforce as a route to modernity, film in India was mobilized as a vehicle to reconcile multiple temporalities. The feeling of 220

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being in two places at the same time, or inhabiting two temporal planes in the same place, is a form of reflexive recognition. To understand that one is a consumer as well as a worker, that the deity on screen is produced by a manmade machine, requires an uncanny intuition, one that may be called “cinematic.” The notion of the cinematic, as I have been discussing in this book, is an emergent embodied sensation; an experience of the modern world as deeply imbricated in and indeed enabled by a techno-industrial assemblage dedicated to creating fictional representations of the world—called cinema. S L O W I N G D O W N, O R , A T I R E D F I L M S E T

The production of cinematic energy and its depletion are both consequences of practice. In My Name Is Radha, Manto constructs a fascinating mise-en-scène of everyday practice in a film studio. Crucial to the story of Neelam and Rajkishore is Manto’s gradual mapping of the spatial production of the film studio through a constellation of practices and relations. We travel with Neelam and Rajkishore from the central studio compound to the local tea shop just outside, the recording room to the rehearsal room, the processing lab to the set, and built spaces start to reverberate with the erotic tensions between the two. Manto stays attuned to the little meanings that emerge in the spaces between people and things, or even between people and the weather, the meanings of alignments and misalignments. For example, how do bodies react to the film set? At a crucial moment in the story Manto creates an atmospheric portrait of a tired film set: “After each dialogue was shot, the electric lights would glow and dim with a monotony that was tiring, shouts of ‘start’ and ‘cut’ would rise, and by evening when it was time to shoot the climax, Rajkishore took Neelam’s hand with a romantic gesture.”63 The film set comprises the mechanical film apparatus of the camera, sound recorder, lights, and reflectors as well as human bodies, props, architecture, make-up, and costumes. By identifying the rhythmic, relentless work of electric lights on the film set as an agent of human exhaustion, Manto comes close to suggesting a theory of production experience that transcends ontological boundaries. Recursivity, as a mode of human-nonhuman relationality, helps us better understand the role of energy in ecologies of film production. Vit alit y | Jo sh

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figure  4.8 Meera and Mumtaz Ali rehearse a scene for Vachan (Franz Osten, 1938). (Josef Wirsching Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

Recursivity refers to repetition with self-referentiality, a steady feedback loop wherein a cultural technique or form sustains itself by learning to name itself. Manto’s use of time in Mera Naam Radha Hai exposes some recursive operations inside the film studio. This recursivity yields another embodied intuition—that of inhabiting the emergent historical position of the self as cine-worker. If early Bombay cinema was a historically and locationally specific cine-ecology, a dense media assemblage of technologies, techniques, aesthetics, institutions, spaces, publics, and affects, then Manto shows us how to think time and duration within this ecology. His literary style is akin to Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, in which “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”64 Neelam and Rajkishore are acquainted at the start of the monsoons in June, and each stage of their relationship is marked by the recursive rhythms of the rain and the working life of the studio. Sets get painted 222

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and sets dry, actors wait for the next shooting schedule, studio cats get fed, the monsoon presses on, sets continue to dry, more rounds of tea are ordered. The space of the studio turns into a fleshy and continuous present, a time that strains against the leash, aching to move forward. Manto transitions from one intimate event to another using temporal markers such as “when we were working on the third set,” or “when the paint on the fourth set had dried.” The painting and drying of sets emerges as a repetitive operation that defines the experience of film work by breaking it up into discrete periods of time. Time inside the studio becomes production time, measured in terms of specific tasks and stages of filmmaking, connected to paint, wood, and weather. Film trade journals of the period tell us that such a material marking of production time permeated broader discussions of film industrial activity. Ranjit Movitone’s monthly bulletin frequently mentioned the change and construction of sets to indicate the passage of time in reports such as this: “The Studio is so much ‘thrilled’ with the [success] of Soldier’s Sweetheart—that every body is in a breezy mood. The characters believe that they are still in the ‘sets’—but those ‘sets’ are dumped, and different ‘sets’ are taking place.”65 The transition from one film set to another is discontinuous and disconcerting, even as it marks a new phase of work and a new time in the life of the film studio. Manto further extends the markers of production time into the realm of climate by invoking weather as a temporal index. My Name Is Radha is continually propelled (or interrupted?) by statements such as, “I don’t remember which month it was and what the date. All I can recall is that the fifth set for Jungle Beauty was being erected and the rains were in full force when [Neelam suddenly got a high fever].” This is an active, experiential time, a time embodied by both human and environmental activity. This ecological understanding of production time is further consolidated when Manto notes the geographical contingencies of filmmaking in Bombay city: In Bombay the monsoon starts in June and continues till the middle of September. The first couple of months the rain comes down so hard that it’s impossible to work in the studio. The shooting of Ban ki Sundari had started towards the end of April. We were just about finishing the third set when the rains broke on us. Only one Vit alit y | Jo sh

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small scene that had no dialogues remained, so we kept shooting. Once that ended, we were at a loose end for months. / This provided many opportunities for people to spend time together.66

As I discuss in chapter 6, the monsoon has had a fundamental role in shaping Bombay’s cinematic landscape. The monsoons affect studio activity in two direct ways, both arising from the special infrastructural realities of Bombay film studios. First, the poor soundproofing of film studios of the 1930s meant that torrential monsoon rain would disrupt attempts to record “clean,” controlled sound and speech. Second, the civic infrastructures of the city regularly broke down during the monsoons, resulting in massive flooding of city streets that physically prevented employees from getting to work. Film production was forced to stop in order to accommodate a seasonal climate phenomenon. For Manto, the cessation of one kind of production activity created opportunities for film workers to encounter one another in a different mode. The rains produced an altered social space, and the studio’s workers congregated in Gulab’s restaurant for “idle” hours of tea and gossip. Gulab’s tea shop became a place to hang out and provided a shelter from the rain that welcomed bedraggled, drenched humans, Niaz Muhammad’s cats Chunni and Munni, and a host of flies. It becomes impossible, in Manto’s description, to approach cinematic practice without addressing the specificities of location and climate, the interrelations between human activity, urban infrastructure, and environmental behavior. The monsoon-induced inclusivity of Gulab’s restaurant is radically altered when Rajkishore enters the space. “The minute he crossed the threshold with his tall, athletic body, everyone’s eyes suddenly lit up, but not mine. The young male extras immediately got up to offer Raj Bhai their seats. Once he sat down, everyone crowded around him like so many moths.”67 The monsoon is also the time when Neelam and Rajkishore start to spend more time together, culminating in Neelam’s complete infatuation with Rajkishore. Neelam, a debutante junior actress who is repeatedly cast in the highly sexualized role of the “vamp,” keenly feels the industrial hierarchy that separates her from the reigning studio star, Rajkishore. Particularly vexing for Neelam are Rajkishore’s flirtatious attempts at charming her in private and simultaneous disavowals 224

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of attraction when the two are in the public eye. Neelam grows dispirited with his contradictory behavior, and matters reach a tense climax when the two have to shoot a romantic scene together. Under the expectant gaze of the film’s crew, Rajkishore takes Neelam’s hand but deftly turns it and kisses his own hand to publicly demonstrate his moral superiority as a chastely married and “respectable” male star. This is a defining moment for Neelam, who feels sexually humiliated by this ostentatious performance. Her infatuation dissipates. Why does Manto connect this moment of romantic disillusionment with the tiring repetitive operations of the cinematic apparatus? As we know, metacinematic films about filmmaking are often aimed at whetting fan curiosity about the “glamor” industry and constitute an important subgenre in cinema.68 These films typically feature starry-eyed female extras, cynical producers, and harried directors to suggest that cinema’s main effect on its workers might be a loss of innocence. If we read Manto’s story as part of this subgenre, might we find a way to unpack this loss of innocence in terms of energy and its dissipation? Following Manto’s cue, I suggest that we read textual representations of metacinematic disillusionment on a continuum with the on-set and off-screen enervation of bodies and things. The daily wear and tear that constitutes film practice creates the conditions for an intuitive recognition of the unequal social relations within the cine-ecology. On one hand, Manto enables an ecological theory of filmmaking, and on the other, he also suggests a way to pose political questions about hierarchy and labor exploitation in the film industry. Robert Stam’s rereading of the literary chronotope could well apply to Manto’s short story, where time and things-in-time mediate “the historical and the artistic, providing fictional environments where historically specific constellations of power are made visible.”69 Neelam’s epiphany occurs at a limit point of repetition—exhaustion mingled with the hope that something will change—and the fact that nothing changes is the final catalyst for awareness. Rajkishore pulls a classic Rajkishore move, confirming his identity within the cine-ecology as a star whose self-definition rests on the continual performance of his public image. At the same time, Neelam intuits the coextension of her body with the technical objects surrounding her and finally understands the true nature of the relation between Rajkishore and herself, between her body and the body of Vit alit y | Jo sh

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technology. Collective exhaustion becomes the condition of possibility for critical reflexivity. Reflexivity is a privileged mode of being in studies of art and the avant-garde. It is generally understood as the critical awareness of the self as subject, a canny consciousness and distance from the practices and worlds that the subject encounters. The concept rests on the assumption of mind-body dualism. Instead, via Manto, I look to embodied recursivity as a condition for resistance, a somatic awareness gained through the repetitive nature of film work which can both induce reflexivity and manifest radical criticality on a bodily level. Most theoretical accounts present repetition as the condition for apathy or false consciousness. Even Gilbert Simondon, with his deep concern for technical relations between human and machine, suggests that “habitual repetition erases the awareness of structures and operations with the stereotypy of adapted gestures.”70 In my reading, Manto offers us an alternative possibility. Neelam’s disenchantment occurs in the moment of the cheat kiss; she achieves a new understanding of stardom, the gendered hierarchies of film work, and double standards of bourgeois respectability. But even before Rajkishore’s faux-kiss, there was the repeated dimming and glowing of the electric lights; the whirring of the camera motor; the drumming down of the monsoon rain; and the cats that always needed feeding. These repetitive rhythms of life and work resonate in Neelam’s body and consciousness. Herein lies another intuition of the cinematic modern—an embodied intuition of the uncanny synchronicity of humans and nonhumans together in a technologized space. C O N C LU S I O N : O F F - S C R E E N E P I P H A N I E S

Euro-American film theory and philosophy, from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Georg Simmel, and Siegfried Kracauer, to Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, to Jonathan Crary, insist on cinema’s powerful impact on the human sensorium. Tied to this insistence is an approach to modernity as rupture and shock, variously described. Attention to accounts of cinematic modernity as produced by practitioners and viewers in locations such as India reveals a greater complexity of experience.

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In Miriam Hansen’s reading of Walter Benjamin, cinema’s promise “was that it might give the technologically altered sensorium access to a contemporary, materially based, and collective form of reflexivity that would not have to surrender the mimetic and temporal dimensions of (historically individualized) experience.”71 Manto’s description of production experience embodies this promise. In his oeuvre we see workers and practitioners whose professional identities were tied to an understanding of cinema as technologically mediated artifice—who, at the same time, were located in specific experiential matrices of work, necessity, and desire. Hansen also points out that cinema’s utopian promise failed for Benjamin during his own lifetime. For Manto, on the other hand, the film studio was never a utopian space but mapped several of the social differences and fractured economic realities of the city. There are repeat suggestions in My Name Is Radha of another gulf between Rajkishore and Neelam—that of caste. Rajkishore’s beautiful “fair” chest and Rawalpindi accent is contrasted with Neelam’s “dark” complexion and Benarasi accent, creating a tension between their caste and ethnic identities. Manto carefully choreographs a sociocultural polarity between the upper-caste Punjabi man, respectably married and with the means to avail a university education, and a dark-skinned girl whose mother was a sex worker. Even though skin color and caste identity in India have no verifiable connections either historically or anthropologically, the two are subliminally interlinked in the North Indian imagination. In a region notorious for colorism, a structured character variance based on skin color produces deliberate mental associations. Manto therefore points to the gradients of power that characterize the cine-assemblage in its specific context. Neelam registers this power on her skin and in her body in the moment of a faked kiss, a cinematic spectacle that unfolds on a set in the glare of arclights and the gaze of curious coworkers. The web of energy that connects the actress, the electric cables, the lighting equipment, the film’s crew, and the male star ebbs and swells at different points of the web, revealing to some that the discourse of energy enables the extraction of labor. In his discussion of the documentary film Coute que Coute (1995), Jean-Louis Comolli proposes that the on-screen carries the trace of everything else that cannot be or is not filmed. Some traces can make

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the frame “pregnant” with the off-screen, almost waiting for the camera to arrive on the scene. The off-screen can bring into play “the reality of the workplace, of work, of the relations and conflicts taking place there.”72 Building on the idea of relational energy practices, I have considered the on-screen trace and off-screen experience simultaneously, with a sobering acknowledgment that the off-screen is a place of uneven power relations and thus “pregnant” with depletion, even violence. For Comolli, only a few documentary films are able to indicate traces of work because for him fiction cinema is notoriously resistant to filming the experience of labor. “Mera Naam Radha Hai,” if understood as a firm part of a broad cine-ecology, provides a way to rethink the relation between representation and the bodily experience of film-as-work.73 The off-screen always-already leaves its material trace on the screen and the diegesis. Rajkishore’s body, like the actor Rama Shukul’s body, displays the vitality demanded of the cinematic image even as it carries the possibility of vulnerability and exhaustion. Neelam, by the end of the story, embodies this possibility; she is completely depleted. Manto’s spatially unorthodox, transgressive gaze moves from place to place, site to site, completely unmindful of boundaries of public/private, intimate/ official, representation/production. He identifies for Bombay cinema the crucial moment that marked industrial modernity on the terrain of technology and the technological body; the delicate respect between human and machine that replaced an earlier concern with human and nature. In a similar mode, it is time to rethink the relation of bodies, filmed and unfilmed, on-screen and off-screen, within the cine-ecology and recognize their ability for play, recognition, and refusal. Viewed from such a perspective, Neelam’s tiredness and disillusionment lie on a continuum with the Naigaum worker’s exhaustion and rejuvenation, or Premchand’s cinematic epiphany of a life gone wrong. The moment of cinematic reflexivity is impossible without a careful synergy of vital energies, “of other forms of life and ways of being together—as practice and embodied critique.”74 The electric lights dim and glow, the camera trolley is set up on tracks, while some humans wait, wait for the boom to be readied, the lights to come on, the rain to stop.

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CH APTER FIVE

Exhaustion | Thakaan In the evening, having shaken off the world, Face down on the bed, in the end What’s left but misery riding one’s shoulders What’s left in the end But mold on the soul. ... When night mutely Crouches on my chest, Black exhaustion climbs into bed Negotiates the curve of muscles Raises its hand from the abyss. —Mangalesh Dabral, “Exhaustion”

On May 10, 1938, three “extras” drowned to death during the shooting of the stunt film Veer Bala (A. R. Kabuli, 1938). The incident took place at the Powai Lake after seven male actors, all “good swimmers,” entered the water to film a swimming scene. According to a newspaper report, “hardly had 30 feet of film been shot when three of them showed signs of exhaustion and sank within a short time.” They were K. G. Shastri (age thirty), Sheikh Abdulla (twenty), and Abdul Salam (twenty-five). Only two of the bodies were retrieved. It takes approximately twenty seconds to run thirty feet of 35mm film at twenty-four frames per second. Moreover, the men “were swimming only twenty feet away from the shore.”1 Why would three competent swimmers drown within mere seconds? If the news report is to be believed, these men were at the limit point of human exhaustion.

How should media theory address the body as it exists at the limits of cultural practice and technological mediation? In turn, what can somatic states such as exhaustion tell us about the history of cinema, its forms, techniques, and place in the world? Building from our discussion of Neelam in the previous chapter, particularly her epiphanic moment of embodied synchrony with a tired film set, this chapter focuses on exhaustion as a material trace of practice. Exhaustion (thakaan) is, as Mangalesh Dabral writes, “what’s left in the end.” It is the residue that accrues in the shadow of cultural techniques, often quite literally as the “exhaust” or waste that is expelled from a machine during the course of its operation. The cine-ecology is constituted by productive relations between machines and organisms, and the exhaustion that builds up within this network of energy relations offers us a generative analytic to expand film history toward a history of production experience. In what follows I plot an intricate map of practices, performances, and theories of exhaustion in order to draw out the connections between film as work, as representational apparatus, and as commercial enterprise. The main protagonist in this chapter is the star-actress Shanta Apte, who interrogates the cinematic logics of vitality discussed in chapter 4 and demonstrates that it is the discourse of energy that enables the extraction of labor. I weave in and out of Apte’s writing and activism, starting with a hunger strike that I read as a deliberate strategy of deceleration aimed at the altar of speed and energy, which were the central fetishes of cinematic modernity. Tiredness, for several thinkers of exhaustion, “exists as a threshold, always at the edge of something else, often allied with a drift or fall toward sleep at one end or a rebounding rejuvenation at the other.”2 For Roland Barthes, weariness is “the opposite of death” since it points to that which is “livable in the body,” precisely because it can grow tired.3 But there is always also another possibility with exhaustion: to drift into death, to transit from a threshold condition that defines life, to the end of all sensation and potential. I begin with this specter of death to point to the fundamentally ambivalent nature of tiredness, at once a marker of life and a harbinger of death. As a concept and a material phenomenon that lies between life and death, exhaustion forces us to think of the relationalities between the living and the nonliving, rather than see them as oppositional ontologies. Nevertheless, ideas of fatigue, depletion, and 230

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exhaustion have been mobilized over the decades precisely to reinforce distinctions between the living human and the nonliving thing. This ideological binary between man and machine played a significant part in Bombay’s cine-ecology. In the early twentieth century the concept of fatigue wound its way from metallurgical discourse to industrial labor considerations, from where it migrated into multiple public and private trajectories. During the First World War, energy, output, and fatigue became terms to address machinic productivity as well as the efficiency of factory workers. By the 1930s these terms influenced the discursive struggles for legitimacy being fought by India’s cineworkers. Film practitioners and commentators struggled to retain the status of art for cinema against comparisons with factory work and machinic toil. Within this milieu, the star-actress Shanta Apte seized on exhaustion as the critical threshold that distinguished the cineworker from the other stuff of cinematic production, such as props and equipment. In 1940 Apte wrote and published a polemical text titled Jaau Mi Cinemaant? (Should I join the movies?), which was marked by the idea of finitude, considered by Katherine Hayles to be “a condition of human being.”4 Writing as an actress-singer, Apte pointed out that an actor’s physical capacities suffer depletion with time and her looks and her voice change, making her career and popularity ephemeral. Apte therefore asserted that the question of exhaustion is also the question of the individual. In this chapter I will historicize Apte’s insistence on maintaining a human-object demarcation, an insistence that is at odds with my own emphasis on the relationalities between multiple and multispecies actants. At the same time, as I hope to have demonstrated thus far, I agree that it is important not to lose sight of individual subjects, singular actors whose practices shaped and transformed the networked cine-ecology of energy and exhaustion. An ethics of relationalities is most successful when we recognize that assertions of singular individuality constitute the ecological process, and for some actors, these assertions constitute the right to life itself. S T R I K E ! A N AC T R E S S C O N F O U N D S

Glamor and asceticism, beauty and a prolonged bickering, screen and a sense of highly developed self-respect, hunger-strike and E xhau stion | Thak aan

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salary, and stardom and satyagrah are things that have very rarely gone together. —“Full Story of the Poona Star’s Hunger Strike”

On the evening of July  17, 1939, Shanta Apte went on a hunger strike against the management of Prabhat Studios, Poona. The star-actress chose “the verandah of the outpost of the studio” to stage her protest, and after two consecutive nights of fasting in situ, she was advised by her doctor to break her fast. Her protest was “against what she considered to be arbitrary and uncivil treatment accorded to her by the directors [of the studio].”5 Prabhat’s executives denied the allegations. Apte’s rebellion was unprecedented in its form and elicited multifarious reactions. Large crowds turned up at the gates of Prabhat to witness the scene of a film star on hunger strike. A constable had to be posted at the gates to keep ardent fans in check. Newspapers from as close as Bombay and as far away as Singapore and Australia covered the event.6 Prabhat Studios issued an official statement that subtly characterized Apte as a verbally abusive woman who was unable to convey “what exactly she wanted.”7 Prominent film critics followed suit. The editor of filmindia magazine, Baburao Patel, declared the strike to be a tasteless publicity stunt, concluding that “everyone was surprised to note that the star should have adopted this procedure instead of coming to an amicable settlement with her proprietors. In fact, this procedure did the star no good except giving her some newspaper publicity.”8 Overall, commentators were at a loss to explain the meaning of Apte’s public protest, and its gendered dismissal is the only coherent line running through the contemporaneous reportage. Born in the town of Dudhni, Shanta Apte (1916–1964) showed a talent for singing at an early age. Orphaned at the age of six, she was cared for by her older brother, Baburao, a schoolteacher determined to transform Shanta into a “musical star.”9 Shanta Apte trained at the Maharashtra Sangeet Vidyalaya music school in Pandharpur and regularly sang at local religious festivals. With the talkies, she found a lucrative new avenue for her vocal skills and was cast as Radha in the mythological Shyam Sunder (B. G. Pendharkar, 1932) at the age of sixteen. She soon became “one of the great singing stars in the pre-playback era.”10 In 1934 Apte signed a six-year contract with Prabhat Film Company. Some 232

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figure 5.1 Shanta Apte poses for Mirror magazine in the April 1939 issue. (Image courtesy of National Film Archive of India)

of the most famous films of her career were Amrit Manthan (V. Shantaram, 1934), Amar Jyoti (V. Shantaram, 1936), and Kunku / Duniya Na Mane (The Unexpected, V. Shantaram, 1937). These films offer us a representative sample of the aesthetics of vitality that characterized Apte’s star persona—a vitality that she performed using posture, gesture, E xhau stion | Thak aan

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stance, and voice. They also contributed greatly to public perceptions of Apte’s “fighting nature,” an image of a fiery woman who defied hypocritical social norms and advocated for gender equality.11 In Kunku, for example, Apte plays a young woman, Neera, who is tricked into marrying a much older man. Appalled by her situation, Neera treats her marriage as a performative arena for embodied dissent. In a move that echoes the mode of the hunger strike, Neera refuses to consummate her marriage and asserts her control of her body as an exercise in self-determination. By all accounts, Apte’s hunger strike was exceptional, “unique,” “strange,” and perhaps even “unparalleled in the film-history of the world.”12 Apte mobilized contradictory symbols to make her point. She appropriated the security guard’s bench at the entrance to Prabhat Studios, right by the studio’s time clock. Dressed in trousers and a sports shirt, Apte looked quite unlike her on-screen, saree-clad avatar, provoking a reporter to describe her outfit as “hunting attire.”13 Journalists found it “embarrassing” to approach the female star as “she was reclining herself on a narrow bench perusing a picture magazine.”14 In a detailed analysis of Apte’s hunger strike, Neepa Majumdar notes that, “while her attire was a violation of gender norms, her location [on the guard’s bench] violated class boundaries.”15 Furthermore, what was the appropriate political genealogy for this perplexing event of performative self-depletion? Some pointed out that it was a cinematic “equivalent of the classic practice of sitting dharna at the doorsteps of the oppressor.”16 A vague Hollywood precedent of a sit-down strike was cited, as was Gandhi’s use of the fast “as a soul-purifying source or perhaps a political weapon.” Reporters found a pattern between Apte’s protest and her feisty screen image as a principled opponent of social injustice, suggesting that she was simply “living the part of the spirited young lady which she so successfully portrayed in the Prabhat Film Co.’s first social The Unexpected.”17 Admittedly, there is no evidence of individual or collective strikes by film employees in India in this period, and Apte’s protest is indeed exceptional. Yet from a cine-ecological perspective, Apte’s strike is connected to a wide range of similar modes of struggle and defiance in late colonial India. In 1939 the hunger strike was a recognizable form of dissent in British India, closely identified with Mahatma Gandhi’s 234

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politics of passive resistance and his philosophical approach to protest as penance and self-purification. Gandhi’s fasting body was photographed widely and constituted a visual event, as performative as Apte’s in its power and sensory address. Militant revolutionaries such as Jatin Das and Bhagat Singh had also used the hunger strike as a collective means of bargaining with the colonial establishment and asserting moral superiority.18 At the same time, the strike as refusal of work and demonstration of proletarian solidarity had become a spectacular feature of growing industrial agitation in Bombay Presidency. To cite just one instance—in 1928 more than 150,000 workers from eighty mills in Bombay went on a strike that lasted eighteen months.19 Millworkers resoundingly demonstrated their ability for powerful solidarity actions, leading to the consolidation of a radical labor movement in interwar Bombay. It is between these various iterations of the strike— the anticolonial and the anticapitalist, the individual and the collective, the inwardly purifying and the outwardly political—that Shanta Apte’s isolated, individualized gesture of resistance must be positioned. In the end, however, as an individual fast undertaken as a mode of principled protest against a mightier opponent, marked by modern masculine dress, muddled by Apte’s conspicuous femininity, and contrary to her energetic star persona, this event may be truly unfixable. I attend to this unfixability by pinpointing that which was most ineffable in the performance—the staging of bodily depletion, that is, an insistence on embodiment as the grounds for resistance. What was the compelling reason for Shanta Apte’s performative resistance? The immediate cause she cited was the nonpayment of her dues for a number of days that she did not visit the studio. Prabhat was rumored to be transitioning into a limited concern, and Apte had  inquired about her status in the future scheme of things.20 The studio failed to respond to her queries and she stayed away from the studio premises for two weeks.21 When she arrived to pick up her salary on payday, she was asked to sign a receipt acknowledging her absence. Apte agreed to sign the receipt on the condition that she would record the circumstances of her absence in the salary register itself, claiming that she was “entitled to stay away because there was no definite written reply from the management.”22 This angered the management, and they threatened to withhold her salary on “disciplinary” grounds. Apte went E xhau stion | Thak aan

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on strike. Journalists and studio executives implied that she had deliberately exacerbated the situation in order to break her contract with Prabhat. And indeed, contract issues were at the core of Apte’s dissatisfaction with the film company. Up until the 1940s, actors, even stars, were hired by film companies on a salaried basis. Employment contracts were multiyear and restrictive in nature, binding the actor to a particular studio on a fixed monthly remuneration. Contracts could quantify the actor’s labor in terms of a stipulated number of films that had to be completed within the contractual timeline, or in terms of the number of years that the studio exclusively owned the actor’s labor. Public awareness of studio contracts was widespread, and tabloids and film trade magazines regularly gossiped about contractual negotiations. Rumors about the interstudio migrations of popular actresses such as Sulochana, Leela Chitnis, Padma Devi, Durga Khote, and Rattan Bai made for significant news. Around the time of her hunger strike, Shanta Apte, too, was being competitively wooed by studios in Bombay and Lahore.23 Apte’s assessment of her market value, augmented by rival offers and fan adulation, was at odds with Prabhat’s casting decisions. Despite the major success of her heroine-centric, dual-language film Kunku, Apte was passed over in favor of the lesser-known Shanta Hublikar as the heroine in Aadmi / Manoos (V. Shantaram, 1939). For her final acting obligation at Prabhat, Sant Dnyaneshwar (V. G. Damle, 1940), Apte was relegated to second heroine. By all standards, she was underemployed at Prabhat, averaging one film a year. In contrast, Devika Rani and Gohar Mamajiwala averaged three films a year at the height of their talkie stardom. With one year remaining before her contract expired, Apte’s strike was catalyzed by frustration over long periods of inactivity, a desire to seek better work and higher compensation elsewhere, and an acute sense of the temporality of an actor’s bodily capacities. It is difficult not to see Apte’s hunger strike as a loud critique of contemporaneous studio-actor or management-labor relations. Apte strategically staged her protest at the limits of the studio and the world outside, with the studio clock that monitored work time ticking dramatically overhead, marking her durational fast as time that could not be monetized by the studio. If the symbolism and material specificities of the strike seem legible to us today, in its own day it led to much confusion, 236

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figure 5.2 “Mr. Gandhi Taking His Last Meal Before Starting His Fast at Rajkot on Friday,” Times of India, March 7, 1939. (Proquest LLC)

even derision, at least for the journalists whose accounts provide our main access to the event. These accounts indicate a struggle over meaning—not only what does this mean, but how does it signify? Neepa Majumdar has argued that the dominant discourse on “respectability” in the cine-ecology called for a kind of “moral and cultural labor” from stars, particularly women, who were required to demonstrate decency E xhau stion | Thak aan

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and education. Journalists and producers thus tried to trivialize Apte’s strike by pointing to the supposed impropriety of her behavior. Further, the respectability framework “completely bypassed the legal discourse of stardom as material labor.”24 This is an important point. Even though film businesses across the world use legal tools to contractually own, rent, or restrict a film star’s labor, public discourse around stars deliberately disavows their labor.25 For most viewers, an actress’s labor remains unseen even though it is starkly visible as acting on the silver screen and continues into the off-screen world in the form of interviews and public appearances.26 This invisibility is supported by the capitalist mode of the film business, where labor must be relegated to the fringes of recognition; the labor of stars is camouflaged by a deflecting focus on their glamor and surface appeal, and the labor of the extra is rendered invisible through its literal positioning on the edges of the screen and the cine-ecology. To understand stardom as labor, we have to see the onscreen and off-screen as relational and frequently discontinuous, rejecting the manufactured illusion of the seamless continuity of the star image from screen to world. Rama Shukul’s on-screen hypochondria, discussed in chapter  4, is made comic because of the contrapuntal vision of his healthy body. We do not see his exhaustion, however, as it accrued at the end of each day’s shooting. Rajkishore, on the other hand, shows us the labor of stardom by continually acting the part of the energetic star, whether on camera or in a private moment with Neelam. Rajkishore is trapped within the logics of film stardom and its demand for continual spectacular vitality. In stark contrast, Shanta Apte’s hunger strike stages the actress’s body as vulnerable to depletion, thereby reminding her spectators that the star body participates in everyday material rhythms of energy and exhaustion. Her act befuddled journalists precisely because it juxtaposed conflicting concepts—stardom and labor, an energetic star aura and a depleting live body. D U R AT I O N A L D E P L E T I O N : S H A N TA A P T E ’S T H E O RY OF L ABOR POWER

Just as workers are squeezed dry wherever there are huge factories and industrial centers in Hindustan, so does the same thing happen here. The factory workers and their leaders are fighting 238

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their battles; but who will take up the grievances of the people in the film industry, and how? —Shanta Apte, Jaau Mi Cinemaant?

A year after her hunger strike, still at the height of her stardom, Shanta Apte published a fierce polemic against India’s film studios.27 This Marathi-language monograph, long out of print, combines political economy analysis of the increasingly capitalist film business, detailing the systemic flaws of an enterprise premised on the extraction of surplus value, alongside an unusual consideration of the body at work. In the preface Apte declares that her primary motivation for writing the text sprang from the hundreds of fan letters she received every day, each asking the same question, “Jaau mi cinemaant?,” or “Should I join the movies?” Apte’s text was her public response to the film fan who longed to transition into a film worker.28 Meant more as a warning to film aspirants rather than an instruction manual, Should I Join the Movies? is an insider’s exposé of the film industry’s institutionalized bad practices and is absolutely without precedent in the archives of Indian cinema.29 The text is marked by what has been termed a “Marathi Marxist” vocabulary, a set of words and phrases that were popularized in the interwar Bombay region since the publication in 1931 of the first Marathi translation of the Communist Manifesto (1848), alongside ongoing proletarian mobilizations.30 While I have not found any direct record of Apte’s reading habits, it is certain that her Marxist vocabulary and some of her ideas were informed by a dynamic Marathi literary sphere that actively translated and circulated socialist ideologies in the interwar period. She uses terms familiar within Marathi labor and socialist circles— kaamgar, majoor, and “worker,” on the one hand, and bhandavalwaley, bhandavalshahi, maalakshahi (capitalists, capitalism) on the other—to characterize the class struggle she claims was raging within the cineecology. Fond of similes and metaphors, Apte draws direct comparisons of film work with factory work. At the same time she crafts her own theory of film work and labor, exploitation and resistance, which marks her text as an original expression of political thought grounded firmly within Bombay’s intellectual milieu. Most striking is the fact that, despite its overall hyperbolic tone, Should I Join the Movies? eschews the sensational for the mundane, giving the reader case studies E xhau stion | Thak aan

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of durational forms of workplace depletion rather than eventic tales of injury and death. Apte focuses on the work of acting and describes the everyday treatment of labor, the steady withering away of human faculties due to temporally accruing overexertion, on one hand, and underuse, on the other. Should I Join the Movies? was written at a time when Apte was reflecting on, and chafing at, the position of the salaried actress in the film studio. In a chapter titled “In the Furnace of Capitalism,” the reader is given a series of anonymized case studies that explicate Apte’s corporeal-psychic diagnosis of cinema’s extractive effects. The most affective complaints are reserved for a studio’s deliberate underuse of its human resources. Apte narrates the story of a bodybuilder from Indonesia who was hired by a film studio to train its in-house actors. The bodybuilder signed an exclusive contract at a low salary with only one stipulation from his side: to be allowed time for a daily exercise regimen so that he could maintain his main asset—his physique. The studio denied him this one request and insisted that he appear at the studio every day at a fixed time and wait to be assigned tasks. The days turned into months, and not only was he kept idle at the studio, but the contract prohibited him from taking up any outside work. Eventually he lost his strongman’s body, fell ill, and lost his job. In another example, Apte describes the case of a young actress that was likely based on her own experience at Prabhat: Days and then months passed like this. The poor girl would come in every day and ask, “No work for me today?” and go home, resigned, in the evening. The period of the contract was almost over and still the young woman was given no work. She was made to just sit around for a year or two. . . . Who then thinks about the mental state of the actress who is kept on merely as a substitute? It gnaws at her mind: to come to the studio day after day and get no work. She must not speak to anybody, but has to stay shut up in a tiny room. Nothing to read, no other means of passing the time; she has to sit there staring at the ceiling. To come each morning with hope, and return home in the evening bored and disappointed. . . . But what did the producer care? We are paying

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her a salary, we will give her work or make her sit idle, it’s for us to decide. (65–66)

The depletion that Apte describes here is psychic and durational, the kind of worker depression that has been theorized as the malaise of immaterial labor in the twenty-first century but afflicts workers in any system of production that sunders work from pleasure, labor from sovereignty.31 Her diagnosis is that of unfreedom, of being rendered incapable of productive activity or the growth of individual potential. The development of one’s potential was a personal mantra for Apte, and her main advice to film aspirants was that they strive to improve themselves, asserting that, if one is to become a successful actor, one needs to acquire proficiency in the areas of physical form, fitness, singing and histrionic art. One’s form is a gift of the gods, which means it is not in one’s hands to acquire. Still one can make efforts to look good, to be attractive. To keep one’s body trim and proportionate is always in our hands. A singing voice and acting skill can be acquired through practice. All these qualities are such that, even after one has acquired them, one has to work hard to retain them and develop them. (78)

As we saw in chapter  4, discussions of energy and vitality suffused the late colonial imagination and cinematic representation. The popularity of physical culture at this time was paralleled by interest in nutritional science. Apte, too, subscribed to modern ideas of bodily productivity, enhanced by disciplined exercise, a regulated diet, and voice lessons. In a rare first-person account in Should I Join the Movies?, Apte declares: “I had a daily routine which I never changed, whether I had work or no: for the last seven or eight years I kept my diet regulated, I performed two or three different exercises daily, practiced singing at least three hours a day without fail, and took great care that my health would remain good and my voice would be unaffected” (81). But this is not a celebration of the vital body for its own sake. Apte explains, “Those qualities [form, fitness, artistic skill] are what allows us to live with

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dignity. They are what give us our success, our money and fame” (78). Those carefully nurtured and cultivated “qualities” are the critical assets of an actor; they have value in the marketplace, and thus the actor, who is simultaneously a worker and a commodity, must take conscious control of it. Apte conceives of an actor’s physical capacity and proficiency as the locus of artistic sovereignty and political subjectivity. She reiterates the point: “When one is completely proficient in one’s work, when one has acquired mastery of one’s art, no capitalist [bhandavalshahi] force, however untrammeled and drunk with power, can subjugate or oppress us” (82). What Apte is describing here is labor power, which she terms karya-kshamta or the capacity to work, a concept that captured the global industrial imagination from the nineteenth century onward. Moreover, Apte advocates an awareness of individual labor power as a tool against the very alienation of labor that is so central to Marx’s enduring critique of capitalism. Anson Rabinbach has given us a valuable account of the discovery of labor power by modern society. According to Rabinbach, a singularly powerful idea that defined nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of work and productivity was that of the human body as a motor. The human body as motor supplied “a metaphor of work and energy” that allied the body with modern industry and allowed scientists, philosophers, politicians, social reformers, and physiologists, of varied ideological persuasions, to apply concepts of energy conversion and conservation to the working body.32 The modern Western idea of labor power derives from this thermodynamic model and describes a quantifiable, mechanical potential for energy expenditure. Apte saw labor power not as mechanical and abstract potential but organic and individualized latency. In Should I Join the Movies? the mechanical is the inhuman and the film industry is an “inhuman mechanical city” (amanush yantranagri) that uses various techniques to “squeeze the life out of poor people” (72). Her use of the concept of labor power is material and embodied, rooted in experience and affect even as it is firmly located within a transactional regime of value. It is important to note here, as Rabinbach does, that even in Marx, labor power is “a purely quantifiable output of force, subject only to abstraction. As mechanical work, as ‘Arbeitskraft,’ labor power is entirely indifferent to the nature of its material form.”33 For Apte, labor power is qualitative and embedded in 242

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the singularity of material biology. It is a delicate relation between slowing down and speeding up, wherein each body has its own velocity, where bodies are vulnerable to tiredness and exhaustion but also capable of being revived with a careful touch. Apte’s commitment to the self as worker makes karya-kshamta much more than simply physical wellness, and she veers away from liberal and Vedic notions of physical health as personal responsibility. Labor power is the capacity to produce monetary value for an employer, and hence the worker alone cannot be held accountable for the sustenance of labor power. In an interview Apte directly asks, “Who is responsible for the development of the abilities of an actress? Does this responsibility not fall on the institution—the film concern—to which the actress belongs?”34 She elaborates in her book: “What have the owners and managers of these film companies done to ensure that the labor power [karya-kshamta] of actors increases, that their lives have some security? Is it not their duty to take care of their bodily health, to teach them the art of acting, to train their singing voices, to provide libraries so that they can improve their knowledge, furnish them with sports equipment, and generally look after the welfare of the actors?” (69–70).35 It is worth noting that labor power, for Apte, is simultaneously physical and intellectual, joining the mind with the body. Apte passionately argues that film producers’ reluctance to spend any capital on developing and nurturing the work potential of their employees ensures that actors, particularly children, are routinely tossed out “on the rubbish heap of the film industry” (49).36 The exhaustion of creative labor potential thus creates its own kind of human waste, a kind of dead labor. In a chapter derisively titled “Sajeevapeksha Nirjeev Shreshtha!” (The Inanimate are superior to the animate!), Apte addresses the place of the human body, its possibilities and limitations, within a film industrial context: The owners and managers of the film industry do not look at actors, actresses and children as if they are human! They look at these people in the same way that they would glance at a piece of furniture in the studio! . . . Does the shape of wooden statues ever alter? Does the voice of a sound machine ever change? Even so, E xhau stion | Thak aan

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they will pour their soul into ensuring that these inanimate objects should remain intact. They will take the greatest care of them. But an actor’s qualities do not remain static, they undergo change, and that is because the actor is a human being. (54)

Apte’s critique of the film industry rests on deconstructing the political economy of human exhaustion and vulnerability. Thus she posits a fundamental separation of human and object in formulations that, although rife with internal contradictions, are significant for their conceptual and political claims. For Apte, the capacity to change, to change negatively, or deplete serves as the ultimate distinction between the human and the machine, where the machine is understood in its most basic sense as a technical object that is designed by humans to perform certain tasks. In his famous text On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), Gilbert Simondon is primarily interested in this question of the relation between technical objects and humans. Simondon’s opening idea is that there is a crisis in human society because culture and technology have been falsely sundered, divided into two separate realms of meaning versus utility, resulting in a state of alienation. “While the aesthetic object has been considered suitable material for philosophical reflection, the technical object, treated as an instrument, has only ever been studied across the multiple modalities of its relation to man as an economic reality, as an instrument of work, or, indeed, of consumption.”37 For Simondon, man and the machine, or natural objects and technical objects, are different but imbricated in a coextensive web of processual relations that can be called technics. The term technics indicates that technologies and humans are fundamentally entangled, and the techniques that link one to the other also transform and define both. According to Simondon, it is because we do not recognize this processual entanglement that society looks on the machine with either fear or euphoria, as a savior or a subjugating force. Historically, humans as tool-bearers invented machines to take on the tool-bearing function but soon grew anxious about being replaced by the machine or even being enslaved by technology. These framing concepts of enslavement and domination mask the reality of the human-machine relation, which is ideally one of working alongside rather than above or below. 244

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Simondon’s theories were a response to decades of technoutopianism alternating with techno-phobia in industrial centers across the world. Twentieth-century Bombay was tied to other industrial centers by global capital and European imperialism. It is no surprise therefore that Bombay’s human workers were compared to machines in the 1920s, their capacity for work was measured and calibrated, and their identities were abstracted into categories such as energy and fatigue. The boundary between living and nonliving, human and object, is critical to Apte’s sense of artistic self-respect. She seizes on exhaustion as the ultimate arbiter of the boundaries of human and machine. In this she is not alone. Fatigue was “the permanent nemesis of an industrializing Europe,” “the most evident and persistent reminder of the body’s intractable resistance to unlimited progress and productivity.”38 Apte’s interest in the humanness of her labor was an explicit rejection of the dehumanization of fatigue and the machinization of the human in contemporaneous industrial discourse. T H E P R O B L E M O F FAT I G U E : I N D I A N C O N D I T I O N S

But it is plain, to anybody with an elementary knowledge of physiological processes, that the facts of industrial fatigue, established elsewhere, are doubly applicable to India and Indian workers. —“Fatigue in Industry”

Bombay city, in the years that Shanta Apte entered the cine-ecology, was becoming the foremost center of industrial activity in India and the site of a growing militant labor movement. The postwar boom led to an expansion of the local textile industry from 1918 to 1922, but depression soon hit the sector, leading to irregular rhythms of production and an increased demand for casual labor.39 Millowners, desperate to maximize short-term profits, increased their use of machinery and intensified their use of labor, in keeping with new rationalization schemes.40 Worker retrenchment, stagnating wages, and poor work conditions were some of the factors that led to the epic general strike of 1928. Bombay city in these decades was witness to unprecedented and massive demonstrations of worker solidarity, strikes, and subsequent clamp-downs E xhau stion | Thak aan

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by the industrial-colonial complex. Ripples of the global financial crisis were felt in Bombay, and by 1934 “the number of unemployed workers in the textile industry alone was estimated variously as between 40,000 and 60,000.”41 Calls for rationalization grew louder with another impending war. Shanta Apte’s hunger strike and her discussion of labor power as organic and fundamentally human unfolded against this backdrop. Her specific use of weariness as the key to exposing the reification and exploitation of labor drew on a larger discourse of fatigue that circulated in Bombay in the first decades of the twentieth century, the same years as cinema’s implantation as a powerful public institution and a large-scale employer. In his book on the railways, Wolfgang Schivelbusch elaborates on how the idea of fatigue took on a technical connotation in the midnineteenth century at the height of the Industrial Revolution.42 The emergence of the concept of material fatigue was, like labor power, dependent on the emergence of the “machine” and notions of the machinic, which centrally implied a repetitive, dynamic, and intensified expenditure of energy. By the 1910s material fatigue was routinely conceptualized as a problem in Bombay’s print-mediated public sphere. Newspapers regularly discussed the latest research on metal fatigue that shed light on the problem or offered a solution. Experiments by aeronautical engineers, metallurgists, and architects were presented as evidence that repeated interaction of metal parts within a machine result in strain and breakdown. During the First World War the constant demand for large-scale production of heavy machinery increased journalistic coverage of metal fatigue. Soon, however, the focus of this public discussion, as seen in articles and op-eds, subtly shifted from the problem of metal fatigue to the question of worker fatigue. In India local anxieties about the tired body were now layered by concerns about worker efficiency. Fatigue itself was defined as “a state of diminished efficiency occurring after labor and partly dependent on it, the degree of fatigue being determined partly by the duration and character of labor performed.” By 1918 worker fatigue was a topic of significant interest to multiple parties, from industrialists and factory owners to politicians, labor activists, and advocates of industrial reform.43 An article in the Times of India from September 1922 surveyed current research on the “problem of fatigue in industrial workers” and 246

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found that this new field of investigation had attained “something of the dignity of a science.”44 It cited a series of articles written in the West that asserted that the key to worker efficiency was shorter working hours with more intense bursts of activity. Indeed, since the final years of the Great War, research on worker productivity had argued for shorter working hours and a weekly day of rest. Labor advocates in India had been fighting for an eleven-hour workday and lamented that change was slow to come to India, where “experiments in this subject of industrial fatigue are still almost unknown.”45 The surge in articles advocating statistical research on fatigue in India was a reaction to long-standing racial-climatological beliefs about the lack of vitality of the Indian worker. Indian journalists and labor advocates hoped that scientific fatigue experiments would dispel the tenacious myth of the laziness of the Indian worker. “The heinous charge brought against the Indian operative, that he is incurably lazy, still stands, because no one has tried to find out what he would do under different conditions. . . . Experiments are badly wanted to discover where fatigue interferes with efficiency under Indian conditions.”46 The idea that human vitality is connected to climate is a long-cherished one. Peter Redfield, among others, has amply discussed “climatic theories of action” that started to consolidate around the fin de siècle.47 A case in point is Ellsworth Huntington’s Civilization and Climate (1917), which posited a direct causal relation between climate and racial inferiority. In fact, theories about the capacity of climate to affect human bodies, and through bodies to affect social customs, technological capacities, and intellectual development, go back at least to eighteenth-century ideas about environmental determinism. Compared to colder climes, the tropics were considered particularly unfavorable as heat and humidity supposedly engendered indolence and lustfulness. Such beliefs were foundational to the racialgeographic epistemology of colonial science and the imperial projects it sustained. In Bombay’s dynamic industrial economy, racial stereotypes of the Indian worker’s inferior physiology were mobilized by millowners to justify longer work hours. Longer hours were deemed necessary when faced with a lethargic labor force. The discourse on labor reform also toed the climatological line but argued for uncertainty, citing the need for scientific experimentation before passing the final verdict on the Indian worker’s productivity. For example: “It is vain to hope that E xhau stion | Thak aan

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inhabitants of almost tropical countries will ever work at the speed of cold lands, but that they have an efficiency point which must be discovered in the interest of economy, and that this point is being far overstepped at the present moment it is impossible to doubt.” From 1916 until 1922, newspapers regularly reported on new statistical data that correlated numbers of work hours with percentage increases or decreases in production output.48 Labor reporters were confident that Indian millowners would have to concede to the findings of fatigue research as “competition with better organized industries in other lands will force experiments on us shortly.” Finally, in 1922 the government of India enacted the Indian Factories (Amendment) Act whereby no adult worker was to work for more than eleven hours a day and sixty hours a week. The Factories Act sparked a new trend in the public discussion of labor, one that militated against the reduction of work hours and redeployed the climatological language of fatigue as a weapon against workers’ interests. The Times of India’s “Engineering Supplement” ran a detailed article claiming that the “genesis of fatigue” lay in the accumulation of toxins generated through continuous muscle and nerve function. Rest and sleep allowed the body to clear itself of these toxins. After a certain threshold of exhaustion was crossed, however, the human body needed more serious rehabilitation. Thus workers would benefit from a different approach to fatigue reduction such as intermittent periods of repose accompanied with longer work hours. Based on the assumption that “in tropical countries the human organism reacts more thoroughly and more swiftly to hard work and hard physical exercise than in temperate countries,” the article claimed that the new shorter workday was harmful to the Indian worker as it could not accommodate “intervals of rest.”49 The writer cited Taylorist experiments that measured workers’ movements, the number of steps required to complete a task, the time taken for each task, and the “output” yielded. None of these experiments had been conducted in India. The brief fouryear period of resistance to Taylorism was gradually overturned, and mainstream public discourse returned to a machinic discussion of industrial fatigue and efficiency. Debates on best practices in India’s industrial sector continued through the 1930s, with all sides privileging scientific findings and 248

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empirical research over ethical or social frameworks for approaching the labor question. For Schivelbusch, the migration of the concept of fatigue between physiology and technology “demonstrates how the two realms exerted a mutual influence upon each other.”50 The physiological meanings of fatigue took on an “exactitude” through the technological interest in machine and metal fatigue. While this is certainly true, I want to highlight that in 1930s urban India the Taylorism-inspired scientific discourse on energy and fatigue helped displace the social problem that was raging across large-scale industries, namely, the problem of embodied worker distress. The comparison of the human body with the machine, coupled with the allegedly Indian problem of lethargy, permitted factory owners, labor committees, and politicians, alike, to abstract the question of embodied labor into one of energy, efficiency, and output. It is essential, therefore, to consider Apte’s preoccupation with exhaustion within this discursive history. Technical discussions of fatigue and productivity crossed over into everyday discourse and informed the broader cine-ecology that accommodated Apte’s strike and Should I Join the Movies? By 1930 the scientific discourse on fatigue and stress had permeated popular discourses of physical well-being. One index of this was the use of the language of research, experimentation, and proof in new advertising campaigns for older vitality tonics. Sanatogen, a popular brand of health supplement (a “nerve food”), brought out an advertisement that mirrored the language of technical industrial reportage (fig. 5.3). The crisis, identified by Simondon, between the aesthetic and the technical was extremely pertinent to late colonial India. The forced fracture of the vital and the mechanical was endemic to twentiethcentury modernity, but its contradictions were exacerbated in colonial India, where nationalists struggled to construct artificial limits between the authentic and the foreign, the inner and the outer, art and industry.51 Film practitioners and diverse cine-workers grappled with social opprobrium and suspicion to render cinema a respectable cultural form and mobilized the high estimation of art to raise the cultural status of cinema. Even as the language of class struggle started proliferating across Indian industrial centers in the 1930s, cinema became a blind spot in these debates, with producers, cine-workers, and even leftist film writers unwilling to concede that film work was labor. E xhau stion | Thak aan

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figure 5.3 Sanatogen advertisement in the Times of India, March 13, 1930. (Proquest LLC)

U N I O N, O R , W H AT I S A F I L M W O R K E R ?

The production of a motion picture is an art, the like of which has not been known to the world, and which by no stretch of imagination can be called a product turned out by a factory within the meaning of the Indian Factories Act. —R. L. Gogtay, “ ‘Factorization’ of Studios”

A progressive cultural magazine, Sound (“Holds Freedom’s Torch Aloft”), published a special appeal in its March 1947 issue on behalf of Hollywood’s labor unions requesting international support.52 Nine thousand striking workers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) film unions had recently been locked out for demanding the right to elect their own representatives. Studios used several extreme measures to crush the strike, including mass arrests, mass trials, and strikebreakers. Pushed into a corner, the unions sent out solidarity appeals to various international labor organizations requesting that audiences in Hollywood’s key film markets boycott films produced by the most notorious antilabor studios. Sound’s editor, Zabak, introduced the article with his hope that “the appeal to India for support, we hope, will not fall on deaf ears and we trust that our various film unions will unhesitatingly offer their wholehearted support to the cause of the American trade unions concerned.”53 Zabak’s appeal begs us to consider if there was a wider configuration of labor mobilization within India’s film industries that went beyond the individual efforts of Shanta Apte. Unsurprisingly, it is a challenge to access any systematic data on the history of Indian film unions. Labor activist and filmmaker Opender Chanana emphatically declares that “no broad-based data is available on the origin, history, and growth of most of the . . . craft associations. No serious thought has ever been given to archiving available data. If there is any aspect of the largest entertainment industry in the world that is never given its due importance, it is RESEARCH.”54 Broadly, we can safely claim that the Bombay film industry’s technicians, artistes, and wageworkers started to officially organize in the 1950s. Today the Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE) is the umbrella organization that represents about twenty-two affiliated specialized craft associations. The FWICE was established in January 1956 E xhau stion | Thak aan

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under the Trade Union Act (1926) and had eleven craft unions under its purview.55 Prior to the 1950s most unions were registered under the Societies Registration Act, which “offered no scope for resolution or settlement of labor disputes,” and it was only in the late 1950s that a number of trade unions were registered under the Trade Union Act to finally give the workers’ organizing efforts some legal standing.56 Occasional attempts to organize along craft lines can be dated back to 1930s, in the shadow of rigorous moves by film producers to safeguard their own interests via the registration of the Motion Picture Society of India (1932) and the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association (1938). A group called the All-India Cine-Technical Association met during the MPSI’s silver jubilee conference in 1939 and passed several resolutions to improve work conditions and employment security.57 The MPSI and the IMPPA, though lobbying hard for governmental funds and favors, were resistant to any interference in matters of film production and workforce management.58 Varying imaginations of the self as worker, the body as repository of labor power, and the conflict between capital and labor permeated 1930s Bombay through print and cinema. Against the background of Bombay’s general strikes, the mazdoor (worker) became a symbol of subaltern agency and revolutionary potential. In 1934 a film written by the acclaimed novelist Premchand was proscribed in Bombay Presidency on the grounds that Bombay offered some peculiarities in its current industrial climate that made it necessary to prevent its release. The film was titled Mill, or Mazdoor (Mohan Bhavnani, 1934). Shot on-location at Bombay’s Hansraj textile mill, the film promised “realistic” footage of workers’ rallies and strikes. The censorship saga surrounding Mill lasted six years, until it was finally released, heavily edited and reshot, in 1939. Indian media scholars have noted various pretexts for the censorship of films in colonial India. These reasons commonly included perceived slights to British prestige, depictions of “indecency,” causing offense to religious sentiments, excessive violence, or seditious intent. The 1930s mark a striking phase in the history of colonial censorship as a new justification for proscription announced itself—the recurrence of so-called communistic themes. The proscription of Mill, which was promptly released in Lahore in 1934 with only a minor cut, references the nervousness felt by Bombay’s business elite and the local 252

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administration in the face of the growing global influence of communism, especially the increasing regional clout of trade unions. The government had become so jumpy that even a celebrated foreign film like Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) was banned in 1932 on account that it “deals with conflict between labor and capital and class-hatred and depicts many mob scenes.”59 Mill was not the first film to discuss the exploitation of Bombay’s mill workers, nor the first to be surveilled for incendiary content. The silent film Bismi Sadi (Twentieth century, 1924) centered on an evil cotton mill owner, and “the mise en scene of a factory workers’ violent revolt figured prominently in the film’s marketing campaign.”60 Bharat ki Beti (India’s daughter, 1935), Shaher ka Jadoo or Lure of the City (1934), and Ghar Jamai (Househusband, 1935) all dealt with the crisis of urban unemployment, economic inequality, and the arrogance of wealth. Communist visions, ideology, and interpretations flowed through the cine-ecology, and cinema played an important role in the dispersal of socialist ideals. Much of this was direct, given that certain key players in the film production process subscribed to Marxist ideology. The silent film producer and scenarist Indulal Yajnik (1892–1972) was put on a watchlist of “Prominent Communists in the Bombay Presidency” in 1928 alongside Comrades Dange and Jhabwala.61 Mama Varerkar, famous for his novel Dhavta Dhota (The Flying shuttle, 1933) about working-class life in World War I Bombay and emerging class consciousness, also wrote screenplays for silent and talkie films. In the late 1930s a new group of politically committed and ideologically left-leaning writers, actors, and lyricists entered the Bombay cine-ecology. The Progressive Writers Movement created a vibrant space for Marxist modernists, anti-imperialist intellectuals, and socially committed nationalists who chose literature as their primary mode of expression.62 Many leftist writers of the Progressive Writers Association and artistes from the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (which was closely affiliated with the Communist Party of India)—such as Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, K. A. Abbas, S. H. Manto, Balraj Sahni, and Chetan Anand—joined the film industry as writers, actors, and lyricists, recharging the laborversus-capital trope of the previous decade. A spate of working-class films were made in the 1940s that centrally raised questions about class struggle, and films such as Mazdoor, Mud (Gunjal, 1940), Hamrahi E xhau stion | Thak aan

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(Bimal Roy, 1944), Bhookh (Safdar Aah, 1947), and Neecha Nagar (Chetan Anand, 1946), presented sharp views on the exploitation of the urban proletariat. What’s most puzzling in this cinematic trajectory is the fact that none of the left-inclined, self-styled intellectuals of Bombay cinema turned their activist gaze toward the cine-worker. If the mazdoor, the urban worker, was the mascot of Bombay cinema’s socialists then why was the film worker not accorded any attention?63 For an industry that had long suffered a crisis of image, the definition of film work became the locus of industrial anxiety and cultural status. This definitional anxiety became particularly clear in 1938 when attempts were made to include film studios under the Factories Act of 1934. Under the Factory Act of 1891, a factory was a workplace that used mechanical power and employed more than fifty workers. In 1934 the act was amended and a factory was redefined as “any premises . . . whereon ten or more workers are working . . . and in any part of which a manufacturing process is being carried on.”64 The key terms that defined a factory were “workers,” and “manufacturing process,” and it is on these terms that a new debate erupted within the cine-ecology. Was a film studio a factory? Were film practitioners workers? In 1937 the Labor Department decided to determine whether Bombay’s film companies would be eligible to be deemed factories. Specifically, the government was “concerned with the employment of coolies, carpenters and mechanics of various kinds who are employed in film studios.”65 These attempts were aggressively debated in trade journals, with the most vociferous resistance articulated by Ram Gogtay, editor of Lighthouse weekly magazine and secretary of the MPSI. Gogtay claimed that film production was not a “manufacturing process,” and hence “the individuals employed in the various processes ancillary to the production of a film cannot be termed workers. They are either artists or technical experts. . . . Moreover, a worker by the very word implies a laborer, an individual who has more brawn than brain, a manual worker who only knows how to traverse the prescribed turnstiles.”66 Gogtay deemed that there were no manual workers in the film industry as all film practitioners are skilled “artists or technical experts.” His characterization was consistent with the industrial respectability project to resignify Indian cinema as a techno-aesthetic form served by a workforce of artists and technical specialists, as opposed to a lowbrow 254

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commercial form commonly associated with dancing girls, uneducated laborers, and venal financiers. Gogtay rejected the very idea that cinema was an industrial form on the belief that films are not commodities but works of art. Unlike commodities such as “soaps, hosiery, clothing, hardware, footwear, or any other article of mass consumption, hundreds of which can be produced per day,” Gogtay concluded, “the motion picture not being an article of consumption, the studio in which it is produced after months of artistic labor, cannot be said to be carrying on a manufacturing process.”67 In a follow-up editorial titled “The Motion Picture as an Art,” Gogtay marshaled an influential book of popular philosophy, Mortimer Adler’s Art and Prudence: A Study in Practical Philosophy (1937), as evidence that “the cinema is unique, today or at any other time, in being the only fine art ever subjected to elaborate scientific research with regard to its moral and social resources.”68 Polemically, Gogtay concluded that those that think otherwise are “enemies of the motion picture.”69 The need to socially validate the film form was an industrial crisis of a high order in the early talkie period, and a variety of stakeholders joined in the effort to recuperate cinema as a worthy cultural object. Positioning film as art was one of the strategies employed in this project. However, ossified divisions between art and industry precluded any possibility for commentators and practitioners to recognize that cinema could be both. Ultimately, the Factories Act did not include film studios under the provision for “small concerns,” though film laboratories were covered under the Hazardous Occupation Rules (1937) because film processing and developing was “a wet process in which electrical energy is used in the process of chemical manufacture,” and therefore governed by the Factories Act. Even so, debates on the issue of work, worker, and workplace definition percolated into everyday consciousness in the cineecology, and practitioners started to formulate demands based on the Factories Act. The All-India Cine-Technicians’ Conference of 1939 proposed two special resolutions dealing with “questions of sickness insurance, insurance against accidents, provident fund and a weekly holiday, preferably on Sundays, as is already observed in certain departments within the scope of the Indian Factories Act.”70 The very fact of their location inside the cine-ecology made the Progressive writers ambivalent about the status of cinema and the E xhau stion | Thak aan

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cine-worker. Many writers framed their film work as a financial necessity and a means to sustain their “real” work—literary production outside of the film economy.71 The need to distance the artist-self from the corrupting day job prevented most progressives from taking on an active role as spokespersons for the film industry and its particular class of urban mazdoors. For Premchand, the category of writer was produced in opposition to the worker in the classic hierarchy of intellect and labor; for solidarity does not demand equivalence. In a letter to a friend he pondered the implications of the Soviet Writer’s Union in Russia, saying, “I don’t know if such unions exist in other countries. However, I find it difficult to think of writers as simply literary workers. A writer isn’t only a laborer but something else—he is also one who invents ideas, provokes and propagates them.”72 Premchand was sorely disillusioned with Bombay and its film world and declared that there was a root conflict in the cine-ecology over the definition of cinema: “Cinema’s destiny is in those hands which unfortunately believe it to be an industry. What use does an industry have for improvement or humor? It only knows how to exploit, and the tender emotions of human beings are being exploited here.”73 It seems impossible for Premchand to imagine overlaps between culture and industry, and labor and literary creativity. The mazdoor could only be the worker in the factory. In Should I Join the Movies?, published only a few years after the definitional crisis provoked by the Factories Act, Apte treats the category of “film worker” as a given. At complete variance with Premchand, Apte urges actors, as a creative and artistic class, “to throw off its inertia, its nonchalant attitude, and form its own union” (71). T R A N S L AT I O N : C A S T E , C L A S S , A N D T H E B O D Y OF THE C I NE-WOR K E R

The lord Krishna used his enormous intellect to split Indian society into four varnas. But those who come into contact with the world of cinema can be split into seven varnas, and who can pick out the fair and dark among them? Shri Krishna cast the varnas according to culture, while in this world they are cast according to power. He who has power falls in the upper caste! —Apte, Jaau Mi Cinemaant? 256

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An early chapter in Should I Join the Movies? is titled “Saptavarna” or “The Seven Castes,” and Apte likens the film industry’s organizational structure to the discriminatory caste hierarchies entrenched in modern Hindu society. According to Apte (37), the film industry could be divided into seven caste groups: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Capitalists Companies (Managing Directors) Distributors Exhibitors Advertisers Workers (Directors, Assistant Directors | Technicians, Cameramen, Developing, Printing, Editing, Recording | Actors and Actresses | Music Directors, Other Musicians | Extras 7. Public At the top of the caste pyramid were the bhandavalwaley or capitalists, who “are born in the house of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth” and “naturally get first place among the upper castes.” Apte explains that film capitalists, “only look to whether the capital they have invested will fetch the expected interest. In short, they show the utmost persistence in the matter of getting their hands on excellent goods at the cheapest price” (26–27). For all practical purposes, the first five varnas could be considered a mighty quintet, an “impermeable cartel” whose members had “full freedom to eat together,” in a reference to the exclusionary social practice of in-caste dining for fear of social “pollution.” At the opposite end of the spectrum are the “workers,” who are the “slaves or serfs” of the dominant castes. The worker is completely dependent on the upper caste quintet and “must take the money that is given and do whatever work he is told to” (26). Apte labels all salaried as well as daily wage employees of a film studio as “workers,” a term she uses in the original English. Workers can be divided into two subgroups: actors and actresses, and “other workers,” or “servants.” The servant class includes “those that earn big salaries” and “those who are laborers” (36).74 Among the class of servants the most highly paid are the directors, the music composers, cinematographers, sound designers, etc. The E xhau stion | Thak aan

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failure or success of a film depends on their virtuosity. In some companies they have a position of respect and some authority. There is a strong possibility that this authority turns into a proprietorial dictatorship. . . . The class of laborers, whether salaried or working for a daily wage, is a separate one. They just toil in the business of cinema in order to feed themselves. Their sufferings and trials, their complaints, are like those of factory workers, and there is no one to take up their cause. (33–35)

Apte recognizes that the last varna, the public, may appear to be “a caste apart,” but “since it is the arena where the former six varnas play their part, we may well consider it to be a part of the world of cinema” (25–26). She argues that because all the previous varnas are employed in creating a product for an audience, the paying public is an inseparable part of cine-ecological power relations. The public generally has a “materially intolerable” life, intuiting their humanity only in moments of resentment, anger, and despair. “This despair destroys the liveliness of their beating hearts and the ardor of their minds. It is to find some distraction, some relaxation, that these suffering souls go to the cinema” (38). Cinema can energize these depleted souls, and it is the film worker’s duty to create “effective” and “attractive” entertainment for the public.75 In Apte’s taxonomic vision of the power asymmetries in the cineecology, laborers and the public together constitute the most undervalued and oppressed class. They are to be considered the paddalit (crushed underfoot) (out)castes of cinema, a term that was used by prominent anticaste thinkers such as Jyotirao Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar.76 Actors and actresses “are just a little above” film laborers, but still within cinema’s working class. It soon becomes clear that the nuances between different types of film work and technical expertise are irrelevant for Apte. Her agenda is to point to the broad battle lines of class conflict within the cine-ecology, that is, between the agents and the foot soldiers of capitalism—the bhaandavalwaley versus the workers. Thus complex internal differences of training, creative agency, and salary, on one hand, and class, ethnic, linguistic, gender, and even caste divisions, on the other, are subsumed under the idea that all workers have a precarious vocational existence. The worker is one who can be exploited at will and 258

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can be dismissed at will because she depends on those with capital and the means of production to purchase her labor. This precarity marks the body and everyday life of the film worker, transcending the industrial and social boundaries of above- and below-the-line work that are in use today. In this, Apte anticipates current critiques of the “creative economy” by scholars such as Vicki Mayer who assert that “deconstructing the rhetoric of the creative economy and its implicit material inequalities in the first instance means breaking down artificial distinctions between the mental and the manual, between skilled labor and organic labor, between above the line and below the line.”77 The framing of cinema’s industrial hierarchy as a seven-tier caste system allows Apte to magnify the crisis of class oppression. It automatically suggests a socially sanctioned inflexibility to organizational relations within the cine-ecology, where each class of players has a fixed place that is impossible to transcend. But there is more to Apte’s caste analogy than the immobility of the taxonomic pyramid. As an embodied historical figure, the film worker’s identity as a systematically depleted, paddalit or downtrodden form of life has deep connections to the history of caste experience and identity in India. Dalit identity and caste history are inextricable from embodied experiences of stigmatization and degradation. While Apte does not, and cannot, equate the cine-worker’s somatic status within a capitalist structure with the social and psychic stigma of the “caste body,” she tries to create an equivalence through images of the suffering body.78 Her focus on embodiment pinpoints the dehumanization of so-called untouchables by the caste system as the point of comparison with the treatment of the cine-worker under capitalism. Historian and social theorist Anupama Rao has examined the place of the body within Dalit emancipatory politics, noting that Dalit political subjectivation repeatedly returns to the affective meanings of the stigmatized caste body, claiming political space by exposing somatic suffering as the ontic identity of the Dalit self.79 Rao argues that Ambedkar’s critique of caste grappled with a corporeal politics of thinking untouchability as a “peculiar kind of body history.”80 The principal tension lay in the paradox that the more the stigmatized body was mobilized to assert identity, the more intractable became the problem of shedding that corporeal stigma. Further, embodiment privileged particularity and was harder to channel toward a collective and E xhau stion | Thak aan

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universal politics of enfranchisement. Ambedkar thus mobilized labor and class as metaphors for the collective experience of caste dispossession. As Rao highlights, the emancipatory potential of a universalized category called the “proletariat” depends on the abstraction of labor, whereas stigma “is a form of embodiment that cannot be abstracted, or universalized.”81 Ambedkar therefore “struggled with caste and class, stigma and labor as supplemental, yet incommensurable categories.”82 This tussle, between the abstract and the embodied, the universal and the particular, is central also to Shanta Apte’s polemics. Whereas Ambedkar negotiated the materiality of the stigmatized caste body with the universality of labor, Apte makes the reverse move of rematerializing labor power as embodied experience by using caste as a metaphor for proletarian subjection. At this point it is important to highlight that though Apte and Ambedkar were separated by caste, gender, education, vocation, and political power, both were thinker-activists intent on theorizing humanity and dehumanization as the locus of social justice. Apte repeatedly returns to ideas such as the right to dignity and selfrespect as the basic conditions for an equitable film workplace, thus homing in on dignity as the key arena for the constitution of the actor as human, much as the Dalit movement focuses on dignity in the fight to recognize the Dalit as human, that is, a subject with rights to citizenship and justice. The question of caste in Bombay cinema is woefully underanalyzed and constitutes a particular gap in the field of production studies. This gap is amplified in historical studies of cinema, partly because of the recalcitrance of conventional archives. There is ample evidence to suggest that cinema as a workplace enabled the social mixing of peoples from diverse caste backgrounds. It is harder to assess the nature of this intercaste mixing and the everyday life of caste in the cine-ecology. Film magazines of the 1930s regularly shared information on the religious, linguistic, and ethnic identities of cine-workers. Even if caste categories were not always explicitly named, much was implied for those who could read the codes of naming and description.83 The magazine filmindia could therefore suggest that some actresses were “respectable girls” from “first-class families” while others were referred to as “lower types of women.”84 Readers regularly inquired about cine-workers’ real names, as opposed to their screen 260

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names, in order to identify their religious and caste status. For example, “Is Renuka Devi a Muslim Girl? What is her real name and where is she from?,” or “What is the age of Vasanti and to what caste does she belong?”85 The social valuation of caste was so naturalized that in 1946 a film yearbook mentioned dominant caste identities almost as an added virtue: “Anjali Devi (Miss). Her real name is Durgesh Kumari and comes of a respectable Brahmin family of Benares”; “Azurie. Daughter of a German father and Brahmin mother”; “A Kashmiri Brahmin, Chandramohan is now about 42 and of medium height”; “Girish was born in 1906 in Muttra District in a Brahmin family”; and so on.86 Caste prejudice added another vector of pressure to the film industry’s respectability project. The same journalists, editors, and yearbook compilers mentioned above introduced descriptors such as “cultured” and “respectable” not to underline caste and religious status but to expand the very definition of those terms.87 In the January 1931 issue of the Lahore-based film magazine Cinema, Ram Swaroop congratulates the recent entry of several “cultured and educated people” into the film industry. His list reads: “Miss Ruby Meyers (Sulochana), Miss Renee Smith (Seeta Devi), Miss Enakshi Rama Rau, Miss Eugene Peterson (Indira Devi), Mr.  Himansu Rai, and Mr.  Niranjan Pal,” including European, Anglo-Indian, Bengali, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu identities in one breath.88 Public discourse about cine-workers’ “birth” and “family background” thus reveals a tension between upholding traditional social cleavages and undermining them in order to promote a modern industry. In the realm of filmic representation, several talkie social films took up anti-untouchability positions, once again signaling the modernity of Indian cinema. Nevertheless, the respectability agenda that was chosen as the film industry’s priority plank for industrial legitimacy signaled caste consolidation in various material ways. The most self-consciously respectable studios, such as Bombay Talkies and New Theatres, were dominated by an upper-caste executive class. Further, if we were to study the demographic composition of vocational and technical subgroups, caste hierarchies would reveal themselves in the historical preponderance of certain caste groups in certain work profiles. In such a scenario, the admixture of caste and class consciousness in Shanta Apte’s book marks a critical moment in Indian intellectual, social, and E xhau stion | Thak aan

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political life. Apte’s fluid translation of mixed metaphors and multiple political genealogies resonates with the political complexity of the time and heterogeneous visions of a future that would be “free.” Juned Shaikh, in his study of the formation of a Marathi Marxist public sphere in late colonial Bombay, notes the importance of sociocultural translation in shaping the everyday meanings of communism.89 Scarcity of reading materials and low rates of English-language literacy prompted multilingual activist-intellectuals like S. A. Dange, S. G. Sardesai, and Gangadhar Adhikari to actively translate and publish communist pamphlets.90 The translation of the English into the vernacular necessitated a parallel translation of the “foreign” into the “Indian.” Shaikh argues that “the vernacular version had to navigate the structures of language and a social structure in which caste was an important feature to make itself comprehensible to other intellectuals, trade union leaders and workers.”91 Caste served as the perfect cultural exemplar for explicating ideas of naturalized power relations and structural oppression, and it offered a radical horizon for imagining an Indian revolutionary future. At the same time, the politics of translation transferred linguistic hierarchies and the translators’ own caste biases onto socialist ideas. Gangadhar Adhikari used the term dalit to “denote the oppressed proto-middle class of feudal Europe” but also replicated a power binary between the high and low, the abstract and the material in his choice of linguistic registers. Shaikh notes that “abstract categories like use value (upyukta vastu) or exchange value (vikriya mola), mode of production (utpadanpaddhati) were translated in Sanskrit or Sanskritized Marathi, but embodied categories like the lumpenproletariat (mavali) were translated into a lower register, the urban slang in this case.” Shanta Apte was born into a Chitpavan Brahmin family from Pune and she, like Bombay’s Marathi Marxists, struggled to translate her analysis of film industrial hierarchies into caste terms. On the one hand, Apte’s focus on the depleting human body suggests that her class location altered her relation to her bodily subjectivity. She does not hesitate to add actresses to the caste group of “workers,” mixing up traditional vocational (and caste) distinctions between musicians, carpenters, scribes, performers, and technicians under the same umbrella. In fact, the caste-ing of the actress’s body was an ongoing social and industrial 262

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reality. An article in the Chicago Defender from 1930 explicitly notes this: “The educated woman [in India] is forbidden by caste and religion to appear before the public on either stage or screen. Only three classes of girls are eligible for a stage career, the nautch girls, Eurasian (half castes) and sweeper women. The latter have no caste at all and after cleaning up food remnants and garbage can appear as any female character.”92 As an actress, Apte invites the reader—aspiring actors and actresses—to join in affective solidarity with the worker-caste, a social category defined by its need to sell its labor power to those with the means of production and simultaneously rendered out-caste. On the other hand, Apte possibly also aims to outrage readers who find it insupportable that a carpenter and a screenwriter should be forced into the same caste bracket, thereby also inciting outrage against the capitalist film system itself. This possibility is supported by Apte’s opening lines in the chapter, cited at the start of this section. Caste was invented by Lord Krishna on the basis of culture, that is, certain norms of a civilization. In contrast, the film industry’s caste system is instrumentally improvised in the service of power. Apte problematically attributes caste in society to a certain naturalized order of things while caste in the film industry is arbitrary and artificial. In this way, caste prejudice is mobilized to win class solidarity. Apte’s translation of class into caste might thus be seen as an appeal to the caste consciousness of local readers and filmgoers in order to make film industrial hierarchies more visceral, and we must not shy away from the contradictory implications of one woman’s very personal and public struggles with the caste question. The journalists who covered Apte’s hunger strike were unable to fix its antecedents within recent global and nationalist histories. We might take their befuddlement as a salutary lesson. Apte’s actions belong to an expansive historical force field of protest politics centered on the body— collective industrial strikes, Gandhian biomoral politics, the jail protests of Bhagat Singh and his revolutionary comrades, and even Neera’s embodied refusal of a false marriage in Kunku. Apte’s hunger strike denounced the imbrication of industrial rationalization and an energetic cultural modernity. Her approach drew as much from bourgeois and upper-caste frameworks of individual improvement as from nationalist ideals of self-determination. Shanta Apte linked Indian capitalists E xhau stion | Thak aan

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with the colonial oppressors in claiming a workers’ community—a national public of the exploited—and attempted to place cinema on the stage of the Indian economy and nationwide labor struggles. Her public activism allows us another vector for viewing the relation between cinema and colonial modernity in South Asia. Reading across Apte’s hunger strike and her book, we see many continuities as well as contradictions, a push-and-pull of ideas that were hers in her time and those that are ours today. What is most significant in this dialogic play is that we witness one actress’s process of becoming cine-worker, her attempts at individuation on the terrain of cinema. Apte’s hunger strike eventually led to the termination of her contract with Prabhat Film Company and the creation of her own company— Shanta Apte Concerns. She was hired by Circo Film Company (see chapter  1) as one of the “well-known and famous artists whom they [Circo] had secured with great difficulty and influence,” going to such great lengths as paying her “waiting salary” during her legal tussle with Prabhat, along with a fabulous advance of Rs. 90,000 for her short-term contract. Apte later worked in Bombay, Lahore, and Madras in a variety of roles in an attempt to break her image of being a “regional” star. In Lahore, she once again found herself in a legal battle, this time with the producers of Pancholi Studios for alleged breach of contract.93 It is important to note here that the initial talkie years were a highly litigious period in Indian cinema, and actresses, as the prized locus of a film’s commercial potential in these years, were frequently involved in legal contractual tussles with studios (e.g., Ruby Myers, Tara Sundari, Meena Shorey). Industry commentators regularly made disapproving noises about litigious women, but the very publicness of these legal “scandals” allowed the film actress to produce herself as a modern worker. C O N C LU S I O N : A P O L I T I C S O F D E P L E T I O N

History is also always a history of labor: of labor as either dead or dying, and its resuscitation through politics. —Anupama Rao

What is cinema? This is an originary question for the field of film studies and has been addressed by generations of scholars. In this book I 264

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have shifted the focus of the question toward processes and practices of becoming, a study of ontogenesis rather than ontology. What, therefore, does becoming cinema mean? How did people and assemblages attempt to remake themselves as individuals and industries under the sign of cinema? Shanta Apte gives us one possible answer: that to individuate oneself as cine-worker it was necessary to define the relation between the body and the cine-ecology, the entire assemblage of technology, ideology, finance, objects, and environments that constituted the milieu of cinema. Embodiment, via Apte, is key to unlocking the historical status of cinematic labor. Itineraries of exhaustion, fatigue, and depletion yield new meanings of cinema and the experience that we call the “cinematic.” As a category of durational work and embodied experience, the cinematic is located somewhere on the steadily depleting threshold between motion and stasis, a place marked by and marking the passage of time. Mary Ann Doane argues that the founding fantasy of cinema—the fantasy of perpetual motion—was built on the knowledge of technological and corporeal contingency. Not only could cinema’s machinic platforms break down, but the very illusion of motion was based on the early twentieth-century theory of “persistence of vision,” which presupposed a deficiency in human vision.94 Expanding on this argument, I have argued that the foundational material contingency that defines cinema extends into the world of film-as-labor, in the exhausted body of the cine-worker. Exhaustion is the secret at the heart of the cine-ecology’s contingency. Depletion and death can be found at the center of several cinematic anxieties. Our concerns with the death of the medium, the politics of archives, or the problem of film conservation are anxieties that arise from the very exhaustibility of cinema as material. The physicality of celluloid assumes depletion; indeed, depletion of the film print has been a prerequisite for its projection and continued cultural life. Depletion signals the limits to growth, yes, but it also marks new pathways for circulation and invention that circumvent the temporality of linear progress. The variegated political economy of film in South Asia has historically necessitated the circulation and recycling of the depleted print into second- and third-tier exhibition markets.95 A critical look at exhaustion allows us to connect material histories of celluloid and equipment with experiential histories of embodied film practice; E xhau stion | Thak aan

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together they complicate notions of obsolescence, finitude, and the very temporality of cinema. Exhaustion also intervenes in current theorizations of embodiment in cinema. The weariness of the actor, their capacity for wearing out and “being spent,” is an experiential category that pushes us to connect theories of filmic embodiment rooted in studies of spectatorship and representation with embodiment as production experience. In exhaustion, the history of the body intersects with the history of cinema, to yield new insights on how mediatic and ideological constructions of the vital body of the 1930s played out alongside legal and economic control of the depleted body. Film work comes into view as labor, and creativity shows itself as monetized labor power, enframed by the exigencies of cinema as marketplace, as employer, and as site of production.96 Experiences of bodily distress point us toward the inequalities that sustained the Bombay film industry. The deaths of K. G. Shastri, Sheikh Abdulla, and Abdul Salam were deemed a “tragedy” at the time. The film’s producers could not be held directly responsible for the abrupt and rapid drowning of three capable and healthy young swimmers. But if we inquire after the causes of their exhaustion, the net of accountability is cast much wider across a cineecology marked by speculative practice and corporeal precarity. The speculative financial practices we examined in chapter 1 depended not only on advance finances from distributors but also on restrictive contracts with stars and the replaceable bodies of hundreds of daily wage workers. “Extras” such as Shastri, Abdulla, and Salam enabled the lowcost, high-risk production culture of the 1930s and were periodically expelled from the cine-machine as so much exhaust or the exhausted residue of production. Their attempts to make good in the film industry, to hustle multiple gigs and work untenable shifts were efforts toward desperate individuation. Shanta Apte deployed the hunger strike as a deliberate and durational staging of bodily depletion, a depletion that defined the human in opposition to a machinic or nonhuman other. Her theory of cinematic labor power depends on the difference between the human and the object. However, in my view, Apte’s corporeal politics does not depend on a denigration of objects or suggestions of human mastery over technological tools. Rather, she points to the dangers of conflating different modes of existence and the material implications of reducing the human 266

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to the status of the object-as-commodity under the specific regime of  twentieth-century capitalism. From such a perspective, Shastri, Abdulla, Salam, Neelam, Rajkishore, Apte, and the anonymous Indonesian bodybuilder each occupy differential positions of power within an asymmetrical cine-ecology that is also determined by cameras, studio buildings, microphones, and the summer heat. Further, the possibility of resistance isn’t tied solely to machines but enfolds other humans, beings, and things. Here I return to Manto, who seized on the key perceptual realignment engendered by film work—the understanding of human and nonhuman as co-actors. Neelam’s experience of exhausted synchrony with a tired film set afforded the place from which she could launch her own form of resistance. At the end of “My Name is Radha,” Neelam refuses cinematic illusionism and the invisibility of labor by reminding Manto that her name is not Neelam (screen name) but Radha (birth name). Shanta Apte also provides us with a vision of resistance. She concludes her book by saying that while her analysis of the film industry seems bleak, there is one clear way out: “One should have anger about injustice, be aware of one’s own rights, and be ready to make the utmost effort to gain those rights. When one sees oppression, one must resent it; one’s blood must boil. If young men and women with this kind of gumption enter the film industry as actors and actresses, then Paradise can be created there.” Apte urges cine-workers to develop an activist and collective stance to injustice. She advocates that if a “capable and conscious class of actors forms a union and begins a struggle for their rights, it will soon be apparent how cowardly this capitalism and this mogulocracy really is.”97 If vitality was seen as human infrastructure by the nationalist and the capitalist imaginary, then exhaustion refuses that infrastructural role. Going on strike, performing bodily depletion, or refusing to maintain a continuous show of vitality are acts of refusal and resistance. Film labor is braided into multiple energy relations, continually moving between vitality and depletion. As such film labor reveals itself not as a medium-specific ontic experience but an urban, historical, and spatial practice that narrates an important history of the modern body, its subjugations, and its aspirations. My goal is not to locate what is specific and bounded to the experience of film work, for that is an E xhau stion | Thak aan

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impossible (and, eventually, irrelevant) project particularly if we conceive of cinema as an ecology of transmedial practices. The specificity of film labor lies in the particularity of the body, its location, the time, weather, and the flux of personal and professional relations within which work is done. Shanta Apte shows us that the screen image, the film studio, and the laboring body are all connected in a network of energy relations. In her acting, her fasting, and her writing, Apte uses her body to make meaning in cinema and of cinema. To think of cinema as practices beyond the frame is to remember that cinema is not a reining in or isolation from the world but an opening out and extension into it.

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CH APTER SIX

Short Circuit | Struggle Short circuit (noun): a connection of comparatively low resistance accidentally or intentionally made between points on a circuit between which the resistance is normally much greater.

It is 2006. I am at a preview screening of Omkara at Yashraj Studios in Andheri. I’ve given up my seat and moved into the aisle with the other assistant directors because we have a few unexpected guests. Shah Rukh Khan has just turned up, straight from the sets of Don, which is currently being shot at YRF. During the interval, as I stand outside with my friends, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around. It is Shah Rukh. A rush of emotions floods my brain as my body tries to decide how to respond to this moment. I move aside. He walks away. I have often returned to that tap on my shoulder. My head turning in slow motion. His face. He looks at me and smiles, because we have known each other for ever. This is the dream of the fan. The dream of the fan rests in recognition of the self in the eyes of the screen idol. Fan desire teeters on the edge of madness and can surreptitiously slide into the kind of obsession depicted in Maneesh Sharma’s Fan (2016). In the film, Gaurav Chandna has such an intense desire for the film star Aaryan Khanna that he longs for nothing less than total reciprocity. The star must recognize him as his greatest fan, and the fan must thereby achieve his own form of stardom. The cinematic coup pulled off in the film is to cast superstar Shah Rukh Khan in the roles of both fan and star. Through the use of prosthetic makeup, Gaurav Chandna is made to look almost like Shah Rukh Khan, but not quite. He

is caught in a short-circuiting loop of desire where the distance between star and fan, self and other, collapses to produce a glitch in the system. Gaurav responds to cinematic interpellation rather too perfectly, identifying himself almost completely with the hero on screen. His misrecognition of the limits of spectatorial identification also creates a space for agentive action, and the fan sets out to exact murderous revenge when the star insists on a separation between self and other, private and public.1 How do passionate energies move through the cine-ecology? Is there a predetermined route for desire to flow, as we often tend to think, unidirectionally from the screen to the spectator? Are there other itineraries of other desires that enable, elude, or defy the logics of the screen? Further, how are energies transformed across the material encounters that constitute the cine-ecology? To conclude my three-part exploration of energy in this half of the book, this chapter tracks the complex and surprising routes through which energy circulates, branches off, and is transduced in the cine-ecology. Energy, as we have seen, is relational, moving through and between diverse encounters. In this chapter I think of the places in the cine-ecology where energy flows are short-circuited, moments of least resistance that highlight the vulnerability of laboring human bodies and their coextension with varied networked actants. Of the many desires of the fan, there is a kind that propels her to walk out of the movie theater with a burning need to penetrate to the other side of the screen. I therefore begin the chapter by drawing a historical connection between the fan and the cine-worker, focusing on the scores of early talkie film viewers who chose to remake themselves as film workers, each asking the same question (this time rhetorical): Should I join the movies?2 In the 1930s the fan-as-worker emblematized cinema’s drive to social reproduction, creating a feedback loop of desire and labor that continually renewed its workforce even in the face of extreme workplace notoriety. Today the process continues, not in the face of notoriety as much as continuing workplace precarity. I elaborate on the historical significance of the fan-as-worker by exploring the experiential meaning of what it means to “struggle” as a film aspirant in Bombay. In the second half of the chapter I speculatively follow the film aspirant as she inhabits different historical avatars—Mohammed 270

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Rafique the male extra, Pramila (née Esther Abraham) the stunt queen, and Nalini D the female extra or “background artiste.” I attend to each of these avatars in moments of extreme corporeal vulnerability to unpack the meaning of the film industrial term “shooting accident,” a term that contains assumptions about intention and causality while masking truths about structure and agency. These histories embody the tense entanglement of bodies, technologies, machines, climate, and other elemental forces in the process of filmic creation. The title of this chapter pairs the terms short circuit and struggle, which belong to quite different worlds. The word struggle, as I explained in the introduction, means something so specific to Bombay that it is considered urban patois. To struggle in Bombay is to hustle for the elusive “big break” in the movies, and strugglers are those who do the exhausting work of struggle. A short circuit yields new connections at points of unexpectedly low resistance; struggle depletes the body and can reduce resistance to the seductions of the screen and the injustices of the world. I consider struggle alongside the technical term short circuit in order to reinsert the messy materiality of embodied desire into media studies’ fascination with the materiality of mechanical circuits, feedback loops, and systems breakdowns. Current debates in film and media studies, particularly in studies of digital, online, and infrastructural media, often use vocabulary from a cybernetics episteme to describe the relations between viewers and screens, users and platforms, players and avatars, in order to understand our “posthuman” present. As N. Katherine Hayles points out, however, both liberal humanist constructions of the subject and cybernetic approaches to the posthuman have relied on the “erasure of embodiment.”3 On the one hand, to approach the human as machine, as Shanta Apte pointed out, is to negate material specificity in favor of abstractions (such as output, information, efficiency) that enable exploitative extraction. Further, as Muriel Combes underlines, to approach society as a machine (whether as analogy or as ontology) runs the risk of technicism, “reducing any crisis—even social crises—to a problem of regulation, and presenting as the only ideal, homeostasis, that is stable equilibrium of attendant forces.”4 On the other hand, to consider the human as an independent force in the world, capable of immense production and destruction through sheer will and intelligence, is to disavow the web of nonhuman Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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relations that carry us. Struggle is embodied and grounded. It is situated and relational. When paired, short circuit and struggle together generate a view of the cine-ecology as simultaneously technical and organic, human and nonhuman, controlled and uncontrollable. F R O M FA N TO W O R K E R : H O W C I N E M A R E P R O D U C E S ITS WORKFORCE

When Annette saw her first Indian film, she was stunned. She felt it was all like magic. Instantly she felt the urge to be a part of that magic. Many times after that first time, Annette slipped away from home at great risk to see the magic till one day she saw the shooting of a film in which she saw Sulochana (Ruby Meyers) for the first time. “Oh she was so beautiful! When she came down the steps. I almost lost my heartbeats. She was like an angel, a Goddess coming down from heaven. I stared at her for almost an hour.” —Ali Peter John, “Azurie Interview”

It is impossible to understand the desire of the fan without understanding the fascination of the star. In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin tell us that social and ideological meaning resides not within individuals but between them. It is from the affective space between the viewer and the silver screen, the billboard, the poster, or the cellphone that stardom unfolds and the fan is born. There is a two-way energy relay from the screen to the viewer and back to the star image, and within this relay the desiring self and the desirable other are both coconstituted.5 This is what Gaurav Chandna means when he angrily says in one of the most popular lines from Fan: “Aaryan is because Gaurav is. Without Gaurav, Aaryan is nothing.”6 Similarly, when fans of Tamil superstar Rajnikanth interrupt the seamlessness of theatrical display by dancing right in front of the movie screen, they highlight that they are not obscuring their star’s screen image, but rather that it is in that in-between space that “Rajnikanth” is also made.7 The academic study of film stars and stardom dates back to sociological studies of celebrity in the 1950s.8 Film studies’ own engagement with stardom can be said to have been inaugurated by Richard Dyer’s 272

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Stars (1979), and since then the field of stardom studies has expanded to include research on the mechanics via which a “star text” is produced, the cultural economy of stardom and fan desire, the labor of acting, the social status of star-actresses within modern nationalist projects, and the negotiations of the star text by active audience groups.9 Star studies recognizes the important role of audiences and fans in the construction of stars, and film scholars such as S. V. Srinivas have even pointed to the fraught nature of this relation, with fans in South India often trespassing their mandate of star reinforcement and adulation with violence and self-harm.10 As its own separate field, fan studies is much newer than star studies. One of its main contributions has been to turn film studies away from the idea of passive reception by ideologically susceptible spectators to the active textual engagement and “participatory cultures” of fans. Fan practices and cultures are central to this field with a growing focus on textual production (fanfiction, vidding, blogs) and material interfaces (toys, video games, apps, fashion, memorabilia). However, amid all these studies of the mechanics of stardom, on one hand, and the politics and practices of fandom, on the other, the energetic relay that transforms the fan into a cine-worker remains unremarked on. There is much at stake here. Cinema can transport the spectator from the theater to the studio; to imagine the fan as the becoming-worker is to think transversally across the spheres of production and reception. The fanas-worker embodies cinema’s drive to socially reproduce its own labor force and as such offers important insights into the organization and operation of media industries.11 In an article in 2013 I discussed “kinetomania” as a kind of fandom that manifests itself in the impulse to archive, document, and preserve. The kinetomaniac is the fan who clings to objects such as posters and postcards of screen idols, ticket stubs, and song booklets, following a libidinal logic. This is the fan-as-collector framed as an amateur archivist of cinema.12 That article owed a debt to Amelie Hastie’s Cupboards of Curiosity (2007), in which she recovers marginalia, memoirs, and dollhouses made by female film celebrities and reframes them as works of film theory and history. Hastie unsettles disciplinary boundaries by switching categories such as “star” with “theorist,” domestic craftmaker with archivist, thereby democratizing these cultural profiles, allowing us to see connections between different kinds of creative production. Sh o r t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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figures  6.1a and 6.2b Annette Gueizler, screen name “Madam Azurie,” left, and her screen goddess, Sulochana, right.

figures 6.1a and 6.2b (continued)

The fan-as-worker needs to be accorded a similar reappraisal. In the academy, the fan continues to operate within a limited cultural ambit and is called on to practice legibly fan-like activities.13 The adoration of stars, unruly behavior in theaters, scrapbooking, writing fan letters, even music connoisseurship are practices that retain the traditional identity of the fan. But the fan who decides to remake herself into a star is a boundary-crossing figure who short-circuits the orderly flow of social affects. Little wonder then that even feature films that dramatize this figure envision the fan’s itinerary as doomed (Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, 2003), destructive (Fan, 2016), or supernatural (Om Shanti Om, 2007). The fan-as-practitioner or the fan-as-worker defies our expectations of boundaried identities and links up the spheres of production and reception, exemplifying in her own body the energy transfers and transductions that are necessary to the production of screen images. Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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At a time when India seemed poised for political freedom, when transnational tales of adventure and success circulated widely via massprinted text and image, and when filmic visions of romantic coupling gripped the imagination of college students, Bombay and its cineecology were bound to attract the young and the hopeful. The film fan’s desire to approximate the object of her adoration was partly a longing for a life of excitement and beauty. And there was something especially seductive about watching an actress at work as Azurie points out in the epigraph to this section. Watching Sulochana confidently glide down a staircase, dressed in an actress’s finery and full studio makeup, glowing in the strong glare of carbon lamps and encircled by an almost entirely male cast and crew, would surely create a heady sensation. The actress on set was a paragon of glamor and cinematic otherworldliness. More pragmatically, the actress was also a material symbol of earning power and female financial independence. Azurie, born Annette Gueizler (1907–1998), was forbidden by her family from associating with the world of performing arts.14 In her early adulthood, Azurie tried her luck with the two main vocational options for women seeking white-collar work in 1930s Bombay—nursing and stenography.15 Apparently “nursing left Azurie sick,” and stenography was not her forte.16 She was already captivated by the magic of cinema, and her desire to “be a part of that magic” solidified when she witnessed the most prominent star of the time, Sulochana, rehearsing on set. Azurie began visiting film shoots on a regular basis, unbeknown to her father, and was eventually offered a minor walk-on part in a film. In the years to come, Azurie refashioned herself as Indian cinema’s first dancing star, improvising a form of film choreography that was completely self-taught.17 The fan’s longing to remake herself as a star therefore goes far beyond a naïve conflation of the real and the representational and points to a complex history of urban work and desires for individual self-fulfillment. As I have argued throughout this book in various ways, cinema responded to and influenced urban transformations not only through on-screen fantasies of modernity but also through the material presence and circulation of a highly visible cinematic workforce. If cinema in the twentieth century was a force that indexed various registers and affects of the modern experience, we must also consider that film production itself manifested a singularly modern workplace with several features that were 276

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emblematic of modernity’s powerful promise—newness, romance, heterosocial contact, mobility, celebrity, and freedom. The study of early cinema in Europe and the United States often characterizes the emergence of the commercial film industry as a force with a democratic promise. Discussing German cinema theory, Miriam Hansen points out that even for Siegfried Kracauer, who was mostly cynical about mass media, “something like an actual democratization of culture seemed to be taking shape” via early cinema. Hansen elaborates: The cinema suggested this possibility not only because it attracted and made visible to itself and society an emerging, heterogeneous mass public ignored and despised by dominant culture. The new medium also offered an alternative because it engaged the contradictions of modernity at the level of the senses, the level at which the impact of modern technology on human experience was most palpable and irreversible. In other words, the cinema not only traded in the mass production of the senses but also provided an aesthetic horizon for the experience of industrial mass society.18

From the potential to embody an alternative public sphere to its appeal to the worn and tired proletariat, the movies replicated and responded to some of the most defining elements of industrial modernity. We thus have histories of immigrant and working class audiences drawn to the democratic spatial potential of the film theater and its egalitarian promise to one and all—the promise of a brief respite from the humdrum routine of daily city life. In recent years feminist historians of Hollywood have pointed to other modes of democratization that were at play in the early decades of cinema. Hilary Hallett notes that “the actress came to embody the ‘democratization’ of fame as elite men, and then men altogether, lost their monopoly over incarnating the combination of personal achievement, distinction, and freedom at the heart of modern renown.”19 Despite the considerable social differences between Los Angeles in the 1910s and Bombay in the 1920s–1930s, the volume of public discourse about a film star like Sulochana approximated that around prominent men and built on the already existing infrastructures of celebrity generated by urban theater and the Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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gramophone record industry. The celebrity status of the star and circulation of news about star salaries augmented the democratic promise of cinema. What is particularly noteworthy here is that thousands of moviegoers across the globe seized on this promise rather directly: they decided to join the “dream factory” as film workers.20 Amid the many motivations of the film fan and aspirant, one must also consider the very concrete desire for employment. Cinema offered an unprecedented opportunity for work at a time of grave unemployment in India. Following the American Depression and the colonial government’s lackadaisical approach to investment in Indian industry, unemployment in British India reached crisis proportions and triggered considerable political debate. Nationalist critique of British policy highlighted the twin problems of poverty and unemployment, and middleclass unemployment among the educated continued to be a subject of political discussion through the late 1930s.21 Shanta Apte noted that “the searing fire of joblessness” had contributed to the surge in interest in film work: “Young people found themselves in a situation where they only had thorns for food, and a line of unemployed youths turned up at the door of the film industry.”22 The legendary actor Eddie Billimoria (1900–1981) did not long for an individual star but craved the whole cinematic set-up. Growing up in the cantonment town of Khirkee (Maharashtra), Billimoria had no access to films as the only cinema hall was reserved for British soldiers. He found an ingenious way around this problem and got a job as a gatekeeper at the theater. Billimoria soon moved to Bombay as a projectionist and ultimately became a leading man in scores of silent and talkie features.23 Dreaming in the city of Nagpur, a young Kishore Sahu (actor, director, producer) also longed for a film future: “I had made up my mind. My forensic dreams, which I had once, were laid to rest; and those of the silver screen came to fill all my heart. Just after submitting my last B.A. paper I left for Bombay. I could not wait for the result. That seemed [a] sheer waste of time.”24 V. M. Vyas, a prominent talkie producer, caught the film bug while staring out of his office balcony in Bombay, “longingly looking at the crowds that used to visit the Majestic Cinema every week-end.”25 And the legendary director Mehboob Khan remembers being a film aspirant since his early childhood: “before I could learn a bit of Gujarati and Urdu, I was overwhelmed by a strong 278

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desire to join the movies.”26 Journeys such as these, repeated over and over again, present a snapshot of the itinerary of the film fan who transitions to a worker-practitioner.27 Cinema was its own best spokesperson when it came to firing a desire for film. As we have seen in chapters 3 and 4, films about filmmaking, film actresses, and Bombay as a cinematic city proliferated since the 1920s. A paradigmatic example is the silent film The Village Girl (Mohan Bhavnani, 1927), starring Azurie’s idol, Sulochana. The story goes something like this: a village zamindar named Bholaram and his pretty daughter Sunderi are shaken out of their rural tranquility when a neighbor returns from Bombay brimming with stupendous tales of a different life. “The Electric Trains, motor cars and buses, the giant wheel, Cinemas and theaters, Bholaram could not digest the stuff. He went mad over the description. A longing sprang up within him and Sunderi, which ultimately ripped into a resolution and father and the village girl” set off for Bombay. The cinematic city lives up to all their most ardent fantasies, but there is danger lying in wait. Sunderi’s beauty attracts the evil attentions of Mr.  Karsondas, “a keeper of gamblingdens and a terror to Bombay.”28 She escapes his clutches but is separated from her father in the process and roams the city in desperation. Cinema, and filmic serendipity, come to the rescue. Sunderi wanders onto an outdoor film shoot at Worli Gardens and is hired on a contract by Diamond Film Co. The studio’s staff provide her with an alternate community until the day arrives when she is reunited with her father. Sunderi marries the studio’s action star, Navinchandra, and the publicity synopsis indicates that she stays on in Bombay and at Diamond Film Company. Even at the basic level of plot, Village Girl deftly interlinks the glamor of Bombay city with its cine-ecology, marking cinema as the quintessential site of urban opportunity, a site of both work and romance. It suggests that the “longing” created by stories of Bombay can best be satisfied in cinema work. If one were to generalize, using contemporary fan studies from India, about the identity of the Indian film fan, one would believe that the fan is a performatively male, publicly declarative, and excessive figure.29 Turning to the archive of the talkie period, the film historian finds a more complex picture. For one thing, the fan could definitely be female. In a biography of the actress Indurani (nee Ishrat Jehan), film Sh o r t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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buff and online archivist Professor Surjit Singh mentions an interesting anecdote about Indurani’s older sister, Roshan Jehan. Although the two sisters were not allowed to go to the movies, Roshan avidly consumed “filmi magazines and became a fan of movie stars,” mailing fan letters to select stars.30 Around 1934–1935, Roshan received an autographed portrait from an actress at Poona’s Saraswati Cinetone studio in response to her fan letter. Emboldened by the thrilling portrait of her idol, Roshan secretly got herself photographed at a local studio and mailed the picture to Saraswati Cinetone seeking a position as an actress.31 Roshan delineates the precise mechanism by which a fan attempts to become a cine-worker and illustrates the allure of film for a significant constituency of young female fans. South Asia in the 1930s was home to a million “modern movie-struck girls” who have not yet been adequately recognized. A poem published in Cinema magazine in 1939 describes the desires of the female fan who fantasizes about life as an actress:

A M O D E R N M OV I E - S T RU C K G I R L

To feel the pulse of a new life, The ideas are in my mind rife, To dally for hours with men, In love-like, yet romantic vein. There’s such a boundless freedom, For a girl of my sort in filmdom. With Saigal, Sanyal, I’sh to chat, Handsome Najam I would fondly pat. Najam—I should crave to kiss, Nor I like Moti or Ashok to miss. With men I’sh to walk arm in arm, And to flirt with them—What’s harm? The best life is that of Screen, To meet gay men already seen. I’ll be proud of my film fame, In press, on lips, will be my name. For things unknown, unseen I pine, How’ll I realize the desires of mine.32

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The unnamed poet articulates a very particular vision of freedom here, one that is premised on romance and mixed sociality—cutting across gender, caste, and religion. At the same time, while the poem privileges the historical possibility of a new professional figure—the actress—it also diminishes her professional significance by limiting the agentive ambit of the actress to the increased scope for romance.33 To balance this perception of an actress’s life, film magazines started to carefully frame the actress as simultaneously a worker, a creative talent, a consumer, a commodity, and a public celebrity. This concerted construction of the image of the film actress eventually presented her as an aspirational role model for the modern woman.34 This entire narrative, of moral anxiety mixed with the unrivaled cultural power of the film actress, is very similar to the story of Hollywood in the 1920s, with one major difference: the mobility and social freedoms of women in 1930s India was quite different from their American counterparts. Even if women were more visible in newfound public roles as college-goers, political speakers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, and secretaries, the number of white-collar working women in India was relatively miniscule because of lingering norms of gendered segregation, purdah practices, and the inability of a majority of women to access and succeed in higher education.35 These conditions presented a major challenge to the Indian movie-struck girl who longed to work in films. In Hollywood, on the other hand, the number of young women desirous of working in the movies far exceeded the number of men. When the Central Casting Corporation of Hollywood was formed in 1925, its first registration list totaled approximately ten thousand men and women, “with female registrants outnumbering male registrants by three to one.”36 In India, it was only in the 1940s that a few intrepid women started publicly advertising for “jobs wanted” in film magazines, a space that had previously been reserved for male aspirants. The practices of the fan as film aspirant and as worker become more legible when we shift our gaze from exceptional examples of fans who successfully became stars to the routine influx of anonymous cineworkers who never made it to stardom. The craze for film work grew exponentially in the 1930s, a phenomenon that was partially indexed by increasing commentaries on “movie-mad” film aspirants in the trade

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and popular press. In 1940 the journalist and magazine editor Zahir Kureishi (a.k.a. “Zabak”) penned a passionate three-page article titled “Ruined by the Glamor of the Screen? A Heart-Rending Story of Hundreds of Young Boys and Girls Who Go Astray.” Describing a typical case of movie mania, Zabak said: It usually starts at the end of a show with the youngster imagining himself to be madly in love with the heroine. . . . There is no difference between him and the hero. In fact, he suspects, he is a wee bit better. / That is the beginning. “Bombay” is the Mecca of his dreams and to Bombay he comes determined to smash the gates and be flashed in huge neon lights. / He does not come alone. His kind is legion. They come from far and near. From the heights of Srinagar. From the heat of Madras, from Delhi, Punjab and all the four corners of India.37

Zabak’s hyperbole about the massive migration of purportedly naïve film aspirants to Bombay was matched by the real anguish of parents who felt that they had lost their children to “movie mania.” In a 1939 missing persons advertisement, Motilal Shamlal Kapoor of Deoli was “Reported Missing!” by his “heartbroken” parents who hadn’t heard from him in the eleven months since he “left his home for his craze of the movies.”38 How do we characterize Motilal’s craze if not as fandom? Cinema’s myriad promises ranged from the assurance of wealth to sexual freedom, personal celebrity, or proximity to film stars. But the processes by which film fans became film workers were not straightforward. By pathologizing all film aspirants as naïve, movie-mad fans who could not distinguish between themselves and the fictional characters on screen, Zabak inadvertently replicated the colonial view of India’s audiences as infantilized, susceptible, passive spectators who could not differentiate between the image and reality. In fact, the film aspirant of the 1930s was motivated by varied desires and consciously battled the disreputable image of the film industry, attracted by goals such as money, fame, and the possibility of creative fulfillment. These were destinations that the industry itself had generated in its aggressive drive to recruit new and “respectable” workers and position itself as a national industry. 282

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S TAY I N G W I T H T H E S T RU G G L E

The term struggle has been romanticized. So many people answer, when I ask them how they are doing, “Struggle jaari hai, ma’am.” [The struggle goes on, ma’am.] But let’s face it, it’s a struggle. One is trying to survive in a hard city like Mumbai and the capacity to deal with rejection constantly. They have to get up in the morning, keep going day after day, with a whole bunch of No’s. —Nandini Shrikent

We do not know exactly when this came to pass, but at least since the 1980s the term “struggle” has meant something very specific in Mumbai. Struggle defines the major part of the everyday labor of the fan-asworker and is an energetic, embodied practice. As a particular mode of work within the cine-ecology, it defines a particular social actor, the struggler, who is a “long-suffering aspirant to stardom (in any field, but particularly acting),” someone “without any kin or social connections who [is] trying to get a break in the film industry.”39 Only a small handful are able to achieve stardom in the cine-ecology. Most others remain stuck in a struggle that “goes on.” An understanding of the temporal, spatial, and affective experience of struggle can bring greater depth to studies of media industries, production cultures, and urban history. Toward this goal, I present a few theses on the nature and significance of struggle in the cine-ecology. 1. Struggle is continuous. Struggle is marked by a peculiar temporality, one that is decisively oriented toward the future but also determinedly grounded in the present. The film aspirant’s identity is based on a speculative futurity, a hopeful investment in a tomorrow that will define the self and render the past meaningful in retrospect. As a form of speculative practice, struggle is the counterpart to the everyday financial hustle of film producers and defines the cine-ecology as a space of contingency. Certainly, the struggler is a gambler, given her penchant for risking everything on the slim chance of “making it.” Madan Mohan, one of the most renowned music directors in the Hindi film industry and son of Bombay Talkies producer Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall, delineated the future-oriented stance of the struggler in a rare letter. Despite his considerable connections, Madan Mohan was compelled to Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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become a struggler, as he knew his father would not support his film dreams. In 1944, while serving as an officer in the British Indian Army, a twenty-year-old Madan wrote this letter to Devika Rani: Yes, I will be a great man, and that also of my own ability, and with no one’s help. This is the first time I am going to tell you. My interest is in your industry, it always has been, and if ever I had any talents, it was for this industry. I shall join it as soon as I can, and if nobody takes me up, I will work as an extra and show my talents. It may take years before they are realized. . . . I am not afraid of anything in the world and my head shall always be up.40

Mingled in with all its hope and bravado, the letter reveals an acute awareness that the struggle could be a long one. Strugglers, like every other speculative actor in the cine-ecology, have their eyes on the horizon but are committed to preparing the grounds for the present. Strugglers do not represent the kind of futurism that Donna Haraway recoils from in Staying with the Trouble, one that avoids engagement with current troubles by investing a naïve faith in a technological-divine solution or one that assumes that the future is inevitable and there is nothing to be done. For Haraway, “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as moral critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”41 The immediate context for Haraway’s ideas is climate change and the role of capitalism and colonialism in enframing the planet as a place of extraction for the benefit of some humans rather than a symbiotic shared space for multispecies living. Her ideas are useful to us here because Bombay’s cine-ecology is a similarly fraught place that continues to produce contingency and precarity even as its global profits and status enlarge. Just like the city, which continues to expand and make space for people and their desires against the grim urgency of rising sea levels and a volatile monsoon, Bombay’s film practitioners have stayed with the trouble. The daily struggle of film fans, extras, and workers is a determined effort to make meaning of their fragile lives in fragile times. Through their situated and libidinous investment in cinema, strugglers compel us to rethink our own relation with cinema and unsettle overly 284

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utopian or deterministically structural readings of Bombay cinema. Thus in 2017 when an actor says to a casting director that “struggle jaari hai,” he confirms that the “struggle goes on.” 2. Waiting is part of the labor of struggle. A critical aspect of the struggle and its particular temporality is the practice of waiting. Waiting is not passivity; it is a specific kind of labor. The struggler waits for phone calls to be returned, for agents to bring good news, for casting directors to get in touch, for that dream assignment to come her way. In the meanwhile, she continues with other activities that prepare the ground for waiting—click better portraits for the portfolio, craft and submit CVs, keep an ear to the ground for news of work opportunities, exercise and train, do the rounds of studios, and network, network, network. Waiting is therefore an engaged mode of being in the world, constantly alert and in readiness for a different time. Since waiting and preparing are continual processes, the struggler has a very different relation to late industrial capitalist time as compared to a factory or office worker. There is little separation between work, leisure, and self-care, a phenomenon that is painfully familiar to us today in the new “creative” economies of global capital. On the streets of present-day Mumbai, struggle is a badge of honor, a code word legible to a wide community of the new precariat, who read it as respect for the daily hustle of surviving in an overpopulated, competitive environment. The cultural worker today is interpellated by what Angela McRobbie terms a dominant “creativity dispositif,” an ideological apparatus that enables, even validates, the current precaritization of cultural work by privileging ideas of inherent talent and individual self-fulfillment as oppositional to aspirations for job security, regulated work hours, or health insurance. While freelancing in the gig economy is a necessity for most young workers, it is overwhelmingly framed as a choice. McRobbie highlights that this approach to work as necessarily risky but still desirable, is “inherently individualistic and conservative.” Thinking through these ideas in the context of the film struggler in Bombay’s cinematic archive, one recognizes immediately a similar impulse to normalize, even romanticize precarity by framing “insecurity as part of the adventure.”42 The emergence of the film aspirant in 1930s Bombay set the stage for this form of ongoing labor, enabled by narratives of creativity and artistic pursuit. When Madan Mohan invokes the language of Sh o r t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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talent, ability, and pride, he participates in an emerging ideological narrative that infuses the terrible odds of film success with the selfsustaining promise of creative struggle. At the same time, it is necessary to recognize the textured differences between struggle in the 1930s, at a time when cinema as a site of self-fulfilment was still an unfamiliar idea, and today, when the normalization of cut-throat, atomizing competition and acceptance of bodily vulnerability as a prerequisite of creative success have attained new levels. Figure 6.2 offers an early glimmer of this cultural type, visibly gendered, with the full swagger of a star-in-the making who is nonetheless

figure  6.2 “Portrait of a Film Aspirant,” filmindia, September  1940, 17. The printed caption said: “This handsome young man, MD Jaini of 309 Barrack Street, Meerut, a matriculate, seeks a job in any film studio. He is prepared to work as a clerk, peon, bearer, cooly, floor-cleaner or any work—as long as the work is in a film-studio. This young man also hopes to come to Bombay one day.” 286

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pragmatic about how to struggle in the present. The photograph was submitted to filmindia magazine in 1940 to advertise for “jobs wanted.” 3. Struggle is situated and peripatetic at the same time. Struggle marks the city and produces the relations that build a sense of place. Zabak outlines how the fan-as-worker populates the city, revealing material links between disparate spaces and practices: By the sidewalks of Bori Bunder, on the pavements of Apollo Bunder, along the stretch between Dadar and Parel, outside the gates of every film studio you can see hundreds of these aspirants to film fame, begging, cajoling, threatening the pathan [Afghan security guard] to grant them entrance. . . . If you are observant enough . . . you may probably see the dreamer of film fame selling newspapers in the streets, or serving you single cups of tea in hotels, or you may even find him lurking in shady lanes waiting to guide you to brothels and prostitutes.43

Struggle requires constant movement from place to place and job to job. As an energetic daily hustle, struggle connects different places, revealing their interdependencies and power relations.44 If Bombay’s film aspirant could move fluidly from the gates of the film studio to the lanes of a red-light district, it was because the worlds of film work, sex work, and factory work already overlapped in the cine-ecology. As noted in chapter 1, the city’s working-class accommodations and mass entertainment venues clustered around the mill districts that employed the largest numbers of urban workers, who in turn needed food, shelter, and cheap diversion. Such material, affective, and social zones of contact were critical nodes in the expansion of the cine-ecology. The peripateticism of struggle therefore produced the cine-ecology as an imaginative space that could not be defined by physical boundaries. Not contained within one studio or office, the film industry was, and continues to be, a dispersed ecology with a diffused spatial distribution of practices. If we track the geographies of film production networks—of sociality, professional networking, connections between formal and informal labor—we will end up with a map of Bombay city itself, heavily marked by repeatedly crisscrossing routes of micropractices. In many ways, iconic film cities such as Mumbai and Los Angeles constitute the “industry” within Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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their physical and imaginative limits. A poignant manifestation of this idea can be seen in this news report from 1935: “Lured by prospects of finding employment in film companies in Bombay two boys left Gorakpur in Northern India some days ago. Arriving in the city on Thursday last they wandered through the streets in search of employment. One of them, Satnarayan Bhanoo, lost his way and finally gave himself up to the Bhoiwada police.”45 Conflating the city with its filmmaking apparatus, these boys simply wandered the streets without any concrete address in hand. Is it possible to see their childish mistake as an intuitive knowledge instead? This is an intuition of the city as film studio. Satnarayan Bhanoo and his missing friend illustrate the fact that the city and its cine-ecology cannot be disentangled. Itineraries of the struggler, the film aspirant, the fan, or the becoming-worker constitute the arteries and veins of the cine-ecology, swelling and contracting as the energy they carry surges or depletes. AC C I D E N T

There is always a risk of some kind of injury on [sic] human body in the industrial field. The possibility of injury, however, is only for those persons who handle the machinery or are found working near it. But injury in the motion picture industry can be caused to any person irrespective of the fact whether he handles any machinery or not. It is so owing to an inherent characteristic in the nature of work, which can cause injury at any moment. —Rikhab Dass Jain

Rikhab Dass Jain’s book The Economic Aspects of the Film Industry in India (1960) builds on his doctoral thesis, submitted at Agra University. It is based on seven years of primary research, 1,500 interviews, and visits to 125 film sets in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Poona, and Coimbatore. In a chapter on “Working Conditions in the Film Industry,” Jain claims that there this something peculiar about film as work that makes it inherently injurious to the human body. Jain does not elaborate on the “inherent characteristic in the nature of [film] work” but lists some common scenarios of “employment injury,” such as falling from railings while adjusting lights, electric shock, crashing down a staircase or from 288

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horseback while acting, overheated electric lamps bursting in an actor’s face, a “baby spot light” falling on a crew member, and the collapse of a weakly constructed set.46 In this section I pick up on the idea of injury in order to get closer to the experience of film as work. Desire and depletion characterize the affective experience of film work on an everyday, durational basis. Histories of everyday production experience are hard to grasp precisely because of their mundane ordinariness. We can approach them only through memories, oral histories, anecdotes, and speculative historiography. In stark contrast, stories of bodily injury often push their way into the historical record because of their spectacular and morbid appeal. They produce an irruptive archive of exception. Newspapers and magazines from Bombay’s early talkie decades (1930s–1940s) recurrently report production disasters such as near-fatal drownings, electrocutions, lion attacks, fires, wrongly timed explosions, and car crashes. How does one interpret these “accidental” happenings? From where do accidents erupt? And what do accidents produce? The word accident signifies that which arises unexpectedly—“in a device, or system, or product . . . the surprise of failure or destruction.” In his discussion of the technological accident in modernity, Paul Virilio questions this conceptual premise. Following Aristotle, who said that “the accident reveals the substance,” Virilio argues that every technological invention contains within it the future accident, and it is through the accident that we learn something crucial about the invention. Thus the invention of the sailing ship carried within it the invention of the shipwreck, and the shipwreck uncovered some essential but invisible features of the sailing ship. Industrial modernity, too, with its highly accelerated temporalities, produced accidents on a mass scale alongside commodities. The assembly line was where workers’ bodies and speedy machines encountered each other daily in dangerous ways. Virilio therefore asks whether industrial accidents are not already “programmed, in a way, when the product [i]s first put to use.”47 From this perspective, shooting accidents reveal something critical about the Bombay film industry that remains hidden within conventional accounts of technological and industrial progress and the steady march of cine-modernity from silent to talkie to color. Film disasters speak of the contradictory logics of a local film industry that struggled to reconcile the demands of studio competition, steady production turnovers, Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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dubious finances, improvisational structures of work, and a surplus of movie-mad workers. Accidents focalize that which exceeds the scientific imagination— the unruly excess of uncertainty. “As the negation of impossibility,” Mary Ann Doane says, “contingency is a witness against technology as inexorability, a witness that it could have been otherwise.”48 Rather than accept Rikhab Dass Jain’s axiomatic explanation for shooting accidents, an explanation that tends to naturalize the shooting accident by mystifying film as a medium, we might try to understand the nature of film technical ensembles and cine-ecologies. Each of the instances of bodily injury listed by Jain reveals the coupling of the human with cinema’s standard tools and collaborators—lights, horses, electricity, built sets. In the next three case studies I situate the shooting accident within simultaneous networks of productive and destructive relations to better understand the nature of Bombay’s talkie cine-ecology.

Mohammed Rafique (c. 1909–1939) FATA L M O T O R AC C I D E N T. F I L M AC T O R ’ S D E AT H .

A mock motor accident which was to have been filmed for a picture resulted in death of Mohammed Rafique (30), who sustained serious injuries in the premises of the Sagar Film Company, Bombay, on Sunday. Mohammed Rafique was an extra “actor” in the picture. The scene in which he was to have participated was to have portrayed a motor accident in which the car, running at high speed, was to have smashed a gate. The arrangement was that three men and Mohammed should stand outside the gate. One of them would give warning of the approach of the car and all of them would immediately rush into the building, close the gate after them and stand on one side of the path. All the preliminary precautions were taken. The director informed the actors that the scene had commenced, and one of the actors, Abdul Gani, warned the rest of the approach of the car. All of them rushed inside and closed the gate behind them. 290

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Mohammed Rafique, it is stated, ran in front of the car instead of jumping off its way. He was knocked down and seriously injured. He was taken to the JJ Hospital where he died shortly after admission. An inquest will be held on April 6.49

What is a mock motor accident in cinema? A completely cash-strapped filmmaker, for example, might shoot a car crash with toy cars on a miniature set, throwing all concerns of verisimilitude to the wind. Most stunts in the 1930s, however, were staged with real automobiles, trains, animals, and humans.50 These objects may have been temporary constructions, “dummies,” or secondhand vehicles filmed under controlled conditions, but on-screen accidents could not be filmed without the actual physical collision of objects and bodies. The mock motor accident was therefore an oxymoron, an impossibility. The pervasive aesthetics of vitality in late colonial cinema was predicated on speed. This “most distinctive” feature of twenty-first-century modernity was shadowed by a necessary corollary—the accident— always animating the experience of speed with the anxiety of catastrophe. The car crash, as a “metonym of accelerated modernity out of control,” was a regular feature in Bombay’s stunt and action films of the 1930s, produced by studios such as Wadia, Prakash, and Mohan.51 These stunt genres relied on the nerve-wracking and simultaneously thrilling anticipation of accident and frequently featured cars crashing into buildings, trains, other cars, and humans. The car crash was also used in social films as a plot device to facilitate “accidental” romantic encounters and separations.52 In an ecology determined by contingency, the car crash belonged on the same representational continuum as the speculative stock market crash; a reminder that life is “but a passing show.” Bombay’s action stars, that is, the heroes and heroines of stunt films, performed their own stunts in the early decades of filmmaking in India as there was no concept of professional stunt doubles as yet.53 Prominent female action stars such as Amboo in the 1920s and Pramila, Fearless Nadia, Indurani, and Padma in the 1930s executed their own falls, fights, and chase sequences. Even action directors or “fight masters” did not exist as a separate specialist category.54 Nadia recalls, “We had no fight composers in those days. The director, the cameraman and Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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we managed it ourselves. In fact, many of our fighters like Azimbhoy and Mohammed Hussein later became fight composers.”55 Nadia had experience in the circus as well as in ballet and therefore could handle various kinds of action scenes. Actresses like Pramila or Indurani, hired more for their looks than stunt-potential, were not required to perform the same level of complicated stunts as Nadia, but even so, action sequences had a built-in or “programmed” risk factor due to a variety of unpredictable elements, from the human element to technology. As Nadia herself recounts: In Diamond Queen, Sayani and I were supposed to be fighting in a carriage which was traveling down a steep slope. It had a brake and after a sufficient lapse of time we were supposed to pull the brake to stop the carriage. As it happened, the brake failed. The carriage continued to roll down the slope at increasing speed. Sayani was shouting “Gayo, Gayo” (Gone, Gone). I told him to hold tight but he couldn’t take it any longer. He jumped. Broke his ankle. I clung to the carriage, which after a while hit a big boulder and came to a halt.56

Accidents involving animals were also common. Brijrani was bitten on her left arm by a lion while shooting in a circus in Mahim; Maruti Rao was attacked by a “state lion” let loose for an outdoor scene shot under the auspices of the Maharaja of Kolhapur; and Dixit was bitten by a snake on the sets of Kimti Ansu (1935) at Ranjit Movitone.57 And then there were environmental actants that could not be controlled, such as dangerous terrain or uncontrollable mobs. In a fight scene, the actor Dewan Sharar miscalculated a lunge and toppled the hero over a low wall and onto rocks; and Sabita Devi suffered a head injury during a crowd scene in 1937.58 Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte point out that all work has potential for danger, that is, all “productive activity routinely kills, injures and makes sick workers and local communities.”59 This “routine devastation” is exacerbated in specific work contexts such as the filming of stunt scenes, which are premised on visual spectacles of risk and bodily harm. Contemporary film industries try to manage this risk factor through a variety of measures that reduce the probability of accident and material loss. These include safety measures such as 292

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harnesses and invisible wiring; specially built controlled sets for swimming scenes; the presence of security, lifeguards, or animal trainers; and accident insurance. By present-day parameters, stunt production in the 1930s was a highly risky enterprise, with practitioners using improvisational techniques and ad-hoc strategies for shooting stunts. Several sequences were shot in the mode of the speculative experiment, that is, with a calculated adoption of risk. Feminist scholars have tackled questions of the gendered body of the female stunt star as it intersects with the demands of nationalism, modernity, and industrialization.60 Jennifer Bean’s analysis of the centrality of risk and high-speed action to the early star system shows us the value of privileging corporeality when thinking thrill, stardom, and cinematic mimesis. Bean convincingly argues that the female star of silent Hollywood stunt films reconstituted “the classical humanist subject into an exceptional subject of modernity. The star not only experiences accident but, more importantly, survives and, better yet, thrives on it—her persistence in the face of ceaseless catastrophe raises the threshold of commonly held psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human motility.”61 Now what if we look at the other end of the spectrum, at the extra? Here, death rather than injury, invisibility rather than publicity, are the principles at work. The extra, as well as the broader category of fan-as-film worker, remains unreported in the face of accident, her injuries routinized into normalcy, and only the “unexpectedness” of death becoming worthy of a news story. Mohammed Rafique was an extra, part of an informal, precarious workforce hired on a case-by-case daily wage system for “non-specific, non-speaking, unnoticed, or unrecognized character role[s], such as part of a crowd or background . . . usually without any screen credit.”62 Extras are often movie-struck in some way. J. B. H. Wadia recalls shooting a crowd scene in which most of the extras were “film struck Railway Coolies absconding from their duty at Dadar Station.”63 The star system, which produces fans and movie-struck workers, also contributes to the routine depletion of the extra. Despite the huge risk potential to stars in the process of filming, it is the extra who reveals herself as truly expendable. Extras can be replaced, and the film industry’s need for disposable bodies is readily met by a surfeit of daily wage workers. What is critical to grasp is that the use of extras (or stunt doubles, for that matter) does Sh o r t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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not eliminate the risk of accident, only reduces its cost. An injured extra is preferable to an injured star. At the time of Rafique’s accident, Sagar Movietone had just moved from Chowpatty to new premises on Nepean Sea Road where they had built two soundstages working under two production units that cumulatively produced six to eight films a year.64 Sagar’s growth and its ambitions to shoot actuality footage on real locations in the city take us part of the way toward understanding Rafique’s death. The greatly expanded operational scope of the company was exemplified in a 1938 verité shoot where a massive motorcade of thirty-seven cars was filmed on the streets of Bombay.65 The location shoot featured no prominent actors or dialogues. Sagar’s general manager, J. R. Pandya, simply stopped the cars for a few minutes in different neighborhoods, including Chowpatty and Walkeshwar. No permissions were taken for this shoot, and Pandya was later charged a nominal fine of Rs. 2 for “causing obstruction to traffic.”66 The fact that no prominent actors were involved in the street shoot suggests that most of the drivers and participants were extras. Shooting a guerilla-style sequence in the middle of city traffic with extras made perfect business sense. Location shooting does not afford the controlled environment of a studio, and hence there could be inordinate delays. A star’s time costs more than an extra’s, and a star is less likely to be pliable in the face of traffic hold-ups, chaotic shooting methods, and the humidity of the Bombay summer. Accidents involving these extraneous “background artistes” reveal that risk effects during shooting were distributed differentially across bodies separated along socioeconomic lines. As Tombs and Whyte maintain, the risk effects produced by the modern workplace “are distributed not randomly, but . . . in ways which reflect long-standing structures of vulnerability constructed upon the modernist cleavages of class, gender and race.”67 Mohammed Rafique’s accident belongs within a complex set of relations—some specific to Bombay in his time, and some specific to the business of cinema. Sagar Movietone’s ambitious production turnover, its artistic ambitions to shoot spectacular urbanscapes, and its reliance on the bodies of extras were connected to a regional race to dominate the “all-India” film market and a transnational struggle to fend off the colonizing power of Hollywood. On the other hand, all we know about Mohammed Rafique himself is that he was young, male, Muslim, and 294

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most probably broke. Surely these social coordinates played their own part in the “accidental” death of a film extra? In dead labor, says James Tyner, “we must recognize those social and structural relations that condition life itself, for prior exposure to oppression and exploitation are congealed in death itself.”68 Death constitutes the absolute limit case within the cinematic phenomenon of the shooting accident. While stunt accidents involving stars continue to occur even today, the death of a star during shooting is the rarest of rare situations. Instead, it is the death of stunt doubles, extras, and technicians that occurs on a more frequent basis.69 Which brings us to one final question: Why did Mohammed Rafique run toward the car? Was it a classic case of human unpredictability, or did the news report publish a classic account of managerial obfuscation, in other words, a lie? As truth or as lie, Rafique’s deadly embrace of a wrecked car goes to the heart of Bombay’s cine-ecology, where daily forms of violence were absorbed by certain bodies and objects. Readers will arrive at their own conclusions, but let us imagine for a minute that Rafique did indeed run madly toward a speeding car, despite safety rehearsals and all instincts for self-preservation. Perhaps his death drive was a literal outcome of his desire to be a part of the cine-ecology? The fan-as-extra couples with the cine-assemblage to form a “desiring-machine,” the coupling being machinic or productive rather than symbolic.70 Rafique, in his death, produces something uncanny in his negative agency; his collision with a speeding automobile offers another example of cinematic short-circuiting where desire abruptly diverts toward a path of least resistance. The exhausted body of the desiring cine-worker shows us that “desire is not only energy and speed. It is also the ability to find another rhythm.”71 Rafique’s death can therefore be seen as a form of refusal, his encounter with another film body an expression of that which has become unbearable in the cine-ecology.72

Pramila (1916–2006) Esther Victoria Abraham was born into a Baghdadi Jewish family in Calcutta in 1916. To support her family, Esther sought employment immediately after completing high school and began her professional Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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life as a schoolteacher. By the age of nineteen, she was divorced and a single mother. Her cousin, Rose, and younger sister, Sophie, were both actresses on contract with the Imperial Film Company in Bombay. During a summer visit to Bombay, Esther was also offered an acting job, and she promptly sent her parents a telegram “saying she would not be returning.”73 She adopted the screen name “Pramila” and appeared in more than thirty-five films from 1935 to 1961. Her early acting career was defined by stunt films, and in the late 1930s one could often find her dressed in tiger skins and jumping off horses in films such as Jungle King (Nari Ghadiali, 1939) and Bijlee (Balwant Bhatt, 1939).74 In an extended oral history workshop held in 1997, Pramila recounted significant incidents from her life. Prominent in her account were three major shooting accidents, events that marked her body, and her memory of a lifetime in cinema.75 Pramila had a close brush with death in 1939, during an outdoor shoot for Jungle King. The film unit had gone to Ghodbunder, north of Bombay, to shoot a song sequence that required Pramila to sing while swimming in a river. The song’s lyrics went like this: “Prem nadi lehrati hai, madhur svaron mein gaati hai” [The river of love undulates, sings in dulcet tones]. The river was normally a small one but this was the monsoon season and the river was gushing. A whirlpool sucked her under; she kept bobbing up and down; each time she managed to come up she would make frantic gestures asking for help. The camera crew continued shooting, mistaking her frantic gestures for authentic acting. She was in her tiger costume, which was heavy, and when she finally gave up, she was thrown out by the whirlpool onto the bank. Everyone came up to congratulate her—“Kya scene tha!” [What a scene!]76

The river described here is the Ulhas, which seasonally branches into Ghodbunder and onward to Vasai Creek. It was no accident that this spot was chosen for Pramila’s song sequence because the Ulhas is a monsoon-fed glory—its increased water flow in the rainy season combines with estuarine tidal currents to create a lush medium fit for a lovedrenched film song. Unfortunately for Pramila, these very conditions

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figure  6.3 Pramila in a publicity still from Jungle King (Nari Ghadiali, 1939). (Image courtesy of SPARROW, Mumbai)

transformed the fictive “river of love” into a swollen river of danger that could very easily have swept her straight into the Arabian Sea. The monsoon and the ferocity of a seasonal river have historically served as important actants in Bombay’s cine-ecology; media forms that periodically produce and channel meaning into the city’s films.77 The monsoon annually brings the city to a standstill, flooding its sewers and streets, dismantling its major infrastructures, and forcing film companies to factor in days when employees might simply be unable to make it to the studio. In the first decade of the talkies, studios were unevenly soundproofed, and the monsoon months were often reserved for preproduction or set construction to avoid shooting with the deafening clatter and reverberation of torrential rain overhead. The same monsoon also shaped the characteristic geography of Bombay’s hinterland and nearby hill stations, such as Matheran, Lonavla, Khandala, Panchgani, and Mahableshwar along the Sahyadri mountain range. These tourist towns have served as popular shooting destinations thanks to their verdant landscape and striking topography, complete with hills, waterfalls, streams, rivers, and forests. In this manner, climate phenomena intersect with topographical features to define a cine-ecology. The history of film studios is also a history of environmental control. As Brian Jacobson points out, “filmmakers turned to studios in the 1890s with control in mind,” seeking protection from elements such as wind, rain, heat, so much so that in 1919 studios were being described simply as “a place to keep out of the rain.”78 Studios were designed with an eye on lighting possibilities, often with open roofs to maximize sunlight. The introduction of sound led to greater need for environmental control, and studios had to be insulated from the real sounds of the outside world; increased artificial lighting also became possible with electric carbon arc lamps and greater urban electrification. By the 1920s Hollywood studios seemed to have mastered their internal environment to such an extent that filmmakers confidently set out to simulate natural environments inside the studio. Bombay’s talkie studios occasionally tried to simulate external environments inside the studio, using artificial, hand-painted backdrops. Newly available archival images from Bombay Talkies studio reveal the construction of elaborate indoor sets with artificial rainfall, small streams, and the manufacture of

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microclimatic phenomena such as wind and storms. Overall, however, it was far more convenient and economical for Bombay film crews to shoot in available outdoor locations in and around the city. Location shooting gives up the contrived safety of the studio environment in order to create more naturalistic images and convey all the romance associated with the outdoors. Still, as Jennifer Fay notes, something of the studio-manufactured “image of nature entirely human made . . . carries over into on-location shooting.” Fay identifies a historical tendency in cinema to further its project of worldmaking by manufacturing artificial environments and altering physical landscapes, practices that simultaneously reinforce and deconstruct the boundaries between nature and culture. Cinema, in Fay’s appraisal, is the “aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene” as it represents the drive to exert human will on the environment, to make, remake, destroy, and manipulate, in order to further the dream of an anthropogenic planet.79 Even though production design in 1930s Bombay could not match the monumental scale and budgets of major Euro-American studios, a similar attitude toward nature can be detected. In the Bombay Talkies film Jeevan Prabhat (Franz Osten, 1937), an outdoor location featuring a placid lake plays a pivotal role. Soon after their wedding, the lead couple enjoy an idyllic honeymoon picnic on a lake. They are blissfully in love, and the fecund location serves as a reflection of their mental state. This is a tamed environment that presents nature as a man-made vision and a background for human flourishing. As the couple glide down the lake in a small boat, human mediation is underlined by the prominent presence of a record player that provides musical accompaniment to the couple’s outdoor reveries (figs. 6.4 and 6.5). The film returns to this same location toward the end. The couple have been torn apart by jealousy, and the heroine has lost her memory owing to severe emotional trauma. The disorder of her mind is cured by a return to the familiar site of ordered nature. Revisiting the lake of her honeymoon days and replaying the old record on the gramophone heal the heroine’s trauma and amnesia. Nature is displayed in these scenes as an aesthetic backdrop, carefully arranged for spectatorial pleasure. In this production still we can apprehend the outdoor location as a set, a real world being made up for cinema.

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figure  6.4 Jeevan Prabhat outdoor lake song sequence. Note boatman on left, gramophone player inside boat, and microphone set-up on a raft in front. (Josef Wirsching Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

figure 6.5 A boatman in Jeevan Prabhat lowers a weight into the lake to steady the boat. (Josef Wirsching Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography)

The film that Pramila was shooting when she had her close brush with death, Jungle King, was a direct imitation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories. Its hero (named Karzan in either parody or homage) embodied a palatable form of wild nature.80 The plot was simple and formulaic—a young orphaned boy, Karzan, grows up away from human civilization in a jungle. Karzan finds a romantic partner when a young city girl lands up in the jungle after a series of fortuitous events. Karzan turns out to be a chivalrous lover and protective beau, battling evil goons single-handedly atop a raft (fig.  6.6). Unlike the romantic social films that Bombay Talkies was known for, the thrill of a stunt film lay in the knowledge of a real possibility of risk alongside a filmic demonstration of the conquest of nature. Nature here was not a pleasing and static backdrop but an immersive force that could overwhelm human life. In his well-known book on the railways as a form of “industrialized consciousness,” Wolfgang Schivelbusch talks of the changing conception

figure 6.6 Lobby card from Jungle King (1939) showing a fight sequence on a raft. (Osianama Archive & Library Collection) Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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of the accident from the preindustrial to the industrial age. In a preindustrial age, it was nature that destroyed things and people as an external force operating from the outside. In the age of industrialization, technological accidents operated from the inside as “technical apparatuses destroyed themselves by means of their power.”81 The nineteenthcentury technological accident, as an internal, self-inflicting shock, soon lent itself to theories of psychic trauma as an indication of “the disequilibrium of the entire organism.”82 This inside/outside directional distinction of destructive energies compels us to ask, what is the “inside” of the film apparatus, or the cine-organism? What constitutes the boundaried outside of the cine-ecology? Did the threat to Pramila’s life come from an external force named “nature?” In this particular instance, technology, human intentions, and the weather combined to destabilize production. Pramila herself helps us see that her experience of physical danger constituted a temporary disequilibrium in a cine-organism with flexible boundaries. Her physical encounter with the whirlpool was activated, indeed programmed, by the unit’s decision to expose Pramila to a furiously cinematic river. Pramila recalls that, during the shooting of Jungle King, the unit was instructed to simply go out and shoot every day, “Jaao, shooting karo” (Go and shoot), without any concern for the weather. Next, her heavy, water-absorbent tiger-skin costume made mobility difficult and kept dragging her body down. And finally, there was the inability of the technical crew to recognize Pramila’s frantic gestures, which added to the real possibility of death by drowning, indicating either that the hazardous nature of their enterprise was illegible to them or, worse, that human safety became irrelevant in the face of an excellent take. Which brings us to a historical industrial question: Did instances of location shooting in Bombay decrease with the increased desire and ability for controlled and efficient manufactured environments? The answer is a bit complicated. Largely, I would venture to say that yes, the need for synchronized, clear sound ensured that most talkie films in the 1930s and 1940s were plotted for interior studio locations. This is evident from extant publicity stills of lost films, stills that picture living rooms, warehouses, cinema theaters, courtrooms, village huts, and offices. The humid climate of Bombay was also far from ideal for outdoor location shooting. Nevertheless, there were other industrial

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pressures to incorporate exterior landscapes into films such as a perceived audience demand for scenic outdoor scenes, genre requirements, and meagre production budgets. The popular stunt film genre, including jungle adventure films and crime thrillers, turned its motion picture cameras on varied topographies that were readily available in and around Bombay city. Companies like Mohan, Prakash, and even Wadia embraced the unpredictability of cheaper and more accessible outside worlds to produce their sensational creations. The Powai Lake drowning accident involving K. G. Shastri, Sheikh Abdulla, and Abdul Salam is a case in point (see chapter 5). Set in a princely state, the stunt film Veer Bala tells a typical tale of aristocratic tyranny and masked avengers. Its heroine, Indurani, plays a feisty village belle, Sobha, and the primary plot revolves around attempts by the libidinous prince, Vilas Vijaya, to abduct Sobha and separate her from her lover, Pratap. At a pivotal point in the film, Pratap and Sobha are chased by the prince’s men, and they “run away on horses. Sobha jumps into the water with sepoys following her. Pratap in order to save Sobha jumps in the water too. The mysterious man in mask saves the couple.” The three men who drowned were extras, part of a group of seven male stunt artistes who, one can plausibly speculate, were cast as the sepoys who chased Sobha into the water (fig. 6.7). The accidents during Jungle King and Veer Bala urge us to consider cinema as a sprawling ecology of multiple techniques, actants, symbols, and media forms, including climate phenomena. They highlight the importance of a geography of practice and spatial histories of film production; the coterminous histories of working bodies, improvised industries, location shooting, and the topographical advantages that Bombay city offered a film industry. Place names such as Ghodbunder or Powai Lake semiotically stand in for layered histories of profilmic work, genre production, and the risky attractions of “natural” locations in an industry built on artifice, urging us to reconsider the very meaning of the term accident. Turbulent rivers and the seasonal monsoon system have often been considered radical externalities that resist human will to create or alter the environment. Cinema as ecology, however, compels us to consider these elemental forces as internal to cinema’s ecosystem, not outside and hostile but inside and volatile.

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figure 6.7 Song booklet cover for Veer Bala (A. R. Kabuli, 1938). One might plausibly speculate that the men in uniforms in this poster include the three extras who drowned. (Osianama Archive & Library Collection)

Nalini D The Full Bench of the Bombay High Court confirmed in appeal the conviction of three persons connected with the film industry who were charged with committing rape, criminal assault and abetment on Nalini D. (18), an “Extra” girl, working in films. —“Seven Years for Raping Film Girl”

On the night of April 14, 1945, some extra girls or background artistes were required by the director K. Asif for his big-budget picture Phool (Flower). This was Asif’s first film and was filmed on a scale that held portents of his later big-budget historical epic, the canonical Mughal-eAzam (1960). Phool was being shot at Mohan Sound Studios in Andheri. The prime accused in this case, Nissar, was a Junior Artiste Supplier contracted to provide thirty-five female background artistes for a night shoot. The girls reached the studio at 8:00 p.m. Among them was eighteen-year-old Nalini D. Junior artistes often have to wait for several hours on set, in full costume and makeup, while the lead actors retake their shots and technicians work out lighting and lensing patterns. And so Nalini and the other extra girls, after having completed their makeup, were told to wait outside the studio until they were required on the set. Nalini went and sat down under a tree in the studio compound. The very fact that the extras did not have a designated waiting area indicates their “place” on the margins of the film industry. The spatial segregation of extras was differently imagined in different studios. Mohan Bhavnani, at Ajanta Cinetone, was overly concerned with the fact that several of the female extras he hired had parallel professional interests in Bombay’s sex work industry. To shield his company from repercussions of these conjoined worker identities, Bhavnani forbade his female extras from loitering outside his studio. His German screenwriter, Willy Haas, tells us that in 1939, “On the veranda leading to the front yard I had seen a board with the following inscription: ‘It is forbidden for ladies in the ensemble to linger in the front part of the house.’ ” Haas’s phrase “ladies in the ensemble” refers to female crowd artistes or background artistes. He continues: They were allotted a back room with barred windows high above the ground, almost a dungeon. Here as well, one read the following Sh o r t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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inscription on the door: “Gentlemen are forbidden from entering this room.” “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Unfortunately, it is a very necessary measure,” Bhavnani said. “Up until a few years ago, you could only get film actresses from the caste of dancers and prostitutes in India. Have you seen Kamathipura, the city of love?” “Yes.” “Well, then you know that the prostitutes all sit behind lattice gates or on the verandas in order to entice passers-by. It would be no good to let them sit here on the front veranda!” He showed me that some of the extras had small, blue beauty marks, an emblem of prostitution, tattooed on their cheeks.83

If, on the one hand, Bhavnani was so concerned about his studio’s reputation that he practically imprisoned his female extras and shut them out of visibility, Mohan Studios, on the other hand, dismissed its female extras to the unregulated spaces of a city continually being formed. Extra dancers, like sex workers, emerge in these accounts as surplus city women who can be treated as temporary improvised collectives. Unhoused from studios and untimed from considerations of shifts and schedules, they wait their turn. Of course, neither incarceration in protective cages nor abandonment to the unknown outside could offer a solution to the structural dangers of being a woman-at-work or being a class- and caste-marked body. At some point during the night, Nissar started to make sexual advances toward Nalini, which she rebuffed. In a rage, Nissar arbitrarily dismissed her from work, threatening her with a knife and physically dragging her out of the studio compound and into the street. At 11:00 p.m. Nalini, with no recourse to complaint or redressal, proceeded to walk toward Andheri station. According to a news report, the road from the studio to the train station was dark and deserted, and Nissar followed the girl along with two friends and assaulted her. The judge for the case, Justice Stone, sentenced all three accused to rigorous imprisonment for five to seven years. He also reserved some stern words for the producer and director of Phool, underlining prevalent anxieties in labor regulation debates about female workers: “It must be obvious that 306

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to take 30 or so young girls to the Mohan Studio in the suburbs at night causes on the management which bring them there a duty to see that their business is properly conducted.”84 I have included Nalini’s story in this collection of shooting accidents to deliberately underline the varied forms of bodily and psychic injury that take place inside a cine-ecology premised on precarity. Gendered forms of violence such as sexual assault count with the discourse of accident because they are deemed either so routine as to be normalized or so exceptional that they are consigned to a space beyond the purview of film industrial accountability. Sexual harassment and violence are, in fact, programmed short-circuits waiting to happen at points of least resistance within a cine-ecology of hustle. Even as Justice Stone berated the film’s producers for their gross negligence, he pointed to a concatenation of factors that served as the conditions of possibility for the rape of Nalini. From management negligence to the time of the incident to the location of the studio, Justice Stone helps us situate the vulnerable body of a female junior artiste within the spatial economy of the cine-ecology. The road that Nalini took on her way to the train station is one of the busiest roads in India today, but back in 1945 it would have been truly desolate, especially at 11:00 p.m. From the 1920s onward, Bombay’s biggest film studios were located in the Dadar area, referred to as “India’s Hollywood” until the 1940s.85 Dadar was the center of much trade and commercial activity, well served by trains and electricity. By the late 1920s Dadar had become a fairly developed middle-class residential area. The talkies of the 1930s were shot using synchronized sound recorded on set, and hence studios had to be based in quiet environs. The real estate needed for a studio was considerable, and internationally, film studios are located on the outskirts of cities. The shifting locus of film production from Dadar to Andheri, and today further north still, is an index of the exponential growth of Bombay city during this period. The cine-ecology participated in the territorial logics of urban sprawl.86 As the city expanded, its film industry too kept shifting along its edges. Since 1935 Andheri steadily became home to several film studios, though it was still a developing distant suburb in terms of civic infrastructure.87 In 1935, when the provincial government proposed a consolidation of local bodies by bringing Vile Parle and Andheri together, Vile Parle Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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residents protested that “the residents of Andheri . . . consisted of capitalists and speculators,” and the town itself was viewed as little but “an old village that had grown in haphazard fashion.”88 Mohan Sound Studios was a rental studio used by the numerous small, independent production companies that sprang up during the Second World War. The cash economy of the war years saw a visible boom in film investment and spectatorship, and the gross income of the film industry “went from about Rs. 4 crores in 1940–41 to about Rs. 13 crores in 1945–46.”89 The majority of Bombay’s cine-workers were temporary; most companies hired soundstages and equipment from independent vendors; and finances came in via the stock exchange, feudal economies, or the black market. Independent filmmakers like K. Asif arrived on the scene with dreams that were far bigger than their financial means. Nalini’s walk down an ill-lit, deserted road from a film studio to a train station reminds us of the fractured connections between the surface promises and the infrastructural realities of both cinema and the city that produces it; this is the link between the affective and the material, abruptly made visible when we reintroduce the human body into histories of industry. What we start to see, however dimly, is Bombay cinema as a fraught terrain of embodied material practice and precarious gendered work. As with Rafique, Pramila, and all the others mentioned in this chapter, Nalini exposes differential modes of bodily vulnerability that are routinized within the cine-ecology. These are bodies endangered as much by climatic, locational and technological forces as by commercial concerns for maximizing shooting hours, be it at night or during the monsoon. Nalini reveals to us that shooting accidents are rarely accidental—they emerge from entanglements in intentionality and oversight, infrastructures and practices, the specificities and misalignments of time and space. Another night shoot, this time from 1932, presents a useful comparison. On July 25 Miss Enid Proudfoot and six other ladies “were engaged to dance in Oriental costumes by the Sagar Film Company.” The shoot ended around 1:00 a.m., and “the dancers naturally expected that some conveyance would be placed at their disposal to take them home.”90 There was no such arrangement in place, and after an altercation, Miss Proudfoot and her sister hired a taxi to go register a complaint at Gamdevi police station “against the directors for rude behavior.” This event is 308

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figure 6.8 Mapping a landscape of bodily risk.

available for historical study only because Proudfoot did not pay the taxi driver and he initiated a complaint against her. The court proceedings were reported in the local Times of India newspaper, which had a wide British and Anglo-Indian readership, presumably two of the ethnic communities that Proudfoot might have belonged to. Unlike Nalini, Enid Proudfoot took Sagar Film Company to task. It is likely that her racial status and knowledge of English empowered Proudfoot to demand compensation for the late-night shift. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that her lawyer, Franklin De Souza, when asked about the identities of Sagar’s bosses, referred to them as “some Banias,” indicating casteist contempt for a local mercantile class. Gender, caste, and ethnicity intersect to make some bodies more vulnerable than others, and some bodies more vocal than others. Urban infrastructure, ultimately, cannot be called on to serve as the sole scapegoat for embodied inequalities. C O N C LU S I O N : C O L L AT E R A L DA M AG E

“The Death That Makes Life Worth Living!” This issue of filmindia is dedicated to Mr.  Ram Kamble Chief Cameraman of the “Film City” who died in harness on the 26th February 1938 being electrocuted by a studio lamp. —Opening dedication, filmindia, March 1938

In 1938 Ram Kamble, the chief cameraperson at Film City, died on set after being electrocuted by a studio light. Celebrity film journalist Baburao Patel wrote a strong editorial demanding compensation for workplace death and declared, in the same breath, that “it was an accident, just pure and simple.”91 The accidental is that which springs on us unannounced, an unintended catastrophe. It assumes an epistemic vision that must separate event from structure, immediacy from durationality, and personal distress from collective responsibility. By moving between the desiring fan, the aspiring struggler, and the laboring cine-worker, I have tried to map the points of least resistance within the cine-ecology and argue that these short circuits are not accidental but integral to the overall logics of commercial filmmaking. It is through that which is deemed accidental and exceptional that I have tried to grasp the 310 Ene r g y

mundane, everyday experience of being an engaged participant in the cine-ecology. Jonathan Beller and others have discussed the labor of the spectator-consumer in a mediatized world; the historical fan-as-worker takes this insight further by demonstrating that the spectator’s labor does not consist only in the consumption of images but also in directly (often precariously) laboring in the production of those images.92 In this way, dominant media industries continuously reproduce the labor power that drives them. Thus media industries not only participate in economies of consumer capitalism but have historically set the stage for the proletarianization of the middle class that is a distinguishing facet of today’s gig economy. To voluntarily relinquish rights to fair wages, job security, and defined work hours in the pursuit of one’s “passion” is the hallmark of the so-called creative economy. Bombay’s early talkie studios attempted to remake their industrial structure and manage industrial output through various techniques of efficiency and improvisation. Accidents indicate that control cannot be complete. Failure helps us understand the role of other forces in the cine-ecology that are beyond the jurisdiction of control. In Indian film writing, failure is usually ascribed to industrial peculiarities, organizational incompetence, or incomplete modernization. Apart from their faith in the teleological narrative of progress, such explanations assume that it is possible to achieve total technological mastery over one’s environment. By connecting fan desire, film as vocation, and the routine but differentiated experience of bodily risk, I have attempted an alternative historiography of film. By historicizing the film worker and the laboring body within an ecology of cinematic practices, we not only gain new understandings of the conditions of possibility for a local film industry but are also able to understand cinema’s material entanglements with local geography, corporeality, and social identity. Mohan film studio at night, a gushing Ulhas River during the monsoon, a dummy gate designed for a mock car crash on Nepean Sea Road—each of these places is a palimpsest of practices, desires, and injuries. Similarly, “some Bania” producers, a Muslim stunt artiste, a young female extra, and a Jewish action star together evoke the complexities of a cosmopolitan workplace where caste, religion, and gender continue to mark bodily itineraries. The cine-ecology throbs with the energies flowing through embodied circuits of work. Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e

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The ecologies of early talkie film production produced new temporalities, attached to new experiences of the self and cinema. An actress’s impatient need to fully utilize every moment of her productive capacities was tied to the high speculative valuation of the female star during this period. Simultaneously, it also marked the temporal limits of an actress’s career, beauty, and standing in a volatile and surface-oriented industry. A film aspirant experienced the future not as a limited horizon to be fully exploited but as a realm of unlimited possibility waiting to be seized. With time and cynicism, the film aspirant (as extra) learned that waiting is part of the job, and waiting outside a film studio to be called in for a background part might be the best the future was meant to hold.

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Epilogue The outer edges of the screen are not, as the technical jargon would seem to imply, the frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be a part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal. —André Bazin, What Is Cinema?

Cinema in the twentieth century was a place with a thousand meanings. In early twentieth-century India that place could be a large screen in a brick and mortar movie theater, a traveling projector temporarily pitched in a tent, or someplace that one had heard of from bettertraveled friends. But more than any of these physical places, cinema was a pulsating world of practices through which meaning and memory were made. In this book I have presented a history of cinema as a history of practice in order to show how cinema, at a particular time in the life of India, extended into every area of urban life as “something prolonged indefinitely into the universe.” I agree with Bazin that the film screen has a centrifugal drive; it extends into innumerable realities that flourish and fade outside the purview of the camera. Yet the screen is only one part of a dense ecology of things and people that mutually constitute cinema. Histories of media practice and production give us an account of the lived life of cinema, of the connection among texts, images, and society in the everyday. This approach affords another view of the role of cinema in Indian modernity—as a material participant in

histories of industry, finance, science, technology, labor, energy, and climate. One of the central arguments of Bombay Hustle is that cinema responded to and shaped urban transformation not only through onscreen fantasies of modernity but also through the material presence and circulation of a varied and visible cinematic workforce. Cinema’s status as the foremost cultural carrier of desire and imagination has to be understood along both these axes of representation and work. By tracking multiple kinds of film practitioners and laboring bodies within an ecology of cinematic practices, we gain new understandings of the conditions of possibility for a local film industry. In parallel, we are able to revisit some of the key categories of experience that mark our study of the modern. Speculation, newness, freedom, contingency, mass affect, control, labor power, energy, fatigue, desire, and injury take on specific urgencies and valences when considered in the context of film production in late colonial Bombay city. N AT I O N, C I T Y, E C O L O G Y

A film titled Industrial India premiered in Bombay in 1938. Most films of the day were released with two titles—one in English and one in Hindi-Urdu or another primary language of its target audience. These titles often did not line up as exact translations. Today these deliberate misalignments of meaning pose interesting questions for us. The alternate title for Industrial India was Nirala Hindustan, and it makes a curious choice with its substitution of the word nirala for “industrial.” While industry refers to productive economic activity, particularly the manufacture of goods in a factory, nirala refers to that which is strange and wondrous, extraordinary and marvelous.1 Where “Industrial India” projects a serious image of a nation that is modern, productive, and predictable, “Nirala Hindustan” conjures up a playful national collective premised on surprise and singularity. The two titles thus present us with two similar but different visions for an India-to-come. Similarly, Bombay Hustle has, at one level, told a story about the consolidation of Bombay cinema as an important cultural and industrial form in India. At another level, I have tried to describe the strange and wondrous meanings produced by the new techno-industrial ensemble of the 314 Ep il og ue

talkies, as sound cinema made a distinctive place for itself in late colonial Bombay. Indian film studies, a relatively recent field of inquiry dating to the early 1990s, has understandably kept the nation at the center for much of its career. What kind of films did a newly independent nation produce in the 1950s? What dreams and aspirations, anxieties and disappointments were processed by cinema in the postcolony? How did the nation-state encourage, discipline, or manage filmic output with changing political regimes through the decades? Can we define the unique characteristics of an “Indian” film form and claim national filmic distance from hegemonic forms such as Hollywood? How does this “Indian cinema” chart the career of the nation and its fantasies? These were some of the urgent questions that provided the main impetus for a fledgling field of inquiry and announced a turn to the popular as an index of unruly nationalisms and collectivities. However, despite the vital recuperation of the popular and the political in Indian cinema, the actually existing heterogeneities of filmic content, reception, and practice often tended to coalesce. This tendency is especially evident in commentaries on Bombay cinema, which is frequently called on to perform a de facto national cinema in a region populated by multiple film industries. To be sure, Bombay’s Hindi-Urdu cinema has occupied a dominant place in discussions of film in India and has materially influenced the aesthetics and commerce of many regional cinemas. However, the slippage of Bombay cinema as Indian cinema needs to be remedied as it elides the robustness and significance of other cinemas that end up on the margins of academic production. Such a slippage also blurs competing visions of belonging and political identity that coexisted within the Bombay cine-ecology and its far-reaching networks before 1947, and which continue to contest hegemonic ideas of nationhood today. Bombay Hustle has taken its cues from scores of films from late colonial Bombay that portray multiple, sometimes incommensurable, visions of the future. From a young heiress who sets out to rid Bombay of organized crime (Service Ltd., Chimanlal Luhar, 1939) to a journalist who advocates for nonviolence in her columns (Swastik, Mohan Sinha, 1939); from a college student who practices freedom by marrying against societal strictures (Azad, N. R. Acharya, 1940) to a masked Robin Hood figure who steals from the rich and gives to the poor (Passing Show, Epilog u e

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Dwarka Khosla, 1936); the protagonists of late colonial Bombay cinema have manifold visions of a free and just society. In the past two decades important scholarly interventions have tried to destabilize the easy twinning of the career of India and its cinemas, but we still have a long way to go.2 What we need today is a deeper analysis of the contours and constituents of local production ecologies; their connections to other film production centers in the subcontinent and beyond; and their imbrication in metropolitan life and transnational traffic; historical, ethnographic, and material studies that reframe the questions we ask of cinema’s locations and constituencies. If, as Priya Jaikumar reminds us, “at a time when the nation did not have a sovereign state, films offered different fictional resolutions for imagining an individual’s place in relation to their families, communities, and governing authorities in a future collective,” then practices of filmmaking offer us another dynamic site for approaching the heterogeneity of imagined futures in the final decades of British colonial rule in India.3 The production cine-ecology described in this book represents multiscalar imaginations of belonging that vary from the urban to the regional to the national and the transnational, with many exchanges across these scales. This is how we might start to reassess the significance of Manto’s distaste for Rajkishore’s brand of nationalist politics, visibly identified with the Congress (chapter 4); films about scientific and technological modernity that invested political faith in benevolent princely rulers (Double Cross, 1939; Diamond Queen, 1940); or a Jewish exile in Bombay, Willy Haas, tasked with writing modern talkie screenplays for local audiences in his native German, which were then translated into Hindustani.4 If each of these actors is considered part of the ecology that produced Bombay cinema, then surely they narrate divergent dreams of political collectivity and cultural identity. By zooming in on a multiplicity of actually existing film practices, I have tried to portray a tangled world of practitioners inhabiting heterogeneous temporalities and solidarities. The city constitutes another scale of affective belonging. Cinema worked hard to manufacture certain visions of the city and keep them afloat. Vismi Sadi (Twentieth century, Homi Master), a silent film from 1924, grandly promises that “if you wish to see the real Bombay—the wealthy with their whims and wills, the poor with their miseries, the 316 Ep il og u e

Social workers, the Reform Association, the Fashionable Clubs, if you wish to see the Indian Steamer scenes, dangerous adventures and rescues, the fury of mobs and the difference between The East and The West you can do no better than see this superb production of The Kohinoor Film Co.”5 A heady jumble of experiences marks this modern city: the sensory assault of visible economic inequality, the thrill of modern technology, and the affective power of urban mass mobilizations. On the other hand, we have also seen how the growth and movement of film studios marked the city; how exhibitionary spectacles of film industrial progress drew on the excitement of reclaimed land and electrification; how film, theater, radio, and assorted voice genres produced a resonant acoustic ecology that was self-consciously urban. Most powerfully, the idea of Bombay that was produced in the cine-ecology at this time came to stand in for the quintessence of modernity. Belonging to cinema meant engagement with this idea of a Bombay modern. Postcolonial studies has often posited a split in the “assumed unity called the ‘Indian people’ that is always split into two—a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be modernized peasantry.”6 I have suggested in this book that film stars as well as below-the-line urban workers must be equally viewed as modernizing subjects. Be they cinema workers, mill workers, sex workers, or some combination of all three, those who went from a full day’s work to the movies, bought cheap cigarettes or lottery tickets, then shared a train compartment with anonymous commuters, only to go to a hostel canteen or roadside stall for dinner, were all modernizing subjects producing and participating in the rhythms and spaces of the modern city. Writing about the urgency of sound studies from the South, Ana Maria Ochoa notes that “different ontologies and politics of life cannot be subsumed under the epistemic formations of Western modernity.” Similarly, I maintain that Bombay’s speculatorfinanciers, stunt actors, and continuity writers offer us alternate narratives of modern self-making as enacted on the stage of cinema.7 The analytic of a cine-ecology offers a dynamic and inclusive framework that can accommodate the multiaxial situatedness of a cinema in its milieu. What this means for Bombay cinema is an acknowledgment of its relations with other industries (cotton, communications), other film centers (Calcutta, Kolhapur, Pune, Lahore), and other media forms (gramophone, radio, theater, literature). Doreen Massey argued in 1993 Epilog u e

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that a focus on locality, rather than closing off meaning as parochialism, can actually open up a place to the world because “places are best thought of as nets of social relations.”8 Such a relational approach to the study of a place “makes any form of boundary-drawing difficult,” and Bombay cinema far exceeds the perimeters of the mapped city. Greg Booth has shown us that a history of the Hindi film song cannot be written without acknowledging musical styles, techniques of the voice, and listening cultures in Calcutta, New York, and Lahore; Stephen Hughes has similarly shown that a history of the talkie film cannot be imagined without understanding the gramophone industry and its network of producers.9 It is this proliferation of connections that the cine-ecology analytic foregrounds, requiring the scholar to step into unexpected geographical terrains and trespass against disciplinary boundaries. TEMPOR ALITY AND TELEOLOGY

A phrase that recurs in film synopses from the 1930s—“in the meanwhile” (also “meanwhile,” or “in the meantime”)—proposes an important cine-historiographic lesson. The phrase specifically refers to the depiction of parallel action in a film wherein filmmakers cut back and forth between two sets of concurrent events to indicate simultaneity or underline ironic contrasts. For example, the synopsis of Gay Birds (Do Diwane, Chimanlal Luhar, 1936) describes the many comic misunderstandings that separate the romantic pair of Dr.  Mohan and Miss Rambha. In one section the English-language synopsis states: Life gives Dr. Mohan a good kick yet like a man he persists in pursuing his work at the workless dispensary. He wants to be busy but the dispensary every now and then reduces him to sloth. God! What a luck! Meanwhile Ramdas [a romantic adversary] sees Rambha at Pathe Cinema and arranges to marry her for a dowry of one lac of Rupees. The girl revolts terribly.10

Even while Dr.  Mohan practices a form of white-collar professional modernity and Rambha performs the movie-going modern girl, Ramdas 318 Ep il og u e

introduces the imagination of arranged marriages and dowry into the romantic mix. As such, meanwhileness speaks to a core premise of this book—an understanding of modernity as a category in flux, a phenomenon being made and remade synchronously and variously by multiple actors across different spaces. Bombay Hustle has followed the logic of parallel editing in its structure and methods by consciously bringing together disciplinarily bracketed but historically parallel spaces and imaginations (a method I term conjugation in the introduction). I have considered questions of film finance alongside questions of film genre and paired technology with legal case histories; urban history with studio history; and formal analyses with production studies. Bombay cinema thus appears as a complex chronotope that folds incommensurable temporal rhythms into itself. The tempo of the global cotton trade collides with the disruption of wars that had a planetary impact in the age of colonial connectedness; the seasonal time of climatic exigencies encounters the urgency of inflexible production schedules. Industrial modernity, especially as studied in Western contexts, has been marked by altered perceptions of time, indeed a revised significance of the role of time in the everyday. Through Marx and Weber we have understood the processes by which capital robs workers of time, the ways in which factory and workaday rhythms come to govern life, and the onerous pressure to continuously use time to its most tangibly productive potential. More recently, Sarah Sharma has used the term temporal to specifically denote “lived time.” Sharma suggests that “the temporal operates as a form of social power and a type of social difference.” Temporalities therefore “exist in a grid of temporal power relations,” and the “social fabric is composed of a chronography of power, where individuals’ and social groups’ senses of time and possibility are shaped by a differential economy, limited or expanded by the ways and means that they find themselves in and out of time.”11 The film fan who eagerly awaits a big “break,” the junior artiste who patiently waits her turn outside a studio, and the producer-entrepreneur who anticipates future profits through a series of calculated risks are all located in quite different temporalities, though each is half-turned toward the future. With them we can unravel a skein of power relations and particularities of socio-industrial hierarchy. I have therefore invoked a multiplicity of Epilog u e

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distinct, even antithetical voices that informed film culture and were in turn informed by the movies. My concern has been with looking beyond a signposted history of this period via fragments of the past. The notion of the meanwhile, as an invitation to thinking simultaneity, is in direct confrontation with what Thomas Elsaesser called out as the “false teleologies” of film history.12 Instead of charting a history of cinema as the steady march from silent to talkie to color and so on, it is more accurate to think with continuities, residues, and returns. The recent historical turn in Indian film studies has helped destabilize some of the comfortable commonsense of popular film history in the teleological mode.13 Knowledge about prior silent features like Pundalik (Dadasaheb Torne, 1912) and the Arabian Nights fantasy Ali Baba (Hiralal Sen, ca. 1903) compels us to rethink the tendency to cling to Dadasaheb Phalke as the founding father of Indian cinema and the Hindu mythological Raja Harishchandra (1913) as the standard-bearer of the “Indian” in Indian cinema. As Rosie Thomas points out in Bombay Before Bollywood, the stakes of these “uncritically recycled” versions of Indian film history are very high.14 These stakes include a dangerous emphasis on Hindu mythological epics as foundational texts of the Indian cinematic imagination, which obscures a broader field of coeval cosmopolitan filmic influences and impulses. Similarly, it is important to note that the history of the Bombay film industry cannot be told as a linear journey from the studio period to a poststudio era. The standard narrative, one that travels fluidly from popular journalism to academic conferences, maintains that the 1930s was the age of the classical film studio and the post-Independence decade saw its dismantling, whereas I have shown that mixed models of studio organization coexisted in the 1930s and early 1940s, defying any easy assertions of a dominant studio model. Ranjit, Sagar, and Bombay Talkies already offer many dissimilarities in studio organization and production; future research on other significant studios of the period, such as Imperial, Wadia, Ajanta, Prakash, Krishna, and Saroj, will certainly bring greater complexity to the studio question and further discourage comforting stagist histories, which are useful only to entrench a knowable, national film history. The real question to ask is: What kind of institutions and assemblages were named studios in the early talkie period and how did that change in the 1950s and after? What do those 320

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changes help us understand about the life and meanings of cinema in Bombay? For a start, we must interrogate the shifting parameters we retrospectively adopt to label a film production concern a studio. Is it salaried employment that characterizes the 1930s studio or is it assemblyline output? A recognizable architectural structure or an attempt at vertical integration? A dependence on fixed assets and corporate capital or precarious cash turnover? Just as recent histories of color in cinema have helped us recognize that color practices thrived even in the age of black and white (tinting, toning, stenciling), materially grounded histories of the film studio can help us think of changes and contradictions in the definitions of cinema itself.15 C R E AT I V I T Y, P R E C A R I T Y, H U S T L E

Today Bollywood annually contributes about 40 percent of the net box office collections in India’s country-wide multibillion-dollar film trade, but this financial growth would not have been possible without various locational factors and an assortment of historical actors, big and small.16 To insist on this agentive and collaborative multiplicity is especially important today as the income share of stars in film commerce has increased exponentially since the days of Sagar and Ranjit. Bollywood’s top stars earn approximately thirty million dollars a year, and it is male stars who make the highest figures.17 The labor of thousands of other cine-workers remains as undervalued as in the 1930s, perhaps even more so. With the massive explosion of Mumbai’s local population, slums and informal economies have expanded as has workplace precarity. While Bombay Hustle has no delusions of directly affecting industrial policy changes, it is my hope that this book will be a humble contribution toward acknowledging the many moving parts that make up a cineecology such as Bollywood. Recent work on “creative industries” seeks to remind us of precisely this aspect of media production—that contemporary media products are crafted not by solitary minds but by an ensemble of workers at differentiated levels of economic and creative power. The concept of “creativity” in the cine-ecology is an important one to unpack here because of its long shadow of influence. It assumes a boundary between creative practice and noncreative production, as if the act of creation is a Epilog u e

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phenomenon possible only in the pursuit of art. These terms—creative, or even art—remain burdened with the sort of binaristic assumptions that divide culture from economy, art from commerce, and the mind from the body. It is an unquestioned belief that one of the cornerstones of artistic activity is a self-conscious attitude toward practice, a passionate drive to create regardless of financial recompense. This insistence on consciousness reinforces the idea that art is the domain of the mind and of distanced reflection rather than an embodied and material engagement with things, tools, substrates, and other people. Richard Sennett, a sociologist of work, has suggested a way out of this fetishization of the artist by turning to the craftsperson as a creative maker of things. With a focus on repetition and ritual practice, the social space of the workshop, and the tacit knowledge that is embodied in habit, Sennett’s goal is to proletarianize artistic practice and level the relation between the mental and the manual. There is a drawback in his approach, though, which is to romanticize craftspeople as focused, engaged, passionate makers intent on developing their skills.18 The craftsperson must be reflexive and earnest. This circumscription of the limits of proper craftsmanship might be due to Sennett’s emphasis on imagining abstract subjects rather than actually existing practices. More recently Angela McRobbie has analyzed a similar process of subjectivation in “the call to be creative” in the new “soft” economies of Europe.19 She points to the economization of creativity, wherein new economies, along with state and corporate interests, utilize a vocabulary of creativity and hidden talent to woo young individuals to willingly serve as a new precariat at the cost of job stability, worker solidarity, and fair wages. This is a story familiar to many of us in metropolitan centers such as New York, Paris, Mumbai, or Rio, where young people are remaking themselves as artists and creative entrepreneurs in virtual workplaces and coworking spaces in jobs that offer little in the way of regular salaries, health insurance, or retirement funds. A whole new generation of freelancers, buoyed by “the call to be creative,” survives on credit, shared apartments, and prosocial networks that occasionally serve up short-term, low-paying gigs.20 What is this, if not a new form of hustle? McRobbie discusses the perils of creativity as ideology in contemporary consumer capitalism, but we can extend her analysis to remember that it is the same call to be creative that has kept media 322

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ecologies like Bollywood afloat for decades. Think back on the Bombay “struggler” of the 1940s, or the Hollywood female extra of the 1920s: Did they not also heed a similar call? While a theory of ideological interpellation alone cannot provide the whole picture, it urges us to rethink the qualifier “creative” when we mark out a disciplinary subfield such as creative industry studies.21 Much has changed in Bombay since the 1930s. For one thing, the city is now officially called Mumbai, marking its status as a postcolonial city. New overpasses and roads connect a sprawling city in which the once “distant suburb” of Andheri is now the heart of the film and television industries. International media conglomerates have offices in Mumbai and produce original content for Indian audiences. Women work in Mumbai’s multiple media industries in capacities as wide ranging as director, producer, assistant director, cameraperson, costume designer, screenwriter, lyricist, music composer, choreographer, and editor. Netflix and Amazon Prime have made swift inroads into local production. Scores of trade unions exist to address the needs of various sectors of the film ecology. And the #MeToo movement from 2018, against workplace sexual harassment, is said to have landed in Bollywood.22 Nevertheless, much remains the same. Not precisely, but in the broad contours. Mumbai’s current cine-ecology remains diverse, loosely structured, variously funded, and underserved by industrial infrastructure, labor laws, and social attitudes. While visiting a friend in Mumbai in 2018 I learned that she’d had a close shave with a falling light stand on the sets of a big-budget special effects movie. The stand hit her sideways and punctured the side of her stomach, just missing her vital organs. After a quick visit to the hospital, she was back on set within twenty-four hours. No compensation was offered, nor did she think it worth her time to pursue the question. Apart from routinized accidents such as these, it has become common to hear of cases of temporary paralysis, heart attacks, and premature deaths among television actors, directors, and executives, who are among the most overworked of Mumbai’s media workers, churning out “content” for a relentless daily broadcast cycle. A handful of dedicated union activists routinely make appeals for better safety conditions, provisions for accident insurance and retirement funds for cine workers, but legislation can change little until the hundreds of existing production firms actually implement these Epilog u e

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policies. Relations between the Indian government and the film industry are warmer than ever, but, again, the warmth is channeled toward the glitziest echelons of stars, corporate brands, and celebrity diplomacy. Even in 2019 pay scales remain wildly disproportionate, sexual harassment is common, and work hours are unregulated. Fans now throng their favorite stars on Instagram and Twitter and compete in televised dance and music shows to win a date with their screen idols, thereby also performing productive labor that feeds multiple media revenue streams. Fans also continue to throng the city with dreams of stardom and crowd the coffee shops of Versova and the acting schools of Andheri, waiting to be discovered. Stories of struggle continue to feed mythologies of arrival. Hustle is a practice of the imagination. Starting with the title Bombay Hustle, I have explicitly positioned this as a book about the material production of imaginations—projections and speculations, gambits and fantasies—that sustained a world of viewers and makers in their shared journey through modernity. The making of fiction films involves the invention of stories to be filmed as well as stories told by practitioners to other practitioners in order to maintain and perpetuate a speculative enterprise. Through a history of cinema and its makers we start to understand the many stories that constitute the everyday and the real: creativity as consciousness, production as progress, accident as exception. What these narratives signify, for all material purposes, is that the hustle goes on.

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Notes

IN TRODUCTION 1. The term below-the-line is often used for workers who rank below the top creative and executive members of a film production team. Clothing can indicate definite hierarchical structures of a work culture. Based on rare photographic documentation of film production from the Josef Wirsching Archive and a range of dispersed images in film publications of the time, it is certain that officer-level film practitioners wore full trousers on set in the 1930s while wage workers and below-the-line employees of a studio wore shorts. 2. The city was renamed Mumbai in 1995. I use the colonial-era name Bombay in order to stay accurate to the period I am discussing; when discussing the contemporary city, I switch to Mumbai. Many Indians continue to use the name Bombay because of its long affective history, far bigger than its colonial legacy. Moreover, the renaming politics of the 1990s took on a specifically exclusionary and ethnonationalist tenor in Bombay, which further complicates the question. 3. For a synoptic genealogy of media ecology studies across New York and Toronto in the 1960s–1970s (Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan) and its key future strands, see Corey Anton, “On the Roots of Media Ecology: A MicroHistory and Philosophical Clarification,” Philosophies 1, no. 2 (2016): 126–32. 4. For this industrial and cultural history, see Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

5. I use the term transmedial to describe crossovers, exchanges, and migrations that take place across and beyond media forms, such as radio, cinema, gramophone, theater, print, and oratory. As the term transnational does for the category nation, transmedial brings into question the stability or givenness of the category medium. 6. Narratives about making and practices from the margins in India invariably choose jugaad as a descriptor or framework. This book is not about jugaad, i.e., cultures of makeshift innovation. Instead, I deal with various modes of self-definition, aspiration, and ambition within a speculative ecology that transcends class differences and binaries of corporate versus bazaar economies and practices. The term jugaad has been grossly overused in the past decade and has become a catch-all term for improvisational tactics of manufacture and self-employment by India’s urban working class. It has also become imbricated in a euphoric narrative of the resilience of the poor in the Global South, at the cost of a critique of the structural conditions of capitalist urbanization that necessitate such cultures of everyday innovation. 7. Influential work by Sujata Patel, Alice Thorner, and Thomas Blom Hansen has dealt with Bombay’s encounter with modernity in terms of the city’s political and social life, new forms of urban nationalism, the sociopolitics of industrialization, and the psychology of urban violence. Newer work by Sandip Hazareesingh, Prashant Kidambi, Ashwini Tambe, and Nikhil Rao takes on the colonial city’s civic-associational, legal-sexual, and domestic-architectural lives. Cinema is either marginal to, or completely missing from these accounts. The most cinema-attuned urban history to date remains Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). See also Arjun Appadurai’s reading of the conjoined lives of cinema and Bombay city in “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 627–51. 8. Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 236. 9. Distinctions between tradition and modernity, as between emotion and reason, nature and culture, have been historically imbricated with the strategies of colonialism, which served as the incubator for European visions of the modern self, a self that was considered to be radically separate from the colonized other. 10. For a discussion of cinema’s earning potential for actresses, see Debashree Mukherjee, “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 9–30; and Mukherjee, “Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Film Actress in Late Colonial Bombay,” Marg: A Magazine of the Arts 62, no. 4 (2011): 54–65.

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11. Meena Menon, “Chronicle of Communal Riots in Bombay Presidency (1893– 1945),” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no.  47 (November  20–26, 2010): 63–72. 12. “Riots and the Cinema,” Journal of the Film Industry, May 1941, 9. 13. Prem Chowdhry, “Propaganda and Protest: The Myth of the Muslim Menace in an Empire Film (The Drum, 1938),” Studies in History 16, no. 1 (2000): 124. 14. For detailed discussions on Indian reactions to colonialist and racist films, see Prem Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Babli Sinha, Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India: Entertaining the Raj (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Poonam Arora, “ ‘Imperilling the Prestige of the White Woman’: Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British India,” Visual Anthropology Review 11, no. 2 (1995): 36–50. 15. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 3. 16. I use the term cultural techniques to refer to the reciprocal entanglement of humans and machines in the constitution and use of technology and technological media. Thus technics and culture, humans and media platforms are not discrete entities but coconstitutive. For an intellectual genealogy of the term and the many philosophical currents that pass through it, see Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 17. The Cine-Workers and Cinema Theatre Workers (Regulation of Employment) Act (1981) defines a cine-worker as “an individual who is employed, directly or through any contractor or other person, in or in connection with the production of a feature film to work as an artiste (including actor, musician or dancer) or to do any work, skilled, unskilled, manual, supervisory, technical, artistic or otherwise.” Additionally, the act sets an upper wage limit of 1,600 rupees per month to define cine-workers as below-the-line workers. This wage limit is clearly designed to offer legal protections to the most vulnerable of film workers. I am aligned with the act’s capacious understanding of a cine-worker’s job profile, and its intentions, but I choose to move beyond class boundaries as a reminder of other existing forms of inequality, even shifting inequalities, such as gender, religion, caste, and language. 18. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Shikari Auratein,” in Manto ki Kahaniyan, ed. Narendra Mohan (New Delhi: Kitab Ghar Prakashan, 2004), 209 (my translation). Many thanks to Aftab Ahmad of Columbia University for going through the original Urdu versions with me.

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19. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 20. For an overview of the field, see Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, eds., Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Also see Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001); and the two-volume anthology edited by Adrian Athique, Vibodh Parthasarathi, and S. V. Srinivas, The Indian Media Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). Of the twenty essays in the latter volumes, only two speak to the lived experiences of media practitioners: Ratnakar Tripathy, “Artist as Entrepreneur: Talent, Taste, and Risk in Haryana and Bihar,” and Babu P. Remesh, “Unpaid Workers and Paid News: Working Conditions of Journalists in India.” 21. See John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 22. For example, the Behind the Silver Screen book series from Rutgers University Press “promises a look at who does what in the making of a movie” and includes monographs on set design, costume, makeup, hair, cinematography, and so forth. 23. Key examples include Raqs Media Collective and C. K. Muralidharan’s research on “The History and Practice of Cinematography in India,” 2001; Sarai-CSDS’s collaborative research project titled “Publics and Practices in the History of the Present,” 2001–2012; Ranjani Mazumdar’s work on the traffic between the images and production practices of Bombay cinema, 2007; Gregory Booth’s study of the music industry, 2008; Tejaswini Ganti’s ethnographic research on Bollywood and practitioners’ self-identity, 2012; Aswin Punathambekar’s study of postliberalization Bollywood, 2013; Clare Wilkinson-Weber’s research on dressmen, 2014; Nitin Govil’s work on the long history of encounters between Hollywood and Indian cinema, 2015; and Athique, Parthasarathi, Srinivas’s anthology The Indian Media Economy, 2018. 24. E.g., Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (New York: Open Court, 2011); and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). Both come from different philosophical traditions but are at the vanguard of a revival of interest in things. 25. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017).

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26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2004); Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 27. My insistence on embodiment stems from a belief in the sensual, sensory, and experiential nature of human knowledge. A working assumption here is that the mind and body are not distinct, hierarchized, or oppositional faculties but part of an “irreducible ensemble” that constitutes the self. Dualist epistemologies have played a pivotal role in maintaining hierarchies of male and female, rational and corporeal, elite and proletarian, European and Oriental, and many other binaries, with dangerous material repercussions. Vivian Sobchack’s definition of embodiment is useful here: “Embodiment is a radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble.” Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. 28. I’d like to thank Abhik Sarkar for being on the other end of the phone. 29. The city has functioned as a discursive entry point into studies of modernity in Europe and North America, as a distinct locus of the newness of the modern. The experience of the European metropolis was marked by speed and mobility effected through technological inventions of everyday transport systems, the imposition of an industrial structuring of work and leisure hours, increasing emphasis on consumerism, the overwhelming ubiquity of the “crowd,” and redefinitions of social relations and gender roles—all driven by the logic of late capitalism. These factors have led Euro-American film theorists in the recent past to interrogate the precise relationship between the early years of cinema and the turbulence of the city experience. The early cinema interventions of Tom Gunning and Ben Singer have drawn our attention to cinema’s affective relationship to the sensations of the city. This argument is predicated on the idea that spectacle and display, as opposed to narrative, form the primary drive of early cinema. Thus the term early cinema has, as Zhang Zhen points out, “a quite specific reference in film scholarship in the West. More than a period term, early cinema functions as a critical category” (Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], xv). Zhang is referring primarily to characterizations of American cinema from 1895 to 1917 as a cinema that preceded the classical narrative form of Hollywood. The term early, therefore, cannot apply to non-Western cinemas where the timeframes as well as the stagist model of cinematic development might not hold. For other non-Western histories of

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cine-modernity, see Laura Isabel Serna on Mexico; Rielle Navitski on Mexico and Brazil; and Aaron Gerow and Daisuke Miyao on Japan. 30. Nitin Govil, “Recognizing Industry,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 3: 173. 31. Of course, the term industry continues to have widespread relevance, and I use it in this book to designate the specifically industrial logics of worker management, associational activity, and the struggles of film practitioners to claim the status of industry for their combined production enterprise. A cine-ecology goes beyond industrial production and management, embracing a variegated field of cinematic meaning-making, including viewership. 32. “Our Point of View,” Dipali, January 5, 1940, 4. 33. John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 34. I join recent calls to think of cinema’s “affordances,” such as Sudhir Mahadevan’s A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), in which he points out that “cinema is less substance than agent,” suggesting that we “move away from mediumspecificity to the ‘affordances’ of a medium” and consider instead what a medium “enables and makes possible” (9). 35. In the past two decades, media historians have increasingly turned to a genealogical approach to the past where history is seen not as a progressive series of events and ruptures but as a complex entanglement of change and repetition. The field of media archeology is indebted to this conceptualization of history as a plane of continuity as well as discontinuity and has gained strength in the face of celebratory proclamations of newness in early studies of digital media. Media archeology, however, remains susceptible to imagining the past as the sedimentation of layers of palimpsestic technologies. On the other hand, media technology studies focuses on breakdown and speculative media futures, on that which could have been. A turn to ecology keeps multiple temporalities and technological itineraries in tense, simultaneous play. It also makes room for a history of production, practice, and experience, both beyond and alongside technology. 36. On the Indian city and cinema, see Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Preben Kaarsholm, City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience (London: Seagull, 2007). 37. “These ‘Social’ Films!” Bombay Chronicle, February 2, 1938, 10. 38. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). On

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homogeneous empty time, see Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253. 39. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7–8. 40. “The Indian Screen,” TOI, October 4, 1935, 7. 41. For example, in Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), William Glover describes how chroniclers of Lahore traced histories of splendor and ruin, looping back to a story of colonial rejuvenation because of the long history of the city as an imperial and provincial capital. 42. “India Will Make Bid for Attention in Film Medium,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1935, 23. 43. See the foundational and influential history by Erik Barnouw and Subrahmanyam Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), for this hypothesis. 44. Distinct languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Marwari, Kannada, Urdu, Sindhi, and English were spoken in Bombay’s factories, schools, bazaars, and coffee houses. Bombay Presidency (1843–1936), the larger colonial administrative region, of which Bombay city was the capital, included parts of the present-day Indian states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Karnataka, as well the Sind province of present-day Pakistan, and Aden in Yemen. For more on the consolidation of Hindi, see Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). 45. Inaugurating the All-India Women’s Conference in Ahmedabad in 1937, Dr. Sumant Mehta focused on the new visibility engendered by women’s political activity: “In 1930, during and after the Civil Disobedience Movement, the whole atmosphere was changed, but the awakening amongst women was something wonderful. They threw off their age-long reserve and timidity, even the Purdah was cast off, and they marched in processions, sang national songs, bore lathi charges, and many were imprisoned; but over and above all this a very large number of them went through the drudgery of picketing shops of Videshi [foreign] cloth and alcoholic drinks, day after day, through dust and heat, cold and rain.” Bombay Chronicle, January 19, 1937. For detailed research and individual accounts, see Geraldine H. Forbes, Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine & Historiography (New Delhi: Chronicle, 2005). 46. In 1930 Bombay province had seventy-seven permanent theaters, while Bengal had only twenty-six. See “The Indian Film Industry: A Survey of Progress,” TOI, January 3, 1930, 10. 47. Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 97.

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48. “Bombay Leads India in Movie Industry,” Hartford Courant, August 20, 1930, 8. To be precise, it was the neighborhood of Dadar that was termed India’s Hollywood because of the high concentration of film companies there in the 1920s. 49. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 105. 50. Y. A. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film: A Review (Bombay: Bombay Radio, 1939), 3–4. Film production in Lahore started in the 1920s, and the Bombay producerdirector Chandulal Shah has suggested that Lahore’s United Players’ Corporation and Film Studio, established in 1929, was the first film production company in the Punjab. These companies were unable to make the transition to sound for a variety of reasons relating to technological access and personnel. The first Punjabi-language films were shot in sound studios in Calcutta and Bombay. Lahore cinema made a comeback in the early 1940s with such runaway musical hits as Khazanchi (Moti  B. Gidwani, 1941). For the impact of Partition on the power balance between film industries in Lahore and Bombay, see Salma Siddique, An Evacuee Cinema: Travels of Film Cultures Between Bombay and Lahore (1940– 60) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 51. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film, 4. 52. Kulfi is a local form of iced dessert. 53. Manto, “Shikari Auratein,” 209–10. Horse-drawn commercial carriages were called “Victorias” in Bombay up until at least the 1990s. A third anecdote in this story takes place in Lahore and features a burqa-clad woman. 54. Elizabeth Wilson notes “the importance of dress [in] the uncertainty and anonymity of urban life. The city was a spectacle, and in the right costume a woman—or a man—could escape into a new identity. Such, at any rate, was a widely held belief about the great nineteenth century city. To what extent individuals were really able to escape their origins is less certain, but undoubtedly many reformers believed that anonymity not only made it possible, but also presented an insidious challenge to law and order.” Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 50–51. 55. These are some ways in which Manto describes the shikari auratein, be they in Bombay or Lahore. Manto, “Shikari Auratein,” 209–10 (my translation). 56. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 6. 57. The Parisian flâneur has most famously been characterized by Charles Baudelaire as a detached but perceptive stroller who walks through the city to take in its myriad delights. Predicated on the new urban phenomena of visual stimuli, excess, and consumerist displays, the flâneur has become an emblem of nineteenth-century European modernity. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations.

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58. The flâneuse is a feminist reimagining of the gendered mobility of the male flaneur, and her class location is decidedly different. Manto’s shikari aurat is similarly mobile, visible, and anonymous and astutely identifies some of the basic rules of urbane public life—minimal contact between strangers, emotional restraint, and maintenance of decorum. Transgression of any of these boundaries would necessarily lead to a “scandal,” which served the function of a social disciplinary mechanism. It was precisely this fear of the scandal that Manto’s huntress catalyzed. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 50, discusses both contemporary and historical meanings of male loitering as flânerie and female wandering as a mark of prostitution. For another feminist response to male-centered theories of European modernity, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 59. Here I want to take a minute to complicate popular descriptions of the city itself as a prostitute. Namdeo Dhasal’s oft-cited poem about Mumbai as a “dear slut” in Golpitha and myriad descriptions of Bombay as a dangerously alluring and deceitful “slut” may be powerful, even empathetic, metaphors, but they run the risk of normalizing violent attitudes toward women and female sex work. Male desire reframed as female entrapment turns both the sex worker and the feminized city into malevolent others rather than fellow travelers in the flux of modern life. The poem can be found in Vidyut Bhagwat, “Bombay in Dalit Literature,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123. 60. For an in-depth historical study of cultural and industrial pressures on women in film, see Neepa Majumdar’s Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s (Urbana-Campaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 61. In mainstream propaganda narratives, both communities of women were viewed as sexually suspect, the former due to the increasing stigmatization of their professions, and the latter due to their conspicuously Westernized lifestyles. Invariably, the “Muslimness” or “Anglo-Indianness” of certain women was more a label of their social status than an accurate marker of religious belief or ethnicity. 62. I discuss actresses and caste in greater detail in chapter 5. 63. For a global comparative discussion of the early twentieth-century “modern girl” prototype, see Tani Barlow et  al., eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 64. “Bombay Cinema Artist in Court,” TOI, January 29, 1927, 13.

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65. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 30. 66. All figures about the National Film Archive of India’s holdings are based on my personal cross-checking of its catalog in 2014. The NFAI is currently recataloging its materials, and these numbers are likely to change in 2020–2021. 67. Recent dissertations have mobilized exciting new historical materials, bringing new insights to South Asian film history. For example, see Ranita Chatterjee, “Journeys in and BeyoMOnd the City: Cinema in Calcutta, 1897–1939,” Ph.D. diss., University of Westminster, 2011; and Bindu Menon, “Re-Framing Vision: Malayalam Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life in Keralam,” Ph.D. diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2014. 68. S. Theodore Baskaran, History Through the Lens: Perspectives on South Indian Cinema (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 5. 69. The song booklet is the unrecognized star of Indian film historiography. This humble document was essentially a slim publicity pamphlet that carried miniaturized versions of the film poster on the cover, complete cast and crew credits, the film’s synopsis, and song lyrics. Some also carried publicity stills and advertisements for upcoming features. Most song booklets carried this information in two or more languages and scripts in order to cater to the varied linguistic competencies of India’s film audiences. They were cheaply printed, meant for commercial circulation, and even made their way into colonial surveillance catalogs of printed books (see chapter 3). 70. Sherry  B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 190. 71. I am inspired here by Gil Z. Hochberg’s forthcoming book, tentatively titled Becoming Palestine: Towards an Archival Imagination of the Future. 72. The idea of swadeshi (of one’s own country) was a central motif of the Indian freedom struggle. As an organized campaign, the swadeshi movement first began with the Partition of Bengal in 1905 as an effort toward economic nationalism through the use of locally produced goods, home-spun cloth, and the boycott of all foreign commodities.

1 . S P E C U L AT I V E F U T U R E S | T E J I - M A N D I 1. “Night Life in Bombay,” Times of India (TOI), July 23, 1935, 9. 2. See “Bombay Broadcasting Programmes,” listed in the TOI from 1929 onward. 3. Nripender Nath Mitra, ed., The Annual Indian Register: An Annual Digest of Public Affairs of India, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Annual Register Office, 1935), 164. 4. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor  W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer also took up the study of the relation between capitalism’s forms and ideas and the aesthetic politics of mass spectacles, cinema, and popular print cultures. 5. Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 184. 6. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7. 7. E.g., Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); Timothy Mitchell and Anupama Rao, eds., “Special Issue— Speculation,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 3 (2015). 8. Laura Bear, Ritu Birla, and Stine Simonsen Puri, “Speculation: Futures and Capitalism in India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 3 (2015): 387. 9. Tilottama Rajan, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 151. 10. On the early corporatization of Hollywood, see Iwan Morgan, “Introduction,” in Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s, ed. Philip Davies and Iwan W. Morgan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1–26. 11. Representatives of the Bombay Cinema and Theatres Trades Association in response to questioning by the Indian Cinematograph Committee, in Evidence, vol.  1 (Calcutta: Government of India, Central Publications Branch, 1928), 4. 12. Y. A. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film: A Review (Bombay: Bombay Radio, 1939), 9. 13. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 30–32. 14. Teji-mandi was the local term for “options on futures,” a sophisticated derivatives instrument supposedly invented by Bombay’s cotton traders. Teji is the term for a contract that gives its buyer the option to purchase the underlying futures contract, while a mandi option gives its buyer the right to sell a futures contract. Teji-mandi is a versatile double option that entitles buyers to either buy or sell the futures contract at their discretion. Teji-mandi options trading offered speculators a low-risk and low-cost option, as any losses would only be to the tune of the fixed premium and potential gains could be of an unlimited scale. See Madhoo G. Pavaskar, Saga of the Cotton Exchange (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1985). 15. See, e.g., Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private

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Investment in India, 1900-1939 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and B. R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India: From 1860 to the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 16. The term financialization is a recent neologism, referring to “the growing influence of capital markets, their intermediaries, and processes in contemporary economic and political life.” Its key features, as identified by Andy Pike and Jane Pollard, are “the proliferation of financial intermediaries; heightened risk, uncertainty, and volatility of financialized capitalism; the extending social, spatial, and political reach of financialization.” Andy Pike and Jane Pollard, “Economic Geographies of Financialization,” Economic Geography 86, no. 1 (2010): 30. 17. Asiya Siddiqui notes that “India had one of the most highly developed commercial economies of any country in the pre-industrial world. This was particularly true of the western region, especially Gujarat, which had a high level of urbanization at least as far back as the 17th century.” Asiya Siddiqui, Bombay’s People, 1860–98: Insolvents in the City (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19. 18. See introduction for information on theatrical distribution and audience share. 19. E.g., Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018). 20. Bear, Birla, and Puri, “Speculation,” 390. 21. Kaushik Bhaumik, “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry,” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2001, 15. 22. Red Signal song booklet (Bombay: Standard Pictures, 1941). 23. “Is Speculation Vice or Virtue?,” TOI, November 10, 1945, 5. 24. S. M. Edwardes, The Bombay City Police; a Historical Sketch, 1672–1916 (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 173. 25. As advertised in TOI, November 9, 1938, 3, and TOI, November 11, 1938, 6. 26. “Jodhpur Maharaja Sued: Share Broker’s Story of Transaction,” TOI, September  5, 1935, 12; “How Bombay Share-Broker Was Lured to Death: Story of Crime on Parsik Hill,” TOI, July 9, 1931, 4 (an infamous case in which the film producer, Jagtap, was finally acquitted); and “Share Broker on Forgery Charge,” TOI, February 22, 1934, 16. 27. See Kaushik Bhaumik on the significance of “loss of face” in Bombay’s Gujarati credit landscape, where reputation and one’s word of honor were the most prized guarantors of funding liquidity. Kaushik Bhaumik, “Myths, Markets and Panics: Speculating About the Proto-Cinematic Historical Significance of

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the Popularity of Two Parsi Theatre Plays at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations, ed. Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal, and Parichay Patra, 11–24 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 28. C. F. C. De Sousa, The Indian Investor (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1942), xi. 29. C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown, 44 BOMLR 387 (1941). All case details are cited from the Indian case law website, Indian Kanoon, http://indiankanoon.org/doc /191336/. 30. “The Indian Film Industry,” TOI, January 3, 1930, 10. 31. Judas, “Another 250 Unemployed!” filmindia, August 1938, 9. 32. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film, 1. 33. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928 (Calcutta: Government of India— Central Publications Branch, 1928), 35; Gulamhoosein A. Dossani, Present Problems of the Motion Picture Industry (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1936), 2. 34. Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 35. Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 249, 276, 248. 36. Huang Xuelei, Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 24. 37. The House of Kapurchand was started by Kapurchand Nemchand Mehta, who worked as a clerk in a Bangalore firm until he assessed the potential of the film business. With his brothers, Kapurchand set up the distribution firm Super Pictures in 1931, took over Roxy and Plaza Talkies, acquiring guaranteed exhibition venues, and bailed out Imperial and Saraswathi studios, thereby acquiring proprietorial control of production as well. They finally withdrew from film financing in 1936. “Silver Jubilee Supplement,” TOI, May 5, 1939, 16. 38. Baburao Patel, “Parasites of the Industry,” filmindia, July 1941, 3. 39. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 36; “Prospectus for Navyug Chitrapat,” TOI, December 9, 1939, 7. 40. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film, 6. 41. For more on corporate and “scientific” industrial methods, see chapter 2. 42. Such a setup partly allayed financial risk as the shareholders could be held liable only for the amount they had invested in the company—not their personal assets or wealth. In Hollywood, funds raised by studios as public-issue capital were used to buy exhibition spaces and property, unlike in Bombay, where most funds had to be funneled into basic raw materials of film production. See Morgan, “Introduction.” 43. In 1939 New Theatres suffered serious financial losses and infrastructural setbacks. After a disastrous fire broke out on its premises, New Theatres

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withdrew from the Circo partnership and the Bombay company was forced to start its own production. 44. C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown. 45. One of these highly prized artistes was Shanta Apte, who was contracted at Prabhat in 1939 and straining to break out. See chapter 5. 46. That such unstable elements of film profitability such as story and stars provided reasonable hope of a studio’s future success is hardly surprising or unique to India. All speculative practices need a few parameters for ascertaining the probability ratio of profit to loss. Film stars have been a particularly consistent probability parameter, mobilized in industries across the world. All other production elements, from story to language to music, have shifted in and out of speculative favor. See Arthur De Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (London: Routledge, 2004). 47. Anna L. Tsing argues along similar lines when discussing the contemporary landscape of financial capitalism: “In speculative enterprises, profit must be imagined before it can be extracted; the possibility of economic performance must be conjured like a spirit to draw an audience of potential investors.” Anna L.Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 57. 48. The durationality of profit accrual is a category that has simultaneously expanded and contracted over the years. As new technologies of film exhibition and distribution have emerged over the years, from broadcast, cable and satellite television, to video cassettes and dvds, and now to streaming platforms such as Netflix, producers are able to “exploit” a film’s value over several years through reruns and re-releases. On the other hand, spatial circuits have collapsed through methods such as simultaneous world theatrical release and hence an immediate idea of “first Friday” takings and a film’s future value can be determined within days. 49. Indian Cinematograph Committee, Evidence, 1:178. 50. Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India. For a detailed overview of the complexities of indigenous credit and speculative finance in Bombay after World War 1, see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital,” Journal of the Moving Image 5 (2006): 1–24. 51. Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 52. See Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 1931–1939: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2–4. India’s big capitalists were concentrated in cities that had large-scale mechanized industries: Bombay, Calcutta,

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Ahmedabad, Kanpur, and Coimbatore. These local elites had combined stakes in industry, finance, and trade. They provided leadership to most of the regional business associations and established the first pan-Indian business organization, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 1927. 53. “Obituary,” TOI, September 1, 1906, 8. 54. “Obituary.” 55. “The Catastrophe in Bombay,” TOI, July 25, 1865, 3. 56. B. D. Bharucha, ed., Indian Cinematograph Yearbook (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1938), 65. 57. Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 19–20. 58. Details courtesy of Dietze Family Archive studio papers. 59. Dinshaw was considered a captain of Bombay industry and dealt in cement, cotton, and securities. 60. Phiroze Sethna, As I Look Back (Bombay: Taraporevala, 1938). 61. The film industry has historically been a site for investing such “black money,” i.e., untaxed income. See Ganti, Producing Bollywood. 62. The ambiguous status of futures trading received another severe jolt during the Second World War when shortages in cotton drove up futures prices. Critics argued that the price increase would have to be compensated by more cotton farming at the cost of food production. In May  1943 the government of India closed the cotton futures markets operating in the country. Markets reopened after five months following strong lobbying and representations by the Cotton Committee. 63. Baburao Patel, “Architects of the Future?,” filmindia, January 1945, 3. 64. Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, 168–69. 65. Bhaumik, “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry,” 26. 66. For a spatial history of sex work in Bombay, see Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 67. “From Lakshmi to Ranjit,” Lighthouse, February 12, 1938, 5–8. 68. “From Lakshmi to Ranjit,” 5. 69. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928, 35–36. 70. “From Lakshmi to Ranjit.” The star of Typist Girl, Sulochana, herself left Kohinoor Film Company after a few sour tussles over fees and contract. 71. Shah and Gohar remade Gunsundari in a talkie version in 1934. 72. According to Gohar, Ranjit’s main financier, Vithaldas Thakordas only agreed to lend Chandulal Shah the start-up capital if Gohar was deemed a partner in the company. See Girish Karnad, “Glorious Gohar,” Cinema Vision India 1, no.1 (January 1980): 74–79.

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73. “Glorious Gohar Mamajiwala,” in Parde Ki Pariyan, ed. Abhay Chhajlani (Indore: Nai Duniya, 1990), 36; “Miss Gohar,” in Filmdom: All-India Film Directory, ed. R. A. Shaikh (Lahore: Globial Linkers, 1946), 70. 74. “Glorious Gohar,” 76. 75. According to Chandulal’s son Navin Shah, the studio logo, commonly referred to as the “Ranjit lancer,” was a tribute to Ranjitsinhji and his cavalry regiments. Chandulal was originally from Jamnagar and often returned to shoot outdoor sequences. See Shishir Krishna Sharma, “Bigger than the Sky—Ranjit Studio,” Beete Hue Din, http://beetehuedin.blogspot.com/2012/07/biggerthan-sky-ranjit -studio.html. 76. Devi Devyani was released with seventeen songs and twenty-two “scenes.” See Vidyawati Lakshman Rao Namra, Hindi Rangmanch aur Pandit Narayan Prasad Betab, 1853–1960 (Varanasi: Vishwavidyalaya Prakashan, 1972); and Kathryn Hansen, Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011). 77. Baburao Patel, “A Salute to Ranjit,” filmindia, May  1946, 3–7; “Ranjit Celebrates Its Tenth Anniversary,” Mirror, June 4, 1939; Erik Barnouw and Subrahmanyam Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 78. “Ranjit Celebrates Its Tenth Anniversary.” 79. Judas, “The Man Behind the Scenes,” filmindia, March 1938, 10. 80. “Born Slaves But Let Us Not Die Slaves!” filmindia, November 1941, 23. 81. Bunny Reuben, cited in Biren Kothari, Sagar Movietone: Reel by Reel Story of Sagar Movietone and Chimanlal Desai (Ahmedabad: Saarthak Prakashan, 2014), 119. 82. See Kothari, Sagar Movietone, 122. 83. For example, in the week of January 11, 1936, as many as ten Ranjit films were being shown across India in cities including Bombay, Ahmedabad, Aden, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Poona, Belgaum, and Delhi. These films included Kimti Ansu (fifth week); Noor-e-Watan (third week); Toofan Mail (second run, third week), and Tyrant (third run, second week). In 1939 Ranjit acquired theatrical release rights for one year at the Royal Opera House in Bombay and now had two first-run theaters in the city. Again, Ranjit leased this theater rather than build its own, contra the Hollywood model of stabilization. 84. Hindi-Urdu formed the staple language of the studio, but films were also made in Punjabi and Gujarati. 85. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 111; Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 272. 86. According to Shah’s nephew, Jairaj Punatar, this incident took place in 1944. Sharma, “Bigger than the Sky—Ranjit Studio.”

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87. “Obituary,” TOI, September 1, 1906, 8. 88. Chandulal Shah, “I Remember . . . ,” Filmfare, August 19, 1955, 47. 89. Shah, “I Remember . . . ,” 30. 90. Chimanlal B. Desai, “Sagar Was Ten Years Ahead,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 127. 91. Baburao Patel, “Editor’s Mail,” filmindia, May 1938, 35. 92. Ranjit also paid disproportionately large salaries to its stars and top actors. Between 1931 and 1945 the studio spent approximately 60 percent of its production expenditure on artiste salaries and only 8.4 percent on the rest of the staff salaries. Calculations derived from statistics reported in Patel, “A Salute to Ranjit.” 93. Cited in Kothari, Sagar Movietone, 44. 94. Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 63. It is unclear where the prefix “Dr.” comes from. Not to be confused with Ambalal J. Patel, cinematographer. 95. Kothari, Sagar Movietone, 28. 96. “Indian Film Notes,” TOI, November 22, 1929, 12; and “Bombay Film Studios,” TOI, November 29, 1929, 16. 97. Master Vithal, “Defended by Quaid-e-Azam,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 122. 98. With an authorized capital of Rs. 2,500,000, of which Rs. 500,000 was to be issued as preference shares for public subscription. “National Studios, India’s Newest Film Producing Unit,” TOI, August 4, 1939, 12. 99. As reported in Mirror, August  6, 1939. Vertical integration refers to an economic model in which a single manufacturing company controls the entire supply chain of the commodity; in the case of film, from production to distribution to exhibition. 100. Desai, “Sagar Was Ten Years Ahead.” 101. See Kothari, Sagar Movietone, 70–76, on Mehboob. On Silver Screen Exchange, see filmindia, September 1942, 68, and November 1942, 81. For more on breakaway production units see chapter 2. 102. The auction was won by K. M. Modi for Rs. 900,000. At the end of the 1945 fiscal year, National Studios announced a 5  percent dividend on preference shares and 10 percent on equity shares. Its last film was Sabita Devi’s Sarai ke Bahar (1947), and buyers were invited in 1950 for rights to all sixteen National films. 103. These were Light of Asia (Franz Osten, 1925), Shiraz (Franz Osten, 1928), and Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929). 104. See letter from UFA general director Klitzsch to director Correll, December 16, 1929, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, R/109/I. 105. He was bestowed with the title Rai Sahib by the British Government in India.

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106. Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 40. 107. HRIIT was registered in Lahore with offices at 26 McLeod Road and managed by Rai Sahib Chuni Lall. 108. For additional details, see the entry on Himansu Rai in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 1998, 183–84. 109. This account of Chuni Lall’s train encounter with Dewan Sharar is based on an oral interview with his daughter Shanti Mahendroo, interviewed by author, March 28, 2013, Bombay. 110. Temple was a civil servant with family connections to the British royal family. 111. Tsing, Friction, 57. 112. Letter to Setalvad, May 27, 1933. All letters in this section are from the Dietze Family Archive. 113. Letter to Himansu Rai, August 7, 1933. 114. Letter to Himansu Rai, September 18, 1933. 115. This was also an unprecedented form of market research as the first systematized collation of statistical data on talkie infrastructures was published in 1938 by the Motion Picture Society of India, Bombay—Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook. 116. These are some of the statistics cited: 62 Indian towns have cinemas; there are 128 cinemas in these towns; 56 of these theaters have permanent talkie sets; 5 theaters have portable talkie sets; 67 cinemas still run silent pictures. Letter to Himansu Rai, March 20, 1932. 117. Letter to Himansu Rai, August 23, 1932. 118. Karma was first advertised in the Indian trade press as Nagin ki Ragini / Song of the Serpent in December 1931 but wasn’t released until 1933. 119. Letter, August 20, 1931. 120. Letter to Himansu Rai, September 18, 1933. 121. Letter to Himansu Rai, October 2, 1933. 122. Letter to Himansu Rai, March 20, 1932. 123. For more on the “hidden sociality” of speculative markets, see Edward LiPuma, The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). 124. To read about Jaddan Bai’s astonishing career as a film actress, composer, screenwriter, director, and producer, see Debashree Mukherjee, "Screenwriting and Feminist Rewriting: The Lost Films of Jaddan Bai (1892–1949),” in Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo, eds., Women Screenwriters: An International Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 125. Mary Poovey considers money and literature both to be genres of writing whose stylistic features are borrowed quite liberally from each other, in Genres

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of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 126. All details in this paragraph are based on Director’s Report and the Audited Statement of Accounts for the Period Ending 31 October 1935, Wirsching Family Archive. 127. This unit had recently filmed the Quadrangular Cricket Match and the Test Match between India and Australia. 128. See Director’s Report, Wirsching Family Archive. 129. Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private Investment in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 208; A. D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics, Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–1933 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), 242. F. E. Dinshaw died in 1936. 130. Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 15. 131. Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 16. 132. See N. Srinivas, “Slandering the Cinema,” Talk-a-Tone, December 1939, 5–6. 133. Letter to Setalvad, July 15, 1933, Dietze Family Archive. 134. “Prospectus for Navyug Chitrapat.” 135. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, 66. 136. Ganti, Producing Bollywood, 7. 137. For more on the managing agency model, see Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics; Rabindra Kishen Hazari and A. N. Oza, The Structure of the Corporate Private Sector: A Study of Concentration, Ownership and Control. Mumbai: Asia Publishing House, 1966). 138. The Film Law drastically regulated Japanese film production, ensuring that the film industry served state aims. 139. Details of the rivalry between Nikkatsu and Shochiku studios in the 1930s are described in Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013). 140. For a detailed analysis of the process and phenomenon of “Bollywoodization,” see M. Madhava Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood,” Seminar, 2003 and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no.  1 (2003): 25–39.

2. SCIEN TIFIC DESIRES | JADU GH AR 1. The growing fields of paperwork studies and document studies take documents themselves as central objects of historical, anthropological, and media inquiry. In the past decade there has been a concerted interest in the materiality of paper archives as well as an approach to documents as objects

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of ethnographic study. Now, with the varied work of Annalies Riles, Angel Rama, Ann Laura Stoler, Matthew Hull, Bhavani Raman, Roberto Gonzales Echevarria, Ben Kafka, and Lisa Gitelman, there is a growing understanding of the document as technology, genre, practice, media, and process. From the imbrication of paperwork in colonial and bureaucratic regimes of control to the counterhistories that can be read from the study of textual marginalia, paper can have many uses for the film historian. 2. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43. 3. I take this phrase from Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), and build on his discussion of colonial science later in this chapter. 4. “Film Industry as the 8th Key Industry,” filmindia, February 1939, 24. 5. E.g., Baburao Patel, “Give Us a Square Deal,” filmindia, February 1939, 3. See also B. D. Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1938), 423; and Y. A. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film: A Review (Bombay: Bombay Radio, 1939), 4, for similar figures. Nitin Govil describes the use of numbers in the contemporary Indian film industries as “the very evidence of industry itself—proof of its industriousness.” Thus “numbers do not only supply sociotechnical evidence of Indian economic change. Rather, enumeration itself has become a signifier of transformation within the Indian creative industries.” Nitin Govil, “Envisioning the Future: Financialization and the Indian Entertainment Industry Reports,” South Asian Popular Culture 14, no. 3 (2016): 222. 6. The Ottawa Agreement of 1932 instituted a set of trade policies based on the system of imperial preference in British colonies and had been hotly negotiated in India. Its impending expiration raised alarms of further tariff increases on imported stock and reduction of import duties on British films. See B. R. Oberai, “Ottawa Conference,” Cinema, July 1932, 11–12. 7. Gulamhoosein  A. Dossani, Present Problems of the Motion Picture Industry (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1936), 8. 8. The Indian Film Industry; Plea for Government Support for Legitimate Demands (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1936), 7. 9. The swadeshi (of one’s own country) movement first began with the Partition of Bengal in 1905 as an effort toward economic nationalism through the use of indigenously produced goods and the boycott of all foreign commodities. 10. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928 (Calcutta: Government of India— Central Publications Branch, 1928), 48.

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11. See Prakash, Another Reason; and Shiv Visvanathan, Organizing for Science: The Making of an Industrial Research Laboratory (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). 12. Prakash, Another Reason, 7. 13. This is only one strand of a complex story, and I refer here to the “Science and Culture group” led by Meghnad Saha. See Visvanathan, Organizing for Science. 14. Charkha is a hand-cranked spinning wheel popularized by Gandhi as a way to produce homespun cloth. Cited in Vishvanathan, Organizing for Science, 37. 15. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film, 4, 10. 16. Prakash, Another Reason, 7. 17. Brian Shoesmith, “From Monopoly to Commodity: The Bombay Studios in the 1930s,” in History on/and/in Film, ed. T. O’Regan and B. Shoesmith (Perth: History & Film Association of Australia, 1987), 68–75. 18. “Chief Drawback of Indian Film Industry,” TOI, February 20, 1935, 14. 19. “Chief Drawback,” 14. 20. Mustansir Dalvi, “ ‘This New Architecture’: Contemporary Voices on Bombay’s Architecture Before the Nation State,” Tekton 5, no. 1 (2018): 62. 21. For a detailed discussion of the transmedial crossovers and dense acoustic ecology that cradled the consolidation of the talkie cine-ecology, see chapter 3. 22. “Radio Section of the Exhibition,” Indian Film Industry Silver Jubilee Supplement, TOI, May 5, 1939, 18. 23. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 53. 24. Prakash, Another Reason, 20 25. Khadi refers to handwoven cloth, and homespun khadi was one of the centerpieces of Gandhi’s movement of economic, social, and political reform. See Lisa N. Trivedi, “Visually Mapping the ‘Nation’: Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920–1930,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (2003): 11–41. 26. Cited in Trivedi, “Visually Mapping,” 11. 27. Prakash, Another Reason. Tapati Guha-Thakurta further exemplifies this in the context of archeological museums that were “caught in the unresolved tensions between the ‘scholarly’ and the ‘popular.’ ” Guha-Thakurta, “The Museum in the Colony,” in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), 81. 28. Monica Juneja, preface to No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), xiii.

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29. See G. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. A. Hartz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); Lorraine  J. Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 1998); and Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). 30. For foundational formulations on this topic, see Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), 56–62; and Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). In India, pleasure in the apparatus and faith in the divine combined in the canny viewership of religious films, as we will see in chapter  4. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology,” in Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, ed. Tejaswini Niranjana and Vivek Dhareshwar (Calcutta: Seagull, 1993), 47–82; and Ravi Vasudevan, Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 31. The notion of nirala shares some of its meaning with the idea of the “sublime.” For example, see Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), xx, for a discussion of the “colonial sublime” following from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. While the nirala is indeed that which exceeds comprehension and elicits awe, its usage in Hindu South Asia has traditionally indicated a benevolent divinity with no inflections of terror or fear. 32. “Industrial India Supplement,” TOI, November 18, 1938, 20. 33. See “Industrial India Supplement,” 22; and Industrial India song booklet, (Bombay: General Films, 1938). 34. For a discussion of Bombay’s conquest of the sea, see Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 35. Bombay Chronicle, May 13, 1939, 2. 36. “Indian Film Industry Silver Jubilee Supplement,” TOI, May 5, 1939, 6. 37. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 38. For a cultural history of artificial light, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 39. Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways Company (BEST) was established in 1905, and the first cotton mills switched to electric power in 1915, supplied by the Tata Hydroelectric Power Supply Company (1911). In 1918 the streets of South Bombay were lit up with hydel power, and in 1928 the electrified

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Colaba-Borivali suburban train line made its first foray. Andheri got electric streetlights in 1929, Versova in 1933, and Malad, Goregaon, Kandivali, and Borivali after 1935. See TOI news reports, 1918–1938. 40. G. C. Dorset, “Round the Sets at Twentieth Century Fox,” Mirror, April 1939. 41. Letter from Jayant Shah to Devika Rani, September  7, 1944, Dietze Family Archive. 42. Dharamdas Tekchand, letter to the editor, Cinema, August 1933, 48. 43. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 167. 44. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1951), 65, emphasis mine. 45. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 337. In 1930s Bombay the term rationalization could mean a variety of things, but, per Chandavarkar (339), “in its widest sense [rationalization] comprehends all measures that can, on grounds of systematic reasoning, be recommended for adoption by an industry for improving its technique, its management and its finances.” 46. Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 335. 47. The “scientific” methods used by Taylor included time and motion studies, standardization of tools and movements of workers, use of slide rules and stopwatches to monitor work, and instruction cards for workers. 48. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 50, 27, 16. 49. Thomas Schatz, Genius of the System, Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 9. 50. B. V. Dharap, “Some Important Film Makers of the Silent Era,” Cinema Vision India: Pioneers of Indian Cinema—The Silent Era 1, no. 1 (1980): 26–38. 51. A total of 23 Hindi-Urdu talkie films were made in 1931, a number that increased to 61 in 1932 and 154 in 1935. Of these, approximately 60  percent were made by independent and/or short-lived concerns, indicating increased production by studios and the ever-growing number of independent film companies. See “Alam Ara to Subhalagna,” Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), appendix. 52. B. D. Garga, Art of Cinema: An Insider’s Journey Through Fifty Years of Film History (London: Penguin, 2005), 89. 53. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 35. 54. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film, 8. 55. Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 271–84. 56. See Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928, 43–45.

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57. C. V. Desai, executive committee member of the MPSI, in Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 423. 58. Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 215. 59. Ganti, Producing Bollywood, 223. 60. Janet Staiger, “ ‘Tame’ Authors and the Corporate Laboratory: Stories, Writers, and Scenarios in Hollywood,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 8, no. 4 (1983): 34. 61. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 62. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 32, 42, 43–44. Karl Marx used the analogy of watch-making to exemplify “heterogeneous” manufacture: a dispersed mode of production carried out by separate specialists such as dial makers, screw makers and lever makers. The production of each component can take place independently and at any location; it need only be handled by the concerned specialist/s until it reaches the hands of the final watchmakerassembler. In contrast, serial manufacture “produces articles that go through connected phases of development, through a series of processes step by step,” and each step is dependent on the one before it. In transposing the watchmaking analogy to cinema, Prasad interprets heterogeneity as the assemblage of separate narrative elements like dance, action, comedy, fight, and story into a single film that, as a result, has a uniquely “heterogenous form.” Fight and dance specialists exist in Hollywood, too, so what makes Bollywood’s disaggregated form an exceptional case? Prasad tells us that Bombay has historically lacked the basic “raw material” that is the ground on which serial manufacture can operate. Thus we arrive at the main point of distinction between Hollywood and Bombay cinema, as per Prasad—the status of the script. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1974), 323–25. 63. Prasad, Ideology of Hindi Film, 45. 64. Niranjan Pal, “A Few Hints on Scenario Writing,” Movie Show, Annual 1930, 34–35, emphasis in original. 65. K. T. Dalvi, A New Profession or Manual of Indian Talkies (Bombay: International Pictures, 1931), 8–9. 66. Letter to D. S. Benegal, July 22, 1944, Dietze Family Archive. 67. J. B. H. Wadia, “Those Were the Days,” unpublished memoir. 68. Durga Khote, “Films Were Better Planned in Earlier Days,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 123. 69. “Making a Film,” TOI, July 27, 1920, 11. 70. Rex Beach, “Characters on the Screen,” TOI, July 1, 1921, 2. 71. For example, see TOI, June 25, 1927, 4; October 29, 1927, 6.

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72. Cinema, August–September  1930, 45; “Through Our Lens,” Cinema, February 1930, 6. 73. It must be noted that cast and costume lists were required even by theater companies, making some parts of the continuity script a transmedial technique. 74. Ian  W. Macdonald, “Screenwriting in Britain 1895–1929,” in Analysing the Screenplay, ed. Jill Nelmes (New York: Routledge, 2010), 56. 75. Kaushik Bhaumik, “The Script of Gul-e-Bakavali (Kohinoor, 1924),” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 3, no. 2 (2012): 178. 76. Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 129. 77. The studio did, however, regularly credit its continuity assistants, e.g., S. Najam-ul-Hasan Naqvi in the Jawani ki Hawa song booklet (1935). Niranjan Pal, storywriter and scenario writer of BT’s earliest films, was given pride of place in publicity materials as the originator of the films, in formulations such as “Mother by Niranjan Pal” rather than as part of the crew credits. Later, e.g., in Bhabhi (1938), Saradindu Banerji is credited for the “story” and for adapting the story for the screen. 78. In 1938 the Fazalbhoy family set up the Abdulla Fazalbhoy Technical Institute for Radio & Cinema, which was to be run by St.  Xavier’s College, Bombay. Advertisements and brochures indicate that courses were slated to begin in 1939. Not much more is known yet about the history of this institute—for example, when the first students enrolled, who the instructors were, or the list of alumni. Ongoing research by Deepak Rao and Shekhar Krishnan may shed more light on this important educational history. 79. A. Sundaram, “So This Is Your Indian Film,” Sound & Shadow, February 1933, 14. 80. Movie Show, Annual 1930, 34–35. 81. Tarit Kumar Basu, “Revolt Against Nature,” Cinema, August  1931, 24. Basu’s scenario is in the recognizable “Hollywood” silent style with sequentially numbered scenes (referring to individual shots), description of location (ext/int, specifics), lensing or shot size (long, close, mid close), action, intertitle text, and even transitions (mix, dissolve, iris in). While the scene numbers, locations, and times would help in preplanning a shooting schedule, we also see a specifically filmic vocabulary demonstrated through the shot descriptions. See also G. P. Srivastava, “Story of Bantadhar,” Cinema, March–April 1932, 11, which is a more amateur, theatrical attempt, focusing on dialogue and stage direction and using shot sizes in a formulaic rather than creative manner. 82. It is unclear whether this film was produced. A film with the same title, Briefless Barrister (Homi Master), was released in 1926 but featured Gohar and not Sulochana or Sandow.

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83. Dalvi notes that two kinds of feelings can be produced in a viewer—“pleasant and unpleasant”—while four kinds of emotions can be evoked—“Compliance, Dominance, Inducement and Submission. These four are elementary emotions, while there may be compound or mixed emotions and complex and abnormal emotions. Instances of these are—mixed emotions—sorrow, joy, love etc.; complex emotions—Desire, satisfaction, passion etc.; abnormal emotions—Fear, Rage, Jealousy, Hatred etc.” Dalvi, Manual of Indian Talkies, 17. 84. Indeed, early talkie films frequently hired literary writers and borrowed stories from the worlds of literature and theater. Publicity booklets also credited translators who converted original stories in Gujarati or Bengali into Hindi-Urdu. 85. For more on the Germans at BT, see Amrit Gangar, Franz Osten and the Bombay Talkies: A Journey from Munich to Malad (Bombay: Max Mueller Bhavan, 2001); and Debashree Mukherjee, ed., Behind the Scenes: Josef Wirsching and an Unseen History of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Mapin, 2020). 86. Siddharth Kak, “The Colossus and the Little Flower from India,” Cinema Vision 1, no. 2 (April 1980): 73. 87. Vacha was sound recordist at BT; Suchet Singh was a prominent cameraperson of the silent era; and Desai founded Surya Film Co. in Bangalore. On Tandon, see Karan Bali’s documentary An American in Madras (2013) on American cinematographer, Ellis Dungan, who was a classmate of Tandon at the University of Southern California. Another example of a foreign-returned technician is Satish Chandra Singh, who reportedly worked at Paramount, MGM, RKO, and Fox “as Technical Adviser to the Research Libraries in Hollywood for Oriental Production.” Dipali, March  30, 1934, 23. Movie Show reported on new film courses in American universities; e.g., “Film Courses at Michigan University,” October 1930, 25. 88. G. D. Lal, “The Motion Picture Industry in India,” Journal of the Society for Motion Picture Engineers 26, no. 3 (March 1936): 252. 89. By 1936 at least thirty-three Indians were members of the SMPE, including V.  Shantaram, Y. A. Fazalbhoy, Pareenja and Mathur (assistants at Bombay Talkies), Maneklal Patel, and R. G. Torney. 90. Pasupati Chattopadhyay, “Film Technicians: Their Place in the Industry and Their Problems,” Film Seminar Report 1955 (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1956): 133. 91. For example, Kanjibhai Rathod, who went from still photography to direction in 1920. 92. “Film Director,” Cinema, May 1931, 15. 93. “So This Is Your Indian Film,” 14.

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94. “How Many People Make a Film?” TOI, March 23, 1935, 9. It is important to note that while women were sometimes hired as storywriters at this time, they were not entrusted with directorial roles unless they happened to run their own production company, as in the case of director-producers like Jaddan Bai and Protima Dasgupta. 95. Chimanlal B. Desai, “Sagar Was Ten Years Ahead,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 127. 96. The career of Chandulal Shah is exemplary of this route. Having got his film break as a storywriter, Chandulal Shah continued to write his own stories, treatments, and screenplays even as a director and producer. Chaturbhuj Doshi started as a film journalist in the late 1920s with the paper Hindustan, progressed to writing silent and talkie film scripts for Ranjit, and eventually became a director at the studio. Jayant Desai started his career as an exhibitor and subsequently moved to scenario writing. After a stint in Rangoon for London Film, he relocated to Bombay and landed a spot as Chandulal Shah’s assistant. Both Doshi and Desai were A-list directors for Ranjit. 97. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film, 13. 98. “From 30 to 3000 a Month,” filmindia, August 1940, 13; “Stop Press,” filmindia, December 1940. See chapter 1 for more on Circo. 99. Desai, “Sagar Was Ten Years Ahead,” 127. 100. Chandulal Shah, “Landmarks of Filmmaking in India,” Filmfare, April 11, 1958, 19. 101. A writer-journalist from the 1920s, Jitubhai Mehta, remembers witnessing the shooting of India’s first talkie film, Alam Ara: “Chimanlal [Desai] accompanied me to the sets of Alam Ara. What I witnessed nearly left me bewildered. We were well past the days of relying on sunlight to shoot. The advancement in the lighting technology would now allow us to schedule the shoots as per convenience.” Quoted in Biren Kothari, Sagar Movietone: Reel by Reel Story of Sagar Movietone and Chimanlal Desai, trans. from Gujarati (Ahmedabad: Saarthak Prakashan, 2014), 43. 102. Letter from Devika Rani to D. S. Benegal, July 22, 1944. 103. According to Virchand Dharamsey, Kohinoor Film Company started the practice of “simultaneous production of multiple films” in the silent era. Virchand Dharamsey, “The Script of Gul-Bakavali (Kohinoor, 1924),” BioScope 3, no. 2: 182. 104. “Production Notes and Studio Gossip from Everywhere,” TOI, December 27, 1935, 5. 105. This model of production is similar to Arthur Freed’s units at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s. 106. “Studio News,” Ranjit Bulletin, May 30, 1936.

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107. “Relay from Ranjit,” Ranjit Bulletin, January 11, 1936. 108. Baburao Patel, “A Salute to Ranjit,” May 1946, 5. 109. Director’s Report and the Audited Statement of Accounts for the Period Ending 31 October 1935, Wirsching Family Archive, 4. 110. Klaus Kremeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). 111. Mehboob’s leading man in Al Hilal, Kumar, was hired as a “loan” from New Theatres, and Mehboob wanted to cast him again in his next film. Reluctant to start a trend of freelance hires on per-picture salaries, Chimanlal Desai and Amabalal Patel refused, stipulating that henceforth only in-house studio actors would be exclusively cast. 112. Kothari, Sagar Movietone, 70–76. 113. Desai, “Sagar Was Ten Years Ahead,” 127. 114. Desai claimed that Sabita Devi drew a salary of Rs. 3000 a month and “was the highest paid star in Sagar and perhaps in whole of India, those days.” Desai, “Sagar Was Ten Years Ahead,” 127. 115. “Minimum Wage for Film Workers,” filmindia, March 1948, 5. 116. Chandulal Shah, “Talkies Built Up Film Industry,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 33. 117. See Erik Barnouw and Subrahmanyam Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2nd  ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 117–21. 118. Kothari, Sagar Movietone, 122. 119. Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 180. 120. Amita Malik, “Padma Shri Devika Rani,” Filmfare, March 14, 1958, 37. 121. Kak, “The Colossus and the Little Flower,” 73. 122. For a detailed discussion of this controversy, see Debashree Mukherjee, “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 9–30. By the time Jawani ki Hawa was released, F. E. Dinshaw was the only Parsi left on the BT board.

3. V O I C E | AWA A Z 1. “Good! Good!—Very good!” in rural Marathi. 2. QMS was one of the first schools for girls in Bombay, originally set up by the Zenana Bible Medical Mission in 1876 in Byculla. In subsequent years it moved to Mazagaon (an early student at this time was Atiya Fyzee [1877–1967]) and finally to Girgaum.

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3. O. U. Krishnan, The Night Side of Bombay (Cannanore: O. K. Sreedharan, 1938), 1. 4. Dramatic monologues are a crucial feature of mainstream commercial films in India, a key part of the melodramatic mode. Impassioned, rousing, and spectacular speechmaking has been critical to star formation, with films creating space for a star to deliver a scene-stopping monologue and fans memorizing key speeches in an actor’s career. 5. Jonathan Sterne identifies this sonic relationality as the main challenge of sound studies. See Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012). 6. Neepa Majumdar, “Beyond the Song Sequence: Theorizing Sound in Indian Cinema,” in The Continuum Companion to Sound in Film and Visual Media, ed. Graeme Harper (London: Continuum, 2009), 307. 7. See works by Neepa Majumdar, Shikha Jhingan, Amanda Weidman, and Pavitra Sundar. 8. The term baiji originated in colonial Bengal to refer to “professional singers who did not perform on the public stage,” relying instead on private patrons. “Baijis were famous for their proficiency in singing, dance and with patrons amongst the elite, they [could be] also wealthy.” Shweta Sachdeva Jha, “Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-Making in Colonial India,” African and Asian Studies 8, no. 3 (2009): 277. 9. All sonic histories of Indian cinema are speculative insofar as we cannot access so many early talkie films, and moreover because we can never access the ephemeral experiences of sound inside a 1930s movie theater or within the acoustic soundscape of Bombay at the time. 10. Louis Bromfield, Night in Bombay (New York: Collier, 1940), 110. 11. Bromfield, Night in Bombay, 221. 12. A. K. Hangal, The Life and Times of AK Hangal (New Delhi: Sterling, 1999), 4–5. The plays Hangal saw were written by well-known dramatists who transitioned to film in the following decade—Agha Hashr Kashmiri and Narayan Prasad “Betab.” Shows would start after 9:00 p.m. and last about four hours. 13. Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, The Bombay City Police: a Historical Sketch, 1672–1916 (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 160; “Revolutionary Songs: Prabhat Pheri Members Jailed,” TOI, November 5, 1930, 11. 14. “Bombay Amusements,” TOI, March 9, 1929, 23. 15. “Wireless in Bombay,” TOI, January 17, 1924, 10. The Bengal Radio Club started broadcasting toward the end of 1923 and by January  1924 was broadcasting music programs three times a week. See “Wireless Jottings,” TOI, January 18, 1924, 16. In comparison, Shanghai began radio broadcasting in July 1924.

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16. In a few months the program expanded to include “Indian music,” “Gramophone transmissions,” and a “Children’s Hour,” with programming from Monday through Saturday. In October  1924 the Karnatak Amateurs troupe recorded a program of classical vocal solos and a harmonium solo. TOI, October 8, 1924, 7. 17. “Dancing by Wireless,” TOI, June 27, 1924, 5. 18. Bindu Menon cites several autobiographical accounts from Kerala in the 1930s that record the wonder and disorientation experienced on first encountering a gramophone voice. See Menon, “Re-Framing Vision: Malayalam Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life in Keralam,” Ph.D. diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2014. 19. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 20. Chion suggests that the radio, telephone, and gramophone “systemized the acousmatic situation and provided it with a new meaning by dint of insinuating it automatically and mechanically.” See Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 134. 21. “Successful Experiment in Relaying,” TOI, February 6, 1925, 17. 22. Chion, Sound, 149. 23. Industrial India song booklet (Bombay: General Films, 1938), my translation. 24. Roland Barthes, “Music’s Body,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 245–312. 25. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 45. 26. D. F. Karaka, There Lay the City (Bombay: Thacker, 1945), 247. 27. Bhagat Singh was sentenced to death for his role in the killing of a British police officer in 1928 in what came to be known as the Lahore Conspiracy case, as well as for bombing the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in 1929 along with other companions. He was twenty-three years old when hanged. 28. “Student Demonstrations in Lahore,” TOI, March 24, 1931, 7. 29. “Seditious Speeches on Bhagat Singh Day” and “Youth Urged to Mass Action,” TOI, March 31, 1931, 10–11. 30. “Resolution on Bhagat Singh: Pandit Nehru’s Excited Speech,” TOI, March 31, 1931, 11. 31. See Jonathan Sterne, Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). For a discussion of political oratory and other mass communication techniques used during the swadeshi

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movement in Bengal, see Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1994). 32. “Bombay Labour Leader Jailed,” TOI, December 9, 1931, 4. 33. Bernard Bate, “Swadeshi Oratory and the Development of Tamil Shorthand,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 42 (2012): 70. 34. See, e.g., Isaac Pitman, Stenographic Sound-Hand (London: Samuel Bagster, 1837). 35. I thank J. Daniel Elam for this information. Consider also the Tilak trial in 1908, designed to transport Tilak to the Andaman Islands on sedition charges. Tilak’s Marathi speeches and articles were translated (allegedly rather poorly) as evidence to the all-English judge and jury. Tilak himself presented an epic defense statement that cumulatively added up to more than twenty hours of live speech in court. See Full & Authentic Report of the Tilak Trial (Bombay: N. C. Kelkar, 1908). 36. See listings in the TOI for lectures at the Rotary Club, Taj Mahal Hotel, Theosophical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, Sir Cowasji Jehangir Hall, Royal Institute of Science, YWCA, YMCA, Elphinstone College, Three Arts Circle, Union Hall, Tilak Mandir, and private residences on topics such as “The Humorous Side of Journalism,” December 22, 1930; “The Medical Profession,” March 4, 1931; “Railway Contact,” July 9, 1934; “League of Nations,” July 9, 1934; “Survivals of Mediterranean Culture in India,” July  9, 1934; “Maternity Welfare,” March 7, 1935; “Islam and Its Influence in England and Europe,” March 7, 1935; “The Life of Ramanuja,” 1932; “What Is Wrong with the Present Economic System,” 1932; “Moropant, His Life and Poetry,” 1930; and “Textile Industry in India,” 1927. 37. David Lelyveld, “Eloquence and Authority in Urdu: Poetry, Oratory, and Film,” in Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, ed. Katherine Ewing Pratt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 106. 38. For more on the history of Parsi theater, see Somnath Gupta and Kathryn Hansen, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (Kolkata: Seagull, 2005). 39. In a review of Betab’s dialogues in Devi Devyani, a Gujarati critic opined that “in talkie films, the shorter the sentences, the more successful the dialogue is.” Chitrapat, September  12, 1931, quoted in Vidyavati Lakshmanrao Namra, Hindi Rangmanch aur Pandit Narayanprasad “Betab” (The Hindi stage and Pandit Narayanprasad “Betab”) (Varanasi: Vishwavidyalaya Prakashan, 1972), 454. 40. See “Bombay Programmes,” TOI, June 7, 1934; July 9, 1934; and November 5, 1935.

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41. Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 77. 42. “Kolhapur Cinetone Co.,” Cinema, January 1934, 86. 43. M. Bhanja and N. K. G., “From Jamai Sashti to Pather Panchali,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 82–84. 44. “Editorial Notes,” Filmland, October 3, 1931, 1. 45. Filmland, October 3, 1931; August 13, 1932, 4. 46. “From Legends to Socials,” TOI, May 5, 1939, 4. 47. Catalogue of Books Printed in the Bombay Presidency During the Quarter Ending 31.03.1935, Home Dept. (Pol) File # 201/1935, 40, Maharashtra State Archive. 48. Film dialogues have since become a major attraction of the Hindi blockbuster, a vehicle for heroic speechmaking and melodramatic expressions of righteousness. Dialogues have also circulated in audio economies outside film exhibition circuits on radio, cassette, and CD. 49. The Calcutta-based studio New Theatres is popularly credited with introducing playback singing in India with Dhoop Chhaon (Nitin Bose, 1935) but despite experiments with recorded sound in a few studios such as New Theatres and Bombay Talkies, live sync sound was the standard mode of recording songs through the 1930s. Alam Ara was recorded on the single-system Tanar recorder, and double-system recording was not in use until later. See R. S. Choudhari, “Teething Troubles of the Talkie,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 131. 50. Sheikh Iftekhar Rasool, “How Talkies are Made,” Filmland, October 3, 1931, 19. 51. Bani Dutt, “Sound Recording—Then and Now,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 151. 52. R. S. Choudhari, “Teething Troubles of the Talkie,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 131. 53. Dipali, March 30, 1934, 14. 54. Sulochana, “Ordeals of Stardom,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 126. 55. “The Telephone Girls,” TOI, February 19, 1924, 6. 56. Prabha, “An Indian Star on Screen,” TOI, June 12, 1936. 7. 57. Dutt, “Sound Recording—Then and Now.” 58. K. T. Dalvi, A New Profession, or, Manual of Indian Talkies (Bombay: International Pictures Corporation, 1931), 32. 59. Cinema Sansar, January 1, 1933, 456. 60. Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), 75. Scholars working on Indian film sound in the decades of playback singing, that is, from the late 1940s onward, have argued

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that with the emergence of the playback singer as celebrity, audiences consented to an “audiovisual contract,” cannily agreeing to historically embrace or discount the split between the on-screen body and the off-screen voice. Thus audiences were comfortable with knowing that their favorite stars were voiced by their favorite singers and could negotiate the gap between the two. This gap also becomes a space for the play between embodiment and disembodiment as celebrity playback voices like Lata Mangeshkar’s do not seem disembodied to listeners who are her fans but rather seem particular and embodied. The parallel stardom of the playback singer has also created a differential moral code for the on-screen actress and the off-screen singer. My work is located in a period before the systematization of playback recording and offers a more indirect approach to thinking of the image-voice relation. I suggest that even prior to the consolidation of the talkie form in India, Indian listening publics were already familiar with and accustomed to acousmatic listening, that is, an awareness of the mechanical split between body and voice in modern media. See Pavitra Sundar, “Gender, Bawdiness, and Bodily Voices: Bombay Cinema’s Audiovisual Contract and the ‘Ethnic’ Woman,” in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, ed. Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 63– 82; Neepa Majumdar, “The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema,” in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 161–81; and Amanda Weidman, “Circulating Voices: The Gendered Beginnings of Playback,” Working Papers of the Chicago Tamil Forum 3 (2016). 61. Majumdar, “Beyond the Song Sequence,” 303–4. 62. A. M. O. Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 209. 63. Cinema, June  1932, August  1932 advertisements for Pakdaman Raqasa, or Innocent Dancing Girl, written and directed by B. R. Oberai (Lahore: Elephanta Movietone, 1932). Sound was recorded on the local Fezi double-recording system. 64. See “A Young Indian Star,” TOI, January 10, 1930, 12; and Bombay Chronicle, January 22, 1936, quoted in Kaushik Bhaumik, “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2001. 65. Cinema, December 1933, 45; Dipali, March 30, 1934, 24. 66. Sunita Devi was born Maria Brontis and had migrated from Hungary; Ramola was Rachel Cohen, daughter of an Indian Jewish schoolmaster. 67. “Editor’s Chat,” Cinema, August–September 1930, 40. 68. “Editorial,” Rangbhumi, January 1, 1932, 3, my translation.

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69. This question also serves as the title of a film from 1939, Actress Kyon Bani? or Why Become an Actress? (G. R. Sethi). The film was advertised as “a soul-stirring tale of a girl’s crusade against the tyranny of social customs and her triumph” and starred the famous “Color Queen” of Indian cinema, Padma Devi. 70. TOI, February 9, 1939, 3. 71. This is an extant film currently available on video and CD and online. 72. Basant song booklet (Bombay: Bombay Talkies, 1942). 73. Crucially, mother and daughter are reunited via the airwaves when Uma hears her daughter sing a familiar song on the radio. Radio helps Uma surmount the physical distance separating her from her daughter (enabled by parallel editing), and the acousmatic voice of the singing child is made familiar and embodied by Uma’s personal memories of a tune. 74. Actress song booklet (Bombay: Prakash Pictures, 1934). 75. Mr. X song booklet (Bombay: Prakash Pictures, 1938). 76. Gramophone Singer song booklet (Bombay: Sagar Movietone, 1938). 77. My translations based on the original Urdu dialogue script in the Dietze Family Archive. 78. The law has played a major part in the way Indian film historians have discussed colonialism. This discussion broadly revolves around the law as symptomatic of the colonial state’s desire to control the unwieldy object of cinema through censorship and taxation. More recently, media scholar and lawyer Lawrence Liang has written about Indian cinema and the law from an aestheticphilosophical angle, asking not only how cinema represents law but also how cinema produces its own ideas of legal justice. Lawrence Liang, “Cinematic Justice: The Law In /And of Cinema in India,” Ph.D. diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2015. 79. While links between filmic speechmaking and electoral politics are far more direct in the career of Tamil cinema, this history is also gendered male, rather than female as with the abhinetri films of Bombay. 80. “The Law and the Lady: Women’s Role in Future India,” TOI, April 7, 1937, 15. 81. “Uproar at Lahore Trial,” Manchester Guardian, July  15, 1929, 4; “Woman’s Hysterical Shrieks in Court,” TOI, July 15, 1929, 13. “Mahatma Gandhi-ki-jai” means “Long live Mahatma Gandhi.” 82. As the trial proceeded, the court made stringent searches compulsory for everyone who wished to attend the hearings and, on the grounds that there was no policewoman for the job, no women were allowed inside the courtroom. “Lahore Trial,” TOI, July 31, 1929, 10. 83. For more on women’s participation in revolutionary politics see, Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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84. For an introduction to these debates, see Amanda Weidman, “Anthropology and Voice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 37–51. 85. Urdu transliteration by Aftab Ahmed, based on the original Urdu script in the Dietze Family Archive. The English translation is mine. 86. David Lelyveld, “Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (1993): 665–82. 87. A panel discussion on adaliya zubaan took place at the Jashn-e-Rekhta Urdu festival in 2017. See Malini Nair, “The Silver Tongue: How Urdu Lingers on as the Language of Law,” TOI, February 26, 2017, https://timesofindia.indiatimes .com / home /sunday -times /the - silver -tongue -how -urdu -lingers - on -as -the -language-of-law/articleshow/57350117.cms. 88. Courtroom trials are cultural practices that participate in a shared system of linguistic, rhetorical, and gestural codes. Therefore, as David Black points out, “The representation of court proceedings in film . . . [brings] about a doubling up, or thickening, of narrative space and functionality.” Black, Law in Film: Resonance and Representation (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 89. Dialogues are from the Mother song booklet and original dialogue script. 90. Barrister’s Wife song booklet (Ranjit Movitone, 1935). 91. For readers familiar with the plot and denouement of Awara (Raj Kapoor, 1951), these pre-Independence courtroom films will resonate strongly with various elements of the later film, such as the debate over nature versus nurture, the overlap of family and legal systems, misrecognition and eventual recognition in the courtroom, and even a lady barrister prototype, played in Awara by Nargis. It is the dissimilarities that are of paramount significance here, mainly the centrality of male protagonists and defendants in postIndependence films. 92. For a detailed discussion of Jaddan Bai and her films, see Debashree Mukherjee, “Screenwriting and Feminist Rewriting: The Lost Films of Jaddan Bai (1935–1948),” in Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, ed. Jules Selbo and Jill Nelmes (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), 70–81. 93. Nargis famously played the role of a destitute rural mother in the epic melodrama Mother India (Mehboob, 1957), which has become ingrained in Hindispeaking Indians’ consciousness as a metanarrative of the nation’s virtue, replayed on television every year during Independence Day celebrations. 94. Debashree Mukherjee, “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4, no.  1 (2013): 9–30. 95. “Bombay Programme Notes,” TOI, November 7, 1935, 14. 96. L. C. Verma, visiting scientist from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Star of India, August 28, 1932.

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97. Cinema, April 1932, 8. 98. Advertisement for scenario by a writer based in Dombivli, in Cinema, January 1934, 28. 99. See advertisements in Cinema, July 1932, 8. 100. Hansa Wadkar, You Ask, I Tell, trans. Jasbir Jain and Shoba Shinde (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2013), 25.

4. V I TA L I T Y | J O S H 1. For Manto’s filmography see Debashree Mukherjee, “Tracking Utopias: Technology, Labor, and Secularism in Bombay Cinema (1930s–1940s),” in Media and Utopia: History, Imagination and Technology, ed. Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao (London: Routledge, 2016), 81–102. 2. Saʻādat Hasan Manto, My Name Is Radha: The Essential Manto, ed. Muhammad Umar Memon (Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Penguin, 2015), 2. 3. For more on this, see Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4. The Hindi word swaraj means self-rule or self-governance and became a centerpiece of political thought and strategy during India’s anticolonial movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 5. Manto, My Name Is Radha, 9. 6. I’m referring here to Richard Dyer’s theorization of stardom, where the “star text” is the public image of the film star produced across a range of media and cultural practices including films, promotion, publicity, and criticism. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979). 7. Vivasvan Soni, “Energy,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Jennifer Coopersmith, Energy, the Subtle Concept: The Discovery of Feynman’s Blocks from Leibniz to Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. 8. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1. 9. Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005). 10. For a range of perspectives on media and the environment, see Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017); Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, eds., Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

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11. Notable here is Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s, Greening the Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which examines the health and safety hazards of media production and recycling on workers. 12. Most recently, see William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 13. Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 5, 6. 14. Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 320. 15. “Nav Jeevan Film Review,” Cinema, April 1939, 43. 16. Nav Jeevan song booklet (Bombay: Bombay Talkies, 1939). 17. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scout movement, quoted in James  H. Mills and Satadru Sen, Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (London: Anthem, 2004), 9; and D. M. Katdare, “Rules for the Guidance of Subscribers and Contributors,” Vyayam, the Bodybuilder 1, no. 1 (1927), cited in Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95. 18. “The Enemy,” Cinema, August, 1931, 13. 19. See Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); James  H. Mills and Satadru Sen, Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and PostColonial India (London: Anthem, 2004); and Singleton, Yoga Body. 20. Singleton, Yoga Body, 96. 21. The debate about Indian cinema’s “firsts” continues, but recent archival research makes clear that Phalke was not the first Indian to shoot films for commercial exhibition. 22. R. C. Sawhney, “Screen’s Call,” Cinema, January 1934, 45. 23. M. S. Nagaraj and S. P. Anikar, “Dozes & Downthrows,” Filmland, October 3, 1931, 5–6. 24. Their atypical bodies were explained away as manly, regal, or asexual. Dipali magazine commented about actress Shephalika, aka Putul, that “in spite of her increasing bulk she manages to dance charmingly. “Chand Sadagar Film Review,” Dipali, March 30, 1934. 25. “The ‘Bad Boy’ Who Made Good,” Mirror, July 9, 1939. In Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), Valentina Vitali discusses the bulky male body in early Indian cinema, particularly in the case of Vithal, as connoting aristocratic status. 26. N. C. Lekhram, “Pessimistic Youth,” Rangbhumi, May, 1932, 3. My translation from Hindi.

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27. Symptoms collated from Times of India and Bombay Chronicle newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s. 28. Douglas E. Haynes, “Creating the Consumer? Advertising, Capitalism, and the Middle Class in Urban Western India, 1914–40,” in Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, ed. Douglas E. Haynes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). 29. Nav Jeevan song lyrics. My translation from Hindi. 30. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, “Bouquets for Sabita, Motilal and Badami,” Bombay Chronicle, March 16, 1938, 10. 31. Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 4. 32. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 28. 33. Blocking is choreographed so that multiple lines and planes of human action intersect in geometric spectacle. The pleasure of watching mass-orchestrated human bodies perform in geometric ensembles (most notoriously distilled by Leni Riefenstahl) remains a central ingredient of public and state-sponsored displays of might such as the Republic Day parade in modern India. 34. Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema. 35. Exploring vitality as a traveling mode and dominant cinematic concern allows us to revisit established classics of Indian cinema as markedly nonrepresentative but also as connected. For example, Devdas (1935) does not represent the overriding aesthetics of vitality but embodies the anxiety that lies in its wake— the fear of depletion. 36. “Film Director,” Cinema, May, 1931, 15. 37. Mary Ann Doane, “Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity,” in Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 530–51. 38. The “social” was an industrial genre popular in the 1930s that dealt with contemporary questions of social reform (see introduction). 39. See Vijaya Singh’s recent book Level Crossing: Railway Journeys in Hindi Cinema (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2017) for more analyses of filmic imaginations of trains. 40. “It was in ‘Jai Bharat’ that I introduced the junk Ford car, a Tin Lizzie, which I had purchased from Mohan Bhavnani for one hundred Rupees only. I christened it ‘Rolls-Royce-Ki-Beti.’ Its gags went so much in appeal with my fans that we gave it a separate main title in succeeding films as if the car was also a star of Wadia Movietone along with Punjab-Ka-Beta [a horse].” In  J. B. H. Wadia, “Those Were the Days,” unpublished memoir. Portions published in Cinema Vision India, January, 1980.

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41. Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 72. 42. Doane, “Technology’s Body.” 43. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 308. 44. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 137. 45. Robert Ryder, “Innervation,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 202–5. 46. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Samvega, ‘Aesthetic Shock,’ ” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7, no. 3 (1943): 174, 175, 176. 47. The ideological burden of reflexivity is most marked in classical Marxist approaches to culture, e.g., the Frankfurt school thinkers I have been engaging, as well as artists such as Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein. 48. Hindi: “Sust bana dene wali filmein koi aur hongi, meri Diamond Queen nahin!” 49. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 6. 50. Indian Cinematograph Committee, Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, Evidence, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Government of India— Central Publications Branch, 1928), 956, 957, 338. 51. ICC, Evidence, 2:956. 52. Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–76. 53. K. T. Dalvi, A New Profession or Manual of Indian Talkies (Bombay: International Pictures Corporation, 1931), 52. 54. For detailed studies of the role of magic and artifice in Hindu mythologicals, see Sean Cubitt, “Phalke, Melies, and Special Effects Today,” Wide Angle 21, no.  1 (1999); Ravi Vasudevan, “Devotional Transformation: Miracles, Mechanical Artifice, and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema,” Postscripts: Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts 1, no. 2–3 (2005). 55. The Hindi word darshan refers to the act of seeing and being seen by an idol or image of a Hindu deity, particularly when visiting a temple. In visual and media studies from India, the term has been theorized to identify a culturally specific mode of framing and looking at images. 56. Willy Haas, Die Literarische Welt: Erinnerungen (Munich: Pual List, 1958), 225–26. This section translated by Alexander Holt. 57. Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema, 8.

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58. Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 59. M. D. H. B., “On Location,” Cinema, June, 1930. The film being shot was Flames of Flesh/Kamana-er Aagun, directed by D. R. Das. 60. The concept of samvega helps us approach the “thrill” felt by the shooting crew as an awe intuitively registered on the body. See Coomaraswamy, “Samvega,” 177. 61. Doane, “Technology’s Body.” 62. Naya Sansar song booklet (Bombay: Bombay Talkies, 1941), my translation from Hindi. 63. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Mera Naam Radha Hai,” in Manto ki Kahaniyan, ed. Narendra Mohan (New Delhi: Kitab Ghar Prakashan, 2004), 230 (my translation). Many thanks to Aftab Ahmad for going through the original Urdu versions with me. 64. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. For Bakhtin, the chronotope is the prism through which the historical contexts of the represented world are refracted. 65. “Studio News,” Ranjit Bulletin, March 7, 1936. 66. Manto, My Name Is Radha, 2015, 7. 67. Manto, My Name Is Radha, 2015, 7. 68. The abhinetri films discussed in chapter 3 would be a part of this subgenre. 69. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, Parallax (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11. 70. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2017), 14. 71. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 161. 72. Jean-Louis Comolli and Annette Michelson (trans.), “Mechanical Bodies, Ever More Heavenly,” October 83 (1998), 24. 73. Manto’s Bombay stories are as much ethnography as they are fiction, in a mode that self-consciously deploys mise-en-abyme and reflexivity. Manto’s characters are simultaneously agents, subjects, and participant-observers. 74. Stevphen Shukaitis, “Work 2,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 385.

5 . E X H AU S T I O N | T H A K A A N 1. “Film Actors Drowned. Powai Lake Tragedy,” TOI, May 11, 1938, 9. 2. Elena Gorfinkel, “Weariness, Waiting: Enduration and Art Cinema’s Tired Bodies,” Discourse 34, nos. 2–3 (2012): 315.

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3. Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 20, quoted in Gorfinkel, “Weariness, Waiting,” 316. 4. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. 5. “Film Star Refuses Food. Protest Against Treatment,” TOI, July 19, 1939, 10. 6. See “Miss Shanta Apte Breaks Fast,” Straits Times, July 28, 1939, 15. Australia coverage mentioned in Neepa Majumdar, “Gossip, Labor, and Female Stardom in Pre-Independence Indian Cinema: The Case of Shanta Apte,” in Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, ed. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 181. 7. “Prabhat’s Statement on Miss Shanta Apte’s Hunger-Strike,” Mirror, July  23, 1939. 8. Baburao Patel, “A Star on Hunger Strike,” filmindia, August 1939, 21. 9. All biographical details are from Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 44; V. P. Sathe, “Shanta Apte,” Filmfare, January 21–February 3, 1977, 44; “Left an Orphan, Shanta Apte Becomes Leading Film Star,” Malaya Tribune, November 16, 1938, 19. 10. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 44. 11. See contemporaneous descriptions of Apte cited in Majumdar, “Gossip,” 189. 12. “Full Story of the Poona Star’s Hunger Strike,” Mirror, July 23, 1939. 13. Cited in “Full Story,” quoting from an unnamed “leading English daily of Bombay.” 14. “Full Story.” 15. Majumdar, “Gossip,” 184. 16. Cited in “Full Story,” quoting from another unnamed source. 17. “Full Story.” 18. Most notable is the fast by Jatin Das, Batukeshwar Dutt, and Bhagat Singh when they were jailed in the so-called Lahore conspiracy case. Das died after sixty-three days of fasting, on September 13, 1929. 19. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Questions of Class: The General Strikes in Bombay, 1928–29,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 33, no. 1–2 (1999): 205–37. 20. The transition to a limited company did not take place until June 1945. Hrishikesh Arvikar, “Between the Shots, After the Cuts: The Political Economy of Prabhat Studio,” Wide Screen 8, no. 1 (2019): 14. 21. “Full Story.” 22. “Film Star Refuses Food.”

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23. During her stint at Prabhat, Apte had become a well-known singing star. In 1938 she was invited by fans on a tour of southern India and received with great enthusiasm in Mysore and Madras. 24. Majumdar, “Gossip,” 192. 25. It might be argued that the obvious exceptions to this disavowal are publicity pieces that highlight a star’s death-defying stunts in action films, or a star’s commitment to exercise and fitness. Both genres, however, frame workplace risk and the concern for health as individual virtues—as bravery or as self-discipline—rather than as actions located within the transactional matrix of commerce, the job market, and power hierarchies, that is, as labor. 26. For work on actresses, stardom, and labor, see Danae Clark, Shelley Stamp, Neepa Majumdar, Debashree Mukherjee, Denise McKenna, and Heidi Kenaga. 27. Shanta Apte, Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I join the movies?) (Bombay: Shanta Apte Concerns and B. Govind, 1940). All reproduced text has been translated by Wandana Sonalkar. Thanks also to Madhura Lohokare, who generously helped out during an early stage of translation. This text is often mistakenly referred to as an “autobiography,” but it neither contains a biographical chronology of Apte’s life and career nor mentions specific people, institutions, films, incidents or cities connected with Apte’s life, except when required to explicate an abstract point. Page number references to this work are cited in parentheses in the text. 28. I discuss the idea of the fan-as-worker in more detail in chapter 6. 29. Hrishikesh Arvikar draws attention to the question mark in the book’s title, reading it as “signif[ying] a skeptical outlook of the future in the representational medium.” Arvikar, “Between the Shots,” 10. 30. Juned Shaikh uses the phrase “Marathi Marxist” in his book manuscript, tentatively titled “Outcast Bombay: The Urban Habitations of Caste and Class, 1898–1984.” 31. See, for example, Autonomist Marxist and post-Marxist theory by scholars such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Berardi, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. 32. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 33. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 4. 34. Shanta Apte, “Films Are Not My Goal but a Means to an End,” Mirror, May 14, 1939. 35. Apte uses the term karya-kshamta rather than shram-shakti, the more standard Marathi Marxist term for labor power. I have translated karya-kshamta

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as labor power to indicate that the concept had varied ideological and political uses at this time. Thanks to Juned Shaikh for advising me on the circulation of the term shram-shakti. 36. Apte narrates the story of a young child singer of thirteen who was so overworked by his studio that he ultimately lost his voice, only to be dismissed by the studio and unable to find decent work again. 37. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), xii–xiii. 38. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 4. 39. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 119. 40. S. Bhattacharya, “Capital and Labor in Bombay City, 1928–29,” Economic and Political Weekly 16, no. 42–43 (1981): 36–44. 41. Chandavarkar, Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 119. 42. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 43. Far from becoming the hegemonic norm, Taylorist views on the scientific management of human labor were hotly debated in the British and Indian press, and prominent politicians were quoted for statements such as “the workman does not look with favor upon methods designed scientifically to speed him up, in order that, without making him either a more skilled workman or a more contented human being he should be a more effective producer of marketable goods.” Sir Robert Hadfield, cited in “Industrial Fatigue: Economics of Personal Labor,” TOI, February 1, 1918, 10. 44. “Fatigue in Industry,” TOI, September 1922, 16. 45. “Efficiency and Fatigue II—Sheer Grind,” TOI, June 15, 1918, 8. 46. TOI, June 1, 1918, 8. 47. Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 218. 48. TOI, June 15, 1918, 8. See also P. R. N. Sinha, I. B. Sinha, and S. P. Shekhar, Industrial Relations, Trade Unions, and Labor Legislation (Delhi: Pearson Education, 2004). 49. “Fatigue in Industry,” 16. 50. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 128. 51. I draw here on Partha Chatterjee’s arguments in the essay “Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” which can be reread as a discussion of the feminization of the realm of culture alongside a masculinization of the realm of technology as the way out of the nationalist conundrum with respect to

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industrialization. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question (1989),” in Empire and Nation: Selected Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 116–35. 52. “Hollywood Labour Unions Appeal to India for Support,” Sound, March 1947, 99–101. The established narrative about this strike is that the main issue was a jurisdictional tussle between set decorators and carpenters, but the cable to Sound specifically states that Hollywood employers “have raised the false issue of a jurisdictional dispute and on the basis of this falsehood have rejected the efforts of community and religious leaders to arbitrate a settlement.” See Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (Houston: University of Texas Press, 2013), for a detailed discussion of the strike. 53. “Hollywood Labour Unions,” 99. 54. Opender Chanana, The Missing 3 in Bollywood: Safety Security Shelter (Nyon, Switzerland: UNI Global Union, 2011), 342. 55. The eleven craft unions were, respectively, for assistant film directors, film editors, cine costume and makeup artistes, cine dance directors, western India cinematographers, western India sound engineers, Indian motion picture employees, character artists, film writers, cine production, and art directors. Chanana, Bollywood, 11. 56. Chanana, Bollywood, 223. 57. TOI, May  5, 1939, 12. Apart from the main producers’ conference, the silver jubilee also saw four sectional conferences organized to address the concerns of distributors, exhibitors, technicians, and artistes. 58. Apte doesn’t name the IMPPA directly but warns that associations of film producers will try to reduce actors to “a permanent state of serfdom.” Should I Join the Movies?, 71. 59. Home Dept (Pol), File # 117/1933, Maharashtra State Archive. 60. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 245. 61. Home Dept (Special), File # 543 (18)F/1928, Maharashtra State Archive. 62. The Progressive Writers Association was instituted in 1934, and its 1936 manifesto declared that its aims were to “give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature,” “to bring arts in the closest touch with the people and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future we envisage,” and to “deal with the basic problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjection. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and un-reason, we reject as reactionary.” Available at Progressive Writers Conference by SAPF UK, http://pwa75.sapfonline.org/gpage4.html.

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63. Sone ki Chidiya (Golden bird, Shahid Latif, 1958), written by Ismat Chughtai, might be the only film written by a Progressive writer that directly and critically addresses the labor question within the film industry, delineating the plight of junior artistes, their union activities, and even a strike. 64. See “The Factories Act 1934: Act XXV of 1934,” ILO, accessed March 25, 2019, https://www.ilo .org /dyn /natlex /docs / ELECTRONIC /94254 /110573 / F-37 36 75326/IND94254.pdf. 65. R. L. Gogtay, “The Motion Picture as an Art,” Lighthouse, December 18, 1937, 5. 66. R. L. Gogtay, “ ‘Factorization’ of Studios,” Lighthouse, October 1937, 5. 67. Gogtay, “Factorization,” 5. 68. Mortimer Jerome Adler, Art and Prudence: A Study in Practical Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937), xi. The book relies on the wisdom of the ancients to analyze Hollywood cinema on the belief that “Everything that can be said clearly about motion pictures was said and well said long before motion pictures existed” (vii). According to a reviewer, the book set out to answer the question, “What would Plato or Aristotle or Thomas have said about Hollywood?” Guenther Stern, review of Art and Prudence, Social Research 5, no. 3 (1938): 360–64. 69. Gogtay, “Factorization,” 5. 70. “Cine-technicians in Conference,” TOI, May 5, 1939, 12. Emphasis mine. 71. See Munshi Premchand, Premchand Rachnavali (Collected works of Munshi Premchand), vol. 19, ed. Ram Anand (Delhi: Janwani Prakashan, 1996); Upendranath Ashk, Filmi Duniya ki Jhalkiyan (Glimpses of the film world), vol. 1 (Allahabad: Neelam Prakashan, 1979). 72. Munshi Premchand, letter to friend, December  4, 1934, Premchand Rachnavali, 429. My translation from Hindi. 73. Munshi Premchand, letter to friend, November  13, 1934, Premchand Rachnavali, 427. My translation from Hindi. 74. Apte continues, “This class of workers has another sub-group—they are called ‘Extras.’ They arrive for their day’s work and leave once their work is complete. Bandwalas, wrestlers, bodybuilders, and crowd artistes are included in ‘Extras.’ ” 75. C.f. the discussion in chapter 4 on the energizing possibilities of cinema. 76. This category includes carpenters, ironsmiths, set builders, and even writers who, according to Apte, are hired only to churn out formulaic plots as per the producers’ vision. Apte, Should I Join the Movies?, 35. 77. Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 176. 78. For this formulation of the caste body, see Anupama Rao, Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

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79. Rao, Caste Question. 80. Anupama Rao, “Stigma and Labor: Remembering Dalit Marxism,” Seminar 633 (May 2012). 81. The body that carries stigma is unlike the body carrying labor power and cannot be valorized or mobilized toward the production of value. 82. Rao, “Stigma and Labor.” Emphasis in original. 83. This trend appears to have changed by the 1940s when magazines and film industry compendia often described individuals as “Brahmins,” though not referring to any other caste or subcaste groups. 84. Baburao Patel, “Editor’s Mail,” filmindia, April 1939, 11; Baburao Patel, “Whither Bound?” filmindia, July 1935, 5. 85. “The Editor’s Mail,” questions from S. L. Nawani (Karachi), filmindia, August 31, 1939, 17; and D. Kari (Raichur), filmindia, November 1938, 19. 86. Filmdom Who’s Who, circa 1946, 17, 24, 44, 71. 87. For more on the strategic discursive negotiations taking place in the 1930s over the category of respectability, see Debashree Mukherjee, “Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Film Actress in Late Colonial Bombay,” MARG 62, no. 4 (2011): 54–65. 88. “Cultured People & the Cinema. Or Miss Indira Devi,” Cinema, January 1931, 24. 89. Based on archival records of political literature that was either proscribed or seized by the colonial surveillance apparatus, Shaikh maps the proliferation and vernacularization of socialist and communist texts routed to Bombay via Germany, America, and England by authors such as M. N. Roy, Frederick Engels, Karl Kautsky, Rajani Palme Dutt, J. T. Walton, and Daniel de Leon. 90. The Communist Manifesto was translated into Marathi by Gangadhar Adhikari, a scholar and member of the Communist Party of Germany, while he was imprisoned during the Meerut Conspiracy Trials. It was published in 1931. 91. All references from a draft manuscript tentatively titled “Outcast Bombay: The Urban Habitations of Caste and Class, 1898–1984.” 92. “Indian Extras Get 18c a Day,” Chicago Defender, November 22, 1930, 5. 93. Apte had just acted in Pancholi’s Zamindar (Landlord, Moti B. Gidwani, 1942), and her songs in the film, such as “Chhota sa sansar,” were a sensation. Presumably Pancholi signed her on immediately for a second film. 94. Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 72. 95. See Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), as well as the

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edited anthology by Jennifer Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 96. Angela McRobbie’s discussion of the new gig economy and the “economization of creativity” is useful to think about here and is discussed in the epilogue. McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 97. Apte, Should I Join the Movies?, 74, 84.

6 . S H O RT C I R C U I T | ST RU G G L E 1. See Louis Althusser’s discussion of interpellation in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press), 127–86. 2. See chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of Shanta Apte’s book Jaau Mi Cinemaant? (Should I join the movies?, 1940). 3. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4. 4. Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas Lamarre (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 60. 5. Jennifer  M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” Camera Obscura 16, no.  3 (2001): 14, hints at this when she borrows from Walter Benjamin to connect the fan’s “mimetic faculty,” which is “compelled forward and beyond itself by the technologies of stardom.” 6. In the original Hindi: “Gaurav hai to Aryan hai. Gaurav nahi to Aryan kuchh bhi nahi.” 7. For an introduction to the phenomenon of Rajnikanth fandom, see the documentary film For the Love of a Man (Rinku Kalsy, 2015). 8. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); Edgar Morin, Stars (London: Calder, 1960); Francesco Alberoni, The Powerless Elite (Milan: University of Milan, 1963). 9. See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1986); Christine Gledhill’s major anthology, Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991); Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Neepa Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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10. See S. V. Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 29, no. 1 (1996): 67–-83. 11. Ethnographic research in media industry studies takes into account the aspirational drives of media workers who seek the glamor of creative industries as much as the salaries. That these logics are often impelled by fandom or a certain kind of cinephilia is what I am specifically pointing to. 12. Debashree Mukherjee, “Filmi Jagat: Folding a World Into Itself,” in Filmi Jagat: A Scrapbook: Shared Universe of Early Hindi Cinema, coauthored by Kaushik Bhaumik and Rahaab Allana (Delhi: Niyogi, 2014), 35–63. 13. Jacques Ranciere has powerfully written about the worker who does not conform to his mandated place in history by “dream[ing] of another kind of work.” See Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 9. 14. See  R. A. Shaikh, ed., Filmdom: All-India Film Directory (Lahore: Globial Linkers, ca. 1946), 24. 15. In 1921 one-third of colonial India’s female population was in the workforce, though only a small minority belonged to the professional classes. Within that smaller group, medicine and education were the chief fields of employment. For women who could not earn advanced college degrees, courses in secretarial work and paramedical service were significant work options. See Geraldine H. Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 157–58. 16. Shaikh, Filmdom, 24. 17. Ali Peter John, “Azurie—Interview” (1980), Cineplot .com, June 4, 2016, http:// cineplot.com/azurie-interview. For more on Azurie and a broader history of choreography in Indian cinema, see Usha Iyer’s forthcoming monograph, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Popular Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020). 18. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 70. 19. Hillary Hallet,“Go West, Young Women!”: The Rise of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 27. 20. For an early use of the term dream factory, see Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950). 21. See “Nehru’s Speaks in Malacca,” Morning Tribune, May 31, 1937, 2; “Unemployment in India,” TOI, December 27, 1939, 5. 22. Apte, Should I Join the Movies?, 46–47. 23. “Eddie Billimoria Interview,” Cineplot.com, December 31, 2017, http://cineplot .com/eddie-billimoria-interview/.

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24. Kishore Sahu, “I Stand Disillusioned Today,” filmindia, December  1941, 48–49. 25. “Producer Vyas Refuses to Be Beaten!” filmindia, December 1941, 57. 26. T. M. Ramachandran, “Mehboob Khan—From Poverty to Screen Fame” (1957), Cineplot .com, November  5, 2016, http://cineplot.com/mehboob-khan -from-poverty-to-screen-fame/. 27. Stories of fan desire and serendipitous success formed a popular genre of their own. To cite just two well-worn examples, Sulochana was an ordinary telephone operator before she became the highest-earning actor of her generation, and Mehboob Khan started his career as an unseen, unlettered extra and became one of the most celebrated director-auteurs in Bombay. These real-life stories were recycled as narrative, as fairytales of transformation. 28. Village Girl song booklet (Bombay: Imperial Film, 1927). 29. Contemporary fan studies from India, mainly focused on Telugu and Tamil cinema, tend to associate the Indian film fan with political activity, associational cultures, masculine performativity, and excessive or “rowdy” public behavior. E.g., Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Srinivas, “Devotion and Defiance.” Intervening in this debate, Aswin Punathambekar asks if there might be other conceptual frames through which fan practices can be analyzed. In “Between Rowdies and Rasikas: Rethinking Fan Activity in Indian Film Culture,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), he suggests that the fan-as-rasika or connoisseur needs to recuperated, especially within Indian listening cultures, and fan practices need to be located far beyond the cinema hall. Neepa Majumdar has discussed both forms—the excessive and the restrained—in her analysis of the differential modes of fandom elicited by the star texts of Sulochana and Fearless Nadia in the 1930s in Majumdar, “Beyond the Song Sequence: Theorizing Sound in Indian Cinema,” in Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (London: Continuum, 2009), 303. All these fans, however, are male. Further, what concerns me is not only the location of the fan or her modes of expression but the horizon of her agency. 30. Surjit Singh, Indurani: An Unsung but Unforgettable Heroine of the Early Talkies (N.p.: Self pub., 2017), 27. 31. The studio invited Roshan for a screen test and offered her a contract at Rs. 300 a month. Once they arrived in Poona, both Roshan and Ishrat were offered jobs and their names changed to Sarojini and Indu Rani, respectively. See Singh, Indurani.

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32. “A Modern Movie-Struck Girl,” Cinema, January  1939, 48. Film magazines played an essential part in the circulation of the star image and the cultivation of fan desire. They offered a venue for young people to redefine themselves in relation to the movies, mediating the distance between the star and the fan through lavish star portraits, on one hand, and printed letters, poems, and articles by fans, on the other. See Debashree Mukherjee, “Creating Cinema's Reading Publics: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay,” in No Limits: Media Studies from India, ed. Ravi Sundaram (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–98. 33. Indeed, this is the very image that actresses of the day vehemently opposed. In her autobiography, first published in 1982, Durga Khote recalls: “A question I have been asked over and over again, probingly, is—How do you feel when you co-star with unknown men? Do you feel attracted, do you feel. . . . The question always amused me. I did not blame people for not knowing how much pressure the camera puts on actors. Make-up, costumes, jewelry, hairstyles, the rise and fall of the voice, memorizing dialogue, getting the nuances right, the emotions right, laughing one moment, crying the next, the eternal anxiety about how one was performing in comparison with the other, whether the actor opposite was playing your brother, husband, or enemy. Where was there any place in all this for attraction?” Khote, I, Durga Khote: An Autobiography, trans. Shanta Gokhale (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 185. 34. For a more detailed discussion of the early talkie film actress and acting as a vocation for women, see Debashree Mukherjee, “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 9–30; and Mukherjee, “Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Film Actress in Late Colonial Bombay,” Marg: A Magazine of the Arts 62, no. 4 (2011): 54–65. 35. See Forbes, Women in Modern India. 36. Heidi Kenaga, “Promoting Hollywood Extra Girl (1935),” Screen 52, no.1 (2011): 82. 37. Zabak, “Ruined by the Glamor of the Screen? A Heart-Rending Story of Hundreds of Young Boys and Girls Who Go Astray,” filmindia, September 1940, 17. 38. filmindia, June 1939, 3. 39. Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), 202; Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 134. 40. Letter from Madan Mohan to Devika Rani, July 9, 1944, Dietze Family Archive. 41. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.

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42. Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 107, 15. 43. Zabak, “Portrait of a Film Aspirant,” filmindia, September 1940, 19–21. 44. For more on the question of geographic interdependence and power, see Doreen  B. Massey, “Questions of Locality,” Geography 78, no.  2 (1993): 142–49. 45. “Wanted Work in Film Companies,” TOI, May 21, 1935, 13. 46. Rikhab Dass Jain, The Economic Aspects of the Film Industry in India (New Delhi: Atma Ram, 1960), 152. 47. Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 70. 48. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 232. 49. “Fatal Motor Accident. Film Actor’s Death,” TOI, April 4, 1939, 18. 50. Even in a digital CGI world, the most spectacular crash sequences need real buildings and cars to collide. 51. René Thoreau Bruckner, James Leo Cahill, and Greg Siegel, “Introduction: Cinema and Accident,” Discourse 30, no. 3 (2008): 279–88. 52. E.g., Miss 1933 (Chandulal Shah, 1933), and Sansar Naiya (Nanubhai Vakil, 1939). 53. Action stars were hired precisely for their ability to perform dangerous feats on screen and their reputations as strongmen off-screen. See Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), on 1920s “stunt kings,” such as Master Vithal, whom we met in chapter 1. 54. Legendary fight master Veeru Devgan links the increased safety measures on present-day sets to the emergence of the “action director” as a specialized industrial job profile: “as stuntmen graduated to becoming action directors and fight masters themselves, and as they became involved in the various aspects of filmmaking, the safety of stuntmen and artistes became a major concern. It is to the credit of the action directors that, in the absence of any proper infrastructure, using entirely indigenous material, they ensured the safety of performing artistes. Special glass, balsam wood, cardboard boxes, foam, and air balloons were used for greater safety.” Devgan, “Spectacular Skill and Daring,” in Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema: An Enchanting Close-up of India’s Hindi Cinema, ed. Govind Nihalani Gulzar and Saibal Chatterjee (New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2003), 213. 55. Girish Karnad, “This One Is for Nadia,” Cinema Vision India 1, no.2 (April 1980): 265. 56. Karnad, “This One is for Nadia,” 265.

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57. “Lion Attacks Film Star,” TOI, April 22, 1944, 3; “Bombay Film Star’s Courage,” TOI, May 15, 1935, 12; Ranjit Bulletin, November 23, 1935. 58. Pal, Such Is Life, 121; “Indian Actress Hit on Head,” Singapore Free Press, November 18, 1937, 7. 59. Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte, “Work and Risk,” in Beyond the Risk Society, ed. Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklat (London: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 169. 60. See Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood; Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema; and Anupama Kapse, “Around the World in Eighty Minutes,” in Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, eds. Jennifer Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 61. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom,” 34. 62. This definition of an extra is from Filmsite, s.v. “extra(s),” accessed August 28, 2018, http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms9.html. 63. J. B. H. Wadia, “Those Were the Days,” unpublished memoir. 64. “Achievement and Growth of Sagar Studios,” TOI, May 5, 1939, A5. 65. “Shooting Street Scenes in City: Film Manager Fined,” TOI, May 31, 1938, 16. 66. “Shooting Street Scenes.” Shooting in major film production cities like Mumbai and Los Angeles today requires a clutch of location permits, but it is unlikely that in 1938 any such norms were in place in Bombay. 67. Tombs and Dave Whyte, “Work and Risk,” 169. 68. James A. Tyner, Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), xi. 69. Of the twenty shooting accidents I was able to recover between the years 1935 and 1947, four resulted in the deaths of extras and technicians, two led to serious injuries to extras, and only one ended up causing notable physical harm to a star. This limited data set indicates one level of professional hierarchy within an industry motivated by the increasing profits generated by stars. 70. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004). 71. Franco Berardi, “Exhaustion,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 157. 72. In Original Accident, Paul Virilio suggests that the accident, especially the industrial accident born in the factory of scientific progress, shows us that Progress has itself become unbearable. 73. Roshan G. Shahani, ed., Pramila—Esther Victoria Abraham (Mumbai: Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women, 1998), 8. 74. In the 1940s Pramila started her own production company, Silver Films, in order to build a more stable base in the film industry. See Mukherjee, “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” for more biographical details.

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75. Shahani, Pramila. 76. Shahani, Pramila, 16. 77. For new work on “elemental media,” see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 78. Brian R. Jacobson, “Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (2018): 28. 79. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 8, 4. 80. Remake of Wadia’s Tamil stunt coproduction Vanaraja Karzan (1938). 81. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 131. 82. Mary Anne Doane, “Technology’s Body,” in Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer A. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 543. 83. Willy Haas, Die Literarische Welt: Erinnerungen (München: Pual List, 1958), 216–17. This excerpt was translated by Alexander Holt. 84. “Seven Years for Raping Film Girl!,” filmindia, January  1947, 61. Histories of labor regulation in India point out that much of the regulatory and protectionist discourse that eventually led to the Factory Act of 1881 was concentrated on anxieties about working hours for women and children. E.g., Aditya Sarkar, Trouble at the Mill (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). 85. Valerie Wagg, “Dadar—India’s Hollywood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July  21, 1946. 86. The ever-expanding geographical sweep of Bombay’s studios contains another history of the city’s entanglement with cinema—the place of filmmaking in the phenomenon of suburban sprawl. Mumbai’s film and TV industries are also responsible for the rapid gentrification of certain neighborhoods that are close to studios and production offices. Entire economies of portrait photography, fitness centers and beauty salons, cafes and bars, and food delivery have sprung up around the city’s media aspirants and workers, a demographic that continues to grow and renew itself. 87. Andheri’s “increasingly urban character” was recognized when South Salsette was incorporated into the Bombay Suburban District in 1925, but its urban development was hindered by a multiplicity of local administrative bodies in charge of connected issues, such as sanitation, roads, drainage, and water supply. See Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 198–210, for a history of Greater Mumbai.

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88. S. N. Kalbag, president of the Vile Parle Notified Area Committee, cited in Rao, House, but No Garden, 208. 89. Handbook of the Indian Film Industry (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1949), xxiii. At the same time, thanks to the licensing system for rationed raw stock, Hindi film output fell from 154 in 1935 to 73 in 1945. See Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 1998, 30. 90. “Actress Ordered to Pay Rs 10,” TOI, August 24, 1932, 12. 91. “Tragedies in the Studios,” filmindia, March 1938, 3. 92. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2012).

EPILOGUE 1. See chapter 2 for more on science, technology, and the affect of wonder. 2. See Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), for important interventions in the nation-centricity of Indian film studies. Also Ranita Chatterjee, “Journeys in and Beyond the City: Cinema in Calcutta 1897–1939,” Ph.D. diss., University of Westminster, 2011. 3. Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire, 237. 4. Haas wrote screenplays for Mohan Bhavnani in 1939 and 1940. 5. Vismi Sadi press booklet (Bombay: Kohinoor Film, 1924). 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 349. 7. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in NineteenthCentury Colombia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 213. 8. Doreen Massey, “Questions of Locality,” Geography 78, no. 2 (1993): 148. 9. Gregory D. Booth, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Stephen Putnam Hughes, “Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 1 (2007): 3–34. 10. Gay Birds song booklet (Bombay: Sagar Movietone, 1936). 11. Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 9. 12. Thomas Elsaesser, “Media Archaeology: A Viable Discipline or a Valuable Symptom?” Artnodes, no. 21 (2018): 13. 13. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ravi Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, Kaushik Bhaumik, Priya Jaikumar, Neepa Majumdar, Sudhir Mahadevan, and Manishita Dass. 378

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14. Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), 2. 15. For example, Joshua Yumibe’s Moving Color: Early Film, Mass culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 16. Tasmayee Laha Roy, “Indian Film Industry Grew at 27% in 2017: FICCI,” Money Control, March 5, 2018, https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/entertain ment/indian-film-industry-grew-at-27-in-2017-ficci-2520513.html. 17. Sushant Mehta, “Superstar Salaries: Akshay Kumar to Deepika Padukone, Who Earns What,” India Today, July  6, 2018, https://www.indiatoday.in /movies/celebrities/story/superstar-salaries-akshay-kumar-to-deepika-padukone -who-earns-what-1278820-2018-07-06. 18. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 19. Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 20. I use the term prosocial to indicate the slippage of professional and social networks among contemporary freelance cultures, where assignments and collaborations are worked out at parties, clubs, cultural venues, and social media. 21. Rather than take the descriptor “creative” as a given, academics must consider the role of ideologies of creativity within media industries such as film, television, advertising, and music. 22. Aparna Alluri, “#MeToo Firestorm Consumes Bollywood and Indian Media,” BBC News, October  9, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india -45757916.

Epilog u e

379

Bibliography

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M AG A Z I N E S Cinema (English monthly, Lahore) Cinema Sansar (Hindi weekly, Bombay) Dipali (English monthly, Calcutta) Filmfare (English fortnightly, Mumbai) filmindia (English monthly, Bombay) Filmland (English weekly, Calcutta) Lighthouse (English weekly, Bombay) Mirror (English weekly, Bombay) Movie Show (English monthly, Lahore) Moving Picture Monthly (English monthly, Bombay) Picturpost (English monthly, Madras) Rangbhumi (Hindi weekly, Delhi) Ranjit Bulletin (Gujarati and English, bilingual weekly, Bombay) Sound (English monthly, Bombay) 398 Bibliog raphy

Sound & Shadow (English monthly, Madras) Talk-a-Tone (English monthly, Madras)

N E W S PA P E R S Bombay Chronicle Chicago Daily Tribune Chicago Defender Hartford Courant (Connecticut) Los Angeles Times Malaya Tribune (Singapore) Manchester Guardian (UK) Mint (India) Morning Tribune (Singapore) Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser Star of India The Straits Times (Singapore) Times of India

Bibliog raphy

399

Index

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, 21, 198 Abdulla, Sheikh, 229, 266, 303 Abdulla Fazalbhoy Technical Institute for Radio & Cinema, 349n78 Abhinetri films, 163, 171, 177; Actress and, 31, 167, 168–69 169; Basant and, 167; as transnational, 166; voice and, 167 Abraham, Esther Victoria “Pramila.” See Pramila Accident, 37, 41–42, 311, 323–24, 376n69; actress and, 291–92; animals and, 292; Aristotle on, 289; death and, 294–95, 310; extra and, 293–94; Fearless Nadia and, 291–92; Jain on, 288–89, 290; Kamble and, 310; mock motor, 291; Pramila and, 296, 298, 303; Rafique and, 270–71, 290–91, 293, 294–95; safety measures and, 292–93, 373n54; Schivelbusch and, 301–2; stunts and, 291–92, 293; technology and,

292; in Veer Bala, 229, 266, 303; Virilio on, 289 Acousmatic, 179–80; voice, 161, 162 Acousmatic attunement, 147, 151, 152; as cultural technique, 149 Actants, 231, 270, 292, 298, 303 Actor-networks, 15 Actress, 312; accidents and, 291–92; Anglo-Indian, 30, 159, 165; becoming-actress, 12, 264; body of, 196, 207; caste and, 260–61, 262–63; court cases and, 179, 264; dialogue and, 40; ethnicity of, 165; glamor and, 32, 276; immorality and, 164–66; impassioned speech of, 40; labor of, 238; Lady barrister films, 163, 170–72, 174–79; modernity and, 32; “A Modern Movie-struck Girl” and, 280–81, 374n32; practices of, 12; religion and, 33, 165, 263; respectability of, 237–38; sexual

Actress (continued) assault and, 33; sexuality and, 30; stunts and, 291–92, 293; voice and, 147, 159–60, 160, 161, 163–64. See also Abhinetri films Actress (Bambai ki Mohini), 31, 167, 168–69, 169 Actress Kyon Bani? (Why Become an Actress?), 358n69 Adhikari, Gangadhar, 262 Adhuri Kahani, 55–56 Adler, Mortimer, 255, 369n68 Affect, 10, 17, 94, 140–41, 182, 207; energy and, 192 Affective vocality, 145–46, 171 AFL. See American Federation of Labor Agency, 252, 373n29; creative, 12, 258; distributed, 15; managing, 343n137; mazdoor and, 27; negative, 295; spectatorship and, 108 AIR. See All India Radio Ajanta Cinetone Ltd., 112, 123, 305 Alam Ara, 20, 74–75, 79, 80, 82, 152, 351n101 Ali, Mumtaz, 222 Ali Baba, 77, 320 All India Radio (AIR), 149 All-India Women’s Conference, 331n45 Always Tell Your Wife (Miya-Biwi), 53, 92; gambling in, 54 Amar Jyoti, 233 Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 258, 259, 260 American Civil War, 68 American Depression. See Great Depression American Federation of Labor (AFL), 251 Amrit Manthan, 232–33

402

In d e x

Anglo-Indian, 261, 310, 333n61; actress, 30, 159, 165; labor, 159 Anthropocene, 299 Anticolonial movement, 26 Apna Ghar, 62 Apte, Shanta, 36, 41, 166, 183, 233; body and, 240, 241–42, 243–44, 268; caste of, 262; class and, 234, 239, 261–63; early life of, 232; embodiment and, 259, 265; energy and, 268; exhaustion and, 231, 243–44, 245; hunger strike of, 230, 231–32, 234, 235–36, 246, 263, 264, 266; individuation and, 264; Jaau Mi Cinemaant? by, 41, 231, 238, 239, 242, 243–44, 256–59, 261–62; Karya-kshamta and, 243; in Kunku, 233, 234, 236; labor and, 238–39, 240, 267; labor power and, 242–43, 246, 260, 263, 266, 366n35; Prabhat Studios and, 232–33, 235–36, 264; resistance and, 235, 265; in Sant Dnyaneshwar, 226; on unemployment, 278 Archival absence, 35 Archival conjugation, 35–36, 42 Archive: conjugation and, 14, 35, 36, 42, 319; materiality and, 343n1; NFAI, 34 Aristotle, 289 Arrival: imminent, 22; mythologies of, 324; timely, 23 Art and Prudence (Adler), 255, 369n68 Artist, 322 Asif, K., 305, 308 Assemblage, 320–21; fan-as-worker and, 295; theory, 15, 19 Awaaz, 143 Awara, 359n91 Azad, 315 Azurie, 274; fan and, 276

Baap Kamai, 53 Badami, Sarvottam, 83, 136, 138, 141 Bai, Jaddan, 342n124 Baiji, 146, 353n8 Bakhtin, M. M., 222, 272 Bambai ki Mohini. See Actress Bandhan, 202 Banking Corporation of India, 95 Bao, Weihong, 192 Barrister’s Wife, 177; Gohar in, 176 Barthes, Roland, 230 Basant, 167 Baskaran, S. Theodore, 35 Basu, Tarit Kumar, 128, 349n81 Baudelaire, Charles, 29–30, 332n57 Bazin, André, 313 Bean, Jennifer, 293 Becoming, 115, 153; cinema, 265; industry, 186; performative, 170; sensory-technical, 100 Becoming-actress, 12, 264 Becoming-individual, 15 Becoming-modern, 23, 186 Becoming-subject, 15 Becoming-worker, 273, 288 Beller, Jonathan, 311 Below-the-line workers, 11, 28, 259, 317, 325n1 Benegal, D. S., 135 Bengal Radio Club, 353n15 Benjamin, Walter, 206, 227, 334n4; innervation and, 207, 208 BEST. See Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways Company Betab, Narayan Prasad, 75, 155 Bhanoo, Satnarayan, 288 Bhanu, Jagad, 91 Bhaumik, Kaushik, 35 Bhavnani, Mohan, 63, 123, 131, 305; on sex workers, 305–6

Bhavnani Productions, 126 Bijlee, 296 Billimoria, Eddie, 278 Binaries, 40, 110, 172, 326n6, 329n27; cultural, 193; ontological, 5 Birla, Ritu, 46, 53, 54 Bodily risk, 37; maps of, 309; waiting and, 41. See also Accident Body, 7, 160–61, 182, 185, 212; of actress, 196, 207; Apte and, 240, 241–42, 243–44, 268; colonialism and, 195; Dalvi and, 211–12; Diamond Queen and, 199, 200–1, 201; Doane and, 206–7; exhaustion and, 243; health of, 193, 194–96; lady barrister films and, 177; in “Mera Naam Radha Hai,” 187–88, 225–26, 228; mindbody dualism, 276; modernity and, 207; nationalism and, 201; respectability and, 162–63; samvega and, 208; of Sulochana, 196; technology and, 202–3. See also Nav Jeevan Bombay, 22, 24, 25. See also specific topics Bombay Before Bollywood (Thomas), 320 Bombay Cinema (Mazumdar), 17–18 Bombay Cinema and Theatres Trade Association, 104 Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways Company (BEST), 346n39 Bombay Legislative Council, 45 Bombay Radio Club, 149, 151 Bombay’s People (Siddiqui), 52 Bombay Stock and Cotton Exchange, 47 Bombay Suburban Electric Supply Co. (BSES), 95 Bombay Talkies Ltd., 16, 17, 19, 20, 61, 112; Basant and, 167; Bengali

In de x

403

Bombay Talkies Ltd. (continued) employees at, 97; caste and, 261; continuity scripts from, 126, 128; Devika managing, 138; finances of, 71, 91–92; Jawani-ki-Hawa and, 92, 137, 142, 203–6, 204, 207; Lall and, 88, 283; location shooting and, 299, 300; Nav Jeevan and, 193–94, 194, 196, 197–99, 201, 204, 216, 217–19; network map of, 86; paperwork of, 121, 123; production at, 137, 139; scenario and, 128; speculation and, 91–92; staff of, 141–42; start of, 84–85; studio and, 133, 298–99; as training institute, 130–31, 137. See also Devika Rani; Rai, Himansu Bombay Telephone Company, 159 Booth, Greg, 318 Bordwell, David, 13, 115, 118 Borkar, Saroj, 150 Boundary-work, 117 Bound scripts, 117 Briefless Barrister, The, 129–30 British Dominion Films, 215 British East India Company, 24 Bromfield, Louis, 147–48 BSES. See Bombay Suburban Electric Supply Co. Bubonic plague, 4, 24 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 300 Calcutta, 24, 25, 27 Capitalism, 19, 51, 239, 258, 284, 334n4; backward, 115; cine-worker and, 259; consumer, 311, 322; corporate, 46; cotton and, 27; finance, 57, 336n16, 338n47; gender and, 329n29; industrial, 26, 191, 206; industries and, 338n52; Marxism and, 242;

404

Ind e x

object-as-commodity under, 266–67; science and, 39 Cardozo, Ermeline. See Ermeline Cardozo Caste, 197, 310; actress and, 260–61, 262–63; of Apte, 262; Bombay Talkies and, 261; Dalit movement and, 259, 260; embodiment and, 259–60; in Jaau Mi Cinemaant?, 256–59, 261–62; labor and, 257; “Mera Naam Radha Hai” and, 227 Censorship, 5; colonialism and, 8, 252–53; Mill and, 252 Central Casting Corporation, 281 Chakrabarty, Amiya, 138 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, 113–14, 347n45 Chanderrao More, 59 Chandramohan, 177–78, 261 Charkha, 345n14 Chatterjee, Partha, 367n51 Chattopadhyay, Pasupati, 131–32 Chaudhuri, Devika Rani. See Devika Rani Chinese film industry, 60 Chion, Michel, 149, 151, 354n20 Chowdhry, Prem, 8 Cine-ecology, 46, 97; assemblage and, 19; defining, 2–3, 18–19; elastic, 38; finances and, 36, 58–61; power hierarchies in, 41; scientificindustrial transformations of, 39; spatial practice and, 16–17, 21, 42; speculation and, 4, 36, 39, 48, 65. See also specific topics Cine Finance, 95 Cinema, 9; early, 329n29. See also specific topics Cinema, 112

Cinema and the Wealth of Nations (Grieveson), 65 Cinema Girl, 166 Cinema Queen, 166 Cinema Sansar (Cinema world), 64–65, 66–67 Cinematic, 221 Cinematograph, 4 Cinema world (Cinema Sansar), 64–65, 66–67 Cine-worker, 10, 28, 321, 327n17; capitalism and, 259; class and, 11, 33, 258; female, 33; recursive operations and, 15–16; wage and, 11; waiting and, 15–16, 41, 312. See also Actress; Fan-as-worker; Women Circo Film Company (Cine Industries and Recording Company), 58, 93, 96; profits and, 61–63, 64; S. Apte and, 264; start of, 61; Stock market and, 64 C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown, 57–58, 61–63; Companies Act and, 64; stars and, 79 City. See specific topics Civilization and Climate (Huntington), 247–48 Class, 8, 203, 253, 256, 259, 260, 294, 327n17; Apte and, 234, 239, 261–63; cine-worker and, 11, 33, 258; elite, 92, 93; gaming and, 53; in Jau Mi Cinemaant?, 261; Jawani-ki-Hawa and, 203; merchant, 54, 310; middle, 9, 28, 29, 32, 57, 142, 172, 197, 278, 307, 311; servant, 257–58; struggle, 249; women and, 33, 165, 166–67, 177, 234, 306; working, 24, 27, 70, 144, 157, 211, 215, 258, 277, 287, 326n6 Climate, 42, 186, 223–24, 298, 302–3; climate change, 189; vitality and, 247

Collective memory, 16, 220 Colonialism, 4–5, 189, 316, 358n78; anticolonial movement, 26; body and, 195; censorship and, 8, 252–53; energy and, 193; exhibition and, 107–8; gambling and, 54–55; Hollywood and, 294; modernity and, 95, 103, 326n9; survivalist cinema and, 5 Colonial science, 2, 247, 344n3 Colonial surveillance, 36, 154, 334n69, 370n89 Combes, Muriel, 271 Communist Party of India, 27 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 227–28 Companies Act, 64 Conjugation, 14, 35, 36, 42, 319 Contingency, 147–48, 207, 265, 283, 284; competition and, 139; control and, 39; Doane on, 290; interwar period and, 58; mock motor accident and, 291 Continuity script, 100, 118, 124; Bombay Talkies and, 126, 128; editing and, 129; in Hollywood, 117; paper-based, 20; preproduction and, 135; scenario and, 123; talkie transition and, 119 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 208 Cotton, 319; capital investments and, 68–69; capitalism and, 27; cinema and, 65, 68–69, 70; credit and, 65; electricity and, 111; Ranjit Movitone and, 95; P. Roychund and, 78; Shah and, 75, 77; spatial practice and, 70; speculation and, 50 Cotton futures markets, 50, 55, 64–65, 68; precarity and, 69–70 Court case, 37, 359n88; actresses and, 179, 264; C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown,

In de x

405

Court case (continued) 57–58, 61–63, 64, 79; language and, 174; Legal Practitioners (Women) Act (1923), 171–72; Nalini D. and, 306–7; sexual assault and, 33, 306–7; B. Singh and, 152–53, 171; Tilak trial, 355n35; Vithal and, 81; voice and, 153–54 Courtesan economy, 23 Coute que Coute, 227–28 Creative agency, 12, 258 Creative industries, 42, 344n5, 372n11; production and, 321–22 Credit, 52, 60, 62, 85; cotton and, 65; creditors, 56–57, 64; creditworthiness, 90, 93; economy, 51, 68; Gujarati, 77, 336n27; indigenous, 2, 338n50 Credit networks, 2, 49, 69, 116; mercantile, 97 Cultural techniques, 100, 157, 222, 230, 327n16; acousmatic attunement as, 149; corporeal, 10 Cupboards of Curiosity (Hastie), 273 Dabral, Mangalesh, 229, 230 Dadar, 307 Dalit movement, 259, 260 Dalvi, K. T., 119, 350n83; body and, 211–12; Manual of Indian Talkies by, 129; scenario and, 130 Darshan, 363n55 Dass, Manishita, 35 Dave, Mohanlal G., 123, 124 David, Wilfrid, 34 Death: accident and, 294–95, 310; exhaustion and, 229, 230–31, 265, 266, 303; of Rafique, 270–71, 290–91, 293, 294–95; of Rai, 138 Deccan Queen, 139

406

In d e x

Depletion. See Exhaustion Desai, Chimanlal: National Studios Limited and, 83–84; Sagar Film Company and, 80; Sagar Movietone and, 75, 77, 78–79; Select Pictures Circuit and, 80 Desai, Haribhai, 131 Desai, Jayant, 136, 141, 351n96 De Sousa, C. F. C., 57 De Souza, Franklin, 310 Devgan, Veeru, 375n54 Devi, Sabita. See Sabita Devi Devi Devyani, 74–75, 155; Dialogue in, 355n39 Devika Rani, 33, 84–85, 89, 121, 166, 204; Bombay Talkies managed by, 138; filming of, 236; on film training, 130–31; in Karma, 89; in London, 88; Madan and, 284; Mamata and, 170, 176; profile flexibility of, 137; raw stock and, 135; on staff, 141–42; UFA Studios and, 86 Deware, N. G., 111 Dharamsey, Virchand, 123–24 Dhasal, Namdeo, 333n59 Dhavta Dhota (Varerkar), 253 Dialogue, 10, 75, 99, 128, 146, 349n81, 356n48; actress and, 40; delivery, 2, 158, 171; in Devi Devyani, 355n39; dramatic, 148, 175; film books and, 156; in Give and Take, 148–49; impassioned, 4–5, 171; lady barristers and, 170; live, 157; in Mamata, 172, 173, 174; memorizing, 374n33; Pakdaman Raqasa and, 166; reliance on, 145; in Savitri, 121–22; sound and, 126, 158; theatricality of, 155; writers, 126, 154 Diamond Queen: body and, 199, 200–1, 201; energy and, 209, 209, 210; as

stunt film, 199, 208; vitality and, 201 Dinshaw, F. E., 92 Director, 132; director-producer model, 138, 139–40; writer-director model, 133–34, 138, 139–40 Distributed agency, 15 Doane, Mary Ann, 126, 203, 220; body and, 206–7; on contingency, 290; on motion, 265 Do Ghadi ki Mouj, 54 Doshi, Chaturbhuj, 351n96 Double Cross, 55 Dr. Madhurika, 5, 6 Duniya Na Mane (The Unexpected), 170, 202, 233, 234 Dyer, Richard, 272–73, 360n6 Early cinema, 329n29 East India Film Company, 27 Ecology: environmental control, 298; media, 2, 325n3; of practice, 14; production, 316 Economic Aspects of the Film Industry in India, The (Jain), 288–89, 290 Economics: regulation, 65, 67; speculation in, 48 Economy, 52; creative, 311; credit, 51, 68; culture and, 46; gig, 285, 311, 371n96 Edelman, Lee, 199 Edwardes, S. M., 55 Ek Hi Raasta, 82–83 Elasticity, 116 Electricity, 110; cotton and, 111 Elephanta Movietone, 164 Elsaesser, Thomas, 192 Embodiment, 235, 329n27; Apte and, 259, 265; caste and, 259–60;

exhaustion and, 266; practice and, 15 Enemy, The, 195 Energy, 40–41, 185, 201, 228, 249; affect and, 192; Apte and, 268; cinematic, 221; colonialism and, 193; Diamond Queen and, 209, 209, 210; fan-asworker and, 275; josh, 191; modernity and, 189; “Night starvation” and, 190–91; off-screen, 186, 227–28; as processual, 192; Rangachariar and, 210–11; recursivity and, 221; short circuit and, 270; studies, 191–92; technology and, 202–5 Enervation, 190, 210, 220, 225. See also Innervation Ermeline Cardozo, 33 Exhaustion, 143, 249; Apte and, 231, 243–44, 245; body and, 243; death and, 229, 230–31, 265, 266, 303; embodiment and, 266; of extras, 229, 266; industrial workers and, 246–48; precarity and, 14 Exhibition: colonial, 107–8; form, 107; industrial, 105, 111–12; “Photo-CineRadio Exhibition,” 105–6 Experience: of filmmaking, 15–16; production, 9–10, 15, 16, 36, 221, 227, 230, 266, 289 Extra, 33, 312; accident and, 293–94; exhaustion of, 229, 266; labor of, 238; at Mohan Sound Studios, 306; Nalini D. as, 271, 305; Rafique as, 270–71, 293, 295; Sagar Movietone and, 294; sex worker and, 305–6; spatial segregation of, 305; star system and, 293–94; in Veer Bala, 229 Factories Act (1934), 254, 255 Factory Act (1891), 254

In de x

407

Family-system, 140–41 Fan, 269–70, 324, 373n29; Azurie and, 276; identity of, 279–80; kinetomania and, 273; “A Modern Moviestruck Girl” and, 280–81, 374n32 Fan, 269–70; Chandna in, 272 Fan-as-worker, 270, 273, 281, 319, 372n11; assemblage and, 295; energy and, 275; Jaini and, 286; Jehan and, 280; M. Khan and, 278–79; struggle and, 283; Zabak and, 282, 287 Fay, Jennifer, 299 Fazalbhoy, Y. A., 27–28, 49, 95, 332n50; General Films and, 59; Indian Film and, 104; National Studios Limited and, 83–84 Fearless Nadia, 170, 196, 199, 209, 373n29; accidents and, 291–92 Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE), 251–52 Fiery Cinema (Bao), 192 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), 101 Film City, 310 Film Enquiry Committee, 43, 94 Film History as Media Archeology (Elsaesser), 192 Film Institute of India, 130 Filmistan Ltd., 11, 18, 138, 186 Film school, 130–31 Finance, 49–50, 65, 67, 337n42; of Bombay Talkies, 71, 91–92; capitalism, 57, 336n16, 338n47; cineecology and, 36, 58–61; HRIIT and, 86–87; Investment Corporation of India and, 84; moneylenders and, 69; production costs and, 99; profits and, 61, 63; of Ranjit Movitone, 71–72, 74–75, 95; of Sagar Movietone, 71, 95; speculative, 50, 51, 61, 68;

408

In d e x

Tatas and, 84, 95, 141. See also Cotton Financialization, 336n16 Flâneur, 29–30, 332n57 Flâneuse, 333n58 Flower. See Phool Foreign Qualified Technician, 131 Freedom movement, 5 Freelance acting, 139 FTII. See Film and Television Institute of India Futures markets (satta bazaar), 339n62; cotton, 50, 55, 64–65, 68, 69–70; in film, 55–56; speculation and, 55, 65; teji-mandi and, 51 Futurism: Haraway and, 284; reproductive, 199 Futurity, 15, 39, 50, 85, 88, 199; speculative, 283 FWICE. See Federation of Western India Cine Employees Gambling, 52, 71; in Always Tell Your Wife, 54; in Baap Kamai, 53; colonialism and, 54–55; in films, 53–54; Prevention of Gambling Act (1887), 45–46, 54; Ranjit Movitone and, 77; Shah and, 75, 77–78; speculation and, 54, 55; struggle and, 283 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand: Dandi March and, 26; on exhibitions, 107; hunger strike and, 234–35, 237; swadeshi and, 103 Gani, Abdul, 290 Ganti, Tejaswini, 94, 117 Gay Birds, 136, 318–19 General Films, 59, 84 Genre, 20, 52, 56, 116, 130; abhinetri film, 163, 364n68; actress and, 32;

body and, 187, 366n25; continuity script and, 117; exhibition and, 107; fans and, 373n27; filmmaking as subgenre, 225; finance and, 91, 319, 342n125; Hindu mythological, 212; historical action, 198; popularity, 88; script and, 128; social film, 21, 362n38; speeches, lectures and, 153, 154, 171, 174; stardom and, 166; stunt film, 40, 199, 201, 216, 291, 303, 366n25; voice, 317 German film industry, 96, 138–39, 277 Ghar ki Laj, 53 Gig economy, 311, 371n96; freelancing in, 285 Gitelman, Lisa, 126 Give and Take, 148–49 Glover, William, 331n41 God’s Beloved, 169–70 Gogtay, Ram L., 185, 251, 254–55 Gohar Mamajiwala, 16, 33, 136, 171, 339n72; in Barrister’s Wife, 176; filming of, 236; Jagdish Film Company and, 73–74; Ranjit Movitone and, 72, 74–75, 77, 78; Shree Ranjit Film Company and, 74 Govil, Nitin, 19, 344n5 Great Depression, 59, 68, 80; Karma and, 87; politics and, 278; unemployment crisis and, 26 Grieveson, Lee, 59–60; Cinema and the Wealth of Nations by, 65 Gueizler, Annette “Azurie.” See Azurie Gul-e-Bakavali, 123–24, 125 Gunsundari (Why Husbands go Astray?), 73 Gupta, S. C., 132, 202 Haas, Willy, 212, 215, 305–6, 316 Hallett, Hilary, 277

Hangal, A. K., 148, 353n12 Hansen, Miriam, 207, 227, 277 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 326n7 Haraway, Donna J., 35, 284, 318 Hastie, Amelie, 273 Hayles, N. Katherine, 271 Haynes, Douglas, 197 Himansu Rai Indo-International Talkies (HRIIT), 342n107; Bhanu and, 91; finances and, 86–87; Karma and, 87, 88; speculation and, 89–90 Hindu-Muslim conflict, 8 Hollywood, 65, 95, 96, 108, 112, 315; AFL and, 251; Central Casting Corporation of, 281; colonialism and, 294; continuity script in, 117; ICC and, 114; Prasad on, 118; strike in, 234, 251; studio, 298; stunts and, 293; women in, 281 Homji, Khorshed, 142 Homji, Manek, 142 Horizontal integration, 116, 138; Irani and, 81–82; Ranjit Movitone and, 95–96 Horlicks, 190, 190–91, 196 House of Kapurchand, 60, 75, 337n37 How Films Are Made, 212 HRIIT. See Himansu Rai IndoInternational Talkies Human, 191–92, 244, 271–72; infrastructure, 267; recursivity and, 212–13, 226 Human Motor, The (Rabinbach), 189 Hunger strike, 37; Apte and, 230, 231–32, 234, 235–36, 246, 263, 264, 266; Gandhi and, 234–35, 237; Millworkers and, 235 Hunterwali, 5 Huntington, Ellsworth, 247–48

In de x

409

ICC. See Indian Cinematograph Committee Ideal Movitone, 167, 169 Identity work, 13–14 IMPC. See Indian Motion Picture Congress Imperial Film Company, 27, 59, 82; Irani and, 80, 81; Vithal and, 81 IMPPA. See Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC), 5, 49, 63, 103, 104, 113; Hollywood and, 114; silent film scripts and, 124; Villiers and, 210 Indian Cotton Committee of the Textile Control Board, 65 Indian Factories (Amendment) Act, 248 Indian Film, 104 Indian film studies, 14, 315, 320, 378n2 Indian Motion Picture Congress (IMPC), 8, 101–2; “Photo-CineRadio Exhibition” and, 105–6 Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association (IMPPA), 104, 252 Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association, 253 Individuation, 12, 186, 198, 266; Apte and, 264; mediatic, 100; Simondon on, 14–15 Indurani, 279–80, 292, 303 Industrial capitalism, 191, 206 Industrial exhibition: MPSI and, 105, 111–12; studio tour and, 111–12 Industrial India (Nirala Hindustan), 108–9, 109, 151, 314 Industrial respectability, 254 Industrial science, 330n31; national industry and, 100, 102; technology and, 110; transformations and, 101 Industrial struggle, 2, 311, 329n29

410

Ind e x

Industry. See specific topics Infrastructure, 3, 93, 95, 107, 140, 191, 277–78, 375n54; civic, 224, 307; human, 267; industrial, 323; media, 46; sensory-technical becoming and, 100; silent films and, 145; sound and, 59; speculative, 49, 50, 85, 94; talkie film, 342n115; urban, 310 Innervation: Benjamin and, 207, 208; Nav Jeevan and, 216, 217–19; samvega and, 208 Innocent Dancing Girl. See Pakdaman Raqasa International Pictures Corporation, 119 Investment Corporation of India, 84 Irani, Ardeshir, 59, 152; horizontal integration and, 81–82; Imperial Film Company and, 80, 81; Sagar Film Company and, 80, 139 Jaau Mi Cinemaant? (Should I join the movies?) (Apte), 41, 231, 238; body in, 243–44; caste in, 256–59, 261–62; class in, 261; Marathi Marxist and, 239; nonhuman in, 242 Jagdish Film Company, 73–74 Jaikumar, Priya, 5, 35, 316 Jain, Rikhab Dass, 288–89, 290 Jaini, MD, 286 Japanese film industry, 96 Jawani-ki-Hawa, 92, 137, 142, 204, 207; class and, 203; modernity and, 203–4; shock and, 205–6; vitality in, 204–5 Jeevan Lata, 136, 171, 177 Jeevan Prabhat, 299, 300 Jehan, Roshan, 279–80, 373n31 Jinnah, M. A., 81 John, Ali Peter, 272 Josh, 191

Jugaad, 326n6 Jungle Beauty, 223 Jungle King, 301; monsoon and, 296, 298; Pramila in, 296, 297, 298, 301, 302, 303 Kaliya Mardan, 212 Kamble, Ram, 310 Kangan, 138 Kapoor, Motilal Shamlal, 282 Kardar, A. R., 134 Karma, 87, 88, 89, 91 Karya-kshamta, 243 Khadi, 345n25 Khan, Mehboob, 82–83, 84, 134, 352n111; fan-as-worker and, 278–79; National Studios and, 141; Sagar Film Company and, 139 Khan, Shah Rukh, 269–70 Khan, Ustad Jhande, 75 Khanna, Aaryan, 269 Khazanchi, 332n50 Khote, Durga, 123, 374n33 Kimti Ansu, 292 Kinetomania, 273 Kirti song booklet, 21 Kohinoor Film Company, 68, 73, 111, 114, 317 Kohinoor United Artists, 123 Kolhapur, 24, 25 Kolhapur Cinetone, 126 Kracauer, Siegfried, 206, 211, 277, 334n4 Kumar, Ashok, 138 Kunku, 233, 234, 236, 263 Kureishi, Zahir “Zabak,” 251; colonialism and, 282; fan-as-worker and, 282, 287 Labor, 249, 264, 265, 268, 366n25, 369n76, 377n84; accidents and, 289;

of actress, 238; Anglo-Indian, 159; Apte and, 238–39, 240, 267; caste and, 257; exploitation, 225; of extras, 238; Factories Act (1934) and, 254, 255; Indian Factories (Amendment) Act, 248; industrial, 246–48; mazdoor, 27, 252, 254, 256; Millworkers and, 235, 245, 252–53; paperwork and, 120, 120–21; power and, 242–43; reform, 247–48; sensuousness of, 14; union, 251–52, 323, 368n55; women and, 372n15; writers and, 255–56. See also Exhaustion Labor power, 252, 311, 314, 370n81; Apte and, 242–43, 246, 260, 263, 266, 366n35; creativity and, 266; reproduction of, 70, 212 Lady barrister films, 163, 171, 359n91; Barrister’s Wife, 176–77; body and, 177; dialogue and, 170; Jeevan Lata, 177; Mamata, 92, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175–76, 177; mulzima and, 175; Taqdeer, 177–78 Lahore, 24, 25, 28 Lakshmi Film Company, 72–73 Lal-E-Yaman, 27, 123, 155 Lall, Chuni, 91; Bombay Talkies and, 88, 283; HRIIT and, 86–87 Language, 24, 82, 145, 154, 331n44; court case and, 174; film books and, 156; Hindi, 25, 34, 64, 96, 126, 191, 315, 318, 347n47; Marathi, 41; Marathi Marxist and, 239; Persian, 174; song booklet and, 334n69; Tamil, 27, 96; Urdu, 25, 34, 96, 126, 175–76, 191, 315, 347n47 Larkin, Brian, 9, 100 Legal Practitioners (Women) Act (1923), 171–72 Lelyveld, David, 154

In de x

411

Liang, Lawrence, 358n78 Light boy, 1, 12, 15 Lighthouse, 254 Location shooting: Jeevan Prabhat and, 299, 300; Jungle King and, 296, 297, 298, 301 Lost children, 37 Lost films, 34–37, 51, 146, 167, 302; The Enemy as, 195 Luhar, Chimanlal, 136 Lumiere Brothers, 24 Machine. See Nonhuman Madam Fashion, 5, 7, 91 Madan Company, 114, 116 Madan Mohan: Devika and, 284; struggle and, 283–84, 285–86 Madras, 24, 25, 27 Mahadevan, Sudhir, 35 Mahatma Vidur, 62 Majumdar, Neepa, 35, 145, 162, 234; on respectability, 237–38 Mamajiwala, Gohar. See Gohar Mamajiwala Mamata (Mother), 92, 175–76, 177; Devika in, 170, 176; dialogue in, 172, 173, 174 Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, 316, 364n73; “Mera Naam Radha Hai” by, 41, 186–89, 221–27, 230, 238, 265, 267; monsoon and, 222–24; production experience and, 221, 227; shikari aurat and, 29–30, 33; “Shikari Auratein” by, 11–12, 28–29; women and, 11–12, 28–30 Manual of Indian Talkies (Dalvi), 129 Maps, 37; bodily risk, 309 Marathi Marxist, 239, 262 Marathi theater, 23 Markovits, Claude, 92

412

In d e x

Marxism, 253, 319; capitalism and, 242; Marathi Marxist, 239, 262 Massey, Doreen, 317–18 Master Man, 57 Materiality, 14, 37, 189, 260; embodied desire and, 271; paper archives and, 343n1; voice and, 162 Mayer, Vicki, 259 Mazdoor (worker), 252, 254, 256; agency and, 27 Mazumdar, Ranjani, 17–18 McRobbie, Angela, 285; on creativity, 322–23; subjectivation and, 322 Meanwhile, 318 Media archaeology, 330n35 Media ecology, 2, 325n3 Media industry studies, 13, 19, 372n11 Medium specificity, 21, 126, 132, 267, 330n34 Medvedev, P. N., 272 Meera, 222 Mehboob Productions, 84 Mehta, Kapurchand Nemchand, 337n37 Mehta, Sumant, 331n45 Menon, Bindu, 354n18 “Mera Naam Radha Hai” (My name is Radha) (Manto), 41, 186, 189, 221, 230, 238; body in, 187–88, 225–26, 228; caste and, 227; monsoon, 222–24; recursivity in, 222, 226; reflexivity and, 226; resistance in, 267 Meri Jaan, 79 Microphone, 156–58, 180; voice test and, 40, 159–60, 182 Mill, 252–53 Mind-body dualism, 276 Mise-en-scène, 14 Miss 1933, 171, 205 Miya-Biwi. See Always Tell Your Wife

Mock motor accident, 291 Modernity, 21, 186, 313–14, 329n29; actress and, 32; arrival and, 23; body and, 207; Bombay and, 25–26; colonialism and, 95, 103, 326n9; energy and, 189; industrial, 319; Jawani-ki-Hawa and, 203–4; Nav Jeevan and, 220; Ochoa on, 317; production and, 276–77; science and, 103; shock and, 206 “Modern Movie-struck Girl, A,” 280–81, 374n32 Mody, K. P., 130 Mohan, Madan. See Madan Mohan Mohan Sound Studios, 308, 311; extras at, 306; Phool at, 305 Monologue, 353n4 Monsoon, 311; Jungle King and, 296, 298; Manto and, 222–24; studio and, 224 Monsoon (David), 34 Mother. See Mamata Mother India, 359n93 Motilal, 138 Motion Picture Society of India (MPSI), 101, 102–3, 252; industrial exhibition and, 105, 111–12; registration of, 105; silver jubilee celebrations and, 105 Mughal-e-Azam, 305 Mukherjee, Gyan, 141 Mukherjee, Sashadhar, 138, 186 Myers, Ruby. See Sulochana My name is Radha. See “Mera Naam Radha Hai” Mythology, 212–13, 220 Nai Duniya, 62 Nalini D.: court case and, 306–7; as extra, 271, 305; sexual assault of, 33, 305, 306, 308

Nargis, 179, 359n91; in Mother India, 359n93; in Taqdeer, 177–78 Nation, 314–16; national film history, 320; national industry, 102; transnational and, 326n5 National Film Archive of India (NFAI), 34 Nationalism, 26, 32, 39, 105, 155, 249, 278, 315, 326n7; activists and, 148; actress and, 30, 273, 293; Apte and, 263; consumers and, 109–10; dialogue and, 171; energy and, 190; exhibition and, 107, 108; finance and, 60; imaginary of, 193; Manto and, 316; movement, 147; Partition of Bengal and, 334n72, 344n9; physical fitness and, 201; Progressive Writers Movement and, 253; satire and, 194; science and, 103; speech and, 153; swadeshi and, 102–3; talkie transition and, 5; technology and, 367n51; vitality and, 167 National Studios Limited, 83–84, 141, 341n102 Nav Jeevan (New life), 194, 198–99; innervation and, 216, 217–19; modernity and, 220; Shukul in, 193, 194; vitality in, 196, 197, 201, 204, 216 Navyug Chitrapat Ltd., 93–94 Naya Sansar, 220 New life. See Nav Jeevan New materialisms, 14 New Searchlight, 56–57 New Theatres, 27, 61, 93, 261, 337n43, 352n111, 356n49 NFAI. See National Film Archive of India Night in Bombay (Bromfield), 147–48 “Night starvation,” 190–91

In de x

413

Nirala, 346n31 Nirala Hindustan. See Industrial India Nirmala, 5 Nissar, 305, 306 Nonhuman, 191–92, 244, 271–72; in Jau Mi Cinemaant?, 242; recursivity and, 212–13, 226 Noyce, Frank, 102 Oberai, B. R., 165 Ochoa, Ana Maria, 162; modernity and, 317 Off-screen, 32, 40, 192, 210, 238; action stars, 375n53; energies, 186, 189; enervation, 225; orchestras, 106; power relations, 228; sound, 149, 150, 256n60 Omkara, 269 On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Simondon), 244 Ontogenesis, 15, 264–65; temporality of, 186 Options on futures. See Teji-mandi Oratory, 147, 152, 154, 326n5; political, 2, 153 Osten, Franz, 130, 182 Ottawa Agreement (1932), 344n6 Paapi, 77 Pakdaman Raqasa (Innocent Dancing Girl), 164, 166 Pal, Niranjan, 85–86, 119, 128 Pandya, J. R., 294 Paperwork, 98, 100–1, 126, 343n1; of Bombay Talkies, 121, 123; division of labor and, 120, 120–21; materiality and, 343n1. See also Script Paratexts, 35 Parsi community, 142 Partition, 30, 39, 332n50, 334n72

414

Ind e x

Passing Show, 51, 315–16 Pasta, Madhavdas Goculdas, 73 Patel, Ambalal, 78, 136; Sagar Film Company and, 80 Patel, Baburao, 60, 70, 140, 232 Patel, Ishwarlal Umedbhai, 68 Patel, Sujata, 326n7 Phalke, Dadasaheb, 101, 212, 213, 214, 320 Phool (Flower): at Mohan Sound Studios, 305; sexual assault and, 306–7 Phule, Jyotirao, 258 Physical culture, 40, 194–95, 196, 199, 241 Pommer, Eric, 137–38 Poovey, Mary, 342n125 Prabhat Studios, 234; Apte and, 232–33, 235–36, 264 Practice, 2, 39; acoustic, 38; aesthetic, 3; cinematic, 4, 9; cultural, 10, 13; defining, 12; ecology of, 14; embodied, 15; ethnographic, 37; extractive, 41; material, 36, 50; spatial, 16–17, 21, 42, 70. See also specific topics Prakash, Gyan, 48, 104 Pramila, 270–71, 292, 376n74; accidents and, 296, 298, 303; background of, 295–96; in Jungle King, 296, 297, 298, 301, 302, 303; stunts and, 271, 296 Prasad, M. Madhava, 119, 348n62; on Hollywood, 118 Precarity, 42, 259, 266, 270, 284, 285, 307, 321; cotton futures markets and, 69–70; embodied, 33; exhaustion and, 14; gender and, 186; hustle and, 4; industrial, 20 Premchand Roychund, 256; cotton and, 78; Mill and, 252–53 Premieres, 112

Prevention of Gambling Act (1887), 45–46, 54 Processual, 2, 12, 42, 71, 95, 97; energy as, 192; Simondon on, 15; technics and, 244 Production, 13, 127, 140; accidents and, 289; approaches to, 13–14; at Bombay Talkies, 137, 139; cities and, 27–28; continuity script and, 135; costs of, 99; creative industries and, 321–22; ecology, 316; experience, 9–10, 15, 16, 36, 221, 227, 230, 266, 289; location shooting and, 296, 297, 298–99, 300, 301; modernity and, 276–77; profile flexibility and, 137; profits and, 63; at Ranjit Movitone, 136–37; at Sagar Movietone, 136; time, 223; transmedial, 23 Production cultures, 13, 211, 266, 283 Profits, 58, 113, 338n46, 338n48; Circo Film Company and, 61–63, 64; elasticity and, 63; investment and, 61, 63; production and, 63; of Sagar Movietone, 77; silent films and, 59; speculation and, 338n47; stars and, 376n69 Progressive Writers Association, 253, 368n62 Progressive Writers Movement, 253 Proletariat, 211, 212, 220, 277; lumpenproletariat, 262; Rao on, 260; urban, 27, 254 Prosocial, 379n20 Prostitute. See Sex worker Proudfoot, Enid, 308, 310 Pundalik, 320 Pune, 24, 25 Queen Mary School, 143–44, 179, 352n2

Rabinbach, Anson, 242; The Human Motor by, 189 Radio, 148, 152, 354n20; AIR, 149; Bengal Radio Club, 353n15; Bombay Radio Club, 149, 151; film actors and, 180; “Photo-Cine-Radio Exhibition,” 105–6 Rafique, Mohammed: accident of, 270–71, 290–91, 293, 294–95; as extra, 270–71, 293, 295; negative agency of, 295 Rai, Himansu, 84, 88–89, 89, 91, 130; death of, 138; HRIIT and, 86–87; Pal and, 85–86 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 34–35 Raja Harishchandra, 101, 320 Rajput Ramani, 202, 203 Ramola, 165 Rangachariar, T., 210–11 Rangbhumi, 165–66, 197–98 Ranjit Movitone, 18, 19, 20, 76, 123, 157, 340n83; accidents at, 292; Betab and, 75; construction and, 221; cotton and, 95; decline of, 77; Devi Devyani and, 74–75, 155, 355n39; director-producers of, 138; finances of, 71–72, 74–75, 95; gambling and, 77; Gohar and, 72, 74–75, 77, 78; Gujarati employees at, 97; horizontal stakes of, 95–96; U. Jhande Khan and, 75; network map of, 72; production at, 136–37; salaries at, 341n92; Shah and, 72–73, 74–75; Speculation and, 95; Supreme Distributors and, 75; writer-director model at, 133 Rao, Anupama, 259, 260, 264 Rationalization, 347n45 Rau, Enakshi Rama, 165 Ray, P. C., 103–4

In de x

415

Recursivity, 212–13; energy and, 221; in “Mera Naam Radha Hai,” 222, 226 Redfield, Peter, 247 Red Signal, 54 Reflexivity, 227; “Mera Naam Radha Hai” and, 226 Relationality, 221 Religion, 8–9, 281, 311, 327n17; actress and, 33, 165, 263; riots and, 8 Renaming politics, 325n2 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (1951), 49 Reproductive futurism, 199 Resistance: Apte and, 235, 267; in “Mera Naam Radha Hai,” 267 Reza, Mehandi, 180 Rise, The (Tumhari Jeet), 56 Room No. 9, 201–2 Roti, 202 Roychund, Premchand. See Premchand Roychund Ryder, Robert, 208 Sabita Devi, 33, 83, 84, 112, 136, 171, 341n102; accidents and, 292; Sudama Pictures and, 138 Sacred Ganges, 164 Sagar Film Company, 79, 82; accidents at, 290; Irani and, 80, 139; M. Khan and, 139; Proudfoot and, 308, 310; Reza and, 180 Sagar Movietone, 18, 19, 20, 27; Ali Baba and, 77; C. Desai and, 75, 77, 78–79; Ek Hi Raasta and, 82–83; extras and, 294; finances of, 71, 95; Gujarati employees at, 97; location of, 294; Meri Jaan and, 79; National Studios Limited, 83–84; network map of, 81; Pandya at, 294; production at, 136; profits of, 77; resource

416

In d e x

sharing and, 79; scientific singing and, 181, 182; speculation and, 95; star system and, 78, 82–83, 95; 300 Days, 198; Vithal and, 80–81; writer-director model at, 133–34; Zarina and, 83 Salam, Abdul, 229, 266, 303 Sampat, Dwarkadas, 111 Samvega, 208 Sanatogen, 249, 250 Sangeet Film Company, 126 Sansar Naiya, 205 Sant Dnyaneshwar, 226 Sant Tukaram, 202 Saraswati Cinetone, 280 Saroj Movietone, 59 Savitri, 123; shooting script of, 120, 120–21 Sawhney, R. C., 195 Scenario, 119, 126, 133; Bombay Talkies and, 128; continuity script and, 123; Dalvi and, 130; dimensions of, 129 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 246, 249; accident and, 301–2 Science. See Industrial Science Scientific management, 113 Screenwriting, 124; writer-director model, 133–34, 138, 139–40 Script: bound, 117; continuity, 20, 100, 117–18, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 135; shooting, 120, 120–21, 123–24; silent film, 124 Secrets of an Actress, 166 Select Pictures Circuit, 80 Self-rule. See Swaraj Sennett, Richard, 322 Sensory-technical becoming, 100 Service Ltd, 315 Setalvad, Chimanlal H., 86–87, 91, 137

Sexual assault and harassment, 324; court cases on, 33, 306–7; of Nalini D., 33, 305, 306, 308; short circuit and, 307 Sex worker, 30, 163, 287; extra and, 305–6 Shah, Chandulal, 332n50, 339n72, 340n75, 351n96; cotton and, 75, 77; gambling of, 75, 77–78; Lakshmi Film Company and, 72–73; Ranjit Movitone and, 72–73, 74–75; Shree Ranjit Film Company and, 74; stock market and, 73; Typist Girl and, 73; Vimala Bahu and, 73 Shaikh, Juned, 262 Shanti, Mumtaz, 167 Sharar, Dewan, 91, 292 Sharda Film Company, 81, 195 Sharma, Maneesh, 269 Sharma, Sarah, 319 Shastri, K. G., 229, 266, 303 Shikari, 11 Shikari aurat, 28, 29–30, 33 “Shikari Auratein” (Manto), 11–12, 28–29 Shooting. See Location shooting Shooting script: Gul-e-Bakavali and, 123–24, 125; of Savitri, 120, 120–21 Short circuit, 269, 310; energy and, 270; sexual assault and, 307; struggle and, 271–72 Should I join the movies?. See Jaau Mi Cinemaant? Shree Ranjit Film Company, 74 Shrikent, Nandini, 283 Shroff, Amarchand, 73 Shukul, Rama, 193, 194 Shyam Sunder, 232 Siddiqui, Asiya, 336n17; Bombay’s People by, 52

Silver jubilee celebrations (1939), 101, 106, 109–10, 111; companies at, 106–7; MPSI and, 105 Simmel, Georg, 206 Simondon, Gilbert, 226; on individuation, 14–15; On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by, 244, 245; on the processual, 15 Singer, Ben, 206 Singh, Bhagat, 235, 263, 354n27; execution of, 152–53, 171 Singh, Suchet, 131, 350n87 Singh, Surjit, 279–80 Singularity, 15, 16, 242–43, 314 Sinha, Mohan, 108 SMPE. See Society of Motion Picture Engineers Social films, 5, 21, 156 Society, 185 Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), 131 Sound, 144; acousmatic attunement and, 147, 149, 151, 152; dialogue and, 126, 158; infrastructure and, 59; microphone and, 156–60, 180; Night in Bombay and, 147–48; off-screen, 149, 150, 256n60; playback singing and, 356n60; recording in studio, 158; studies, 317, 353n5; synchronized, 3, 164, 175, 307, 356n49; technology, 180, 182 Soundscape, 36 Spatial practice: cine-ecology and, 16–17, 21, 42; cotton and, 70 Speculation, 48, 99; Bombay Talkies and, 91–92; cine-ecology and, 4, 36, 39, 48, 65; cotton and, 50; finance and, 50, 51, 61, 68; futures markets and, 55, 65; futurity and, 283; gambling and, 54, 55; HRIIT and,

In de x

417

Speculation (continued) 89–90; infrastructure and, 49, 50, 85, 94; profits and, 338n47; Ranjit Movitone and, 95; Sagar Movietone and, 95; social structure and, 85 Speech: declamatory, 145, 146, 154, 175; impassioned, 4–5, 40, 146, 163, 170, 171, 172, 175, 353n4; synchronized, 3, 40, 144, 148–49, 164, 170, 175, 302, 307 Sphinx in the City (Wilson), 29 Spreti, Karl von, 130–31 Staiger, Janet, 13, 115, 117, 118 Stam, Robert, 225 Stardom, 272, 294, 338n46; earnings and, 321; profits and, 376n69; public discourse and, 277–78 Stars, 272–73 Star system: C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown and, 79; extra and, 293–94; Sagar Movietone and, 78, 82–83, 95; studio and, 139 Staying with the Trouble (Haraway), 284 Stock market, 52, 55, 56, 71, 72, 75, 106, 176; Circo Film Company and, 64; crash, 176, 291; Shah and, 73. See also Futures market Strike, 27, 263, 368n52; in Hollywood, 234, 251. See also Hunger strike Struggle, 271, 323, 325; class, 249; continuous, 283–84; fan-as-worker and, 283; industrial, 2, 311, 329n29; for Madan, 283–84, 285–86; place and, 287–88; short circuit and, 271–72; waiting and, 285–87 Struggler, 271, 283–85 Studio, 320, 321, 349n77, 377n86; Bombay Talkies, 133, 298–99; double-unit system for, 135–36; environmental control and, 298;

418

In d e x

Hollywood, 298; monsoon and, 224; sound recording in, 158; star system and, 139; tour, 111–12. See also specific topic Studio system, 114–15 Stunts, 40, 201, 301; accidents and, 291–92, 293; Diamond Queen and, 199, 208; Hollywood and, 293; Pramila and, 271, 296; Veer Bala and, 229; Wadia Movietone and, 205 Sudama Pictures, 83, 138–39 Sulochana, 32, 159, 166, 275, 276; body of, 196; public discourse on, 277–78 Sundaram, A., 128 Sundari, Tara, 160 Sunita Devi, 165 Supreme Distributors, 75 Swadeshi, 103, 334n72; Partition of Bengal and, 344n9 Swaraj (self-rule), 360n4 Swaroop, Ram, 261 Swastik, 315 Synchronized sound, 3, 164, 175, 307, 356n49 Talkie transition, 3, 20–21; cities and, 27; continuity script and, 119; freedom movement and, 5; nationalization and, 96; technology and, 40, 99; vocality and, 145–46 Tamil, 27 Tandon, M. L., 131 Taqdeer, 177–78 Tarkhud, Nalini, 164, 165 Tatas, 84, 95, 141 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 113, 347n47 Taylorism, 113–14, 169–70, 248, 249, 367n43

Techniques. See Cultural techniques Technology, 2, 338n48; accidents and, 292; body and, 202–3; electricity, 110–11; energy and, 202–5; industrial science and, 110; microphone, 156–60, 180, 182; paper-based continuity script, 20; sound, 180, 182; talkie transition and, 40, 99. See also Paperwork Teji-mandi (options on futures), 51, 335n14 Tekchand, Dharamdas, 112 Telephone: Bombay Telephone Company, 159; voice and, 151–52 Telephone girl, 159 Temple, Richard, 87–88, 92, 93 Temporal incommensurability, 41–42 Textile industries, 113 Theater, and voice, 148, 149, 154–55, 158–59 Thomas, Rosie, 34–35; Bombay Before Bollywood by, 320 Thompson, Kristin, 13, 115, 118 Thorner, Alice, 326n7 300 Days, 198 Throw of Dice, 53–54 Times of India, 45 Tombs, Steve, 292, 294 Trade Union Act (1926), 251–52 Training: Bombay Talkies and, 130–31, 137; UFA Studios and, 137–38 Transindustrial, 115 Transmedial, 326n5; history, 100; practices, 115; production, 23 Transnational, 326n5; abhinetri films as, 166 Tsing, Anna L., 338n47 Tumhari Jeet (The Rise), 56 Typist Girl, 73

UFA Studios (Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft), 86, 137–38 Unexpected, The. See Duniya Na Mane Union, 323, 368n55; AFL as, 251; FWICE as, 251–52; Societies Registration Act and, 252 Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft. See UFA Studios Urbanization, 51, 307, 326n6, 336n17 Urbs prima in Indis, 3 Urdu modernist movement, 23 Vacha, Savak, 131, 350n87 Vachan, 222 Vantolio (Whirlwind), 203 Varerkar, Mama, 253 Vasudevan, Ravi, 9, 34–35 Veer Bala, 304; accident in, 229, 266, 303; extras in, 229 Vertical integration, 114, 115–16, 321, 341n99 Vile Parle, 307–8 Village Girl, The, 279 Villiers, E., 210 Vimala Bahu, 73 Virilio, Paul, 289 Vismann, Cornelia, 126 Vismi Sadi, 316–17 Visvanathan, Shiv, 103 Visvesvaraya, M., 105 Vitali, Valentina, 201, 213 Vitality, 185, 193, 267, 362n35; camera and, 202; climate and, 247; Diamond Queen and, 201; in Jawani-kiHawa, 204–5; in Nav Jeevan, 196, 197, 201, 204, 216; speed and, 291; tonics and, 196–97 Vithal, Master, 82; Imperial Film Company and, 81; Sagar Movietone and, 80–81

In de x

419

Voice: abhinetri films and, 167; acousmatic, 161, 162; actress and, 147, 159–60, 160, 161, 163–64; Awaaz and, 143; court case and, 153–54; disembodied, 149, 150, 162; embodied, 145, 158; eroticism and, 163–64; gendered, 147, 172; materiality and, 162; mediated, 146, 151–52, 157, 160, 170, 177; microphone and, 156–60, 180, 182; monologue and, 353n4; speeches, lectures and, 154–55; telephone and, 151–52; theater and, 148, 149, 154–55, 158–59. See also Radio Voice test, 40, 159–60, 182 Wadia, J. B. H., 123, 293, 362n40 Wadia Movietone, 126, 199, 205, 303; Lal-E-Yaman and, 27, 123, 155; stunts and, 205 Wadkar, Hansa, 182 Waiting: bodily risk and, 41; of cine-worker, 15–16, 41, 312; struggle and, 285–87 Where Goest Thou Mr. Civilization?, 128 Whirlwind. See Vantolio Why Become an Actress?. See Actress Kyon Bani?

420

Ind e x

Why Husbands go Astray?. See Gunsundari Whyte, Dave, 292, 294 Wilson, Elizabeth, 332n54; Sphinx in the City by, 29 Wirsching, Joseph, 130 Women, 323; class and, 33, 165, 166–67, 177, 234, 306; in Hollywood, 281; labor and, 372n15; Manto and, 11–12, 28–30; propaganda and, 333n61; public, 26; as storywriters, 351n94; wages of, 8; working, 29. See also Actress Worker. See mazdoor Wrestling, 195 Writer-director model, 138, 139–40; at Ranjit Movitone, 133; at Sagar Film Company, 133–34 Yajnik, Indulal, 253 Yashraj Studios, 269 Zabak. See Kureishi, Zahir Zarina, 83 Zebunissa, 165 Zhen, Zhang, 329n29 Zubeida, 32

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