OPENING SCENES

Debashree Mukherjee tells the story of how the Hindi film industry came of age in pre-independent India

- Jai Arjun Singh

In one of the more engaging chapters of this book about Bombay’s “cineecology”, Debashree Mukherjee examines the larger significance of the hunger strike by the actress Shanta Apte against Prabhat Studios, Poona, in 1939. Part of what Apte was protesting was the de-humanization of the cine workers, treated as no different from inanimate machinery. “Exhaustion/ Thakaan” is the chapter title and, in a recent promotional event, Mukherjee mentioned two keywords that help denote how film work is different from other kinds of work: exhaustion and waiting. Waiting to be called, waiting for lighting, waiting outside a vanity room.

The Apte story is just one of the many sub-narratives that make up this wide-ranging academic work that studies Bombay cinema as a site of production—focusing on the industry as it developed between the “transitional” period spanning the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Bombay Hustle is divided into two parts: the first is a macro view of the industry—the organizational efforts, the financing, the technical practices—while the second is a more intimate view, focused on the bodies and energies that flow through the world of film production. How did Bombay become such a pre-eminent film center? When did work practices and aesthetics start to crystallize into the things we recognise (and even take for granted) in the industry of today? These are among the book’s foundational questions.