Bombay Hustle Making Movies in A Colonial City by Debashree Mukherjee

B O M B AY H U ST L E
Film and Culture
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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
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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 xi
Introduction | Mapping a Cine-Ecology 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 325
Bibliography 381
Index 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 knowl-
edge of cinema but with her commitment to screening films as a mode
of public scholarship. At Delhi University, I first understood that femi-
nism 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 film-
makers 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 read-
ing. 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 Chat-
terjee, Gil Hochberg, Sudipta Kaviraj, Mana Kia, Timothy Mitchell,
Sheldon Pollock, Jennifer Wenzel, and Syed Akbar Zaidi enthusiasti-
cally 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, Ste-
fan 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 xiii
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 Abra-
ham, 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 Fel-
lowship; 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 Leven-
thal 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 (Univer-
sity 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 xv
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 con-
tained 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, wait-
ing. 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. Judg-
ing by the shorts and his location within this spatial field, our anony-
mous 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 mate-
rial 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 strug-
gle, 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 his-
torically 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 environ-
ments 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 provi-
sional 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, infra-
structures, ideologies, actors, and climates that swirl around the film
2 In t ro du c t i on | M ap p i n g a C i n e - E co l o g y
image in locations where filmmaking and film consumption are promi-
nent 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 cine-
ecology 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 lin-
guistic 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 “respect-
able” 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 end-
ing 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 nine-
teenth 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 3
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 produc-
tion 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 extrapola-
tions permeated the cine-ecology in its monetary, infrastructural, tech-
nological, 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 hur-
riedly, 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 imme-
diate 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 Int ro du c t i on | M ap p i n g a C i n e - E co l o g y
national-corporeal strength, or impassioned film dialogues that reiter-
ated the discourse of freedom, Bombay cinema in this period is unmis-
takably 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 infrastruc-
ture, methods, and audiences. One of its main tasks was to assess the
state of film censorship across British India. Even though the commis-
sion’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 maneu-
vered 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 moder-
nity. Filmic protagonists in the trendy “social films” of the 1930s were
required to prove their continuity with global icons of fashion and prog-
ress as a measure of national worthiness, even as they had to indicate
some level of local resistance to foreign influences. This led to interest-
ing on-screen contradictions. If heterosocial college education, free-
spirited 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 bina-
ries.9 It also created one of the most vexing problems of India’s film
In tr o du ction 5
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 con-
cerns about cinema as contagion were founded on salacious extrapola-
tions from scenes of on-screen intimacy, the participation of women
In tr o du ction 7
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 cur-
rent 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 individu-
als’ 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 mobi-
lization. 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 Int ro du c t i on | M ap p i n g a C i n e - E co l o g y
political turmoil to render film workers as intensely vulnerable and
peculiarly mobile. This precarious mobility will be on prominent dis-
play 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 spectac-
ular 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 cin-
ema variously connoted the built space of a theater, the shared experi-
ence of a darkened auditorium, a frisson of illicitness, a vision of moder-
nity, 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 assem-
blage 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 9
high school years in the city. But navigating urban space as a media pro-
fessional was quite different. My journeys through the city involved
work inside studios and on film sets, shooting on streets and from roof-
tops, 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 intu-
ition 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 Church-
gate 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 tra-
versed 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 out-
side 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 mod-
ern world as deeply enwrapped with a techno-industrial assemblage
dedicated to creating fictional representations of the world. The prac-
tices 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 cam-
era 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 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
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 pro-
tections 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, com-
prises the set of daily gestures she uses as she interacts with the techni-
cal objects and geographical particularities of her cine-ecology. These
gestures take place within overlapping regimes of value that commer-
cially appraise the significance of work along parameters such as pro-
ductivity, 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 elec-
tric train from Filmistan and reach home by 6pm. But on that par-
ticular 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 11
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 prac-
tices 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, try-
ing 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 proces-
sual 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 con-
trolled light, color, and noise conditions. The cinematographer and the
camera are defined by their relation to each other but are also depen-
dent 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 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
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 con-
temporary film production. Filmmaking is viewed as a large-scale cor-
porate 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 econ-
omy 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 13
of industry that keeps their labor hidden.21 A third approach to produc-
tion 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 imbrica-
tion 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 com-
bined 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 introduc-
tion. 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 inani-
mate 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 imper-
ative 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 ani-
mal lives.
The historical film worker engaged in the practice of making mov-
ies is not a unified, stable subject but an unfolding figure gradually
moving toward individuation. Here I draw on the concept of individua-
tion as theorized by Gilbert Simondon, whose emphasis was on the pro-
cessual and the emergent, on ontogenesis rather than ontology.25 Indi-
viduation 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 film-
making 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 cre-
ative 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 indi-
viduation are deeply situated practices that foreground corporeal-
affective vulnerability. Some of these actors are also silhouetted charac-
ters, 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 self-
definition, 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 technol-
ogy 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 eco-
nomic contingencies. Cinema as production experience invited work-
ers, then and now, to imagine new horizons for the self, marking the
labor of filmmaking with a particular futurity. Indeed, in the frag-
mented archive of Indian film history, as well as in twenty-first-century
In tr o du ction 15
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 experi-
ence. The durational experience of waiting combines with the recursiv-
ity 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 Chin-
choli 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 real-
ized that past forms of cinema linger in the material spaces of the con-
temporary 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
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 cine-
ecology 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 influen-
tial 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, con-
sumerist 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 imag-
ining. 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 17
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 myr-
iad contradictions of the city. Informality exists in Mumbai’s contem-
porary cine-ecology right next to corporatization. Just walk through
Andheri West and you will see that multimillion-dollar corporate stu-
dios can exist cheek-by-jowl with numerous one-room production com-
panies 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 sys-
tems” 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 pro-
duction 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 produc-
tion companies, such as Imperial, Wadia, Mohan, Circo, New Theatres,
Bhavnani, National, Sudama, and Filmistan, make frequent appear-
ances 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
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 archi-
val protagonists, I realized that they simultaneously inhabited, pro-
duced, 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 assem-
blage with permeable boundaries, dependent on the continuous
exchange of energies between its constituents; a necessarily mixed envi-
ronment wherein rational agentive decisions oriented to the future run
parallel with adaptive choices based on immediate constraints and exi-
gencies of circumstance. Thus I take seriously an observation from 1940
claiming that “the Indian motion picture industry is a living and grow-
ing 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 pro-
duce 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 19
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 inter-
ests, and some luck. The early talkie industry in Bombay was a loose
conglomeration of production concerns with no standardized produc-
tion 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 con-
tinuity, genres like the social, specialist profiles such as assistant direc-
tors, and film industry associations started to stabilize. This was a time
marked by financial, material, and industrial precarity—open, there-
fore, 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 rationaliza-
tion 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 cin-
ema.” 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
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, the-
ater, advertising, and architecture and was fundamentally indebted to
their existing infrastructural advantages. A cine-ecological approach
privileges historical specificity over medium specificity, locational spec-
ificity over a desire for some impossibly fixed, transhistorical, and uni-
versal 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 empha-
sis here is not on continuity/discontinuity but on simultaneity; as par-
ticular 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 recog-
nize 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 defi-
nitely 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 21
dealing with modern times as distinguished from mythological and his-
torical 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 impor-
tant 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)
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 indus-
try, 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 con-
tested ideas of developmental “time lag” in the supposedly linear march
of modernity within the “homogeneous empty time” of Western his-
toricist thought.38 The traditional view held that modernity happened
“first in Europe, then elsewhere,” and the rest of the world was con-
signed to an “imaginary waiting room of history,” waiting to properly
enter into the modern.39 Postcolonial theory has worked hard to dis-
mantle these tendencies of negative comparison by reconsidering the
very category of “modernity” itself; be it multiple, contested, or contra-
dictory. In this book I demonstrate that comparisons with the Holly-
wood 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 becoming-
modern, many of which were directly influenced by successful prece-
dents in other parts of the film-producing world—from Los Angeles to
Berlin to Moscow. Far from being an untranslatable indigenous pecu-
liarity, Bombay’s cine-ecology enthusiastically borrowed from, appro-
priated, 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 Stu-
dios 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 23
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 unre-
markable archipelago of seven minor islands right up to the eighteenth
century. It was only after a major land reclamation project that con-
nected 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 com-
mercial 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 rehabili-
tation 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 activi-
ties 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
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 every-
day expression to the quilted fabric that constituted Bombay’s local cul-
ture.44 Besides, Hindi-Urdu films were made in Lahore too, while Cal-
cutta 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 25
subcontinental center for modern finance capital, anti-imperialism,
gender transformations, and cultural experimentation. The late colonial
city elicited multifarious and paradoxical responses to urban moder-
nity. 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 ener-
gies 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, nov-
els, 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, photogra-
pher, 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 repercus-
sions on Bombay’s trade and finance networks, especially in cotton and
bullion. These networks were crucial to financing the local film indus-
try 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 antico-
lonial 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 move-
ment. 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.
The city’s cotton industry emerged as the leading indigenous indus-
try in the country. With the growth of this major industry, thousands of
workers entered and reshaped the city. While Bombay’s cotton capital-
ists sought to manage the labor force using modern methods of ratio-
nalization, labor grew increasingly restless with poor working condi-
tions 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, headquar-
tered in Bombay, combined with local and community-based trade
organizations to create India’s largest group of radicalized and orga-
nized workers unions. Politically progressive newspapers regularly cov-
ered stories about labor conditions, millworkers’ wages, and union
activities. Social reformers wrote reports on the abysmal living condi-
tions of the urban working classes. The mazdoor (worker) became a
symbol of subaltern agency and revolutionary potential in daily discus-
sion 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 equip-
ment 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 27
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 fea-
tures 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
are these women? Are they aberrations of city life or a figment of a writ-
er’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 pat-
terns, 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 discon-
certing 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, Eliz-
abeth Wilson goes to the heart of the matter: “The city offers untram-
meled sexual experience; in the city the forbidden—what is most feared
and desired—becomes possible.” Wilson goes on to describe how sev-
eral 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 politi-
cal 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
In tr o du ction 29
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 rep-
resents 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 dis-
tinction between the public and the private.59
The film actress is a recurring figure in this book and starkly illus-
trates contemporaneous anxieties about women’s work in the cine-
ecology (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 cer-
tainty and talks of a faith-based “Partition” exacerbated communal ten-
sions, 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
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 rul-
ing 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 auto-
mobiles, 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 plea-
sures 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 contin-
ued 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 pos-
sessions from chiffon sarees to French perfumes. Salaries of actresses
soon became a matter of urban folklore. Judging from a variety of com-
parative 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 gen-
dered work in the city. In each chapter we meet a motley group of
women who posed a perplexing challenge to Indian society in their
newfound role as film professionals and cine-workers. Female cine-
workers 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 tak-
ing 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 criti-
cal to the economic, organizational, and social futures of Bombay stu-
dios. But still, much like Manto’s shikari aurat, the female film profes-
sional 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 pos-
sible to keep women front and center while in others it has not.
The levels of embodied precarity across classes of female cine-
workers 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 com-
plaint 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 char-
acter 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. Sepa-
rated 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 33
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 fix-
ture 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 per-
cent of the Bombay film industry’s output from two decades is available
to us for research and scholarship. Film prints have been lost in acciden-
tal studio fires, through industry neglect and deterioration, or by delib-
erate recycling to extract silver from the nitrate base. There is a slim
chance that some of these lost films have survived in archives and dis-
tribution offices in East Africa or other parts of the world where dia-
sporic 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 col-
lectively reconsidering what an archive of Indian cinema might consti-
tute. 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
pioneering analyses of the industrial, social, technological, and aes-
thetic significance of early cinema in India; Stephen P. Hughes’s detailed
histories of urbanism and movie going in Madras; Priya Jaikumar’s crit-
ical reassessment of British colonial policies on Indian cinema and the
racial-spatial imaginations of India on film; Neepa Majumdar’s prob-
lematization 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 cin-
ema, photography, literature, and theater, complicating the origin nar-
ratives 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. Theo-
dore 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 forma-
tion 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 end-
less process of coaxing up images of the real.”70 For example, in
In tr o du ction 35
chapter 3 I join atmospheric descriptions of Bombay’s soundscape in
novels and memoirs with radio broadcast timetables, colonial surveil-
lance 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 pub-
licity 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 sim-
plest 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 Man-
to’s ethnographic fiction and Shanta Apte’s extraordinary political writ-
ing, 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 unex-
pected tales of human creativity, collaboration, and heartbreak in the
service of cinema. They give us mediated access to a sensual and vis-
ceral history of film as work. Court trials and police cases form a signifi-
cant archive of irruptive presence in Bombay Hustle—testifying to the
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 disci-
plines, 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 interpre-
tation of archival photographs. Chapter 1 visually maps the dense net-
works 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 hand-
drawn 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 first-
hand experience of film work as a sensory route into the past, commit-
ted 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 schol-
ars 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 37
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, tech-
nical, and acoustic practices that enabled the consolidation of Bombay’s
talkie film landscape. These three chapters look at networks, infrastruc-
tures, 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 think-
ing 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 protag-
onists anchor each chapter—such as an ambitious film exhibition in
1939 or an insolvency court case from 1941—or incipient historical fig-
ures 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 colo-
nial 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
entities. Thus the tension between control and contingency that is cen-
tral 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 activ-
ity, 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 prac-
tices premised on speculation, an openness that attracted a nascent
group of entrepreneurs who were sensitive to increasing colonial scru-
tiny 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 spec-
ulative 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 dubi-
ous 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 spec-
tacular 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 estab-
lish 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. Colonial-
ism, capitalism, and nationalism come together in this chapter under
the sign of science to shape the discursive and productive future of cin-
ema 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 scientific-
industrial transformations of the cine-ecology.
In tr o du ction 39
Chapter 3 looks at the drive for industrial legitimacy from the per-
spective 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 speech-
making, 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 nervous-
ness about voice tests, and new affective and gestural exertions were
required to act before a microphone. These emerging machinic encoun-
ters produced energies of their own. Part 2, “Energy: Intimate Strug-
gles,” 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 dis-
cuss 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 pro-
moting 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 aes-
thetics of vitality. In chapter 4 I read the recurrence of bodily attitudes,
postures, and narratives of vitality in 1930s cinema as an attempt to
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 theo-
rize 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 commer-
cial image-making in India. A key protagonist in this chapter is the star-
actress Shanta Apte, whose career and activism allow us an unprece-
dented 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 under-
stand Apte’s defensive insistence on maintaining ontological and agen-
tial 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 produc-
tivity 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 vio-
lence. As the show goes on, certain bodies bear the violent force of
temporal incommensurability. We encounter historical figures who
In tr o du ction 41
continue to dominate contemporary Mumbai’s film landscape—fans,
extras, background dancers, stunt artistes—albeit as shadow imaginar-
ies 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 transna-
tional 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 occa-
sional 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 negotia-
tion, 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 envi-
ronments in the production of narrative media and enduring imaginar-
ies 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.
PA RT O N E
Elasticity
Infrastructural Maneuvers
Everything seems elastic.

—Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, 1951
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 consid-
ered “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 empha-
sis on a frenzied form of communications activity reliant on technologi-
cal 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 net-
work 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 mass-
printed 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 per-
sistently 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 govern-
ment 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 dis-
tinctions in the very shape of its being. The entire morphology of Bom-
bay’s talkie cine-ecology, embracing content, form, community, and
capital, embodied the inseparability of culture and economy, private
and public.
46 El a s t i c i t y
figure 1.1 A broker makes a hand signal while receiving updates on the tele-
phone. From the Bombay Stock and Cotton Exchange series by Margaret Bourke-
White, 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 specula-
tive 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 opportu-
nity for film practitioners who infused the new talkie form with a spec-
ulative momentum that was critical to its consolidation. The imagina-
tive 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. Ety-
mologically, 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 cal-
culations of producers to daily wage workers’ anxieties about landing
the next temporary film gig. Each of these historical players demon-
strated “a willingness to entertain ideas that cannot yet be empirically
established.”9
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 stu-
dio 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 corpora-
tization, 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 com-
plaint 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 expo-
nentially 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, high-
interest 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 resound-
ingly 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 49
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 contin-
uum between filmic fictions and material practices geared toward con-
juring capital in a colonial economy. Next I analyze a court case that
frames film production itself as speculative activity. A number of strate-
gies 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 fundamen-
tally volatile production economy. I consider the role of speculative cot-
ton 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 exam-
ine 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 pre-
fixed 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 fac-
tors. Soon, however, futures markets, or what is colloquially referred to
as the satta bazaar, emerged as prime venues for speculators uninter-
ested 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 com-
prise “fictitious” commodity forms, financial contracts based on notional
values that are less real as compared to physical goods produced by
human labor. Fictitious though they seem, I approach futures contracts
and a range of speculative practices allied with these financial instru-
ments 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 diversi-
fied commodity production, use of the film star as capital, and trust-
based social networks for capital generation. These financial practices
were geographically rooted, linked with the exigencies of war, agricul-
ture, 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 spe-
cific 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 con-
tingencies 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 econ-
omy. Synopses and reviews of lost films of the era present fictitious capi-
tal as a site of opportunity as well as calamity.
Economic historians of Bombay have studied the timeline of capi-
talism, 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
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 retribu-
tion 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 expand-
ing 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 performa-
tivity and social nature of finance capital, which needs to narrate trajec-
tories of the future in order to solicit investments in the present. In a
special dossier on speculation, the editors suggest that speculative prac-
tices in India today are “often driven by the dreamscape of media imagi-
naries. 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 pre-
dictive 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 opti-
mism about a democratizing financial sphere to finger-wagging moral-
izing about the evil of gambling (fig. 1.2). In this manner, Bombay cin-
ema 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
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 docu-
mented 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 sim-
ilarly loses his inheritance. Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929), an Indo-
British 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
far back as the epic Mahabharata, where it figured both as entertain-
ment 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 pro-
tect 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 tech-
nologies 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 mid-
dle 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 specu-
lation, 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 wager-
ing (based on chance) in Bombay State as a means to discourage indige-
nous 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 eco-
nomic threat posed by native speculators. My research shows that colo-
nial discrimination against certain forms of wagering continued right
through the interwar period. Despite the best efforts of the Bombay Cot-
ton 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 cir-
cumspection, 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 fre-
quent 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 mis-
understanding 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, bank-
ruptcy 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 govern-
ment 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
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, Pra-
fulla, who has made a name in the stock market. His chief rival, Milap-
chand, 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, self-
reflexively 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 news-
papers 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 socio-
economic realities of their immediate context. They produced an inven-
tory 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 appropria-
tion 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 cen-
tury, involving stolen checks, forged certificates, embezzlement of
funds, misappropriation of funds by bank managers, dummy corpora-
tions, and prominent suicides driven by insolvency. Several films por-
trayed bankruptcy as an imminent urban tragedy, leading either to pun-
ishment within the colonial-legal system and humiliation within the
community or to suicide.27 “Creditors” are therefore a constant irritant
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 stock-
holders 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 per-
ceptions that financial matters were obscurantist and opaque, and fur-
ther, that the experts who were trained in these esoteric knowledge sys-
tems, 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
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 impossi-
ble 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 specu-
lation in film production, as well as measures commonly adopted to
manage risk.
Circo, or the Cine Industries and Recording Company, was regis-
tered in April 1937 as a public limited company under the Indian Com-
panies 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 argu-
ments, Justice Chagla refused to “speculate” and stated that the prose-
cution 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 para-
mount 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 cine-
ecology—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
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 pro-
ductions 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 dis-
continue production activities despite showing great commercial prom-
ise 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 grow-
ing 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 infra-
structures 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 sce-
nario 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
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 ini-
tially established with modest funds raised by “founders and prospec-
tive shareholders,” says Xuelei Huang, and “this feature was characteris-
tic of the financial situation of the early Chinese film industry.”36 The
situation changed after 1927, when capital was available through gov-
ernment banks under a nationalist leadership keen to encourage propa-
ganda 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 spec-
ulative trading, to high-interest loans pulled from the Bombay region’s
traditional credit markets, films were financed by multiple, often unsta-
ble 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
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 ini-
tial 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 reju-
venate their business. This is how Circo came into being.
Circo was started by a Bombay-based board of principal sharehold-
ers, 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 skep-
ticism 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
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 direc-
tors 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 “realiza-
tions 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, some-
times 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 prepa-
ration 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.
What the defense counsel is saying here is that films are peculiar com-
modities; strange not only in terms of their unpredictable futures but
also because of the elastic duration of profit accrual. This creates a flex-
ible timeline of one to three years during which the film is “exploited” to
its maximum capacity. Owing to this temporal delay between produc-
tion 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 antic-
ipatory 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 hand-
ful of prints would move to second- and third-tier markets in second-
run 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 high-
lighted the slow rhythm of returns as one of the factors that kept inves-
tors 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 produc-
tion? Producers could not afford to keep their production and staff sus-
pended in the interim. Some studios borrowed money against perma-
nent 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 pay-
ment 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 “corporatiza-
tion” of a film company, older financial practices continued unabated.
Even though the Companies Act deemed that a concern could not bor-
row 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 com-
pany’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 dis-
tant 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 specula-
tive 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
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 Bom-
bay 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 nine-
teenth century, but it too played a major role in consolidating and con-
firming Bombay’s status as a modern metropolis with a sway over the
late colonial “national” imagination. These synchronically twinned tra-
jectories 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 Grieve-
son situates the rise of Hollywood within a complex matrix of “inter-
locking relations among telecommunications, media corporations,
and finance capital.”51 He argues that Hollywood’s much-touted sys-
tem 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 side-
ways at the dominant models of business that surround it. Bombay’s
cine-ecology had deep roots in regional networks of speculative trad-
ing, 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 economi-
cally” 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 out-
side the purview of colonial economic regulation. As I will detail in
chapter 2, Indian cinema’s most prominent nodes of growth (studios,
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 govern-
mentally undervalued—made it a prime location for multiple financial
interests to converge.
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 develop-
ment, and the credit economy. Scores of new banks, financial institutions,
and businesses sprang up at this time, and so high was the cotton eupho-
ria that, reportedly, “four thousand rupee shares of the Back Bay Com-
pany 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 mer-
cantile 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, financ-
ing “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, pro-
prietor of Sharda Film Company and President of the Motion Picture
Society of India (1933–34), maintained a parallel business in textile
production.57 The earliest avatar of Bombay Talkies, the “Indian
Players,” received financial backing from the cotton merchant-
turned-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 eco-
nomic 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 commod-
ity. Film was not considered a national commodity that deserved spe-
cial 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
considered as another key factor in the proliferation of intrepid, short-
lived 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 mill-
workers, 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 Mazg-
aon 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 repro-
duction 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, Khet-
wadi, 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, con-
tributing to the consolidation of the talkie cine-ecology.
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 specu-
lative practices in play during the talkie transition in Bombay. Where
Ranjit was built on merchant capital and revenues from the stock mar-
ket, 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 busi-
ness 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 exam-
ine 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 equip-
ment, rented studios, and gambled film reels; and contractual tussles
over actors poached from other studios are just some of the manifesta-
tions 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)
While all Bombay film studios were out to amass profits, none man-
aged 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 in-
house specialists and a galaxy of salaried stars, the studio was undoubt-
edly one of the most successful production ventures of the time. Set up
by local Gujarati entrepreneurs with funding from Gujarati business-
men 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 pro-
duced films under the same banner right until the 1960s. The Ranjit
story is densely woven into a tapestry of interlinking industrial narra-
tives 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 Ira-
ni’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.
Lakshmi Film Company. As luck would have it, when one of the director-
producers 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 condi-
tion 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 Ama-
rchand 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 sce-
nario for Samrat Shiladitya (M. Bhavnani, 1926), starring Sulochana
and Gohar Mamajiwala. This first encounter with Gohar proved fortu-
itous 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 fol-
lowed 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
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 high-
lighted 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 fif-
teen, 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 Maha-
raja of Jamnagar, renowned cricketer Ranjitsinghji, also provided finan-
cial 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
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 Com-
pany. Staking everything on the sound conversion, Ranjit invested con-
siderable 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 suc-
cesses, it is surprising that Gohar and Chandulal did not have the capi-
tal 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 mak-
ing regular salary payments without the kind of delays common else-
where.78 Moreover, when the House of Kapurchand abruptly withdrew
from the film financing business, Ranjit started its own financing con-
cern alongside a new distribution company called Supreme Distribu-
tors, 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, leg-
endary 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. Chan-
dulal was not exceptional in his gambling habits; Bombay’s most pros-
perous film producer-entrepreneurs displayed similar proclivities for
risky trading. Among the many anecdotal tales about Ranjit Movi-
tone’s stupendous career is one involving Chimanlal Desai of Sagar
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 pic-
tures at an average output of six films per year. Ranjit made shrewd use
of the tiered structures of exhibition and distribution across the coun-
try. 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 cam-
eras 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 com-
pany 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
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 entrepre-
neurial history, submerged as it might be under the tragic-romantic
narrative of the heroic gambler. Shah himself encouraged such myth-
making in his later years, in statements like this one: “I have speculated
for incredible stakes on the stock exchange. I have won and lost for-
tunes 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: Mas-
ter 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, Chi-
manlal Desai, claimed that it was the very same stars, once recast as
freelancers, who were to blame for the studio’s misfortunes. His retro-
spective 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 pro-
duction economy. As we saw in the Circo court case, stars served as an
important stabilizing mechanism in a highly volatile speculative econ-
omy. 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 his-
tory 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 long-
enduring 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 com-
plete 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
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 manage-
ment experience in varied industrial sectors before they decided on film
distribution. Desai had dabbled in the coal, textile, and printing indus-
tries, while Patel came from cycle distribution and was based in Banga-
lore.94 Under their management, Select Pictures is said to have become
the foremost film distribution company in India’s “South circuit,” a dis-
tribution territory that included Madras and Rangoon. The South cir-
cuit 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 Impe-
rial Film Company was one of their major suppliers. In 1929, timed with
the onset of the Great Depression, Imperial’s production output drasti-
cally dropped. Running low on Bombay films, Chimanlal Desai hurried
to Bombay to see what had transpired. In recompense for the dimin-
ished supply of films, Ardeshir Irani offered Desai and Patel a partner-
ship 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 Com-
pany. Presumably, the two concerns continued to share amicable rela-
tions 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 perti-
nent to the study of speculative financial practices: the high speculative
value of stars-as-capital, and the industrial strategy of horizontal inte-
gration 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 modern-
ize their business practices often meant a stricter control of their star
assets through legal means such as binding contracts and punitive liti-
gation (more in chapters 3 and 5). The popular stunt actor Master Vithal,
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-e-
Azam (Great Leader) of Pakistan, and they won the case after agreeing
to increase Vithal’s salary severalfold.97 The principal victor in this con-
test 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 entre-
preneur who began his film career as an exhibitor, was making aggres-
sive attempts toward horizontal integration by way of starting up, part-
nering, or investing in production companies. Horizontal integration
refers to the creation or acquisition of multiple production units to
produce similar commodities, in this case, films. This business practice
is geared toward a monopolization of the existing market for a particu-
lar 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 exhibition-
distribution 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 interdepen-
dencies 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 chan-
nel 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 signifi-
cant 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
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 wran-
glings 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, Sab-
ita 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, Fazalb-
hoy’s Sound Studio and General Films. Sagar, which had been formed as
a branch company in a drive to integrate horizontally, was now attempt-
ing its own form of horizontal integration. National Studios was estab-
lished as a public limited liability company, designed to be an innova-
tive experiment with Hollywood-style corporate structures of finance
and organization.98 The newly formed Investment Corporation of India,
run by the Tatas, stepped into film financing for the first time by under-
writing 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 dis-
tribution 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 central-
ized 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 dis-
agreements over creative control, forming Mehboob Productions in
1942 with partial finances from V. Shantaram’s new distribution con-
cern, 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
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 cou-
ple 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 emi-
nent 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 Bom-
bay was inevitable. In fact, the BT story highlights Bombay city’s con-
nectedness 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 rela-
tions of friendship and disappointment, promise and anxiety, as a mot-
ley 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 entan-
glement of credit cultures, entrepreneurial collaboration, and circula-
tory 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
figure 1.8 Network map of Bombay Talkies.
new medium of cinema and set about writing Indian subjects for for-
eign 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 Babels-
burg, hoping for another German coproduction. By 1929 Rai was mired
in financial difficulties and threatening to sue UFA on nuanced contrac-
tual 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 inspec-
tor general of police.106 He now returned to his native Punjab to look
for business opportunities. Significantly, he chose to start his prospect-
ing in Bombay. During one of his railway journeys to the city, around
1931, Chuni Lall serendipitously met Dewan Sharar, an early collabora-
tor of Himansu Rai and a founder-director of Himansu Rai Indo-
International 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
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
Papers may come and go; Constitutions may arise, fail or succeed; Inde-
pendence 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 knowl-
edge 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 inves-
tor, 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 com-
panies, all buoyed by the fact that “Indian pictures are having a very
good market much more than most of the first class American and Eng-
lish 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
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 iden-
tified 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 vis-
iting” in order to promote Karma in uncharted territories.116 In mid-
1932 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
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 pre-
dictive 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 let-
ter, “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 spec-
ulative enterprise.123
The Dietze Archive holds several anguished, desperate, and pan-
icked 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 com-
mercial 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 producer-
director 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 commercial-
institutional success. These intertwined biographical and institutional
details from Bombay Talkie’s prehistory also give us a sense of the geo-
graphical 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 founder-
members 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
according to the imperatives of exploiting maximum value from this
large-scale production infrastructure. Not only did the studio immedi-
ately 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 “Edu-
cational, 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 repre-
sentative of the managing agents. Sir Chimanlal H. Setalvad was chair-
man 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 Hyder-
abad’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 particu-
lar, had the unique distinction of holding the largest number of direc-
torships in Bombay; that is, being on the largest number of boards of
directors, at least from 1924 to 1932.129 Business historian Claude Mar-
kovits 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
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 infra-
structures during India’s volatile talkie transition. All the biggest stu-
dios 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 net-
works 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
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 tele-

scopic 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 pro-
duction 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 econ-
omy, 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 connec-
tions quite clearly. As a distinctive cine-ecology emerged in 1930s Bom-
bay, speculative infrastructures of finance, affect, and business organi-
zation 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 cir-
culation 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 bar-
riers to entry. The most striking feature of the Hindi film industry has
been its exceedingly entrepreneurial and decentralized nature, consist-
ing of hundreds of independent producers, distributors, exhibitors,
and financiers.”136 It is important to note here that the talkie cine-
ecology, 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 produc-
tion, and social influence. Funding from maharajas coexisted with loans
from newly established indigenous financial agencies; Gujarati modern-
ist 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 elec-
tric 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 con-
cerns, and studio rental services, facts that indicate the kind of conver-
gence 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 pro-
duction control to their corporate partners. Studios such as BT, National
Studios, and Circo followed the managing agency model that was domi-
nant in Indian business across urban industrial centers, wherein control
was largely divorced from ownership.137 Shareholders and directors pro-
vided 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
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 national-
ization, 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 Bom-
bay 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 musi-
cal tropes. In India, sound unleashed a multilingual film production
landscape of a hundred voices. Bombay’s overwhelming choice of Hin-
dustani 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 indus-
tries 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 col-
laborative 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, orga-
nization, production, or even location.140 This ecology of shifting borders
was nonetheless recognizable, even in the 1930s, as an individuating
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 rhizomati-
cally 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, lin-
guistic, 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 affilia-
tions were vital to the lateral spread of Bombay’s cine-ecology. Sagar
and Ranjit saw a dominance of Gujarati managers, directors, and tech-
nicians, 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 word-
of-mouth, an assortment of practices were at work in Bombay’s early
talkie industry. To view the 1930s–1940s film industry as an open ecol-
ogy is to acknowledge the processual flux of practices, influences, and
protagonists. Although production structures collapsed or disinte-
grated, 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.
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 cos-
tume 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 cos-
tumes 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; sched-
uling 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 financ-
ing 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, sound-
proofed 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, lyri-
cists, 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 observa-
tions, making a statement such as “the Indian film industry is disorga-
nized” 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 spec-
tacular 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 exacer-
bated 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, aes-
thetic, 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 99
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 indi-
viduation, 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 scien-
tific 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, differ-
entiation 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 Lar-
kin 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 indus-
trial organization. Further, it opens up a transmedial history of knowl-
edge practices, cultural techniques, rhetorical devices, and paper-based
technologies that were critical to the productivity and meaning of
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 English-
language title of this chapter—Scientific Desires—references the contem-
poraneous 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 produc-
tion 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 system-
atization 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
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 impor-
tant 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 govern-
ment 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 govern-
ment 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 receiv-

ing 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 Cen-
tral Exchequer by way of import duty on exposed and unexposed
films and indirectly also a large amount from income tax, enter-
tainment 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 differ-
ent audience—urban film-going publics with increasingly nationalist
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 per-
fectly 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 emerg-
ing 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 respect-
ability 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 histori-
ans 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 Visva-
nathan 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 estab-
lishment of orientalist amateur societies to the institution of universi-
ties 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 indige-
nous 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, sci-
entists, and colonial administrators ultimately came to agree that the
way forward lay in scientific planning, rationalization, and heavy indus-
trialization.13 Looking back at this history in 1932, scientist P. C. Ray
summed up the scenario thus: “In the days of the [swadeshi movement]
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 standard-
ization. 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 prin-
ciples.” 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 daz-
zling 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 simultane-
ous functions as authoritative sign and ambivalent reality, science col-
ored the talkie transition in significant ways. Contemporaneous dis-
course 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 enter-
prise 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 assem-
blage. 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 con-
vened” in 1927.17 Following from this singular experience of intensive
data gathering and colonial scrutiny, India’s producers, distributors, and
exhibitors tried to organize themselves into official coalitions of busi-
ness 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 all-
India film producers, exhibitors, distributors, artistes, and technicians
that started in 1935.
In 1935 the IMPC hosted India’s first “Photo-Cine-Radio Exhibi-
tion,” where audiences were invited to marvel at equipment and tech-
nologies 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 engi-
neer, statesman, and author of the agenda-setting book Planned Econ-
omy 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 cin-
ema with industrial progress and nationalist self-reliance, the exhibi-
tion 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 Church-
gate 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 accommo-
dated. The “streets” were named after ten prominent film companies:
Bombay Talkies Street, Sagar Street, Wadia Street, Minerva Street,
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” broad-
cast 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 broad-
casts that were relayed across the exhibition grounds on Phillips loud-
speakers.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 extrava-
ganza. Lightweight cement (Feathercrete), electric bulbs (Philips,
Bijlee), fire-proof steel equipment (Allwyn, Noble, Godrej, Yahya), and
high-speed, noiseless electric fans (India Electric Works) all jostled for
space to illustrate that this twenty-five-year-old industry relied on mul-
tiple technological innovations suited to an energy-intensive, heat-
producing, noise-sensitive, and inflammable medium. As an exhilarat-
ing mix of art, science, commerce, and entertainment, the exhibition
successfully mapped the intricate network of services and infrastruc-
tures 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 Colo-
nial 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 dis-
plays. 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 ped-
agogy 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 per-
ceived as scientific sites for visual pedagogy. Gandhi was clear that as a
visual genre, the exhibition was “not a cinema,” “not a mere ocular dem-
onstration to be dismissed out of our minds immediately.” For him, cin-
ema 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 evi-
dentiary 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
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 spectacu-
lar 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 classifi-
cation 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 ambiva-
lent 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 plea-
sure in the sensory-technological novelties of the medium itself.30 Such a
perspective aligns the film viewer with the fairground attendee as a self-
conscious consumer of thrilling attractions. The exhibitionary mode,
premised on display, is thus formally aligned with the pleasures of cin-
ema. 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
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 materi-
als, 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 document-
ing, 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
consumers enthralled as much by films as by the wonder of high-tech
local film production. Technology, dramatized through display, was evi-
dence of the power and future of Indian film entrepreneurship and capi-
tal. 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 enter-
tainment form with ticketed entry and daily film screenings, dance
shows, and music recitals. Advertisements announced the heady juxta-
position 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 neces-
sary 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 consump-
tion. The exhibition of 1939 mobilized the elevated status of science in
colonial India to confer a weighty legitimacy to cinema and its practitio-
ners, 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 sen-
sory. Electricity accelerated a leisure economy premised on the con-
sumption 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
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 twenty-
four-hour day and recalibrated the meaning of darkness.38 It is worth
noting that though the Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways Com-
pany came into being in 1905 and the first cotton mills switched to elec-
tric power in 1915, most film studios in Bombay were not outfitted with
electric carbon arc lamps until the 1930s and continued to rely on day-
light, 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 obsta-
cles 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 neighbor-
hoods 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, politi-
cal leaders, and visiting foreign celebrities were regularly invited to tour
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 stu-
dio premises. On receiving this request, Devika Rani writes a quick note
to her secretary: “Yes, answer using the word Jwar Bhata [their upcom-
ing 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 alto-
gether 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
the shape of raw stock and licenses but were also designed as displays of
a well-oiled organizational machine that conformed to colonial stan-
dards of scientific hygiene and hence did not need further supervision.
The display mode could invite a certain kind of attention while deflect-
ing 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 fre-
quently 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 hap-
hazard 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 com-
paratively note that the Textile Tariff Board “prescribed rationalization
as the cure for the industry’s problems” in 1927.45 Rajnarayan Chanda-
varkar 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 Win-
slow 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
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 manage-
ment in order to maximize productivity. As we will see in part 2, how-
ever, 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 com-
parative developmentalist logic against Hollywood.48 Hollywood’s leg-
endary 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 distri-
bution to exhibition. Some elements of a classical studio system were in
evidence in Bombay since the 1920s, but these coexisted alongside ad-
hoc 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 distribu-
tion and theatrical implantation in the 1920s. However, at least 45 per-
cent 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 stu-
dio, nor was there any single business model that characterized Bombay
in the “heyday of the studio system.”52
A systems approach to understanding the link between Holly-
wood’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 techno-
logical 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 character-
ize it as an immature industry or an example of “backward capital-
ism.”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 evi-
dence of a stable identity.
So what, then, qualified as a “studio” in talkie Bombay? Infrastruc-
turally, 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 compa-
nies 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 115
qualified as “studios,” and only five studios had processing laborato-
ries.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 integra-
tion in the case of Calcutta’s Madan Company, which was heavily criti-
cized in the ICC interviews as a dangerous precedent that ought to be
controlled.56 Instead, film industry leaders pushed for greater govern-
mental aid, citing examples such as Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy,
Soviet Russia, Czechoslovakia, England, and Japan as countries provid-
ing 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 ecol-
ogy 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 produc-
ers’ 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 short-
sighted financial opportunism. On the whole, contemporaneous accu-
sations 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
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 contempo-
rary Hindi film industry with insider complaints about “bound
scripts.”58 Her informants mourn the nonexistence of completed screen-
plays 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 them-
selves from the disdain-worthy norm. She usefully points to the “tre-
mendous 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 charac-
terize 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 normal-
ized 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
schedules, and shot breakdowns. As a technology for rationalized pro-
duction, 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 conti-
nuity script became a reality in Bombay only in the 1990s, with eco-
nomic 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 Thomp-
son’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 spe-
cialists, 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 late-
blooming, “not-yet” cinema, unable to adapt to Hollywood’s model of
industrial efficiency (contrary to Prasad’s avowed intentions to dis-
mantle 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
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 signifi-
cant: 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 play-
ers, preventing us from understanding the labor hierarchies and tech-
nologies of control that have governed Bombay’s film writers over
decades of commercial filmmaking.
During the early talkie years, the continuity script was an impor-
tant technological actor in the network of industrial practices that
translated writing techniques from one medium, such as literature, the-
ater, 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 devel-
opment” 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 actu-
ally 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
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
temporary English dialogues. Note the scene numbers, shot transi-
tions, and time of day, all of which allow efficient scheduling and non-
chronological 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 war-
time 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 fea-
ture, 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 produc-
tion and the stage has been reached when our shooting pro-
gramme 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.
figure 2.5 Savitri shooting program for Monday, May 17, 1935, indicating loca-
tions, 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 English-
language 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 pre-
pared for the director. It gives the story in terms of scenes or shots.”70 By
1927, classified columns in Bombay newspapers were carrying adver-
tisements 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 Sce-
nario 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 screen-
writing 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 com-
prehension of lensing and shot magnification, optical transitions and
editing.
Another recent archival discovery corroborates this view. A shoot-
ing script for the silent film Gul-e-Bakavali (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1924)
was recently translated and published in the peer-reviewed journal Bio-
Scope: South Asian Screen Studies. Part of the personal collection of
film historian Virchand Dharamsey, this script consists of a bound
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 inter-
titles in separate columns for each scene (fig. 2.6). This complete artifact
is equivalent to a continuity script. Even before the shooting script sec-
tion begins, there are pages in the notebook dedicated to cast and cos-
tume 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 Cinemato-
graph 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 fun-
damentally 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 his-
torical fragments seriously, we can assert that the productivity, com-
mercial 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 stand-
point, 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.
figure 2.6 Shooting script for Gul-e-Bakavali (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1924), repro-
duced 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 destina-
tions required for their movement. The continuity script, as an indus-
trial 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 speci-
ficity is a resolutely historical notion, its definition incessantly mutating
in various sociohistorical contexts.”76
Experiments with the continuity script led to an altered under-
standing of the screenplay as a complex technology produced by profes-
sionals. 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,” “Dia-
logues,” 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 Moviet-
one (Hunterwali, 1935), Bhavnani Productions (Jagran, 1936), and San-
geet Film Company (Jeevan Swapna, 1937). On the other hand, while we
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 stu-
dio 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 car-
ried an excerpt from what appears to be an Indian film script, outlining
scene numbers, locations, shot descriptions, shot sizes, dialogue inter-
titles, and transitions.80 From 1930 to 1931 the trade journal Cinema
published serialized “Scenarios” by one Tarit Kumar Basu, who demon-
strated an understanding of the particularities of the film script as a
genre, with details about shot size and transitions. These serialized sce-
narios 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
Continuity editing in filmmaking is designed to create a sense of seam-
less 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 view-
er’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, includ-
ing Themes, Synopsis, Treatment by Sequences, Scenario, and Conti-
nuity. 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.
2. Exterior: Long Shot 10 feet, fade in—Prabhakar and Nalini are sit-
ting on the swing taking swings.
Mix to.
3. Ext.: Medium Long Shot, 20 feet—Both taking swings with Prabha-

kar’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 roman-
tic 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 techni-
cal specialists, but in an industry that was staffed primarily by person-
nel who had learned on the job through an informal apprenticeship
model, the parameters for expert status were flexible. Until the estab-
lishment 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
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 con-
vert 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 voca-
tional legitimacy, longtime industry assistants, apprentices, and others
with practical experience applied for membership in international tech-
nical 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, cam-
era 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
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 tech-
nician 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 per-
tinently 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 prob-
lem for Chattopadhyay as the drive toward generality of technical expe-
rience 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 direc-
tor’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.
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 produc-
tion was viewed as a system that enabled efficient and streamlined pro-
duction since the same individual carried the project through from con-
ceptualization 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, adapt-
ing, 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, Chiman-
lal Luhar, Modhu Bose, and Zia Sarhadi. Interestingly, in 1939 a future
partner of Sagar strongly called out this method of production as a cost-
saving tactic that resulted in overworked directors, thin plots, and “mis-
erable” 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
silent years, Chandulal Shah claimed that “it is on record that one suc-
cessful 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 pictur-
izing 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 sched-
uling, and in-house flexible specialists available at a moment’s notice, stu-
dios 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 refer-
ence 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
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 stu-
dios 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 Chi-
manlal 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 writer-
directors, 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 con-
trolled production units also served as a laboratory for training future
specialists through apprenticeship and assistantship. The seamless reg-
ularity 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 Billimo-
ria, 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 col-
umns as it is impossible for me to reply to these letters individually, as I
am working in two pictures simultaneously.”107 From an annual produc-
tion 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 aver-
age of five films per year since 1929) and noted that such a record “is not
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 share-
holders 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, litera-
ture, 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, super-
vised set decoration, starred in films, and later served as production con-
troller 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 Film-
Aktien 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 Holly-
wood.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 compart-
mentalized, and an inflexible separation of labor was neither possible
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 fall-
outs. 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 Jay-
ant 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 Produc-
tions 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
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 cameraper-
son 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 direc-
tor 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
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 pos-
sess educational and technical qualifications are paid LESS than munic-
ipal 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 rev-
enues 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 per-
petually 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 man-
aging financial risk through increased productivity. Scientific modern-
ization was the banner under which the leading lights of the Motion
Picture Society of India launched drives to reform the workforce, mod-
ernize studio infrastructures, rationalize workflows, corporatize finan-
cial 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 family-
system.”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
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. Ulti-
mately, 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 Moviet-
one that was financed by the Tatas. The Tatas invited a “production spe-
cialist 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 Alex-
ander as a “hidden transcript for articulating power relations” between
cine-workers and management.119 Despite taking all the possible pre-
cautions 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 compa-
nies 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
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 oblit-
erated 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 respect-
ability, cultural value, moral contagion, newness, and financial instabil-
ity cohered in an uneasy equilibrium. Questions of community and
class, gender and caste played a major part in the way talent and cul-
tural 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.
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 Ken-

nedy 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, 1-2-
123, 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 differ-
ence 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 notori-
ety as the home of “nautch girls,” of workers and bourgeoisie thronging
(some boldly and others furtively) to the movie houses and kothas (cour-
tesans’ 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 clap-
ping. 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 dis-
avow. 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 bene-
fited most materially from this change, rapidly establishing itself as a
dominant film industrial and aesthetic form in the subcontinent with
wide audience reach and commercial power. While Bombay had a poly-
glot 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 tran-
sition 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 pedagogi-
cal 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 representa-
tion 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 145
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 promi-
nently 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 spec-
tacular modernity, not simply a visual modern but an audible and
declamatory modern that participated in the production of new subjec-
tivities and agonistic publics. Cinematic visions of the spectacular
speaking subject promised far more than the mediated voice—they pre-
sented 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 rig-
orously 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 techno-
aesthetic industries of salon singing, urban theater, and the gramo-
phone 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
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 sur-
veillance 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 Bom-
bay 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 lap-
ping 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 fore-
grounds the embodied listening subject. What practices of urban spati-
ality 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 recogni-
tion of their source, and his naming of their meaning demonstrate the
Voice | Aw aa z 147
fundamental contingency of sensory perception, which is dependent on
ideas of personal memory and cultural hierarchy. Bromfield’s protago-
nist 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 Hin-
dustani 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 hetero-
geneous 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 lis-
tening 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 Bom-
bay, 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 Hol-
lywood, appreciating the role of speech in a film like Give and Take
(William Beaudine, 1928), “a sparkling comedy drama which is eighty
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 emanat-
ing from a metal contraption was a repeat phenomenon across the sub-
continent as access to gramophones and radios slowly grew.18 But grad-
ually, 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 bod-
ies; 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 149
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 Termi-
nus 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 atti-
tudes toward liveness, immediacy, and acousmatic listening. To ventril-
oquize Chion, “something new made its entry with modern technolo-
gies, 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 car-
ries 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 151
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 palpa-
ble 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 listen-
ing often requires the active imagining of the voicing body and its con-
text 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 fea-
ture film, Alam Ara. The very next week, on March 23, the young anar-
chist 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 configura-
tion 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 orga-
nized 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
to mass action, labeled by the colonial administration as “inflamma-
tory,” 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 funda-
mental 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 pecu-
liar 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 pro-
liferation 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 examin-
ing the contents of the speech and establishing the accuracy of the tran-
scription.32 Bernard Bate has shown how the focus on “exact words” to
incriminate critics of the colonial administration led to the develop-
ment 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 “sound-
hand,” “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 153
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 surveil-
lance. 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 pub-
lished 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 spec-
trally 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 politi-
cal 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 enter-
tainment form, was premised on oratory and exaggerated speech per-
formance.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 ambi-
tious 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
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 crystalli-
zation when in 1934 it was reported that the nationalist leader Pandit
Madan Mohan Malviya would be writing the Hindi dialogue for a Kol-
hapur 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 talk-
ative 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 155
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” pre-
vented 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 vol-
umes. 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 possi-
ble 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 transme-
dial 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 synchro-
nization, that is, on set or on location. Playback singing, dubbing, elab-
orate background scores, and foley design, which have become
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 tech-
niques. 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 cin-
ema necessitated a heightened awareness of the acoustic environment of
production. For the first time, “the buzz of an aeroplane passing over-
head, 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 157
sparsely populated suburbs like Andheri, Goregaon, and Malad. Along-
side 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 con-
gratulated 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 single-
system 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 dif-
ferent 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 com-
petencies 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
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 transi-
tion, 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 responsi-
bility of delivering the lines in correct intonation before the cam-
era 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, Anglo-
Indian, 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 “Anglo-
Indians,” “Goans,” and “Europeans.”55 In 1924 nearly 150 telephone girls
lost their jobs as the Telephone Company took up the automatic switch-
board. 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 techno-
logical 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 159
figures 3.3a and 3.3b In publicity materials, the talkie actress was often pic-
tured as an audio-genic assemblage, posing with telephones rather than micro-
phones. 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 man-
ual published at the cusp of the talkie transition declared that “low-
pitched 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 under-
standable 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
To be clear, the new on-screen human voice was not direct but
mediated; just as ephemeral and mass reproduced as the actor’s on-
screen 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 none-
theless 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 161
material practice is critical here because it renders the speaking and lis-
tening 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 play-
back decades, which have been characterized as the era of the disembod-
ied 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 with-
holding, 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 “ambig-
uous 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 in-
between 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
power of film actresses in the 1930s with raging social anxieties about
female respectability? Talkie cinema needed the actress, talkie audi-
ences 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 argu-
mentation. 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 cine-
matic 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 163
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 nega-
tive social status in colonial India, the filmic female voice took on a
moral edge that became apparent in the first months of talkie produc-
tion. A symbol of glamor and erotic modernity since the 1920s, the film
actress embodied all the tensions of the social space of mass entertain-
ment 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 dis-
tance 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 con-
cerns of “immorality” were fraught with contradictions. Film magazines
stirred audience expectations by labeling debutante actresses as a “well-
known 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 edu-
cation 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, edi-
tor of Cinema magazine, authoritatively noted that “Nayampalli is a
Madrasi, Prithviraj is a Punjabi Hindu, Jal Merchant is a Parsi, Shanta-
kumari 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 frus-
trate 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 “dear-
est” [priya, praan-priya] during her scenes. The film producer is in
a real dilemma due to this. Silent pictures never resulted in a situ-
ation 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 twen-
tieth century, problems such as these only indicate our ancient
narrow-mindedness.68
Voice | Aw aa z 165
These comments attempted to reconcile deeply entrenched ideas about
ideal femininity, rooted in class expectations, with the urgency of artis-
tic progress. While the editor of Rangbhumi left it to the individual
actress to resolve the “dilemma,” films like Pakdaman Raqasa con-
fronted the dilemma through plot and dialogue. Abhinetri films con-
tributed 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 rhetori-
cal question of 1930s cinema.69
I use the term abhinetri film or actress film to discuss films cen-
tered on cinema stars, theater actresses, and women who pursued pub-
lic performative professions such as radio and stage singing. A subset of
the social film, the abhinetri film had transnational purchase with reso-
nances 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 circu-
late similar images of the modern woman as public performer, a glam-
orous 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 chal-
lenge 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 recur-
ring 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 indus-
trial dependence on a certain class of female performers and the
cinematic dependence on the female body as the chief sounding spec-
tacle 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 persua-
sive power of affective speech. These films often featured two proto-
types 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 star-
dom, 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 cold-
hearted 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 privi-
leged, 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 indus-
trial argumentation and the construction of the actress as an honorable
professional. Actress (Balwant Bhatt, 1934) revolves around a fictional
Voice | Aw aa z 167
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)
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 join-
ing the stage. And in Mr. X (Dwarka Khosla, 1938), the heroine, Hem-
lata, becomes an actress after her jealous husband throws her out on the
streets. When Prem recognizes his wife on stage one day he is trauma-
tized— “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 demon-
strating 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 169
The double address of the abhinetri film—a sensationalist invoca-
tion 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 listen-
ing 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 possibili-
ties for the self in a mediated and technologized modernity. A culture of
acousmatic attunement accounts for the excitement of seeing the syn-
chronized voicing body on screen and, at the same time, creates a fan-
tasy 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.
In films such as Miss 1933 (Chandulal Shah, 1933) where Gohar pleads
her own case in court (murder in self-defense); Bharat ki Beti (Preman-
kor 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 defen-
dants 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 ques-
tions of motives and ethics.78
During this period films that depended on the climactic court-
room 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 uni-
verse. 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 “dia-
logue delivery” took place within a moment of acute nationalist mass
politics. As a genre of speech, passionate oration relied on, indeed pro-
duced, a specific imagination of publics and selves in a period of inten-
sified anticolonial struggle.79
In the world outside filmic representation, the presence of women
in Indian courtrooms was recorded rather differently. The Legal Prac-
titioners (Women) Act of 1923 permitted women to practice law in
England and British India, but even India’s first female advocate, Corne-
lia 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 171
presence in courtrooms, it was mainly an opportunity to reiterate gen-
dered stereotypes of feminine bodily excess. During the Lahore trials of
Bhagat Singh and his companions, much ado was made of the “hysteri-
cal” 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, Gov-
ernment, 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 report-
age 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 contemporane-
ously 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 speak-
ing 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 Euro-
pean 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 sub-
jects present impassioned arguments in the language of the law. Speak-
ing 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
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 terminol-
ogy for documents (vakaalatnama, roz namcha) and officials (sarisht-
edaar) 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 con-
sidered 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
both are performative spaces for narrative construction and consump-
tion.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 charac-
ters 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 conversa-
tional realism. The courtroom scene, as an independent attraction
inside a film, allowed a way to circumvent this problem. Given the real-
ity of Persianized legalese spoken in the colonial court, trial scenes
enabled film writers to reference the decorative Urdu of the Parsi the-
ater 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 thrill-
ing 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 law-
yer 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 175
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 objection-
able than a legal attribution of crime. Her speech positions the listener-
spectator, whether inside the cinematic courtroom or in the movie the-
ater, as the ultimate judge. The appeal is to a public, collective conscience
that can hear the cries of the mother rather than a supposedly dispas-
sionate 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 denoue-
ment 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
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, court-
room scenes staged the paradoxical status of the actress as a genera-
tional 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, mar-
ried, and/or Hindu actresses took over the scene. While it is true that
aggressive attempts to recruit cultured actresses met with some suc-
cess, 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 con-
tain competing claims on its actresses. To go a step further, the court-
room 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 dis-
gusted 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
Voice | Aw aa z 177
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 treat-
ment 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 phys-
ical 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 notori-
ous 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 hero-
ine. 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 Knowl-
edge 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 embat-
tled but virtuous actress articulates an ongoing industrial crisis of
image for the cine-ecology’s female workforce.
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 rev-
eled in stories of transgression and projected contradictory fantasies of
virtue and vice onto the actress’s body.94 In the thick of these paradoxi-
cal pressures, the 1930s actress-as-worker was enjoined to present her
own case. Films premised on litigating female protagonists and testi-
monies 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 defa-
mation 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
Voice | Aw aa z 179
acousmatic media, the phenomenon of attunement opens up film histo-
riography to the materialities of parallel media practices. Talkie audi-
ences 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 news-
paper 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 mov-
ing 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. Tech-
nology provided another venue for addressing the problematic fleshi-
ness of the female voice. As we saw in chapter 2, the Bombay film indus-
try 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
figure 3.7 Sagar Movietone advertises its upcoming talkie films, boasting “scien-
tific 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 Mov-
ietone advertised its first talkie features as “super talkies” featuring “clear
recording—able direction—scientific singing.”97 Scenarios, already con-
sidered scientific owing to their ability to streamline production, were
now labeled “scenariographs,” and song lyrics could also be deemed sci-
entific.98 The dreaded “mike test” served as a passport to technical prow-
ess, 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 record-
ing apparatus and public knowledge about voice tests to relocate female
singing from a feudal-traditional to a techno-modern realm of significa-
tion.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 cine-
worker 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 direc-
torial practice. In her memoirs, the actress Hansa Wadkar recalls work-
ing with Osten at Bombay Talkies. Osten, who spoke very little Hindi-
Urdu, 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 dra-
matic 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.
PA RT T W O
Energy
Intimate Struggles
But nobody should understand from this that there are never any
occasions for happiness even in the film world I have described.
There are so many moments of joy and of laughter when one is
doing one’s work in the film industry. . . . Readers will get a chance
to read about such comical and ticklish occurrences in my
forthcoming publication, Fun in the Studios.
—Shanta Apte, Jaau Mi Cinemaant?
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, cine-
matic 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 vital-
ity to the bodies of spectators, encountering energy transfers with the
bodies of equipment and objects along the way. This route joins the tech-
niques 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 con-
sumed by practices required to bring filmed images to a commercial
screen. Running a camera motor, transporting imported raw stock, wait-
ing for the next lighting set-up, and writing continuity all depend on
energy-intensive encounters between humans, electricity, celluloid, cli-
mate, 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 cine-
ecology, 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 peo-
ple who co-inhabit a widely dispersed cine-ecology spread across stu-
dios, 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 bio-
graphical 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 ethnogra-
phy. The story outlines the strange, tensely erotic relationship that devel-
ops 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 Ene r g y
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 cine-
worker. 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, fight-
ing, 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 187
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 flex-
ing 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, inter-
secting 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 maul-
siri [tree]. From her elegantly serious face it was apparent that Rajk-
ishore’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 appear-
ance, 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 cine-
matic attractions, with the power to attract and infatuate audiences en
masse. But it also exposes the searing gulf between bodies differenti-
ated by caste, class, and gender. As the story develops, Neelam’s desire is
defeated by Rajkishore’s vanity, and she abruptly arrives at a disen-
chanted 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 En e r g y
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 quan-
tifiable resource that can be converted into other forms of energy, such
as light, heat, or electricity. It is in this, largely thermodynamic, defini-
tion 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 econ-
omy, 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 indus-
trial 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 per-
vaded disparate political and social visions—from Taylorism to
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 dis-
course. 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 uti-
lizes the routine vocabulary of “used-up energy,” “exhaustion,” “enerva-
tion,” 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 accord-

ing to this Horlicks advertisement, Times of India, May 5, 1939. (Proquest LLC)
190 En e r g y
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 effi-
ciently, his exhaustion leads to multiple retakes, and his film feels life-
less. 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 pur-
pose. The question of ends opens up a space for critique where the prob-
lem 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 trans-
ferred 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 power-
geometries 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 rela-
tional 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 degra-
dation 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 pos-
sible “energy studies” in film and media to include the relational and the
variegated category of the “human.” Recent trends in object-oriented
ontology have rightly questioned the centrality of the human in aca-
demic 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 stake-
holders 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 tech-
nology.” Cinematic affect, for Bao, is understood as resonance, as burn-
ing, as an agitation that can induce audience action and affective trans-
formation, 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 lim-
ited to the principles of thermodynamics, and, most critically, extend-
ing 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.
192 En e r g y
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 imagi-
naries 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 tran-
sition in India as an encounter between aspirations of industrial film-
making, 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 reluc-
tant hero, played by Rama Shukul, has a “manly handsome figure” but
suffers “from an illusion of perpetual ill-health.”16 Mahendra’s hypo-
chondria is announced in the opening shot of the film, a sixty-eight-
second-long take that begins with a close-up of a painting that depicts
his ancestral fort and ends with Mahendra soliloquizing about the myr-
iad ailments he suspects he will soon contract. In the middle we see
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 medi-
cine chest. His performance of imagined physical affliction is counter-
pointed 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 doc-
tor 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 attrac-
tions. 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 mod-
ern 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 Ene r g y
“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 his-
toriography, representation, and education.17A physical culture move-
ment 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 cin-
ema 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. Wres-
tling 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 film-
makers, 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. Sawh-
ney 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 stron-
gest enchantment for the youths and its propaganda in the cause of
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 representa-
tion 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 on-
screen body, and film magazines routinely commented on the physical-
ity 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 Fear-
less 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 jour-
nalists, 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 con-
versation 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 Ene r g y
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 disor-
ders 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 med-
icine that centered on the weakness of nerves; orientalist ideas about
the sexual degeneracy of natives and male potency; and the widely theo-
rized 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 Jee-
van’s plot, Mahendra has two urgent reasons to address his imagined
physical debility: domestic disorder produced by his inadequate disci-
plining 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
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. Capi-
talists 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 prom-
ises 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 heterosex-
ual, conjugal couple.31 Historically, the cinematic emphasis on romantic
couple formation is largely driven by the promise of modern individua-
tion 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 represen-
tational mode of Bombay’s historical action genre, and Menaka reap-
pears 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 pro-
ceeds 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 “col-
lective fantasy that invests the social order with meaning” through the
futurity of the child.32 Compositionally, we get repeat shots of the stu-
dents 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
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 back-
ground.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 national-
ism. From the invention of a mythic martial past in Nav Jeevan to mod-
ern 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 on-
screen 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 Widen-
ing 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 boundar-
ies. With vitality as our techno-aesthetic frame, we start to notice
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 defi-
ance 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 decol-
onizing, modernizing, and heterogeneous collective. The conventions
of mainstream commercial cinema’s a-realist logics demanded an aes-
thetic 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 Bom-
bay 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 advan-

tages of the medium, the movement of the camera and the editing of
shots were identified as the key building blocks of cinema that differen-
tiated it from theater, painting, and photography. As we saw in chap-
ter 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 cam-
era itself. With changed lenses and movement, “at last the camera
received, as if, a charge of life and was transformed from a mere specta-
tor 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 mul-
tiple 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 (Kes-
havrao 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 choreo-
graphed in or around moving machines such as cargo ships and trains
(Passing Show, 1936; Miss Frontier Mail, 1936), lovers mediate their pas-
sions 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
the authoritarian father-patriarch into a space of freedom and self-
fulfillment. Almost 80 percent of the film is situated inside a train,
largely inside a long dining car where a series of songs, dances, and cab-
arets are performed as part of in-train entertainment; the film spectator
watches the train passengers watching shows. This technique is a meta-
cinematic articulation of early cinema’s promise of continuous move-
ment 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 soci-
etal and familial constraints. As we saw in Nav Jeevan and in Diamond
Queen, the vital force of the reproductive couple is essential for the con-
struction 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 Ene r g y
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 rec-
onciled 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 Jay-
ant’s car splashes mud all over Kusum and her motorcar, a comic pre-
lude 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 “driver-
less” 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 not-
ing 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 erot-
ically charged performances in the train saloon, to the radio broadcast
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 psy-
chic shocks relayed by urban crowds, entertainment, mass media, trans-
portation, 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 con-
sumerism, and redefinitions of social relations and gender roles—all
driven by the logic of industrial capitalism. The modern city was a phan-
tasmagoric 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 dis-
tracted gaze, fleeting encounters, shocks, and surfaces came to under-
score 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 pre-
senting 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 contempla-
tion. But distraction could also lead to an attenuated quality of everyday
experience and memory itself. Indeed, shock emerged as the central cat-
egory for an aesthetic theory of modernity from Benjamin to the Futur-
ists. 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 frag-
mented everyday. Cinema performed a key role in this discursive his-
tory—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 Ene r g y
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 deploy-
ment of the female body in cinema” is a buffering mechanism that dis-
tances 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 Bom-
bay cinema. Kamla is determined to marry for love but has little experi-
ence 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 foren-
sic 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 pro-
vide 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 underdis-
cussed 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
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 wander-
ing 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 Euro-
American media studies concept of shock. Both the Benjaminian con-
cept of innervation and Coomaraswamy’s description of samvega offer
us ways to rethink ideological (anticapitalist for Benjamin) and sensory-
philosophical (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 En e r g y
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 impover-
ished colony. Much as the filmic content and aesthetic strategies dis-
cussed 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 sus-
ceptible native spectator, the chairman of the ICC suggested that cin-
ema 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 peda-
gogy 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 West-
ern life which, in turn, would compel them to confront their own lethar-
gic 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 Ene r g y
spiritual intuition of the East must be harnessed to the energy of the
West.”50
What constitutes the “energy of the West”? Rangachariar’s back-
and-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 scandal-
ous 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 math-
ematics.”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, Rangach-
ariar’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 Cin-
ema 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 spir-
its up he requires some amusement. He goes to the nearest
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 tene-
ment in the Naigam Development chawls imbued with the spirit of
devotion to God. He had only to spend three annas to get this bet-
ter feeling!53
Voila! Cinema rejuvenates the worker and imbues him with “better feel-
ings” 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 reli-
gious legends, the movement of images on the screen was said to be
doing somatic work on viewers. The cine-somatic desires of the chair-
man of a colonial fact-finding committee, film producers, and exhibi-
tors 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 repre-
sentation was, in fact, promoted by cinema itself. Filmmaking as prac-
tice 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 suc-
cess 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 Phal-
ke’s daughter Mandakini reveals her acting repertoire and her costume-
dependent transformation into the boy Krishna, Phalke positions cin-
ema as an art-industrial form capable of visual illusionism.
212 En e r g y
Such an archival juxtaposition helps us recognize the peculiar
coexistence of mythic material with a techno-modern industrial appa-
ratus, 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 col-
ored, his longhaired head topped with a golden diadem. He was
entirely covered with jewelry and held a flute in his hand. The audi-
ence 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 per-
ceived 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,
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 working-

class 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 Bengal-
based 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.
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 sat-
urated 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 visu-
alize 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 dif-
ferent filmic genres to produce humor. Cinema, in this instance, is simul-
taneously 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 gene-
alogies of energy, cinematic innervation works here not only as an anti-
dote 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 com-
mentators 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 Ene r g y
Figures 4.7a– f Nav Jeevan’s central dream sequence about an abducted prin-
cess 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 sug-
gests, these theories signaled an inscription of the failure of human vision
to discern discrete moments, and hence a need for prosthetic compensa-
tion for this bodily deficiency.61 In the context of Bombay, however, it
appears that the idea of filmic linearity was embraced for its very discrete-
ness 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 dis-
crete events edited together in continuous and orderly forward motion is
to intuit the origins of present failure. Premchand, the formerly princi-
pled 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 technologi-
cal encounter went far beyond its psychic-ideological benefits for an
individual or a class, the enervated self or the tired proletariat. Nav Jee-
van points out how cinema was viewed as a rejuvenating tonic for noth-
ing 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 spec-
tator in a sensory-corporeal register that sought to innervate the mod-
ern subject into historical awakening and action. Be it invocations of a
Hindu mythic past, fantasies of a romantic future, adventures in a fai-
rytale Arabian Orient, dreams of a militarized civic body, or participa-
tion 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 Ene r g y
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 pro-
duced 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 experi-
ence of the modern world as deeply imbricated in and indeed enabled by
a techno-industrial assemblage dedicated to creating fictional represen-
tations 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 conse-
quences of practice. In My Name Is Radha, Manto constructs a fasci-
nating 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 cam-
era, sound recorder, lights, and reflectors as well as human bodies,
props, architecture, make-up, and costumes. By identifying the rhyth-
mic, relentless work of electric lights on the film set as an agent of
human exhaustion, Manto comes close to suggesting a theory of pro-
duction 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.
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 histori-
cally 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 chrono-
tope, in which “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artis-
tically 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 En e r g y
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 pro-
duction 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 envi-
ronmental 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 mid-
dle 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
small scene that had no dialogues remained, so we kept shooting.
Once that ended, we were at a loose end for months. / This pro-
vided 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 mon-
soons, resulting in massive flooding of city streets that physically pre-
vented 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 oppor-
tunities 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 Muham-
mad’s cats Chunni and Munni, and a host of flies. It becomes impossi-
ble, 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 Rajk-
ishore start to spend more time together, culminating in Neelam’s com-
plete 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 flirta-
tious attempts at charming her in private and simultaneous disavowals
224 En e r g y
of attraction when the two are in the public eye. Neelam grows dispir-
ited 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 tir-
ing 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 consti-
tute 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 inno-
cence. 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 dissipa-
tion? Following Manto’s cue, I suggest that we read textual representa-
tions 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 rec-
ognition 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, provid-
ing 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
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 embod-
ied recursivity as a condition for resistance, a somatic awareness gained
through the repetitive nature of film work which can both induce reflex-
ivity and manifest radical criticality on a bodily level. Most theoretical
accounts present repetition as the condition for apathy or false con-
sciousness. Even Gilbert Simondon, with his deep concern for technical
relations between human and machine, suggests that “habitual repeti-
tion erases the awareness of structures and operations with the stereo-
typy of adapted gestures.”70 In my reading, Manto offers us an alterna-
tive 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 respectabil-
ity. But even before Rajkishore’s faux-kiss, there was the repeated dim-
ming 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 reso-
nate in Neelam’s body and consciousness. Herein lies another intuition
of the cinematic modern—an embodied intuition of the uncanny syn-
chronicity 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 moder-
nity as rupture and shock, variously described. Attention to accounts of
cinematic modernity as produced by practitioners and viewers in loca-
tions such as India reveals a greater complexity of experience.
226 En e r g y
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 pro-
duction experience embodies this promise. In his oeuvre we see workers
and practitioners whose professional identities were tied to an under-
standing of cinema as technologically mediated artifice—who, at the
same time, were located in specific experiential matrices of work, neces-
sity, 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 iden-
tity in India have no verifiable connections either historically or anthro-
pologically, 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
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 con-
sidered 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, dis-
plays 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 spa-
tially 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.
228 En e r g y
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 sec-
ond. 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 extrac-
tion 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 rela-
tionalities between the living and the nonliving, rather than see them as
oppositional ontologies. Nevertheless, ideas of fatigue, depletion, and
230 Ene r g y
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 signifi-
cant part in Bombay’s cine-ecology. In the early twentieth century the
concept of fatigue wound its way from metallurgical discourse to indus-
trial 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 cine-
workers. 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 cine-
worker 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 mul-
tispecies 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 individu-
ality constitute the ecological process, and for some actors, these asser-
tions 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 231
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 consid-
ered to be arbitrary and uncivil treatment accorded to her by the direc-
tors [of the studio].”5 Prabhat’s executives denied the allegations.
Apte’s rebellion was unprecedented in its form and elicited multi-
farious reactions. Large crowds turned up at the gates of Prabhat to wit-
ness 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 charac-
terized 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 run-
ning through the contemporaneous reportage.
Born in the town of Dudhni, Shanta Apte (1916–1964) showed a tal-
ent 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 trans-
form Shanta into a “musical star.”9 Shanta Apte trained at the Maha-
rashtra 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 mythologi-
cal 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 Ene r g y
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. Shanta-
ram, 1934), Amar Jyoti (V. Shantaram, 1936), and Kunku / Duniya Na
Mane (The Unexpected, V. Shantaram, 1937). These films offer us a rep-
resentative sample of the aesthetics of vitality that characterized Apte’s
star persona—a vitality that she performed using posture, gesture,
stance, and voice. They also contributed greatly to public perceptions
of Apte’s “fighting nature,” an image of a fiery woman who defied hypo-
critical social norms and advocated for gender equality.11 In Kunku, for
example, Apte plays a young woman, Neera, who is tricked into marry-
ing a much older man. Appalled by her situation, Neera treats her mar-
riage 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 Stu-
dios, right by the studio’s time clock. Dressed in trousers and a sports
shirt, Apte looked quite unlike her on-screen, saree-clad avatar, provok-
ing a reporter to describe her outfit as “hunting attire.”13 Journalists
found it “embarrassing” to approach the female star as “she was reclin-
ing 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 oppres-
sor.”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, sug-
gesting 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 Ene r g y
politics of passive resistance and his philosophical approach to protest
as penance and self-purification. Gandhi’s fasting body was photo-
graphed 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 col-
lective means of bargaining with the colonial establishment and assert-
ing 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 Mill-
workers resoundingly demonstrated their ability for powerful solidar-
ity 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 collec-
tive, 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 prin-
cipled protest against a mightier opponent, marked by modern mascu-
line 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 stu-
dio 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
on strike. Journalists and studio executives implied that she had delib-
erately exacerbated the situation in order to break her contract with
Prabhat. And indeed, contract issues were at the core of Apte’s dissatis-
faction 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 restric-
tive 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 contrac-
tual timeline, or in terms of the number of years that the studio exclu-
sively 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 migra-
tions 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 Mamaji-
wala 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 con-
temporaneous studio-actor or management-labor relations. Apte stra-
tegically staged her protest at the limits of the studio and the world out-
side, with the studio clock that monitored work time ticking dramatically
overhead, marking her durational fast as time that could not be mone-
tized 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 En e r g y
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
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 deliber-
ately 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 recog-
nition; the labor of stars is camouflaged by a deflecting focus on their
glamor and surface appeal, and the labor of the extra is rendered invis-
ible through its literal positioning on the edges of the screen and the
cine-ecology. To understand stardom as labor, we have to see the on-
screen and off-screen as relational and frequently discontinuous, reject-
ing 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 ener-
getic 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 hun-
ger 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 journal-
ists 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 En e r g y
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 sur-
plus 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 aspi-
rants 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” vocab-
ulary, a set of words and phrases that were popularized in the interwar
Bombay region since the publication in 1931 of the first Marathi transla-
tion 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 cine-
ecology. 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
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 facul-
ties due to temporally accruing overexertion, on one hand, and under-
use, 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 Indo-
nesia 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
240 Ene r g y
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 sov-
ereignty.31 Her diagnosis is that of unfreedom, of being rendered inca-
pable 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 them-
selves, asserting that,
if one is to become a successful actor, one needs to acquire profi-

ciency 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 suf-

fused 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 pro-
ductivity, 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
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 con-
trol of it. Apte conceives of an actor’s physical capacity and proficiency
as the locus of artistic sovereignty and political subjectivity. She reiter-
ates 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, philoso-
phers, 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, mechani-
cal 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 yan-
tranagri) 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 En e r g y
the singularity of material biology. It is a delicate relation between slow-
ing down and speeding up, wherein each body has its own velocity,
where bodies are vulnerable to tiredness and exhaustion but also capa-
ble 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 responsibil-
ity. 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 simul-
taneously 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 employ-
ees ensures that actors, particularly children, are routinely tossed out
“on the rubbish heap of the film industry” (49).36 The exhaustion of cre-
ative 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 indus-
trial 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,
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 fun-
damental 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 nega-
tively, 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 cer-
tain 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 tech-
nology have been falsely sundered, divided into two separate realms of
meaning versus utility, resulting in a state of alienation. “While the aes-
thetic 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 consump-
tion.”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 indi-
cates 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 Ene r g y
Simondon’s theories were a response to decades of techno-
utopianism alternating with techno-phobia in industrial centers across
the world. Twentieth-century Bombay was tied to other industrial cen-
ters by global capital and European imperialism. It is no surprise there-
fore 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 criti-
cal 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 industrial-
izing 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 con-
temporaneous 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 depres-
sion soon hit the sector, leading to irregular rhythms of production and
an increased demand for casual labor.39 Millowners, desperate to maxi-
mize short-term profits, increased their use of machinery and intensi-
fied 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 dem-
onstrations of worker solidarity, strikes, and subsequent clamp-downs
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 back-
drop. Her specific use of weariness as the key to exposing the reification
and exploitation of labor drew on a larger discourse of fatigue that cir-
culated 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 mid-
nineteenth 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 con-
ceptualized 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 con-
stant 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 cur-
rent research on the “problem of fatigue in industrial workers” and
246 Ene r g y
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 indus-
trial 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 Civ-
ilization and Climate (1917), which posited a direct causal relation
between climate and racial inferiority. In fact, theories about the capac-
ity 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 deter-
minism. Compared to colder climes, the tropics were considered par-
ticularly unfavorable as heat and humidity supposedly engendered
indolence and lustfulness. Such beliefs were foundational to the racial-
geographic 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
inhabitants of almost tropical countries will ever work at the speed of
cold lands, but that they have an efficiency point which must be discov-
ered in the interest of economy, and that this point is being far over-
stepped 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 rede-
ployed the climatological language of fatigue as a weapon against work-
ers’ interests. The Times of India’s “Engineering Supplement” ran a
detailed article claiming that the “genesis of fatigue” lay in the accumu-
lation of toxins generated through continuous muscle and nerve func-
tion. 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 intermit-
tent 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 exer-
cise 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 experi-
ments 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 four-
year 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 Ene r g y
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 sci-
entific discourse on energy and fatigue helped displace the social prob-
lem 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 accom-
modated Apte’s strike and Should I Join the Movies? By 1930 the scien-
tific 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 twentieth-
century 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 indus-
try.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.
figure 5.3 Sanatogen advertisement in the Times of India, March 13, 1930. (Pro-
quest 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 strike-
breakers. 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 noto-
rious 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 unhesitat-
ingly 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. Unsur-
prisingly, 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 ori-
gin, 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 techni-
cians, 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 spe-
cialized craft associations. The FWICE was established in January 1956
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 Occa-
sional 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 Bom-
bay’s general strikes, the mazdoor (worker) became a symbol of subal-
tern 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 cen-
sorship 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 En e r g y
administration in the face of the growing global influence of commu-
nism, especially the increasing regional clout of trade unions. The gov-
ernment 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 cot-
ton 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 con-
sciousness, 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 Pro-
gressive Writers Movement created a vibrant space for Marxist modern-
ists, 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 labor-
versus-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
(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 defini-
tion 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 individ-
uals 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 Ene r g y
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, hun-
dreds 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 scien-
tific research with regard to its moral and social resources.”68 Polemi-
cally, 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 recog-
nize 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 work-
place definition percolated into everyday consciousness in the cine-
ecology, and practitioners started to formulate demands based on the
Factories Act. The All-India Cine-Technicians’ Conference of 1939 pro-
posed two special resolutions dealing with “questions of sickness insur-
ance, 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
cine-worker. Many writers framed their film work as a financial neces-
sity and a means to sustain their “real” work—literary production out-
side 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 pro-
duced 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 Rus-
sia, saying, “I don’t know if such unions exist in other countries. How-
ever, 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 disillu-
sioned with Bombay and its film world and declared that there was a
root conflict in the cine-ecology over the definition of cinema: “Cine-
ma’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 imag-
ine overlaps between culture and industry, and labor and literary cre-
ativity. 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 atti-
tude, 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 En e r g y
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. Capitalists
2. Companies (Managing Directors)
3. Distributors
4. Exhibitors
5. Advertisers
6. 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 “natu-
rally 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
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 propri-
etorial 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 cin-
ema” (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 cine-
ecology, laborers and the public together constitute the most underval-
ued 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 Ene r g y
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 econ-
omy” by scholars such as Vicki Mayer who assert that “deconstructing
the rhetoric of the creative economy and its implicit material inequali-
ties 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 auto-
matically 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 embod-
ied 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 stigmatiza-
tion 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 pin-
points the dehumanization of so-called untouchables by the caste sys-
tem 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, not-
ing 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 poli-
tics 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 prob-
lem of shedding that corporeal stigma. Further, embodiment privileged
particularity and was harder to channel toward a collective and
universal politics of enfranchisement. Ambedkar thus mobilized labor
and class as metaphors for the collective experience of caste disposses-
sion. 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 rematerializ-
ing 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 the-
orizing humanity and dehumanization as the locus of social justice.
Apte repeatedly returns to ideas such as the right to dignity and self-
respect 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 citizen-
ship and justice.
The question of caste in Bombay cinema is woefully underana-
lyzed and constitutes a particular gap in the field of production stud-
ies. 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 informa-
tion 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 descrip-
tion.83 The magazine filmindia could therefore suggest that some
actresses were “respectable girls” from “first-class families” while oth-
ers were referred to as “lower types of women.”84 Readers regularly
inquired about cine-workers’ real names, as opposed to their screen
260 Ene r g y
names, in order to identify their religious and caste status. For exam-
ple, “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 sta-
tus but to expand the very definition of those terms.87 In the Janu-
ary 1931 issue of the Lahore-based film magazine Cinema, Ram Swa-
roop congratulates the recent entry of several “cultured and educated
people” into the film industry. His list reads: “Miss Ruby Meyers (Sulo-
chana), 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 uphold-
ing traditional social cleavages and undermining them in order to pro-
mote 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 sub-
groups, caste hierarchies would reveal themselves in the historical pre-
ponderance 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
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 sociocul-
tural translation in shaping the everyday meanings of communism.89
Scarcity of reading materials and low rates of English-language liter-
acy 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 ver-
nacular 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 struc-
tural 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 catego-
ries 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 lumpenprole-
tariat (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 loca-
tion 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 Ene r g y
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 char-
acter.”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 instru-
mentally improvised in the service of power. Apte problematically attri-
butes caste in society to a certain naturalized order of things while caste
in the film industry is arbitrary and artificial. In this way, caste preju-
dice 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 pro-
tests 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 ener-
getic cultural modernity. Her approach drew as much from bourgeois
and upper-caste frameworks of individual improvement as from nation-
alist ideals of self-determination. Shanta Apte linked Indian capitalists
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 cin-
ema and colonial modernity in South Asia.
Reading across Apte’s hunger strike and her book, we see many con-
tinuities 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 stud-
ies and has been addressed by generations of scholars. In this book I
264 Ene r g y
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, ide-
ology, 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 cine-
matic 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 fan-
tasy 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;
together they complicate notions of obsolescence, finitude, and the very
temporality of cinema. Exhaustion also intervenes in current theoriza-
tions of embodiment in cinema. The weariness of the actor, their capac-
ity 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 expe-
rience. In exhaustion, the history of the body intersects with the history
of cinema, to yield new insights on how mediatic and ideological con-
structions 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 pro-
duction.96 Experiences of bodily distress point us toward the inequali-
ties 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 cine-
ecology 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 con-
tracts with stars and the replaceable bodies of hundreds of daily wage
workers. “Extras” such as Shastri, Abdulla, and Salam enabled the low-
cost, 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 dura-
tional 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 tech-
nological tools. Rather, she points to the dangers of conflating different
modes of existence and the material implications of reducing the human
266 En e r g y
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 Indone-
sian 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 experi-
ence 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 con-
cludes 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 spe-
cific and bounded to the experience of film work, for that is an
impossible (and, eventually, irrelevant) project particularly if we con-
ceive 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 cin-
ema 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.
268 Ene r g y
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 cur-
rently 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 sur-
reptitiously slide into the kind of obsession depicted in Maneesh Shar-
ma’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, identi-
fying himself almost completely with the hero on screen. His misrecog-
nition 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 itin-
eraries 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 vul-
nerability 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 his-
torical 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 Ene r g y
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 elu-
sive “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 cir-
cuit 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 infrastruc-
tural 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 con-
structions 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 271
relations that carry us. Struggle is embodied and grounded. It is situ-
ated 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 understand-

ing the fascination of the star. In The Formal Method in Literary Schol-
arship, P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin tell us that social and ideo-
logical 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 “Rajni-
kanth” is also made.7
The academic study of film stars and stardom dates back to socio-
logical 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 En e r g y
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 trespass-
ing 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 grow-
ing 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 the-
ater to the studio; to imagine the fan as the becoming-worker is to think
transversally across the spheres of production and reception. The fan-
as-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 archi-
vist 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 273
figures 6.1a and 6.2b Annette Gueizler, screen name “Madam Azurie,” left,
and her screen goddess, Sulochana, right.
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.
At a time when India seemed poised for political freedom, when
transnational tales of adventure and success circulated widely via mass-
printed text and image, and when filmic visions of romantic coupling
gripped the imagination of college students, Bombay and its cine-
ecology 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 “nurs-
ing 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 influ-
enced 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 mani-
fested a singularly modern workplace with several features that were
276 En e r g y
emblematic of modernity’s powerful promise—newness, romance, het-
erosocial 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 contra-
dictions 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 moder-
nity. 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 histori-
ans 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 com-
bination 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 approxi-
mated that around prominent men and built on the already existing
infrastructures of celebrity generated by urban theater and the
gramophone record industry. The celebrity status of the star and circu-
lation of news about star salaries augmented the democratic promise of
cinema. What is particularly noteworthy here is that thousands of mov-
iegoers 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 unemploy-
ment 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 high-
lighted the twin problems of poverty and unemployment, and middle-
class 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 gate-
keeper at the theater. Billimoria soon moved to Bombay as a projection-
ist 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 pro-
ducer, 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 Ene r g y
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 transi-
tions 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 film-
making, 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 gambling-
dens 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. Cin-
ema, 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 com-
munity until the day arrives when she is reunited with her father. Sun-
deri 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 fig-
ure.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
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 por-
trait 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 pic-
ture 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 constitu-
ency of young female fans. South Asia in the 1930s was home to a million
“modern movie-struck girls” who have not yet been adequately recog-
nized. 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
280 Ene r g y
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 con-
struction 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 Holly-
wood in the 1920s, with one major difference: the mobility and social
freedoms of women in 1930s India was quite different from their Ameri-
can 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 segrega-
tion, 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 cine-
workers 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
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 Hun-
dreds 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 differ-
ence 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 sex-
ual freedom, personal celebrity, or proximity to film stars. But the pro-
cesses by which film fans became film workers were not straightfor-
ward. 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 des-
tinations that the industry itself had generated in its aggressive drive to
recruit new and “respectable” workers and position itself as a national
industry.
282 En e r g y
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 Mum-
bai. Struggle defines the major part of the everyday labor of the fan-as-
worker 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 hand-
ful 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 temporal-
ity, one that is decisively oriented toward the future but also deter-
minedly 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
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 inter-
est 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 any-
thing 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 hori-
zon but are committed to preparing the grounds for the present. Strug-
glers do not represent the kind of futurism that Donna Haraway recoils
from in Staying with the Trouble, one that avoids engagement with cur-
rent troubles by investing a naïve faith in a technological-divine solu-
tion or one that assumes that the future is inevitable and there is noth-
ing 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, mean-
ings.”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 symbi-
otic shared space for multispecies living. Her ideas are useful to us here
because Bombay’s cine-ecology is a similarly fraught place that contin-
ues 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 En e r g y
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. Wait-
ing 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, net-
work. Waiting is therefore an engaged mode of being in the world, con-
stantly 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 com-
pared 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 cin-
ematic archive, one recognizes immediately a similar impulse to nor-
malize, 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 creativ-
ity and artistic pursuit. When Madan Mohan invokes the language of
talent, ability, and pride, he participates in an emerging ideological nar-
rative that infuses the terrible odds of film success with the self-
sustaining 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 com-
petition and acceptance of bodily vulnerability as a prerequisite of cre-
ative success have attained new levels.
Figure 6.2 offers an early glimmer of this cultural type, visibly gen-
dered, 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 En e r g y
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 enter-
tainment 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 peripateti-
cism 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, profes-
sional networking, connections between formal and informal labor—we
will end up with a map of Bombay city itself, heavily marked by repeat-
edly crisscrossing routes of micropractices. In many ways, iconic film
cities such as Mumbai and Los Angeles constitute the “industry” within
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 Gorak-
pur 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 appara-
tus, these boys simply wandered the streets without any concrete
address in hand. Is it possible to see their childish mistake as an intui-
tive 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 vis-
its to 125 film sets in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Poona, and Coim-
batore. 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 Ene r g y
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 deple-
tion 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 spec-
tacular and morbid appeal. They produce an irruptive archive of excep-
tion. 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 Vir-
ilio questions this conceptual premise. Following Aristotle, who said
that “the accident reveals the substance,” Virilio argues that every tech-
nological invention contains within it the future accident, and it is
through the accident that we learn something crucial about the inven-
tion. Thus the invention of the sailing ship carried within it the inven-
tion 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 “pro-
grammed, 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 recon-
cile the demands of studio competition, steady production turnovers,
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 mysti-
fying 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 pic-
ture resulted in death of Mohammed Rafique (30), who sustained
serious injuries in the premises of the Sagar Film Company, Bom-
bay, 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 Ene r g y
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 min-
iature 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 con-
structions, “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 pred-
icated 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 catastro-
phe. The car crash, as a “metonym of accelerated modernity out of con-
trol,” 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 encoun-
ters and separations.52 In an ecology determined by contingency, the car
crash belonged on the same representational continuum as the specula-
tive 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 mas-
ters” did not exist as a separate specialist category.54 Nadia recalls, “We
had no fight composers in those days. The director, the cameraman and
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 Ene r g y
harnesses and invisible wiring; specially built controlled sets for swim-
ming 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 impro-
visational 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 cen-
trality 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 sub-
ject into an exceptional subject of modernity. The star not only experi-
ences 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 spec-
trum, 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 “unex-
pectedness” 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 shoot-
ing 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 expend-
able. 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
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 cumu-
latively produced six to eight films a year.64 Sagar’s growth and its ambi-
tions 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 inor-
dinate 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 meth-
ods, 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 En e r g y
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 unpredict-
ability, 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 automo-
bile 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
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. Dur-
ing 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 inci-
dents 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 com-
bines with estuarine tidal currents to create a lush medium fit for a love-
drenched film song. Unfortunately for Pramila, these very conditions
296 Ene r g y
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 deaf-
ening clatter and reverberation of torrential rain overhead. The same
monsoon also shaped the characteristic geography of Bombay’s hinter-
land and nearby hill stations, such as Matheran, Lonavla, Khandala, Pan-
chgani, 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 phenom-
ena intersect with topographical features to define a cine-ecology.
The history of film studios is also a history of environmental con-
trol. 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 sun-
light. The introduction of sound led to greater need for environmental
control, and studios had to be insulated from the real sounds of the out-
side world; increased artificial lighting also became possible with elec-
tric 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 natu-
ral environments inside the studio. Bombay’s talkie studios occasionally
tried to simulate external environments inside the studio, using artifi-
cial, 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
298 Ene r g y
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 envi-
ronment in order to create more naturalistic images and convey all the
romance associated with the outdoors. Still, as Jennifer Fay notes, some-
thing of the studio-manufactured “image of nature entirely human
made . . . carries over into on-location shooting.” Fay identifies a histori-
cal tendency in cinema to further its project of worldmaking by manu-
facturing 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 Prab-
hat (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 envi-
ronment 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 out-
door 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.
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 for-
mulaic—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 back-
drop 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)
of the accident from the preindustrial to the industrial age. In a prein-
dustrial age, it was nature that destroyed things and people as an exter-
nal force operating from the outside. In the age of industrialization,
technological accidents operated from the inside as “technical appara-
tuses destroyed themselves by means of their power.”81 The nineteenth-
century technological accident, as an internal, self-inflicting shock, soon
lent itself to theories of psychic trauma as an indication of “the disequi-
librium of the entire organism.”82 This inside/outside directional distinc-
tion 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 con-
stituted 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 furi-
ously 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 dif-
ficult and kept dragging her body down. And finally, there was the inabil-
ity 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 out-
door location shooting. Nevertheless, there were other industrial
302 Ene r g y
pressures to incorporate exterior landscapes into films such as a per-
ceived audience demand for scenic outdoor scenes, genre requirements,
and meagre production budgets. The popular stunt film genre, includ-
ing 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 vil-
lage 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 pro-
duction; 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 mean-
ing 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, how-
ever, compels us to consider these elemental forces as internal to cine-
ma’s ecosystem, not outside and hostile but inside and volatile.
figure 6.7 Song booklet cover for Veer Bala (A. R. Kabuli, 1938). One might plau-
sibly 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-e-
Azam (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 differ-
ent studios. Mohan Bhavnani, at Ajanta Cinetone, was overly concerned
with the fact that several of the female extras he hired had parallel pro-
fessional interests in Bombay’s sex work industry. To shield his com-
pany 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
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 repu-
tation 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 abandon-
ment 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 fol-
lowed the girl along with two friends and assaulted her. The judge for
the case, Justice Stone, sentenced all three accused to rigorous impris-
onment 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 En e r g y
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 acci-
dents to deliberately underline the varied forms of bodily and psychic
injury that take place inside a cine-ecology premised on precarity. Gen-
dered forms of violence such as sexual assault count with the discourse
of accident because they are deemed either so routine as to be normal-
ized or so exceptional that they are consigned to a space beyond the
purview of film industrial accountability. Sexual harassment and vio-
lence 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 internation-
ally, 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
residents protested that “the residents of Andheri . . . consisted of capi-
talists and speculators,” and the town itself was viewed as little but “an
old village that had grown in haphazard fashion.”88 Mohan Sound Stu-
dios was a rental studio used by the numerous small, independent pro-
duction 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 sur-
face promises and the infrastructural realities of both cinema and the
city that produces it; this is the link between the affective and the mate-
rial, 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 precari-
ous gendered work. As with Rafique, Pramila, and all the others men-
tioned in this chapter, Nalini exposes differential modes of bodily vul-
nerability 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 mis-
alignments of time and space.
Another night shoot, this time from 1932, presents a useful compari-
son. 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 Proud-
foot 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 Ene r g y
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 com-
munities 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 com-
pensation 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 inter-
sect 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 acci-
dent, 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, organiza-
tional 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 envi-
ronment. 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.
The ecologies of early talkie film production produced new tempo-
ralities, attached to new experiences of the self and cinema. An actress’s
impatient need to fully utilize every moment of her productive capaci-
ties 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 hori-
zon 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.
312 En e r g y
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 better-
traveled 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 his-
tory 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 pro-
longed 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 con-
stitute 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 on-
screen 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 alter-
nate 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 pre-
dictable, “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 won-
drous 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 colo-
nial 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 pro-
duce in the 1950s? What dreams and aspirations, anxieties and disap-
pointments were processed by cinema in the postcolony? How did the
nation-state encourage, discipline, or manage filmic output with chang-
ing political regimes through the decades? Can we define the unique
characteristics of an “Indian” film form and claim national filmic dis-
tance 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 prac-
tice often tended to coalesce. This tendency is especially evident in
commentaries on Bombay cinema, which is frequently called on to per-
form 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 coex-
isted within the Bombay cine-ecology and its far-reaching networks
before 1947, and which continue to contest hegemonic ideas of nation-
hood 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 315
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 cin-
emas, 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 transna-
tional 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 imagin-
ing an individual’s place in relation to their families, communities, and
governing authorities in a future collective,” then practices of filmmak-
ing 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 multis-
calar 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 Bom-
bay, Willy Haas, tasked with writing modern talkie screenplays for local
audiences in his native German, which were then translated into Hin-
dustani.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 multiplic-
ity 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 res-
cues, 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 Kohi-
noor 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 mod-
ernizing 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 speculator-
financiers, stunt actors, and continuity writers offer us alternate narra-
tives of modern self-making as enacted on the stage of cinema.7
The analytic of a cine-ecology offers a dynamic and inclusive frame-
work 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 317
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 mean-
while” (also “meanwhile,” or “in the meantime”)—proposes an impor-
tant 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 misunder-
standings 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 pur-
suing 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 phenom-
enon being made and remade synchronously and variously by multiple
actors across different spaces.
Bombay Hustle has followed the logic of parallel editing in its struc-
ture and methods by consciously bringing together disciplinarily brack-
eted 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 anal-
yses with production studies. Bombay cinema thus appears as a com-
plex 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 connected-
ness; 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 signifi-
cance 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 differ-
ence.” 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 out-
side a studio, and the producer-entrepreneur who anticipates future
profits through a series of calculated risks are all located in quite differ-
ent 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 319
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 simulta-
neity, 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 teleo-
logical 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 Bom-
bay 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 cer-
tainly bring greater complexity to the studio question and further dis-
courage 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 Ep il og ue
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 sal-
aried employment that characterizes the 1930s studio or is it assembly-
line 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 histo-
ries 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 cine-
ecology 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 dif-
ferentiated levels of economic and creative power. The concept of “cre-
ativity” 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 321
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 passion-
ate 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 fetishiza-
tion 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, Sen-
nett’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, pas-
sionate 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 vocabu-
lary of creativity and hidden talent to woo young individuals to will-
ingly serve as a new precariat at the cost of job stability, worker solidar-
ity, 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 con-
temporary consumer capitalism, but we can extend her analysis to
remember that it is the same call to be creative that has kept media
322 Ep il og u e
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 interpel-
lation 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 televi-
sion industries. International media conglomerates have offices in Mum-
bai 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. Netf-
lix 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 work-
place 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 infrastruc-
ture, 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 retire-
ment funds for cine workers, but legislation can change little until the
hundreds of existing production firms actually implement these
Epilog u e 323
policies. Relations between the Indian government and the film indus-
try 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 harass-
ment 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 mytholo-
gies of arrival.
Hustle is a practice of the imagination. Starting with the title Bom-
bay 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 excep-
tion. What these narratives signify, for all material purposes, is that the
hustle goes on.
324 Ep il og u e
Notes
IN TRODUCTION
1. The term below-the-line is often used for workers who rank below the top cre-
ative 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 con-
temporary 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 exclusion-
ary 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 Micro-
History 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, gramo-
phone, theater, print, and oratory. As the term transnational does for the cat-
egory 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 econo-
mies and practices. The term jugaad has been grossly overused in the past
decade and has become a catch-all term for improvisational tactics of manu-
facture 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 urban-
ization 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 industrial-
ization, and the psychology of urban violence. Newer work by Sandip Haza-
reesingh, 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 Brit-
ain 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.
326 In t ro du c t io n
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 techno-
logical 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 Sieg-
ert, 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 produc-
tion 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 work-
ers. 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. Naren-
dra 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.
In tr o du ction 327
19. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity 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 Par-
thasarathi, 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, “Art-
ist 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).
328 Int ro du c t io n
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 epistemolo-
gies 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 Sob-
chack’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 (Berke-
ley: 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 Amo-
rous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 [Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2005], xv). Zhang is referring primarily to character-
izations 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
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 manage-
ment, 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 Criti-
cal 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 Mahade-
van’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 medium-
specificity 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 genea-
logical 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 sedimen-
tation of layers of palimpsestic technologies. On the other hand, media technol-
ogy studies focuses on breakdown and speculative media futures, on that which
could have been. A turn to ecology keeps multiple temporalities and technologi-
cal 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); Man-
ishita 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 His-
torical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). On
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 Colo-
nial 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 Subrahman-
yam 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 admin-
istrative 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 polit-
ical 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 (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 97.
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 Holly-
wood 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 producer-
director Chandulal Shah has suggested that Lahore’s United Players’ Corpora-
tion and Film Studio, established in 1929, was the first film production com-
pany 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 run-
away musical hits as Khazanchi (Moti B. Gidwani, 1941). For the impact of
Partition on the power balance between film industries in Lahore and Bom-
bay, 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 ano-
nymity 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 indi-
viduals 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.
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, emo-
tional 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 mean-
ings of male loitering as flânerie and female wandering as a mark of prostitu-
tion. For another feminist response to male-centered theories of European
modernity, see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard 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 travel-
ers 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 life-
styles. 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.
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 recat-
aloging its materials, and these numbers are likely to change in 2020–2021.
67. Recent dissertations have mobilized exciting new historical materials, bring-
ing new insights to South Asian film history. For example, see Ranita Chat-
terjee, “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 min-
iaturized versions of the film poster on the cover, complete cast and crew cred-
its, the film’s synopsis, and song lyrics. Some also carried publicity stills and
advertisements for upcoming features. Most song booklets carried this infor-
mation 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 sur-
veillance 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).
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 spec-
tacles, 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 Mid-
dle 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 Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 1–26.
11. Representatives of the Bombay Cinema and Theatres Trades Association in
response to questioning by the Indian Cinematograph Committee, in Evi-
dence, 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 deriva-
tives 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
1 . Sp e c ul at iv e Fu tur e s | Te j i - M an di 335
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 contempo-
rary 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 Pol-
lard, “Economic Geographies of Financialization,” Economic Geography 86,
no. 1 (2010): 30.
17. Asiya Siddiqui notes that “India had one of the most highly developed com-
mercial economies of any country in the pre-industrial world. This was par-
ticularly 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, Bom-
bay’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 (Lon-
don: 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, Septem-
ber 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
336 1 . Sp e c ul at iv e Fu t ur e s | Te j i - M a n d i
the Popularity of Two Parsi Theatre Plays at the Turn of the Twentieth Cen-
tury,” 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.
33. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928 (Calcutta: Govern-
ment of India— Central Publications Branch, 1928), 35; Gulamhoosein A. Dos-
sani, Present Problems of the Motion Picture Industry (Bombay: Motion Pic-
ture 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 Lib-
eral 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 exhi-
bition venues, and bailed out Imperial and Saraswathi studios, thereby acquir-
ing 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.
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 per-
sonal 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 produc-
tion. 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
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 pro-
vided reasonable hope of a studio’s future success is hardly surprising or
unique to India. All speculative practices need a few parameters for ascertain-
ing 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 exhibi-
tion and distribution have emerged over the years, from broadcast, cable and
satellite television, to video cassettes and dvds, and now to streaming plat-
forms 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 over-
view of the complexities of indigenous credit and speculative finance in Bom-
bay after World War 1, see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bom-
bay’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 concen-
trated in cities that had large-scale mechanized industries: Bombay, Calcutta,
338 1 . Sp e c ul a t iv e Fu t ur e s | Te j i - M a n d i
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 Pic-
ture 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. Crit-
ics argued that the price increase would have to be compensated by more cot-
ton 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 Mis-
conduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity 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 Kohi-
noor 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.
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 Cele-
brates Its Tenth Anniversary,” Mirror, June 4, 1939; Erik Barnouw and Subrah-
manyam 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 Cinemato-
graph Yearbook, 272.
86. According to Shah’s nephew, Jairaj Punatar, this incident took place in 1944.
Sharma, “Bigger than the Sky—Ranjit Studio.”
340 1 . Sp e c ul a t iv e Fu t ur e s | Te j i - M a n d i
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 pro-
duction 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 eco-
nomic model in which a single manufacturing company controls the entire
supply chain of the commodity; in the case of film, from production to distri-
bution 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 break-
away 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, Decem-
ber 16, 1929, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, R/109/I.
105. He was bestowed with the title Rai Sahib by the British Government in India.
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 system-
atized collation of statistical data on talkie infrastructures was published in
1938 by the Motion Picture Society of India, Bombay—Bharucha, Indian Cin-
ematograph 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, "Screenwrit-
ing 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
342 1 . Sp e c ul at iv e Fu t ur e s | Te j i - M a n d i
of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century 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 Con-
trol. 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 docu-
ments 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
2 . S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 343
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 Imagi-
nation 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 Pic-
ture 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 evi-
dence of industry itself—proof of its industriousness.” Thus “numbers do not
only supply sociotechnical evidence of Indian economic change. Rather, enu-
meration itself has become a signifier of transformation within the Indian cre-
ative 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 negoti-
ated 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: Govern-
ment of India— Central Publications Branch, 1928), 48.
344 2 . S c i e n t i f ic D e sir e s | Ja d u Gh a r
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 Bom-
bay’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 Supple-
ment, TOI, May 5, 1939, 18.
23. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berke-
24. Prakash, Another Reason, 20
25. Khadi refers to handwoven cloth, and homespun khadi was one of the center-
pieces of Gandhi’s movement of economic, social, and political reform. See
Lisa N. Trivedi, “Visually Mapping the ‘Nation’: Swadeshi Politics in National-
ist 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.
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 Cin-
ema: 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 Inter-
rogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, ed. Tejaswini Niran-
jana and Vivek Dhareshwar (Calcutta: Seagull, 1993), 47–82; and Ravi Vasude-
van, 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 comprehen-
sion 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, Disen-
chanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berke-
ley: 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
346 2 . S c i e nt i f ic D e sir e s | Ja d u Gh a r
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: Cam-
bridge 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 sys-
tematic reasoning, be recommended for adoption by an industry for improv-
ing 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 com-
panies. 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.
55. Bharucha, Indian Cinematograph Yearbook, 271–84.
56. See Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–1928, 43–45.
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 Uni-
versity 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 con-
cerned specialist/s until it reaches the hands of the final watchmaker-
assembler. 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 watch-
making 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 disag-
gregated form an exceptional case? Prasad tells us that Bombay has histori-
cally lacked the basic “raw material” that is the ground on which serial manu-
facture 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: Interna-
tional 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.
72. Cinema, August–September 1930, 45; “Through Our Lens,” Cinema, Febru-
ary 1930, 6.
73. It must be noted that cast and costume lists were required even by theater com-
panies, 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,” dif-
ferences 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 num-
bered 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 specifi-
cally 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, Brief-
less Barrister (Homi Master), was released in 1926 but featured Gohar and not
Sulochana or Sandow.
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.; com-
plex 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 sto-
ries 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 Bom-
bay 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 cameraper-
son of the silent era; and Desai founded Surya Film Co. in Bangalore. On Tan-
don, see Karan Bali’s documentary An American in Madras (2013) on Ameri-
can 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 Hol-
lywood 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 Aka-
demi, 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.
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:
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 Lon-
don Film, he relocated to Bombay and landed a spot as Chandulal Shah’s assis-
tant. Both Doshi and Desai were A-list directors for Ranjit.
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] accompa-
nied 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 con-
venience.” 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.
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 Com-
pany, 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:
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,” Bio-
Scope: 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.
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 spec-
tacular 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 Pavi-
tra 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 transi-
tioned 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.
3. Voice | Aw aa z 353
16. In a few months the program expanded to include “Indian music,” “Gramo-
phone transmissions,” and a “Children’s Hour,” with programming from Mon-
day through Saturday. In October 1924 the Karnatak Amateurs troupe
recorded a program of classical vocal solos and a harmonium solo. TOI, Octo-
ber 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 Uni-
versity, 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 insinuat-
ing it automatically and mechanically.” See Michel Chion, Sound: An Acou-
logical 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: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1991), 245–312.
25. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio Uni-
versity 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 ora-
tory and other mass communication techniques used during the swadeshi
354 3 . Voi c e | Aw a a z
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, Theo-
sophical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, Sir Cowasji Jehangir Hall, Royal Insti-
tute 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; “Surviv-
als 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 Sys-
tem,” 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.
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 End-
ing 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 righteous-
ness. Dialogues have also circulated in audio economies outside film exhibi-
tion circuits on radio, cassette, and CD.
49. The Calcutta-based studio New Theatres is popularly credited with introduc-
ing 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 Sou-
venir (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: Sil-
ver Jubilee Souvenir (Bombay: Film Federation of India, 1956), 151.
52. R. S. Choudhari, “Teething Troubles of the Talkie,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56:
53. Dipali, March 30, 1934, 14.
54. Sulochana, “Ordeals of Stardom,” in Indian Talkie 1931–’56: Silver Jubilee Sou-
venir (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: Interna-
tional 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
356 3 . Voi c e | Aw a a z
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.
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 edit-
ing), 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 Fam-
ily Archive.
78. The law has played a major part in the way Indian film historians have dis-
cussed colonialism. This discussion broadly revolves around the law as symp-
tomatic 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 aesthetic-
philosophical 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 court-
room. “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).
358 3 . Voi c e | Aw a a z
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,” Compara-
tive 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 nur-
ture, 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 signifi-
cance here, mainly the centrality of male protagonists and defendants in post-
Independence films.
92. For a detailed discussion of Jaddan Bai and her films, see Debashree Mukher-
jee, “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 melo-
drama Mother India (Mehboob, 1957), which has become ingrained in Hindi-
speaking 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.
97. Cinema, April 1932, 8.
98. Advertisement for scenario by a writer based in Dombivli, in Cinema, Janu-
ary 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: Tech-

nology, 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. Muham-
mad 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 cen-
terpiece of political thought and strategy during India’s anticolonial move-
ment 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 Environ-
ment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Ford-
ham 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).
360 3 . Voi c e | Aw a a z
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 Cin-
ema, 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. Kat-
dare, “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 Post-
Colonial 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, par-
ticularly in the case of Vithal, as connoting aristocratic status.
26. N. C. Lekhram, “Pessimistic Youth,” Rangbhumi, May, 1932, 3. My translation
from Hindi.
4 . Vit alit y | Jo sh 361
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 Con-
sumption 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 nonrepresenta-
tive 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 (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 530–51.
38. The “social” was an industrial genre popular in the 1930s that dealt with con-
temporary questions of social reform (see introduction).
39. See Vijaya Singh’s recent book Level Crossing: Railway Journeys in Hindi Cin-
ema (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2017) for more analyses of filmic imagina-
tions 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 chris-
tened 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.
362 4 . Vi t ali t y | Jo sh
41. Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensational-
ism,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Van-
essa 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,” Criti-
cal 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 engag-
ing, 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 Com-
mittee, 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: Interna-
tional Pictures Corporation, 1931), 52.
54. For detailed studies of the role of magic and artifice in Hindu mythologi-
cals, see Sean Cubitt, “Phalke, Melies, and Special Effects Today,” Wide
Angle 21, no. 1 (1999); Ravi Vasudevan, “Devotional Transformation: Mira-
cles, 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.
4 . Vit alit y | Jo sh 363
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 transla-
tion). Many thanks to Aftab Ahmad for going through the original Urdu ver-
sions 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: Univer-
sity 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, Par-
allax (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11.
70. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapo-
lis, 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
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.
364 4 . Vi t ali t y | Jo sh
3. Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977–78
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 20, quoted in Gorfinkel, “Wea-
riness, Waiting,” 316.
4. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyber-
netics, 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. Austra-
lia 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, Novem-
ber 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.
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 Bom-
bay, 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. Hri-
shikesh Arvikar, “Between the Shots, After the Cuts: The Political Economy of
Prabhat Studio,” Wide Screen 8, no. 1 (2019): 14.
22. “Film Star Refuses Food.”
5 . E xhau stion | Thak aan 365
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 public-
ity 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 transac-
tional 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 chro-
nology 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 representa-
tional medium.” Arvikar, “Between the Shots,” 10.
30. Juned Shaikh uses the phrase “Marathi Marxist” in his book manuscript, ten-
tatively 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 stan-
dard Marathi Marxist term for labor power. I have translated karya-kshamta
366 5. E x h au s t io n | Th a k a a n
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 over-
worked 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: Busi-
ness 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 work-
man 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 mar-
ketable 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 Gui-
ana (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, Indus-
trial 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 Resolu-
tion 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
industrialization. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Wom-
en’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 Ger-
ald 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 pro-
ducers 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 mani-
festo 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 introduc-
ing 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 actuali-
ties 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 sub-
jection. 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.
368 5. E x h au s tio n | Th a k a a n
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 criti-
cally 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 Holly-
wood?” 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); Upen-
dranath 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 Rach-
navali, 429. My translation from Hindi.
73. Munshi Premchand, letter to friend, November 13, 1934, Premchand Rach-
navali, 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).
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 can-
not 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 prolifera-
tion and vernacularization of socialist and communist texts routed to Bom-
bay via Germany, America, and England by authors such as M. N. Roy, Fred-
erick 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. Pre-
sumably Pancholi signed her on immediately for a second film.
94. Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contin-
gency, 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
370 5. E x h au s t io n | Th a k a a n
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 “economiza-
tion of creativity” is useful to think about here and is discussed in the epi-
logue. 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 Cine-
maant? (Should I join the movies?, 1940).
3. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyber-
netics, 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 “com-
pelled 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 docu-
mentary 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: Macmil-
lan, 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 Cin-
ema in India, 1930s–1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New
York: Routledge, 1994).
6 . Sh or t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e 371
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 aspi-
rational 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 cer-
tain 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 con-
form 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 secre-
tarial work and paramedical service were significant work options. See Geral-
dine 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 Cin-
ema (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 (Berke-
20. For an early use of the term dream factory, see Hortense Powdermaker, Holly-
wood: The Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (Bos-
ton: Little, Brown, 1950).
21. See “Nehru’s Speaks in Malacca,” Morning Tribune, May 31, 1937, 2; “Unem-
ployment 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/.
372 6 . Sh or t C ir c uit | S t r u g g l e
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 tele-
phone 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, associa-
tional cultures, masculine performativity, and excessive or “rowdy” public
behavior. E.g., Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Srinivas, “Devotion and Defi-
ance.” 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 Cul-
ture,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jona-
than 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 Fear-
less 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 con-
cerns 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 Talk-
ies (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.
6 . Sh o r t C ir cuit | Str ug g l e 373
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 ques-
tion 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 Hun-
dreds of Young Boys and Girls Who Go Astray,” filmindia, September 1940, 17.
38. filmindia, June 1939, 3.
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.
374 6. Sh or t C ir c uit | S t r u g g l e
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.
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 Mum-
bai 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 seri-
ous 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 Schizophre-
nia (London: Continuum, 2004).
71. Franco Berardi, “Exhaustion,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and
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.
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 Chi-
cago Press, 2015).
78. Brian R. Jacobson, “Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Con-
trol, 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 protection-
ist 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 photogra-
phy, 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 sup-
ply. See Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Sub-
urbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 198–210,
for a history of Greater Mumbai.
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 Encyclope-
dia 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 Cri-
tique of History,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 349.
7. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-
Century 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 Stu-
dios (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Stephen Putnam Hughes, “Music
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Begin-
nings 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.
Orient Blackswan, 2014), 2.
15. For example, Joshua Yumibe’s Moving Color: Early Film, Mass culture, Mod-
ernism (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 net-
works among contemporary freelance cultures, where assignments and col-
laborations 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, televi-
sion, 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
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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, 198 292; in Veer Bala, 229, 266, 303;
Abdulla, Sheikh, 229, 266, 303 Virilio on, 289
Abdulla Fazalbhoy Technical Institute Acousmatic, 179–80; voice, 161,
for Radio & Cinema, 349n78 162
Abhinetri films, 163, 171, 177; Actress Acousmatic attunement, 147, 151, 152;
and, 31, 167, 168–69 169; Basant and, as cultural technique, 149
167; as transnational, 166; voice and, Actants, 231, 270, 292, 298, 303
167 Actor-networks, 15
Abraham, Esther Victoria “Pramila.” Actress, 312; accidents and, 291–92;
See Pramila Anglo-Indian, 30, 159, 165;
Accident, 37, 41–42, 311, 323–24, becoming-actress, 12, 264; body of,
376n69; actress and, 291–92; 196, 207; caste and, 260–61, 262–63;
animals and, 292; Aristotle on, 289; court cases and, 179, 264; dialogue
death and, 294–95, 310; extra and, and, 40; ethnicity of, 165; glamor
293–94; Fearless Nadia and, 291–92; and, 32, 276; immorality and,
Jain on, 288–89, 290; Kamble and, 164–66; impassioned speech of, 40;
310; mock motor, 291; Pramila and, labor of, 238; Lady barrister films,
296, 298, 303; Rafique and, 270–71, 163, 170–72, 174–79; modernity and,
290–91, 293, 294–95; safety 32; “A Modern Movie-struck Girl”
measures and, 292–93, 373n54; and, 280–81, 374n32; practices of,
Schivelbusch and, 301–2; stunts 12; religion and, 33, 165, 263;
and, 291–92, 293; technology and, respectability of, 237–38; sexual
Actress (continued) Anglo-Indian, 261, 310, 333n61; actress,
assault and, 33; sexuality and, 30; 30, 159, 165; labor, 159
stunts and, 291–92, 293; voice and, Anthropocene, 299
147, 159–60, 160, 161, 163–64. Anticolonial movement, 26
See also Abhinetri films Apna Ghar, 62
Actress (Bambai ki Mohini), 31, 167, Apte, Shanta, 36, 41, 166, 183, 233; body
168–69, 169 and, 240, 241–42, 243–44, 268; caste
Actress Kyon Bani? (Why Become an of, 262; class and, 234, 239, 261–63;
Actress?), 358n69 early life of, 232; embodiment and,
Adhikari, Gangadhar, 262 259, 265; energy and, 268; exhaus-
Adhuri Kahani, 55–56 tion and, 231, 243–44, 245; hunger
Adler, Mortimer, 255, 369n68 strike of, 230, 231–32, 234, 235–36,
Affect, 10, 17, 94, 140–41, 182, 207; 246, 263, 264, 266; individuation
energy and, 192 and, 264; Jaau Mi Cinemaant? by,
Affective vocality, 145–46, 171 41, 231, 238, 239, 242, 243–44,
AFL. See American Federation of 256–59, 261–62; Karya-kshamta
Labor and, 243; in Kunku, 233, 234, 236;
Agency, 252, 373n29; creative, 12, 258; labor and, 238–39, 240, 267; labor
distributed, 15; managing, 343n137; power and, 242–43, 246, 260, 263,
mazdoor and, 27; negative, 295; 266, 366n35; Prabhat Studios and,
spectatorship and, 108 232–33, 235–36, 264; resistance and,
AIR. See All India Radio 235, 265; in Sant Dnyaneshwar, 226;
Ajanta Cinetone Ltd., 112, 123, 305 on unemployment, 278
Alam Ara, 20, 74–75, 79, 80, 82, 152, Archival absence, 35
351n101 Archival conjugation, 35–36, 42
Ali, Mumtaz, 222 Archive: conjugation and, 14, 35, 36, 42,
Ali Baba, 77, 320 319; materiality and, 343n1; NFAI,
All India Radio (AIR), 149 34
All-India Women’s Conference, Aristotle, 289
331n45 Arrival: imminent, 22; mythologies of,
Always Tell Your Wife (Miya-Biwi), 53, 324; timely, 23
92; gambling in, 54 Art and Prudence (Adler), 255, 369n68
Amar Jyoti, 233 Artist, 322
Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 258, 259, 260 Asif, K., 305, 308
American Civil War, 68 Assemblage, 320–21; fan-as-worker
American Depression. See Great and, 295; theory, 15, 19
Depression Awaaz, 143
American Federation of Labor (AFL), Awara, 359n91
251 Azad, 315
Amrit Manthan, 232–33 Azurie, 274; fan and, 276
402 In d e x
Baap Kamai, 53 Bhavnani Productions, 126
Badami, Sarvottam, 83, 136, 138, 141 Bijlee, 296
Bai, Jaddan, 342n124 Billimoria, Eddie, 278
Baiji, 146, 353n8 Binaries, 40, 110, 172, 326n6, 329n27;
Bakhtin, M. M., 222, 272 cultural, 193; ontological, 5
Bambai ki Mohini. See Actress Birla, Ritu, 46, 53, 54
Bandhan, 202 Bodily risk, 37; maps of, 309; waiting
Banking Corporation of India, 95 and, 41. See also Accident
Bao, Weihong, 192 Body, 7, 160–61, 182, 185, 212; of actress,
Barrister’s Wife, 177; Gohar in, 176 196, 207; Apte and, 240, 241–42,
Barthes, Roland, 230 243–44, 268; colonialism and, 195;
Basant, 167 Dalvi and, 211–12; Diamond Queen
Baskaran, S. Theodore, 35 and, 199, 200–1, 201; Doane and,
Basu, Tarit Kumar, 128, 349n81 206–7; exhaustion and, 243; health
Baudelaire, Charles, 29–30, 332n57 of, 193, 194–96; lady barrister films
Bazin, André, 313 and, 177; in “Mera Naam Radha
Bean, Jennifer, 293 Hai,” 187–88, 225–26, 228; mind-
Becoming, 115, 153; cinema, 265; body dualism, 276; modernity and,
industry, 186; performative, 170; 207; nationalism and, 201; respect-
sensory-technical, 100 ability and, 162–63; samvega and,
Becoming-actress, 12, 264 208; of Sulochana, 196; technology
Becoming-individual, 15 and, 202–3. See also Nav Jeevan
Becoming-modern, 23, 186 Bombay, 22, 24, 25. See also specific
Becoming-subject, 15 topics
Becoming-worker, 273, 288 Bombay Before Bollywood (Thomas),
Beller, Jonathan, 311 320
Below-the-line workers, 11, 28, 259, 317, Bombay Cinema (Mazumdar), 17–18
325n1 Bombay Cinema and Theatres Trade
Benegal, D. S., 135 Association, 104
Bengal Radio Club, 353n15 Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways
Benjamin, Walter, 206, 227, 334n4; Company (BEST), 346n39
innervation and, 207, 208 Bombay Legislative Council, 45
BEST. See Bombay Electric Supply and Bombay Radio Club, 149, 151
Tramways Company Bombay’s People (Siddiqui), 52
Betab, Narayan Prasad, 75, 155 Bombay Stock and Cotton Exchange,
Bhanoo, Satnarayan, 288 47
Bhanu, Jagad, 91 Bombay Suburban Electric Supply Co.
Bhaumik, Kaushik, 35 (BSES), 95
Bhavnani, Mohan, 63, 123, 131, 305; on Bombay Talkies Ltd., 16, 17, 19, 20, 61,
sex workers, 305–6 112; Basant and, 167; Bengali
In de x 403
Bombay Talkies Ltd. (continued) object-as-commodity under,
employees at, 97; caste and, 261; 266–67; science and, 39
continuity scripts from, 126, 128; Cardozo, Ermeline. See Ermeline
Devika managing, 138; finances of, Cardozo
71, 91–92; Jawani-ki-Hawa and, 92, Caste, 197, 310; actress and, 260–61,
137, 142, 203–6, 204, 207; Lall and, 262–63; of Apte, 262; Bombay
88, 283; location shooting and, Talkies and, 261; Dalit movement
299, 300; Nav Jeevan and, 193–94, and, 259, 260; embodiment and,
194, 196, 197–99, 201, 204, 216, 259–60; in Jaau Mi Cinemaant?,
217–19; network map of, 86; 256–59, 261–62; labor and, 257;
paperwork of, 121, 123; production “Mera Naam Radha Hai” and,
at, 137, 139; scenario and, 128; 227
speculation and, 91–92; staff of, Censorship, 5; colonialism and, 8,
141–42; start of, 84–85; studio and, 252–53; Mill and, 252
133, 298–99; as training institute, Central Casting Corporation, 281
130–31, 137. See also Devika Rani; Chakrabarty, Amiya, 138
Rai, Himansu Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, 113–14,
Bombay Telephone Company, 159 347n45
Booth, Greg, 318 Chanderrao More, 59
Bordwell, David, 13, 115, 118 Chandramohan, 177–78, 261
Borkar, Saroj, 150 Charkha, 345n14
Boundary-work, 117 Chatterjee, Partha, 367n51
Bound scripts, 117 Chattopadhyay, Pasupati, 131–32
Briefless Barrister, The, 129–30 Chaudhuri, Devika Rani. See Devika
British Dominion Films, 215 Rani
British East India Company, 24 Chinese film industry, 60
Bromfield, Louis, 147–48 Chion, Michel, 149, 151, 354n20
BSES. See Bombay Suburban Electric Chowdhry, Prem, 8
Supply Co. Cine-ecology, 46, 97; assemblage and,
Bubonic plague, 4, 24 19; defining, 2–3, 18–19; elastic, 38;
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 300 finances and, 36, 58–61; power
hierarchies in, 41; scientific-
Calcutta, 24, 25, 27 industrial transformations of, 39;
Capitalism, 19, 51, 239, 258, 284, 334n4; spatial practice and, 16–17, 21, 42;
backward, 115; cine-worker and, 259; speculation and, 4, 36, 39, 48, 65.
consumer, 311, 322; corporate, 46; See also specific topics
cotton and, 27; finance, 57, 336n16, Cine Finance, 95
338n47; gender and, 329n29; Cinema, 9; early, 329n29. See also
industrial, 26, 191, 206; industries specific topics
and, 338n52; Marxism and, 242; Cinema, 112
404 Ind e x
Cinema and the Wealth of Nations Collective memory, 16, 220
(Grieveson), 65 Colonialism, 4–5, 189, 316, 358n78;
Cinema Girl, 166 anticolonial movement, 26; body
Cinema Queen, 166 and, 195; censorship and, 8, 252–53;
Cinema Sansar (Cinema world), 64–65, energy and, 193; exhibition and,
66–67 107–8; gambling and, 54–55;
Cinematic, 221 Hollywood and, 294; modernity
Cinematograph, 4 and, 95, 103, 326n9; survivalist
Cinema world (Cinema Sansar), 64–65, cinema and, 5
66–67 Colonial science, 2, 247, 344n3
Cine-worker, 10, 28, 321, 327n17; Colonial surveillance, 36, 154, 334n69,
capitalism and, 259; class and, 11, 33, 370n89
258; female, 33; recursive operations Combes, Muriel, 271
and, 15–16; wage and, 11; waiting Communist Party of India, 27
and, 15–16, 41, 312. See also Actress; Comolli, Jean-Louis, 227–28
Fan-as-worker; Women Companies Act, 64
Circo Film Company (Cine Industries Conjugation, 14, 35, 36, 42, 319
and Recording Company), 58, 93, 96; Contingency, 147–48, 207, 265, 283,
profits and, 61–63, 64; S. Apte and, 284; competition and, 139; control
264; start of, 61; Stock market and, and, 39; Doane on, 290; interwar
64 period and, 58; mock motor accident
C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown, 57–58, 61–63; and, 291
Companies Act and, 64; stars and, 79 Continuity script, 100, 118, 124;
City. See specific topics Bombay Talkies and, 126, 128;
Civilization and Climate (Huntington), editing and, 129; in Hollywood, 117;
247–48 paper-based, 20; preproduction and,
Class, 8, 203, 253, 256, 259, 260, 294, 135; scenario and, 123; talkie
327n17; Apte and, 234, 239, 261–63; transition and, 119
cine-worker and, 11, 33, 258; elite, 92, Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 208
93; gaming and, 53; in Jau Mi Cotton, 319; capital investments and,
Cinemaant?, 261; Jawani-ki-Hawa 68–69; capitalism and, 27; cinema
and, 203; merchant, 54, 310; middle, and, 65, 68–69, 70; credit and, 65;
9, 28, 29, 32, 57, 142, 172, 197, 278, electricity and, 111; Ranjit Movitone
307, 311; servant, 257–58; struggle, and, 95; P. Roychund and, 78; Shah
249; women and, 33, 165, 166–67, and, 75, 77; spatial practice and, 70;
177, 234, 306; working, 24, 27, 70, speculation and, 50
144, 157, 211, 215, 258, 277, 287, 326n6 Cotton futures markets, 50, 55, 64–65,
Climate, 42, 186, 223–24, 298, 302–3; 68; precarity and, 69–70
climate change, 189; vitality and, Court case, 37, 359n88; actresses and,
247 179, 264; C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown,
In de x 405
Court case (continued) Depletion. See Exhaustion
57–58, 61–63, 64, 79; language and, Desai, Chimanlal: National Studios
174; Legal Practitioners (Women) Limited and, 83–84; Sagar Film
Act (1923), 171–72; Nalini D. and, Company and, 80; Sagar Movietone
306–7; sexual assault and, 33, and, 75, 77, 78–79; Select Pictures
306–7; B. Singh and, 152–53, 171; Circuit and, 80
Tilak trial, 355n35; Vithal and, 81; Desai, Haribhai, 131
voice and, 153–54 Desai, Jayant, 136, 141, 351n96
Courtesan economy, 23 De Sousa, C. F. C., 57
Coute que Coute, 227–28 De Souza, Franklin, 310
Creative agency, 12, 258 Devgan, Veeru, 375n54
Creative industries, 42, 344n5, 372n11; Devi, Sabita. See Sabita Devi
production and, 321–22 Devi Devyani, 74–75, 155; Dialogue in,
Credit, 52, 60, 62, 85; cotton and, 65; 355n39
creditors, 56–57, 64; credit- Devika Rani, 33, 84–85, 89, 121, 166,
worthiness, 90, 93; economy, 51, 68; 204; Bombay Talkies managed by,
Gujarati, 77, 336n27; indigenous, 2, 138; filming of, 236; on film training,
338n50 130–31; in Karma, 89; in London, 88;
Credit networks, 2, 49, 69, 116; Madan and, 284; Mamata and, 170,
mercantile, 97 176; profile flexibility of, 137; raw
Cultural techniques, 100, 157, 222, 230, stock and, 135; on staff, 141–42; UFA
327n16; acousmatic attunement as, Studios and, 86
149; corporeal, 10 Deware, N. G., 111
Cupboards of Curiosity (Hastie), 273 Dharamsey, Virchand, 123–24
Dhasal, Namdeo, 333n59
Dabral, Mangalesh, 229, 230 Dhavta Dhota (Varerkar), 253
Dadar, 307 Dialogue, 10, 75, 99, 128, 146, 349n81,
Dalit movement, 259, 260 356n48; actress and, 40; delivery, 2,
Dalvi, K. T., 119, 350n83; body and, 158, 171; in Devi Devyani, 355n39;
211–12; Manual of Indian Talkies by, dramatic, 148, 175; film books and,
129; scenario and, 130 156; in Give and Take, 148–49;
Darshan, 363n55 impassioned, 4–5, 171; lady barris-
Dass, Manishita, 35 ters and, 170; live, 157; in Mamata,
Dave, Mohanlal G., 123, 124 172, 173, 174; memorizing, 374n33;
David, Wilfrid, 34 Pakdaman Raqasa and, 166;
Death: accident and, 294–95, 310; reliance on, 145; in Savitri, 121–22;
exhaustion and, 229, 230–31, sound and, 126, 158; theatricality of,
265, 266, 303; of Rafique, 270–71, 155; writers, 126, 154
290–91, 293, 294–95; of Rai, 138 Diamond Queen: body and, 199, 200–1,
Deccan Queen, 139 201; energy and, 209, 209, 210; as
406 In d e x
stunt film, 199, 208; vitality and, exhaustion and, 266; practice
201 and, 15
Dinshaw, F. E., 92 Enemy, The, 195
Director, 132; director-producer model, Energy, 40–41, 185, 201, 228, 249; affect
138, 139–40; writer-director model, and, 192; Apte and, 268; cinematic,
133–34, 138, 139–40 221; colonialism and, 193; Diamond
Distributed agency, 15 Queen and, 209, 209, 210; fan-as-
Doane, Mary Ann, 126, 203, 220; body worker and, 275; josh, 191; modernity
and, 206–7; on contingency, 290; on and, 189; “Night starvation” and,
motion, 265 190–91; off-screen, 186, 227–28; as
Do Ghadi ki Mouj, 54 processual, 192; Rangachariar and,
Doshi, Chaturbhuj, 351n96 210–11; recursivity and, 221; short
Double Cross, 55 circuit and, 270; studies, 191–92;
Dr. Madhurika, 5, 6 technology and, 202–5
Duniya Na Mane (The Unexpected), Enervation, 190, 210, 220, 225. See also
170, 202, 233, 234 Innervation
Dyer, Richard, 272–73, 360n6 Ermeline Cardozo, 33
Exhaustion, 143, 249; Apte and, 231,
Early cinema, 329n29 243–44, 245; body and, 243; death
East India Film Company, 27 and, 229, 230–31, 265, 266, 303;
Ecology: environmental control, 298; embodiment and, 266; of extras,
media, 2, 325n3; of practice, 14; 229, 266; industrial workers and,
production, 316 246–48; precarity and, 14
Economic Aspects of the Film Indus- Exhibition: colonial, 107–8; form, 107;
try in India, The (Jain), 288–89, industrial, 105, 111–12; “Photo-Cine-
290 Radio Exhibition,” 105–6
Economics: regulation, 65, 67; specula- Experience: of filmmaking, 15–16;
tion in, 48 production, 9–10, 15, 16, 36, 221, 227,
Economy, 52; creative, 311; credit, 51, 230, 266, 289
68; culture and, 46; gig, 285, 311, Extra, 33, 312; accident and, 293–94;
371n96 exhaustion of, 229, 266; labor of, 238;
Edelman, Lee, 199 at Mohan Sound Studios, 306;
Edwardes, S. M., 55 Nalini D. as, 271, 305; Rafique as,
Ek Hi Raasta, 82–83 270–71, 293, 295; Sagar Movietone
Elasticity, 116 and, 294; sex worker and, 305–6;
Electricity, 110; cotton and, 111 spatial segregation of, 305; star
Elephanta Movietone, 164 system and, 293–94; in Veer Bala, 229
Elsaesser, Thomas, 192
Embodiment, 235, 329n27; Apte and, Factories Act (1934), 254, 255
259, 265; caste and, 259–60; Factory Act (1891), 254
In de x 407
Family-system, 140–41 Tatas and, 84, 95, 141. See also
Fan, 269–70, 324, 373n29; Azurie and, Cotton
276; identity of, 279–80; kinetoma- Financialization, 336n16
nia and, 273; “A Modern Movie- Flâneur, 29–30, 332n57
struck Girl” and, 280–81, 374n32 Flâneuse, 333n58
Fan, 269–70; Chandna in, 272 Flower. See Phool
Fan-as-worker, 270, 273, 281, 319, Foreign Qualified Technician, 131
372n11; assemblage and, 295; energy Freedom movement, 5
and, 275; Jaini and, 286; Jehan and, Freelance acting, 139
280; M. Khan and, 278–79; struggle FTII. See Film and Television Institute
and, 283; Zabak and, 282, 287 of India
Fay, Jennifer, 299 Futures markets (satta bazaar),
Fazalbhoy, Y. A., 27–28, 49, 95, 332n50; 339n62; cotton, 50, 55, 64–65, 68,
General Films and, 59; Indian Film 69–70; in film, 55–56; speculation
and, 104; National Studios Limited and, 55, 65; teji-mandi and, 51
and, 83–84 Futurism: Haraway and, 284; reproduc-
Fearless Nadia, 170, 196, 199, 209, tive, 199
373n29; accidents and, 291–92 Futurity, 15, 39, 50, 85, 88, 199; specula-
Federation of Western India Cine tive, 283
Employees (FWICE), 251–52 FWICE. See Federation of Western
Fiery Cinema (Bao), 192 India Cine Employees
Film and Television Institute of India
(FTII), 101 Gambling, 52, 71; in Always Tell Your
Film City, 310 Wife, 54; in Baap Kamai, 53;
Film Enquiry Committee, 43, 94 colonialism and, 54–55; in films,
Film History as Media Archeology 53–54; Prevention of Gambling Act
(Elsaesser), 192 (1887), 45–46, 54; Ranjit Movitone
Film Institute of India, 130 and, 77; Shah and, 75, 77–78;
Filmistan Ltd., 11, 18, 138, 186 speculation and, 54, 55; struggle
Film school, 130–31 and, 283
Finance, 49–50, 65, 67, 337n42; of Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand:
Bombay Talkies, 71, 91–92; capital- Dandi March and, 26; on exhibi-
ism, 57, 336n16, 338n47; cine- tions, 107; hunger strike and,
ecology and, 36, 58–61; HRIIT and, 234–35, 237; swadeshi and, 103
86–87; Investment Corporation of Gani, Abdul, 290
India and, 84; moneylenders and, Ganti, Tejaswini, 94, 117
69; production costs and, 99; profits Gay Birds, 136, 318–19
and, 61, 63; of Ranjit Movitone, General Films, 59, 84
71–72, 74–75, 95; of Sagar Moviet- Genre, 20, 52, 56, 116, 130; abhinetri
one, 71, 95; speculative, 50, 51, 61, 68; film, 163, 364n68; actress and, 32;
408 In d e x
body and, 187, 366n25; continuity Hangal, A. K., 148, 353n12
script and, 117; exhibition and, 107; Hansen, Miriam, 207, 227, 277
fans and, 373n27; filmmaking as Hansen, Thomas Blom, 326n7
subgenre, 225; finance and, 91, 319, Haraway, Donna J., 35, 284, 318
342n125; Hindu mythological, 212; Hastie, Amelie, 273
historical action, 198; popularity, 88; Hayles, N. Katherine, 271
script and, 128; social film, 21, Haynes, Douglas, 197
362n38; speeches, lectures and, 153, Himansu Rai Indo-International
154, 171, 174; stardom and, 166; stunt Talkies (HRIIT), 342n107; Bhanu
film, 40, 199, 201, 216, 291, 303, and, 91; finances and, 86–87; Karma
366n25; voice, 317 and, 87, 88; speculation and, 89–90
German film industry, 96, 138–39, 277 Hindu-Muslim conflict, 8
Ghar ki Laj, 53 Hollywood, 65, 95, 96, 108, 112, 315;
Gig economy, 311, 371n96; freelancing AFL and, 251; Central Casting
in, 285 Corporation of, 281; colonialism
Gitelman, Lisa, 126 and, 294; continuity script in, 117;
Give and Take, 148–49 ICC and, 114; Prasad on, 118; strike
Glover, William, 331n41 in, 234, 251; studio, 298; stunts and,
God’s Beloved, 169–70 293; women in, 281
Gogtay, Ram L., 185, 251, 254–55 Homji, Khorshed, 142
Gohar Mamajiwala, 16, 33, 136, 171, Homji, Manek, 142
339n72; in Barrister’s Wife, 176; Horizontal integration, 116, 138; Irani
filming of, 236; Jagdish Film and, 81–82; Ranjit Movitone and,
Company and, 73–74; Ranjit 95–96
Movitone and, 72, 74–75, 77, 78; Horlicks, 190, 190–91, 196
Shree Ranjit Film Company and, 74 House of Kapurchand, 60, 75,
Govil, Nitin, 19, 344n5 337n37
Great Depression, 59, 68, 80; Karma How Films Are Made, 212
and, 87; politics and, 278; unemploy- HRIIT. See Himansu Rai Indo-
ment crisis and, 26 International Talkies
Grieveson, Lee, 59–60; Cinema and the Human, 191–92, 244, 271–72; infra-
Wealth of Nations by, 65 structure, 267; recursivity and,
Gueizler, Annette “Azurie.” See Azurie 212–13, 226
Gul-e-Bakavali, 123–24, 125 Human Motor, The (Rabinbach), 189
Gunsundari (Why Husbands go Hunger strike, 37; Apte and, 230,
Astray?), 73 231–32, 234, 235–36, 246, 263, 264,
Gupta, S. C., 132, 202 266; Gandhi and, 234–35, 237;
Millworkers and, 235
Haas, Willy, 212, 215, 305–6, 316 Hunterwali, 5
Hallett, Hilary, 277 Huntington, Ellsworth, 247–48
In de x 409
ICC. See Indian Cinematograph Industry. See specific topics
Committee Infrastructure, 3, 93, 95, 107, 140, 191,
Ideal Movitone, 167, 169 277–78, 375n54; civic, 224, 307;
Identity work, 13–14 human, 267; industrial, 323; media,
IMPC. See Indian Motion Picture 46; sensory-technical becoming
Congress and, 100; silent films and, 145; sound
Imperial Film Company, 27, 59, 82; and, 59; speculative, 49, 50, 85, 94;
Irani and, 80, 81; Vithal and, 81 talkie film, 342n115; urban, 310
IMPPA. See Indian Motion Pictures Innervation: Benjamin and, 207, 208;
Producers’ Association Nav Jeevan and, 216, 217–19;
Indian Cinematograph Committee samvega and, 208
(ICC), 5, 49, 63, 103, 104, 113; Innocent Dancing Girl. See Pakdaman
Hollywood and, 114; silent film Raqasa
scripts and, 124; Villiers and, 210 International Pictures Corporation, 119
Indian Cotton Committee of the Investment Corporation of India, 84
Textile Control Board, 65 Irani, Ardeshir, 59, 152; horizontal
Indian Factories (Amendment) Act, integration and, 81–82; Imperial
248 Film Company and, 80, 81; Sagar
Indian Film, 104 Film Company and, 80, 139
Indian film studies, 14, 315, 320, 378n2
Indian Motion Picture Congress Jaau Mi Cinemaant? (Should I join the
(IMPC), 8, 101–2; “Photo-Cine- movies?) (Apte), 41, 231, 238; body in,
Radio Exhibition” and, 105–6 243–44; caste in, 256–59, 261–62;
Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ class in, 261; Marathi Marxist and,
Association (IMPPA), 104, 252 239; nonhuman in, 242
Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association, 253 Jagdish Film Company, 73–74
Individuation, 12, 186, 198, 266; Apte Jaikumar, Priya, 5, 35, 316
and, 264; mediatic, 100; Simondon Jain, Rikhab Dass, 288–89, 290
on, 14–15 Jaini, MD, 286
Indurani, 279–80, 292, 303 Japanese film industry, 96
Industrial capitalism, 191, 206 Jawani-ki-Hawa, 92, 137, 142, 204, 207;
Industrial exhibition: MPSI and, 105, class and, 203; modernity and,
111–12; studio tour and, 111–12 203–4; shock and, 205–6; vitality in,
Industrial India (Nirala Hindustan), 204–5
108–9, 109, 151, 314 Jeevan Lata, 136, 171, 177
Industrial respectability, 254 Jeevan Prabhat, 299, 300
Industrial science, 330n31; national Jehan, Roshan, 279–80, 373n31
industry and, 100, 102; technology Jinnah, M. A., 81
and, 110; transformations and, 101 John, Ali Peter, 272
Industrial struggle, 2, 311, 329n29 Josh, 191
410 Ind e x
Jugaad, 326n6 of actress, 238; Anglo-Indian, 159;
Jungle Beauty, 223 Apte and, 238–39, 240, 267; caste
Jungle King, 301; monsoon and, 296, and, 257; exploitation, 225; of extras,
298; Pramila in, 296, 297, 298, 301, 238; Factories Act (1934) and, 254,
302, 303 255; Indian Factories (Amendment)
Act, 248; industrial, 246–48;
Kaliya Mardan, 212 mazdoor, 27, 252, 254, 256; Millwork-
Kamble, Ram, 310 ers and, 235, 245, 252–53; paperwork
Kangan, 138 and, 120, 120–21; power and, 242–43;
Kapoor, Motilal Shamlal, 282 reform, 247–48; sensuousness of, 14;
Kardar, A. R., 134 union, 251–52, 323, 368n55; women
Karma, 87, 88, 89, 91 and, 372n15; writers and, 255–56.
Karya-kshamta, 243 See also Exhaustion
Khadi, 345n25 Labor power, 252, 311, 314, 370n81; Apte
Khan, Mehboob, 82–83, 84, 134, and, 242–43, 246, 260, 263, 266,
352n111; fan-as-worker and, 278–79; 366n35; creativity and, 266;
National Studios and, 141; Sagar reproduction of, 70, 212
Film Company and, 139 Lady barrister films, 163, 171, 359n91;
Khan, Shah Rukh, 269–70 Barrister’s Wife, 176–77; body and,
Khan, Ustad Jhande, 75 177; dialogue and, 170; Jeevan Lata,
Khanna, Aaryan, 269 177; Mamata, 92, 170, 172, 173, 174,
Khazanchi, 332n50 175–76, 177; mulzima and, 175;
Khote, Durga, 123, 374n33 Taqdeer, 177–78
Kimti Ansu, 292 Lahore, 24, 25, 28
Kinetomania, 273 Lakshmi Film Company, 72–73
Kirti song booklet, 21 Lal-E-Yaman, 27, 123, 155
Kohinoor Film Company, 68, 73, 111, Lall, Chuni, 91; Bombay Talkies and,
114, 317 88, 283; HRIIT and, 86–87
Kohinoor United Artists, 123 Language, 24, 82, 145, 154, 331n44;
Kolhapur, 24, 25 court case and, 174; film books and,
Kolhapur Cinetone, 126 156; Hindi, 25, 34, 64, 96, 126, 191,
Kracauer, Siegfried, 206, 211, 277, 334n4 315, 318, 347n47; Marathi, 41;
Kumar, Ashok, 138 Marathi Marxist and, 239; Persian,
Kunku, 233, 234, 236, 263 174; song booklet and, 334n69;
Kureishi, Zahir “Zabak,” 251; colonial- Tamil, 27, 96; Urdu, 25, 34, 96, 126,
ism and, 282; fan-as-worker and, 175–76, 191, 315, 347n47
282, 287 Larkin, Brian, 9, 100
Legal Practitioners (Women) Act
Labor, 249, 264, 265, 268, 366n25, (1923), 171–72
369n76, 377n84; accidents and, 289; Lelyveld, David, 154
In de x 411
Liang, Lawrence, 358n78 Marxism, 253, 319; capitalism and, 242;
Light boy, 1, 12, 15 Marathi Marxist, 239, 262
Lighthouse, 254 Massey, Doreen, 317–18
Location shooting: Jeevan Prabhat and, Master Man, 57
299, 300; Jungle King and, 296, 297, Materiality, 14, 37, 189, 260; embodied
298, 301 desire and, 271; paper archives and,
Lost children, 37 343n1; voice and, 162
Lost films, 34–37, 51, 146, 167, 302; The Mayer, Vicki, 259
Enemy as, 195 Mazdoor (worker), 252, 254, 256; agency
Luhar, Chimanlal, 136 and, 27
Lumiere Brothers, 24 Mazumdar, Ranjani, 17–18
McRobbie, Angela, 285; on creativity,
Machine. See Nonhuman 322–23; subjectivation and, 322
Madam Fashion, 5, 7, 91 Meanwhile, 318
Madan Company, 114, 116 Media archaeology, 330n35
Madan Mohan: Devika and, 284; Media ecology, 2, 325n3
struggle and, 283–84, 285–86 Media industry studies, 13, 19, 372n11
Madras, 24, 25, 27 Medium specificity, 21, 126, 132, 267,
Mahadevan, Sudhir, 35 330n34
Mahatma Vidur, 62 Medvedev, P. N., 272
Majumdar, Neepa, 35, 145, 162, 234; on Meera, 222
respectability, 237–38 Mehboob Productions, 84
Mamajiwala, Gohar. See Gohar Mehta, Kapurchand Nemchand, 337n37
Mamajiwala Mehta, Sumant, 331n45
Mamata (Mother), 92, 175–76, 177; Menon, Bindu, 354n18
Devika in, 170, 176; dialogue in, 172, “Mera Naam Radha Hai” (My name is
173, 174 Radha) (Manto), 41, 186, 189, 221,
Manto, Sa’adat Hasan, 316, 364n73; 230, 238; body in, 187–88, 225–26,
“Mera Naam Radha Hai” by, 41, 228; caste and, 227; monsoon,
186–89, 221–27, 230, 238, 265, 267; 222–24; recursivity in, 222, 226;
monsoon and, 222–24; production reflexivity and, 226; resistance in,
experience and, 221, 227; shikari 267
aurat and, 29–30, 33; “Shikari Meri Jaan, 79
Auratein” by, 11–12, 28–29; women Microphone, 156–58, 180; voice test
and, 11–12, 28–30 and, 40, 159–60, 182
Manual of Indian Talkies (Dalvi), 129 Mill, 252–53
Maps, 37; bodily risk, 309 Mind-body dualism, 276
Marathi Marxist, 239, 262 Mise-en-scène, 14
Marathi theater, 23 Miss 1933, 171, 205
Markovits, Claude, 92 Miya-Biwi. See Always Tell Your Wife
412 In d e x
Mock motor accident, 291 Nargis, 179, 359n91; in Mother India,
Modernity, 21, 186, 313–14, 329n29; 359n93; in Taqdeer, 177–78
actress and, 32; arrival and, 23; body Nation, 314–16; national film history,
and, 207; Bombay and, 25–26; 320; national industry, 102; transna-
colonialism and, 95, 103, 326n9; tional and, 326n5
energy and, 189; industrial, 319; National Film Archive of India (NFAI),
Jawani-ki-Hawa and, 203–4; Nav 34
Jeevan and, 220; Ochoa on, 317; Nationalism, 26, 32, 39, 105, 155, 249,
production and, 276–77; science 278, 315, 326n7; activists and, 148;
and, 103; shock and, 206 actress and, 30, 273, 293; Apte and,
“Modern Movie-struck Girl, A,” 263; consumers and, 109–10;
280–81, 374n32 dialogue and, 171; energy and, 190;
Mody, K. P., 130 exhibition and, 107, 108; finance
Mohan, Madan. See Madan Mohan and, 60; imaginary of, 193; Manto
Mohan Sound Studios, 308, 311; extras and, 316; movement, 147; Partition
at, 306; Phool at, 305 of Bengal and, 334n72, 344n9;
Monologue, 353n4 physical fitness and, 201; Progres-
Monsoon, 311; Jungle King and, 296, 298; sive Writers Movement and, 253;
Manto and, 222–24; studio and, 224 satire and, 194; science and, 103;
Monsoon (David), 34 speech and, 153; swadeshi and,
Mother. See Mamata 102–3; talkie transition and, 5;
Mother India, 359n93 technology and, 367n51; vitality and,
Motilal, 138 167
Motion Picture Society of India National Studios Limited, 83–84, 141,
(MPSI), 101, 102–3, 252; industrial 341n102
exhibition and, 105, 111–12; registra- Nav Jeevan (New life), 194, 198–99;
tion of, 105; silver jubilee celebra- innervation and, 216, 217–19;
tions and, 105 modernity and, 220; Shukul in, 193,
Mughal-e-Azam, 305 194; vitality in, 196, 197, 201, 204, 216
Mukherjee, Gyan, 141 Navyug Chitrapat Ltd., 93–94
Mukherjee, Sashadhar, 138, 186 Naya Sansar, 220
Myers, Ruby. See Sulochana New life. See Nav Jeevan
My name is Radha. See “Mera Naam New materialisms, 14
Radha Hai” New Searchlight, 56–57
Mythology, 212–13, 220 New Theatres, 27, 61, 93, 261, 337n43,
352n111, 356n49
Nai Duniya, 62 NFAI. See National Film Archive of
Nalini D.: court case and, 306–7; as India
extra, 271, 305; sexual assault of, 33, Night in Bombay (Bromfield), 147–48
305, 306, 308 “Night starvation,” 190–91
In de x 413
Nirala, 346n31 Passing Show, 51, 315–16
Nirala Hindustan. See Industrial India Pasta, Madhavdas Goculdas, 73
Nirmala, 5 Patel, Ambalal, 78, 136; Sagar Film
Nissar, 305, 306 Company and, 80
Nonhuman, 191–92, 244, 271–72; in Jau Patel, Baburao, 60, 70, 140, 232
Mi Cinemaant?, 242; recursivity Patel, Ishwarlal Umedbhai, 68
and, 212–13, 226 Patel, Sujata, 326n7
Noyce, Frank, 102 Phalke, Dadasaheb, 101, 212, 213, 214,
320
Oberai, B. R., 165 Phool (Flower): at Mohan Sound
Ochoa, Ana Maria, 162; modernity and, Studios, 305; sexual assault and,
317 306–7
Off-screen, 32, 40, 192, 210, 238; action Phule, Jyotirao, 258
stars, 375n53; energies, 186, 189; Physical culture, 40, 194–95, 196, 199,
enervation, 225; orchestras, 106; 241
power relations, 228; sound, 149, Pommer, Eric, 137–38
150, 256n60 Poovey, Mary, 342n125
Omkara, 269 Prabhat Studios, 234; Apte and, 232–33,
On the Mode of Existence of Technical 235–36, 264
Objects (Simondon), 244 Practice, 2, 39; acoustic, 38; aesthetic, 3;
Ontogenesis, 15, 264–65; temporality cinematic, 4, 9; cultural, 10, 13;
of, 186 defining, 12; ecology of, 14; embod-
Options on futures. See Teji-mandi ied, 15; ethnographic, 37; extractive,
Oratory, 147, 152, 154, 326n5; political, 41; material, 36, 50; spatial, 16–17, 21,
2, 153 42, 70. See also specific topics
Osten, Franz, 130, 182 Prakash, Gyan, 48, 104
Ottawa Agreement (1932), 344n6 Pramila, 270–71, 292, 376n74; accidents
and, 296, 298, 303; background of,
Paapi, 77 295–96; in Jungle King, 296, 297, 298,
Pakdaman Raqasa (Innocent Dancing 301, 302, 303; stunts and, 271, 296
Girl), 164, 166 Prasad, M. Madhava, 119, 348n62; on
Pal, Niranjan, 85–86, 119, 128 Hollywood, 118
Pandya, J. R., 294 Precarity, 42, 259, 266, 270, 284, 285,
Paperwork, 98, 100–1, 126, 343n1; of 307, 321; cotton futures markets
Bombay Talkies, 121, 123; division of and, 69–70; embodied, 33; exhaus-
labor and, 120, 120–21; materiality tion and, 14; gender and, 186; hustle
and, 343n1. See also Script and, 4; industrial, 20
Paratexts, 35 Premchand Roychund, 256; cotton and,
Parsi community, 142 78; Mill and, 252–53
Partition, 30, 39, 332n50, 334n72 Premieres, 112
414 Ind e x
Prevention of Gambling Act (1887), Rabinbach, Anson, 242; The Human
45–46, 54 Motor by, 189
Processual, 2, 12, 42, 71, 95, 97; energy Radio, 148, 152, 354n20; AIR, 149;
as, 192; Simondon on, 15; technics Bengal Radio Club, 353n15; Bombay
and, 244 Radio Club, 149, 151; film actors and,
Production, 13, 127, 140; accidents and, 180; “Photo-Cine-Radio Exhibition,”
289; approaches to, 13–14; at 105–6
Bombay Talkies, 137, 139; cities and, Rafique, Mohammed: accident of,
27–28; continuity script and, 135; 270–71, 290–91, 293, 294–95; as
costs of, 99; creative industries and, extra, 270–71, 293, 295; negative
321–22; ecology, 316; experience, agency of, 295
9–10, 15, 16, 36, 221, 227, 230, 266, Rai, Himansu, 84, 88–89, 89, 91, 130;
289; location shooting and, 296, 297, death of, 138; HRIIT and, 86–87; Pal
298–99, 300, 301; modernity and, and, 85–86
276–77; profile flexibility and, 137; Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 34–35
profits and, 63; at Ranjit Movitone, Raja Harishchandra, 101, 320
136–37; at Sagar Movietone, 136; Rajput Ramani, 202, 203
time, 223; transmedial, 23 Ramola, 165
Production cultures, 13, 211, 266, 283 Rangachariar, T., 210–11
Profits, 58, 113, 338n46, 338n48; Circo Rangbhumi, 165–66, 197–98
Film Company and, 61–63, 64; Ranjit Movitone, 18, 19, 20, 76, 123, 157,
elasticity and, 63; investment and, 340n83; accidents at, 292; Betab
61, 63; production and, 63; of Sagar and, 75; construction and, 221;
Movietone, 77; silent films and, 59; cotton and, 95; decline of, 77; Devi
speculation and, 338n47; stars and, Devyani and, 74–75, 155, 355n39;
376n69 director-producers of, 138; finances
Progressive Writers Association, 253, of, 71–72, 74–75, 95; gambling and,
368n62 77; Gohar and, 72, 74–75, 77, 78;
Progressive Writers Movement, 253 Gujarati employees at, 97; horizon-
Proletariat, 211, 212, 220, 277; lumpen- tal stakes of, 95–96; U. Jhande Khan
proletariat, 262; Rao on, 260; urban, and, 75; network map of, 72;
27, 254 production at, 136–37; salaries at,
Prosocial, 379n20 341n92; Shah and, 72–73, 74–75;
Prostitute. See Sex worker Speculation and, 95; Supreme
Proudfoot, Enid, 308, 310 Distributors and, 75; writer-director
Pundalik, 320 model at, 133
Pune, 24, 25 Rao, Anupama, 259, 260, 264
Rationalization, 347n45
Queen Mary School, 143–44, 179, Rau, Enakshi Rama, 165
352n2 Ray, P. C., 103–4
In de x 415
Recursivity, 212–13; energy and, 221; in sharing and, 79; scientific singing
“Mera Naam Radha Hai,” 222, 226 and, 181, 182; speculation and, 95;
Redfield, Peter, 247 star system and, 78, 82–83, 95; 300
Red Signal, 54 Days, 198; Vithal and, 80–81;
Reflexivity, 227; “Mera Naam Radha writer-director model at, 133–34;
Hai” and, 226 Zarina and, 83
Relationality, 221 Salam, Abdul, 229, 266, 303
Religion, 8–9, 281, 311, 327n17; actress Sampat, Dwarkadas, 111
and, 33, 165, 263; riots and, 8 Samvega, 208
Renaming politics, 325n2 Sanatogen, 249, 250
Report of the Film Enquiry Committee Sangeet Film Company, 126
(1951), 49 Sansar Naiya, 205
Reproductive futurism, 199 Sant Dnyaneshwar, 226
Resistance: Apte and, 235, 267; in Sant Tukaram, 202
“Mera Naam Radha Hai,” 267 Saraswati Cinetone, 280
Reza, Mehandi, 180 Saroj Movietone, 59
Rise, The (Tumhari Jeet), 56 Savitri, 123; shooting script of, 120,
Room No. 9, 201–2 120–21
Roti, 202 Sawhney, R. C., 195
Roychund, Premchand. See Premchand Scenario, 119, 126, 133; Bombay
Roychund Talkies and, 128; continuity script
Ryder, Robert, 208 and, 123; Dalvi and, 130; dimen-
sions of, 129
Sabita Devi, 33, 83, 84, 112, 136, 171, Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 246, 249;
341n102; accidents and, 292; accident and, 301–2
Sudama Pictures and, 138 Science. See Industrial Science
Sacred Ganges, 164 Scientific management, 113
Sagar Film Company, 79, 82; accidents Screenwriting, 124; writer-director
at, 290; Irani and, 80, 139; M. Khan model, 133–34, 138, 139–40
and, 139; Proudfoot and, 308, 310; Script: bound, 117; continuity, 20, 100,
Reza and, 180 117–18, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129,
Sagar Movietone, 18, 19, 20, 27; Ali 135; shooting, 120, 120–21, 123–24;
Baba and, 77; C. Desai and, 75, 77, silent film, 124
78–79; Ek Hi Raasta and, 82–83; Secrets of an Actress, 166
extras and, 294; finances of, 71, 95; Select Pictures Circuit, 80
Gujarati employees at, 97; location Self-rule. See Swaraj
of, 294; Meri Jaan and, 79; National Sennett, Richard, 322
Studios Limited, 83–84; network Sensory-technical becoming, 100
map of, 81; Pandya at, 294; produc- Service Ltd, 315
tion at, 136; profits of, 77; resource Setalvad, Chimanlal H., 86–87, 91, 137
416 In d e x
Sexual assault and harassment, 324; Silver jubilee celebrations (1939), 101,
court cases on, 33, 306–7; of 106, 109–10, 111; companies at,
Nalini D., 33, 305, 306, 308; short 106–7; MPSI and, 105
circuit and, 307 Simmel, Georg, 206
Sex worker, 30, 163, 287; extra and, Simondon, Gilbert, 226; on individua-
305–6 tion, 14–15; On the Mode of
Shah, Chandulal, 332n50, 339n72, Existence of Technical Objects by,
340n75, 351n96; cotton and, 75, 77; 244, 245; on the processual, 15
gambling of, 75, 77–78; Lakshmi Singer, Ben, 206
Film Company and, 72–73; Ranjit Singh, Bhagat, 235, 263, 354n27;
Movitone and, 72–73, 74–75; Shree execution of, 152–53, 171
Ranjit Film Company and, 74; stock Singh, Suchet, 131, 350n87
market and, 73; Typist Girl and, 73; Singh, Surjit, 279–80
Vimala Bahu and, 73 Singularity, 15, 16, 242–43, 314
Shaikh, Juned, 262 Sinha, Mohan, 108
Shanti, Mumtaz, 167 SMPE. See Society of Motion Picture
Sharar, Dewan, 91, 292 Engineers
Sharda Film Company, 81, 195 Social films, 5, 21, 156
Sharma, Maneesh, 269 Society, 185
Sharma, Sarah, 319 Society of Motion Picture Engineers
Shastri, K. G., 229, 266, 303 (SMPE), 131
Shikari, 11 Sound, 144; acousmatic attunement
Shikari aurat, 28, 29–30, 33 and, 147, 149, 151, 152; dialogue and,
“Shikari Auratein” (Manto), 11–12, 126, 158; infrastructure and, 59;
28–29 microphone and, 156–60, 180; Night
Shooting. See Location shooting in Bombay and, 147–48; off-screen,
Shooting script: Gul-e-Bakavali and, 149, 150, 256n60; playback singing
123–24, 125; of Savitri, 120, 120–21 and, 356n60; recording in studio,
Short circuit, 269, 310; energy and, 270; 158; studies, 317, 353n5; synchro-
sexual assault and, 307; struggle nized, 3, 164, 175, 307, 356n49;
and, 271–72 technology, 180, 182
Should I join the movies?. See Jaau Mi Soundscape, 36
Cinemaant? Spatial practice: cine-ecology and,
Shree Ranjit Film Company, 74 16–17, 21, 42; cotton and, 70
Shrikent, Nandini, 283 Speculation, 48, 99; Bombay Talkies
Shroff, Amarchand, 73 and, 91–92; cine-ecology and, 4, 36,
Shukul, Rama, 193, 194 39, 48, 65; cotton and, 50; finance
Shyam Sunder, 232 and, 50, 51, 61, 68; futures markets
Siddiqui, Asiya, 336n17; Bombay’s and, 55, 65; futurity and, 283;
People by, 52 gambling and, 54, 55; HRIIT and,
In de x 417
Speculation (continued) Hollywood, 298; monsoon and, 224;
89–90; infrastructure and, 49, 50, sound recording in, 158; star system
85, 94; profits and, 338n47; Ranjit and, 139; tour, 111–12. See also
Movitone and, 95; Sagar Movietone specific topic
and, 95; social structure and, 85 Studio system, 114–15
Speech: declamatory, 145, 146, 154, 175; Stunts, 40, 201, 301; accidents and,
impassioned, 4–5, 40, 146, 163, 170, 291–92, 293; Diamond Queen and,
171, 172, 175, 353n4; synchronized, 3, 199, 208; Hollywood and, 293;
40, 144, 148–49, 164, 170, 175, 302, Pramila and, 271, 296; Veer Bala
307 and, 229; Wadia Movietone and,
Sphinx in the City (Wilson), 29 205
Spreti, Karl von, 130–31 Sudama Pictures, 83, 138–39
Staiger, Janet, 13, 115, 117, 118 Sulochana, 32, 159, 166, 275, 276; body
Stam, Robert, 225 of, 196; public discourse on,
Stardom, 272, 294, 338n46; earnings 277–78
and, 321; profits and, 376n69; public Sundaram, A., 128
discourse and, 277–78 Sundari, Tara, 160
Stars, 272–73 Sunita Devi, 165
Star system: C.I.R.C.O. v. Unknown Supreme Distributors, 75
and, 79; extra and, 293–94; Sagar Swadeshi, 103, 334n72; Partition of
Movietone and, 78, 82–83, 95; studio Bengal and, 344n9
and, 139 Swaraj (self-rule), 360n4
Staying with the Trouble (Haraway), 284 Swaroop, Ram, 261
Stock market, 52, 55, 56, 71, 72, 75, 106, Swastik, 315
176; Circo Film Company and, 64; Synchronized sound, 3, 164, 175, 307,
crash, 176, 291; Shah and, 73. 356n49
See also Futures market
Strike, 27, 263, 368n52; in Hollywood, Talkie transition, 3, 20–21; cities and,
234, 251. See also Hunger strike 27; continuity script and, 119;
Struggle, 271, 323, 325; class, 249; freedom movement and, 5; national-
continuous, 283–84; fan-as-worker ization and, 96; technology and, 40,
and, 283; industrial, 2, 311, 329n29; 99; vocality and, 145–46
for Madan, 283–84, 285–86; place Tamil, 27
and, 287–88; short circuit and, Tandon, M. L., 131
271–72; waiting and, 285–87 Taqdeer, 177–78
Struggler, 271, 283–85 Tarkhud, Nalini, 164, 165
Studio, 320, 321, 349n77, 377n86; Tatas, 84, 95, 141
Bombay Talkies, 133, 298–99; Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 113, 347n47
double-unit system for, 135–36; Taylorism, 113–14, 169–70, 248, 249,
environmental control and, 298; 367n43
418 In d e x
Techniques. See Cultural techniques UFA Studios (Universum Film-Aktien
Technology, 2, 338n48; accidents and, Gesellschaft), 86, 137–38
292; body and, 202–3; electricity, Unexpected, The. See Duniya Na Mane
110–11; energy and, 202–5; indus- Union, 323, 368n55; AFL as, 251;
trial science and, 110; microphone, FWICE as, 251–52; Societies
156–60, 180, 182; paper-based Registration Act and, 252
continuity script, 20; sound, 180, Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft.
182; talkie transition and, 40, 99. See UFA Studios
See also Paperwork Urbanization, 51, 307, 326n6, 336n17
Teji-mandi (options on futures), 51, Urbs prima in Indis, 3
335n14 Urdu modernist movement, 23
Tekchand, Dharamdas, 112
Telephone: Bombay Telephone Vacha, Savak, 131, 350n87
Company, 159; voice and, 151–52 Vachan, 222
Telephone girl, 159 Vantolio (Whirlwind), 203
Temple, Richard, 87–88, 92, 93 Varerkar, Mama, 253
Temporal incommensurability, 41–42 Vasudevan, Ravi, 9, 34–35
Textile industries, 113 Veer Bala, 304; accident in, 229, 266,
Theater, and voice, 148, 149, 154–55, 303; extras in, 229
158–59 Vertical integration, 114, 115–16, 321,
Thomas, Rosie, 34–35; Bombay Before 341n99
Bollywood by, 320 Vile Parle, 307–8
Thompson, Kristin, 13, 115, 118 Village Girl, The, 279
Thorner, Alice, 326n7 Villiers, E., 210
300 Days, 198 Vimala Bahu, 73
Throw of Dice, 53–54 Virilio, Paul, 289
Times of India, 45 Vismann, Cornelia, 126
Tombs, Steve, 292, 294 Vismi Sadi, 316–17
Trade Union Act (1926), 251–52 Visvanathan, Shiv, 103
Training: Bombay Talkies and, Visvesvaraya, M., 105
130–31, 137; UFA Studios and, Vitali, Valentina, 201, 213
137–38 Vitality, 185, 193, 267, 362n35; camera
Transindustrial, 115 and, 202; climate and, 247; Dia-
Transmedial, 326n5; history, 100; mond Queen and, 201; in Jawani-ki-
practices, 115; production, 23 Hawa, 204–5; in Nav Jeevan, 196,
Transnational, 326n5; abhinetri films 197, 201, 204, 216; speed and, 291;
as, 166 tonics and, 196–97
Tsing, Anna L., 338n47 Vithal, Master, 82; Imperial Film
Tumhari Jeet (The Rise), 56 Company and, 81; Sagar Movietone
Typist Girl, 73 and, 80–81
In de x 419
Voice: abhinetri films and, 167; acous- Why Husbands go Astray?. See
matic, 161, 162; actress and, 147, Gunsundari
159–60, 160, 161, 163–64; Awaaz and, Whyte, Dave, 292, 294
143; court case and, 153–54; disem- Wilson, Elizabeth, 332n54; Sphinx in
bodied, 149, 150, 162; embodied, 145, the City by, 29
158; eroticism and, 163–64; gendered, Wirsching, Joseph, 130
147, 172; materiality and, 162; Women, 323; class and, 33, 165, 166–67,
mediated, 146, 151–52, 157, 160, 170, 177, 234, 306; in Hollywood, 281;
177; microphone and, 156–60, 180, labor and, 372n15; Manto and, 11–12,
182; monologue and, 353n4; speeches, 28–30; propaganda and, 333n61;
lectures and, 154–55; telephone and, public, 26; as storywriters, 351n94;
151–52; theater and, 148, 149, 154–55, wages of, 8; working, 29. See also
158–59. See also Radio Actress
Voice test, 40, 159–60, 182 Worker. See mazdoor
Wrestling, 195
Wadia, J. B. H., 123, 293, 362n40 Writer-director model, 138, 139–40; at
Wadia Movietone, 126, 199, 205, 303; Ranjit Movitone, 133; at Sagar Film
Lal-E-Yaman and, 27, 123, 155; Company, 133–34
stunts and, 205
Wadkar, Hansa, 182 Yajnik, Indulal, 253
Waiting: bodily risk and, 41; of Yashraj Studios, 269
cine-worker, 15–16, 41, 312; struggle
and, 285–87 Zabak. See Kureishi, Zahir
Where Goest Thou Mr. Civilization?, 128 Zarina, 83
Whirlwind. See Vantolio Zebunissa, 165
Why Become an Actress?. See Actress Zhen, Zhang, 329n29
Kyon Bani? Zubeida, 32
420 Ind e x
F I L M A N D C U LT U R E
A series of Columbia University Press

Edited by John Belton
What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic
Henry Jenkins
Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle
Martin Rubin
Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II
Thomas Doherty
Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy
William Paul
Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s
Ed Sikov
Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Rey Chow
The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman
Susan M. White
Black Women as Cultural Readers
Jacqueline Bobo
Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film
Darrell William Davis
Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror
Cinema
Rhona J. Berenstein
This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age
Gaylyn Studlar
Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond
Robin Wood
The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music
Jeff Smith
Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture
Michael Anderegg
Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934
Thomas Doherty
Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity
James Lastra
Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts
Ben Singer
Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture
Alison Griffiths
Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies
Louis Pizzitola
Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film
Robert Lang
Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder
Michele Pierson
Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form
Lucy Fischer
Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture
Thomas Doherty
Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist
Andrew Britton
Silent Film Sound
Rick Altman
Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema
Elisabeth Bronfen
Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American
Peter Decherney
Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis
Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film
Adam Lowenstein
China on Screen: Cinema and Nation
Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar
The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map
Rosalind Galt
George Gallup in Hollywood
Susan Ohmer
Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media
Steve J. Wurtzler
The Impossible David Lynch
Todd McGowan
Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global
Visibility
Rey Chow
Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony
Richard Allen
Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary
Jonathan Kahana
Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity
Francesco Casetti
Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View
Alison Griffiths
Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era
Edited by Noah Isenberg
African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen
Lindiwe Dovey
Film, A Sound Art
Michel Chion
Film Studies: An Introduction
Ed Sikov
Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir
Patrick Keating
Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine
Sam B. Girgus
Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète
Paula Amad
Indie: An American Film Culture
Michael Z. Newman
Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image
Rosalind Galt
Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory
Jörg Schweinitz
Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts
Edited by Lingzhen Wang
Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema
Angela M. Smith
Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet
Peter Decherney
Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity
Lauren Rabinovitz
Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking
Hunter Vaughan
The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik
Christopher Pavsek
Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939
Thomas Doherty
Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies
Ariel Rogers
Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933–1951
Gerd Gemünden
Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life
C. Scott Combs
After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934
Michael Slowik
“It’s the Pictures That Got Small”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden
Age
Edited by Anthony Slide
Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster
Aesthetics
Julie A. Turnock
Maya Deren: Incomplete Control
Sarah Keller
Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media
Adam Lowenstein
Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis
Justin Remes
The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come
Francesco Casetti
The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age
André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion
Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic
Space
Brian R. Jacobson
Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film
Christian Metz
When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film
William Paul
Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America
Alison Griffiths
Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe
William Guynn
Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic
Blake Atwood
Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood’s New World Order
Jonathan Buchsbaum
After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation
Erika Balsom
Words on Screen
Michel Chion
Essays on the Essay Film
Edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan
The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction
Nora Alter
Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes
Maggie Hennefeld
Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures
Edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams
Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist
Thomas Doherty
Cinema/Politics/Philosophy
Nico Baumbach
The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood
Patrick Keating
Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies
Hunter Vaughan
Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s
Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe
Rewriting Indie Cinema: Improvisation, Psychodrama, and the Screenplay
J. J. Murphy
On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942
Ariel Rogers
Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism
Malcolm Turvey
Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture
Nick Jones
Hollywood’s Artists: The Directors Guild of America and the Construction of Authorship
Virginia Wright Wexman

Bombay Hustle Making Movies in A Colonial City by Debashree Mukherjee

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B O M B AY H U ST L E

Film and Culture

A series of Columbia University Press

For a complete list of titles, see page 421

Making Movies in a Colonial City

Columbia University Press New York

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Introduction | Mapping a Cine-Ecology 1

PA RT O N E Elasticity: Infrastructural Maneuvers

PA RT T W O Energy: Intimate Struggles

This is a book about cinema as an ecology of practices. An ecological

xii Ack nowl e dg m e n t s

Ack n owle dg men t s xiii

xiv Ack n owl e dg m e n t s

Ack n owle dg men t s xv

industries: how to be modern and “respectable” at the same time; how

The commercially motivated panic of producers and distributors gives

Life itself changes form, as cinema inflects the conditions of being,

From 2004 to 2007 I worked full-time in Mumbai’s film and television

At the time described, Manto was employed at Filmistan Studio in

seem most particular to the medium of cinema—the work of acting,

After working as a media professional for a few years in the mid-2000s,

meanings urges us to probe the boundaries of the cine-ecology: What

One of the historical promises of cinema has been to provide a ringside

figure 0.5 Bombay, circa 1935. (Getty Images)

Everything seems elastic.

Speculative Futures | Teji-Mandi

The wireless crackled, cables flashed inwards, telegraph boys rushed

A “vivid but true story of a night in Bombay” was conjured by Indian

In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional

Bombay’s fledgling film industry depended on the opportunistic aid

This is the usual manner in which film companies prepare their

A: Because that province has no official gambling dens like the

A cheaply printed Hindi weekly film magazine called Cinema Sansar

laboratories, technicians, actors) were also actively trying to remake

The profounder kind of happiness is only got by taking risks, by

Every creative act is a speculative act, a gesture toward a future where

Ranjit Movitone (1929–1960s): Cotton Kings and

figure 1.4 Network map of Ranjit Movitone.

Sagar Movietone (1929–1940): Star as Speculative Commodity

The career of Sagar Movietone records every nuance of the turbulent

Bombay Talkies (1934–1954): Social Credit and

personalities, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, led to several inquiries

A newly registered film company, Navyug Chitrapat Ltd., invited public

The dramatic narrative of progress described here must end in a tele-

Scientific Desires | Jadu Ghar

No art becomes respectable until its principles are acknowledged,

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 99

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 101

broadcasting and aviation, both important industries, are receiv-

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 103

It was a colonial commission, the Indian Cinematograph Committee,

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 105

Prakash Street, Mohan Street, New Theatres Street, Prabhat Street,

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 107

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 109

to time and temporality.37 Just as cinema and the railways changed

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 111

S c ie n t if ic D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 113

S c ie n t if i c D e sir e s | Jadu Ghar 115

Continuity Script as Production Technology, Diegesis as Data