Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Film and Culture Series)

Product Description
From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India.
Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city.\nDrawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city.
Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production―finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts―to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.
Review
Bombay Hustle goes beyond film criticism and film history to contribute to urban history as well. It is a well-researched, well-written work of history weaving together elements of gender, class, caste, and aesthetics to situation the 1930s as a period that deserves more attention from film enthusiasts and scholars alike. ―
Asian Review of Books\nThe book will certainly be widely cited and influential among existing scholarship on popular Hindi cinema, South Asian film history, and star studies -- Katie Bird ―
Journal of Cinema and Media Studies\nThis is a stunningly ambitious account of the speculative economy, production practices, and urban milieu of the Bombay film industry during cinema’s transition to sound. Mukherjee brings an embodied knowledge of the city and a material historian's keen sense of objects, institutions, and energies as she breathes life into a web of stories about the film studios, entrepreneurs, stars, aspirants, film crews, and extras of early Bombay cinema. A deeply innovative and poetic account of the tangle of film practitioners, technologies, and techniques in India’s late colonial period, this book is a revelation of new archives, histories, and modes of thought. It is a sensational addition to the fields of South Asian studies, film history, labor history, new materialism, affect studies, and actor-network theory. -- Priya Jaikumar, author of
Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space\nMeticulously and inventively researched,
Bombay Hustle offers a methodological model for media historians with its staggering and creative array of sources. Offering an experiential feel for the precarious, open-ended, and speculative terrain of Bombay film production, it also simultaneously takes the reader on a spatial tour of the city itself. -- Neepa Majumdar, author of
Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s\nBombay Hustle is a brilliant excavation of the entangled ecologies of Bombay and its cinema during the 1920s-1940s. It uncovers the improvised traffic between the technological apparatus, speculative finance, the urban environment, storytelling, sound technology, cine labor, actors, bodies, symbolic va