Book review: Debashree Mukherjee,Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

A music video titled ‘Madhubala’ (Trivedi, 2020) paints the tender story of a blooming romance between two anonymous figures on a movie set. One is a makeup artist’s assistant and the other the do-it-all busboy of the supporting crew. ‘Madhubala’ is the story of these two apparently replaceable cine-workers as its two unlikely protagonists: their gestures bear the proof of their dreams, labours and desires. Mukherjee’s book embarks on a similarly poignant storytelling trail and takes us walking through the traces of Bombay dreams from the 1930s.

In the South Asian popular imagination, Bombay is a city of dreams, where one must ‘hustle’ to work one’s way up to grasp some stardust. Mukherjee shows how significant this act of risk-taking is in the production of the city as well as of films. Through rigorous archival work and charming ethnographic details, she describes how speculative capitalism around the cotton industry, colonialism, the labour movement and religious sentiments got inextricably tangled with the emergent world of the talkies. This book presents an urban history of Bombay, refracted through the prism of the film world. It investigates the energies that animate the relationship between city-building and filmmaking, industrial modernity and creative precarity, the ‘energies flowing through the embodied circuits of work’ (p. 311). Here, one might inquire about the role of nationalism and nation-building in this colonial aesthetic universe, especially if one compares a similarly accented urban history from outside Bombay. How to read an urban history of a different film city from colonial South Asia in terms of the nation, and how to liken it to the Bombay chronicle that Mukherjee narrates?

This brings us to the theoretical framework that Mukherjee deploys to recount this evanescent story from the inter-war period. She constructs a ‘cine-ecology’, a network of volatile actors and agents, overspilling the porous boundaries between the city and the film-world it contains. Instead of employing the usual terminology of ‘infrastructure’ or ‘system’, Mukherjee finds ‘ecology’ particularly empowering to recount the embodied experiences that populate her book. Its two parts, ‘Elasticity’ and ‘Energy’, bear testimony to the ambivalence that the author expresses towards structure and stability throughout the text, preferring to treat her subject as an organism in flux. ‘Elasticity’ contains chapters about the industrial hustle. ‘Speculative Futures’ describes cinema as a commodity and business mired in the teji-mandi (ebb and flow, p. 51) of the colonial city’s modern trade, and it transforms the cultural text into an economic wager (p. 57). The chapters titled ‘Scientific Desires’ and ‘Voice’ continue this discussion of modern technologies into a discussion of the film as a scientific site, its most significant development of the time being the launch of the talkies, what Mukherjee terms ‘the picturisation of affective vocality’ (p. 145).

The second part of the book, ‘Energy’, delves into the more private hustles, the relational energies between individuals in social contexts. Inspired by affect studies, labour questions and personal investment, Mukherjee depicts ‘vitality’ (josh) in Chapter 4, as featured in the ‘experience of industrial modernity’ (p. 189). She finds in the author and scriptwriter Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55) a meta-awareness of cine-work as the synchronised energy patterns between the human and the non-human. Similarly, Chapter 5 uses a little-known piece by the activist and film worker Shanta Apte to discuss ‘exhaustion’ (thakaan) as a function of labour structures, gender and exploitation. The final chapter illustrates struggle, the most intimate and embodied form of ‘hustle’, marked by unending periods of waiting, a dialogic relation between fans and workers, accidents and damage. The book concludes in a full circle with the realisation that ‘the struggler is a gambler’ (p. 283), just like the speculative entrepreneurs of the first chapter.

The only question that remains to be asked is about the expansiveness of Mukherjee’s ‘cine-ecology’ which, she claims, ‘can accommodate the multiaxial situatedness of a cinema in its milieu’ (p. 317). The numerous maps, diagrams, photographs and sagas suggest that the vast libidinal economy of films and the city that she has depicted can be entirely contained within this meta-framework. It would be a challenging historical and conceptual experiment, then, to look beyond and find a different organising principle to understand other film-cities. The remarkable capaciousness of this book’s imagination presents future scholars of media and the city with provocations to develop fresh analytics and to probe into unexplored affective registers.

Mukherjee’s debt and contribution to feminist media studies cannot be overstated. Within South Asian film scholarship, she self-consciously and eagerly joins Neepa Majumdar (2009) and Usha Iyer (2020) in their respective sophisticated feminist engagements with Bombay cinema. Their enquiries are not limited to the simplistic work of identifying masculine privileges in a patriarchal industry. All three writers have emphasised the diverse processes of modern subject-formation of women workers in the film-world, and have thus brought women’s struggle for respectability, their intersectional identities, and their labour into visibility. In conversation with Majumdar’s description of the female star, Mukherjee introduces us to the notion of the female fan and the dynamic existing between the two entities. The experience of reading Iyer’s spectacular accounts of the ‘dancing women’ of Bollywood can be enriched by Mukherjee’s provocation to study the robust political economy that thrives among the diverse staff of costume-makers, hairdressers, make-up artists, choreographers as well as the set and the stage, the climate, the shooting and lighting equipment. Herein lies the dual success of Mukherjee’s book. First, it refocuses our attention on the material practices surrounding the film-object in a specific moment in history with particular attention to women workers. Second, it is also a major methodological intervention about the value of the processual and the ephemeral in our consumption and scholarship of all cultural objects.

Thus, Mukherjee replaces a vertical model of historical storytelling with a rhizomatic prototype that is at once resourceful and inventive, unearthing networks of affiliations that are transient and yet telling. Her debt to actor-network theory and models of assemblage is palpable, and the book helpfully demonstrates the value of such theories in writing aesthetic histories of South Asia. If the music video of ‘Madhubala’ showed its audience the story of a mere trace in the history of an unnamed film, Mukherjee theorises innumerable such traces from the ‘backrooms of history’ (p. 1), filling archival silences with speculative stories and evocative images and weaves them into an ‘ontogenesis’ (p. 15), a fascinating tale about the shaping of a modern city. My earlier questions about nationalism or about the scale of its framework notwithstanding, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City transports its readers to 1930s Bombay, eavesdropping on historical encounters which none of us have witnessed. With Lennonesque poetic charm, Mukherjee’s intimate tryst with this enthralling world of multiple entwined imaginations opens new windows, and persuades its readers: ‘Imagine, there’s more to see’.