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.
Drawing 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.
