Who is a Cine-Worker? Scenes from Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

Debashree Mukherjee’s book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press and Penguin Random House, 2020) excavates the histories of people and places that make up the cine-ecology of erstwhile colonial Bombay, particularly between the late 1920s and the early 1940s—a period characterised by the shift from silent to talkie films. With limited institutional and archival material available from that time, Mukherjee carefully pieced together fragments of a narrative gathered from alternative sources such as film ephemera, police reports, court cases and memoirs. The book itself, then, reads as an archive of that period, an empathic study of film and its practice. It expands the contours of cinematic labour and reveals the previously unknown social histories of cine-workers.

In this curated selection of photographs from her book, Mukherjee provides a glimpse into some of the source materials that have informed its writing, specifically song booklets, advertisements, posters and film stills. She highlights two key figures from the workforce of Bombay cinema: women, both in terms of their fictional representation and their work as actors; and fans. This focus compels us to better understand the fluid and diverse nature of the cine-worker within the context of the city and its cinema. 

This is the second part of a two-part curated album. To view the first part, please click here. To know more about the book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, do watch our two-part interview with Debashree Mukherjee here and here.

All images and captions courtesy of Debashree Mukherjee.

Click on the image to view the album