The Ecology of Cinema: Debashree Mukherjee on Bombay Hustle

Film historian and media theorist Debashree Mukherjee’s recent book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press and Penguin Random House, 2020; hereafter Bombay Hustle) opens with an image: we see the back of a young boy on what appears to be a film set. One hand in his pocket, he seems to be looking out onto the empty set, waiting, perhaps in anticipation, perhaps out of boredom? The caption reveals that he is a light-boy on the sets of Franz Osten’s Jawani Ki Hawa (1935), at the Bombay Talkies studio. We do not know much about his identity as his name is a mystery. Yet the photograph offers us an intriguing perspective with which to consider filmmaking and its infrastructure. It compels us to see an iteration of cinema beyond what we see on screen: as a dense network of ideas, practices and people that are at play, embedded within and tied to a history of modern India itself.

Taking off from that single image, Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle reveals itself as an ambitious history of these networks in Indian cinema. It offers a distinct portrait of the Bombay film industry during the silent to talkie transition of the 1920s–40s. The book draws on original archival research to explore what Mukherjee calls a “cine-ecology,” a definition of the cinematic universe that expands the idea of “industry” to include the diverse energies, labour, technologies, desires, sites of production and modes of circulation that constitute this film world. At its core, the book seems to revisit the universal question: what is cinema? Some other questions it addresses include: how can we think through cinema’s simultaneous business as an art form, industry, technology and nostalgic infrastructure? And what is its relationship with the social movements at work in a pre-independent India?

In the first of a two-part interview about Bombay Hustle, Mukherjee discusses the making of the book, the idea of “hustle” in colonial filmmaking and the need for positing cinema as an ecology of practice.

_{(Featured Image: A Film Crew Prepares to Move to the Next Location. Mumbai, c. 1938. Courtesy of Josef Wirsching Archive/Alkazi Collection of Photography.)}

Interview with Ketaki Varma, 16th February 2021

To watch the second part of this interview click here.

Click here to know more about Debashree Mukherjee’s work.