Social Transformation Through the Lens of Cinema: Mapping the 1930s Talkie

The beginnings of Mumbai’s local film market looked nothing like the billion-dollar industry it has become today. In its early stages, as Indian film scholar Kaushik Bhaumik explains, cinema was considered a disreputable bazaar institution, a sentiment influenced by both the pronounced class-status hierarchies of Indian society and anxieties about female public performance.¹ Homegrown silent films in Hindu, such as Phalke’s mythologicals, enjoyed only small viewership and even by 1917, many were still blissfully unaware of his achievements.² Thus, film audiences in Bombay, as Mumbai was then called, privileged Western products over indigenous ones. Starting with the screening of the Lumière Brothers’ short clips in the Watson Theatre in 1896 and continuing through the late 1920s, about 90 percent of films screened in India were foreign imports.³ As the 1928 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee found, nearly 80 percent of those released features were American.⁴

The arrival of the first Indian sound film forever changed the film market in Bombay. Ardeshi Irani’s 1931 Alam Ara was never described as an artistic triumph, but to see that film surging crowds filled the Majestic Theater and there even developed a black market for tickets.⁵ In the long-term, the advent of sound freed India’s local industry from competition with imported films and thus led to the expansion of indigenous cinema.⁶ Indeed, by 1935, 90 percent of the films exhibited in Bombay were Indian productions.⁷ As Indian film scholar Firoze Rangoonwalla wrote, Hindi cinema came of age with the emergence of talking pictures, popularly called talkies: “It was like a second birth of cinema, marked by the advent of a whole new structure and format.”⁸

While early silent film failed to lay the foundation of an organized and respectable industry in Bombay, the talkie era succeeded overwhelmingly. Led by an overarching optimism, several sound studios were established in Bombay between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s. The new film industry offered possibilities for employment and social interaction that did not exist before – and new ideas about class and gender started to proliferate in the wake of Indian nationalism. As leisure grew and notions of public and private discourse changed, the movie-going demographic was broadened: Bombay’s films now attracted a more heterogeneous audience, which included members of the upper, middle, as well as working classes. In Bombay, the early 1930s were an epoch of tremendous socio-cultural change – a change parallel by the advent of its local sound studios. Not only were these social transformations mirrored in the emerging talkie industry, but rather nurtured and encouraged.

In this context, this essay will argue that the film industry of the 1930s served as both a reflective mirror to society and active historical agent of socio-cultural change. It will first briefly discuss Bombay’s indigenous mercantile class, the Parsi, who played a crucial role in the economic and cultural development of Bombay. Next we will examine two important films produced by those studios: Bombay Talkies’ first Hindi production, the social film Achhut Kanya, or “Untouchable Girl” (1936), and Wadia Movietone’s wildly successful stunt film Hunterwali (1935), the first of the renowned “Fearless Nadia” series. The lead actresses of these two films – Devika Rani, the “first lady of Indian cinema” and Nadia, “India’s queen of the box office”, will be considered for the ways in which they reflected new conceptions of Indian femininity.⁹ The essay will conclude with an explication of the ways in which the cinemas where those film premiered – the Roxy Cinema, located in Giragaum, and Super Cinema, located on Grant Road – reflected and inspired social changes in India.

The documentation of the social-historical changes engendered by and evident in early Bombay cinema comes in variety of sources. For primary research, a combination of newspaper articles of the Times of India dating back to the 1930s, oral histories and autobiographies, official census data, and the 1927-1928 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee have been conducted. Furthermore, a map of 1930s Bombay has been constructed to provide the reader with a contextual overview of Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone. Showcasing their studio locations as well as Roxy and Super Cinema, it will be from particular importance at the last chapter of this essay. Overall, the spatial representation will, on the one hand, serve as a contextual background, as several oral histories are mapped onto Bombay’s urban space. On the other hand, it will provide the reader with a visual overview of the various locales discussed in this paper.

Mapping Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone

Why Bombay?

Beginning in 1931, as Columbia University film scholar Debrashree Mukherjee wrote, the film industries of Calcutta, Madras, Lahore, and Bombay were “competing to win the talkie race.”¹⁰ By 1938, however, Bombay cinema had established itself as the winner, in large part because of the language it chose for its films. With myriad of tongues spoken in India, Bombay’s filmmakers settled on Hindustani – a widely understood mixture of Hindi and Urdu – for most film dialogue and song lyrics. According to the Bombay Census of 1931, Hindustani was the strongest subsidiary language in the Presidency, spoken by 42.4% of the population, largely because of the steady immigration of Punjabi and North Indian factory workers.¹¹ The Hindustani talkie allowed the Bombay cinema to spread into the “Hindustani heartland” and appeal to the labors who were increasingly migrating from those regions into the metropolis. Bombay became the only city in India that produced film outside its region’s dominant languages, Gujarati and Marathi. Overall, Bombay’s Hindi films were disassociated from any regional identification and portrayed a more “national character.”¹²

Yet language was not the only reason that Bombay emerged as the early cultural center of film in India. Its success was integrally connected to Bombay’s colonial history as Urbs Prima in Indis – the primary center of commerce and manufacturing in British India.¹³ With a bustling port, Bombay had connections to the world market that allowed the constant circulation of goods, capital, and knowledge. This led to the cultural, linguistic, religious, and regional diversity that became the hallmark of the city; by the late 19 ^th century, Bombay was distinct from other colonial settlements in India for its “cosmopolitan spirit” and future-oriented mindset.¹⁴

Bombay possessed a powerful indigenous mercantile community – the Parsi – which would prove to be intimately linked to the success of its film industry. Parsis were Zoroastrians who had emigrated from Iran to Gujarat around the 18 ^th century.¹⁵ Traditionally involved in the cotton-textile industry, shipping, and shipbuilding, these entrepreneurial-minded members of Bombay society diversified into banking by the mid-nineteenth century. Bombay’s strong economic infrastructure, dominated by the Parsis, allowed film technology and production to take root and flourish as some of the capital generated by other industrial and commercial enterprises flowed into it. In fact, Parsi capital alone played a significant role in developing the nascent film distribution infrastructure for both early silent studios in the 1920s and sound studios in the 1930s.

Wadia Movietone, for example, established in 1933 by J.B.H. Wadia and younger brother Homi Wadia, with M. B. Bilimoria (a well-known film distributor, exhibitor, and agent) and the Tata brothers, was financed entirely by Parsi capital.¹⁶ Wadia Movietone was located at Lovji Castle in the upper-class neighborhood of Parel, an ancestral estate of the Wadias, who were master shipbuilders for the British East India Company and later for the Government of India.¹⁷ Its rival Bombay Talkies, founded by Himansu Rai and Devika Rani after their return from Europe in 1934, likewise enjoyed the support of a principally Parsi board of directors. As Bombay Talkies’ articles of incorporation show, these members included prominent Parsi business leaders who, by their interests in banks, insurance companies and investment trusts, represented a considerable swath of Bombay’s commercial life.¹⁸

In addition to the capital base necessary for filmmaking, Bombay possessed the creative infrastructure: It was the center of Parsi theatre, a commercial theatre movement that originated in the nineteenth century. Unlike other indigenous theatres in the same period, Parsi theatre was not defined by language, ethnic composition or class. Actors, writers, and musicians were often non-Parsi and included Hindus, Anglo-Indians, and Jews.¹⁹ Parsi plays blended realism with fantasy, music with dance, and narrative with spectacle – an approach evident in early Indian film as well. Further, many of the old Parsi theatre halls were converted using Parsi capital into the cinemas spaces of the early twentieth century. For example, the Parsi film distributor and financier Kapurchand & Co. owned multiple former theater halls which were converted into cinemas to serve the different classes that attended Bombay’s early cinema, including the upscale Roxy and second-tier Super Cinema –and it was Kapurchand that became the distributor for both Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone.²⁰

Labor in the One-Big-Family Studio System

From their inception, both Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone operated as employers in ways that had not existed before them. At the same time, the recruiting patterns of both studios mirrored the social transformation of Bombay’s labor force in the 1930s. There was a new kind of worker emerging in the city: young, literate, and eager to work in the film industry. As the Census of 1931 reported, Bombay was “becoming a place where the wage-earners are being drawn increasingly from the younger age-groups.” Further reading of the 1931 Census also shows: “It is likely ... that cinema players and dramatic companies are responsible for some increase in the population.”²¹ As Prakash confirms in Mumbai Fables, “writers and artists from North India flocked to the city, seeking opportunities to practice their craft in newspapers, literary journals, and the growing film industry.”²² Not only was the newly emerging film studio system attractive to the young people pouring into Bombay. Far more, it seemed to have been the explicit reason for many to move to Bombay.

Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone both offered working conditions under the umbrella of the “one-big-family studio system”, which hitherto did not exist.²³ For this discussion, it is important to emphasize the socio-political climate of Bombay to that time. The modern metropolitan milieu of the city was subject to thoughts of anti-colonialism, as Congress activists were heralding nationalist distress. At the same time, communists organized mill-workers for violent actions, such as the 1928-29 textile strikes.²⁴ Meanwhile, Hindu-Muslim assaults and counterassaults took place in mill districts throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s.²⁵ As the following will show, it is precisely this climate of national struggle and social conflict, which influenced Bombay Talkies’ and Wadia Movietone’s working environment: Both companies regarded labor, caste, and class from a humanitarian viewpoint, which in turn allowed for an emancipated, egalitarian worker.

The influence of Ideals of betterment, social service and nationalist reform are best exemplified in Bombay Talkies’ democratic working conditions. At Bombay Talkies, all workers, regardless their role, were considered to be of equal of status. A star system had yet to be developed; lead actors and actresses were employees of the studio and were treated like any other worker. In fact, actors and actresses did not receive significantly more pay than other employees.²⁶ Further, recruitment was made strictly on merit: “Caste, creed, and religion had no say in it.”²⁷ Once one became part of the family that was Bombay Talkies, it was also known that all company members, of whatever caste, ate together at the company canteen. As historian Erik Barnouw noted in Indian Film, Rai seems to have been influenced by ideas of self-help going back to memories of Ghandi’s visit to the Rabindranath Tagore ashram of Santiniketan: On occasion, even Bombay Talkies’ top actors would help clean the studio’s floors.²⁸

This notion of “giving back” speaks to the ethos of social service that emerged in the late nineteenth century, when members of the educated middle class first began to engage in novel forms of civic activism in their quest for public leadership.²⁹ Having already produced widely successful German-Indian co-productions, such as the silent films The Light of Asia (1924) and A Throw of Dice (1926), Himansu Rai could have easily continued his career outside India.³⁰ However, as he told Devika Rani, his major female star and partner in both business and love, Rai was inclined to bring what he had gleaned of film production in Germany to India: “let us learn from these people, but let us put the knowledge to work in our country.”³¹ His statement also exemplifies the reformist ideals of the Indian nationalist movement, which sought the betterment of Indian society: By building a world-class studio in his country, Rai wanted to bring international glory to India’s heritage.

Similar to Bombay Talkies, J.B.H. Wadia of Wadia Movietone was influenced by the socio-political climate of the 1930s.³² A self-proclaimed “humanist”, he had been an active member of the National Congress from 1930 to 1938 and founder of the Radical Democratic Party of India in 1937. In his autobiographical essay “Those were the Days”, J.B.H. Wadia also explains that he was influenced by leftist thinkers, such as the “non-conformist Communist” M.N. Roy. As a result, Wadia was deeply devoted to establishing an egalitarian workspace. For example, Wadia Movietone was the first film studio in Bombay to declare two Sundays a month as holidays and offer bonuses to the staff every year between 1933 and 1942. As J.B.H Wadia makes highlighted, this took place at a time when “unionization did not yet exist in the film industry.” Wadia remembers fondly that in the days of the sound studio, “camaraderie prevailed” among the entire staff: “He who called himself the boss was not more equal.”³³ The new sound studio was thus defined by its democratic mindset, which allowed for the emergence of a new kind of worker.

In this context, both studios were indeed shaping attitudes and doing so in a variety of ways. Education, continuous self-improvement, and discipline were seen as key within the studio family. Veteran actor, director and producer Paidi Jairaj, looking back nostalgically on his days working at the studio, described the educational environment of the studios as “virtually like going to college.” Inspired by their own working experiences in Germany, Rai and Rani had started a trainee program, “poaching” talent from Indian universities. Within a few years, many of these trained at Bombay Talkies would go from anonymity to fame across India.³⁴ At the same time, for Rai, education and self-improvement would go hand in hand with discipline. For instance, actors and actresses would be replaced if they disobeyed instructions even after suitable warnings. As a strong disciplinarian, Rai would prefer expensive re-shootings over an “errant employee” anytime.³⁵ Like Bombay Talkies, Wadia Movietone was known as a strict professional workplace: When the ten o’clock bell rang, stars clocked in along with everyone else and a register was called to check for absences.³⁶

The operation of emerging sound studios of the 1930s in many ways mirrored the multi-ethnic and diverse approach of Parsi theatre. As such, Wadia Movietone’s workforce included a generous representation of Parsi, Muslim, and other non-Hindu communities. Wadia Movietone prided itself on its home-grown, culturally heterogeneous talent pool of actors, musicians, and writers. ³⁷ Likewise, Bombay Talkies employed Parsi song-writers, Muslim screenwriters, and German technicians.³⁸

Yet, the newly emerging studios went one step further than Parsi theatre: Never in the history of colonial India had there been such a curious and accepting blend of different backgrounds in the workforce on such a large scale. As film began to be seen as a legitimate professional institution capable of generating lucrative and steady employment, both Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone maintained large organizational overheads and employed a permanent workforce. Like the U.S. Hollywood studios, each company had a wide range of personnel and almost never turned to outsiders for help or services.³⁹ During the 1930s, Bombay Talkies had a staff of more than 400 Indian artists, technicians, and assistants. By the late 1930s, around 600 people were on Wadia Movietone’s payroll.⁴⁰ As M. A. Oommen and K. V. Joseph argue in Economics of Indian Cinema, the self-sufficient studio system could only exist because of the widespread acceptance of low salaries. ⁴¹ Bearing in mind that 1930s were also a time of worldwide depression, in Indian Film Barnouw explains that the prospect of steady employment outweighed all considerations of pay level. ⁴²

The Social Film – A call for Reform and National Propaganda

By the 1930s, Bombay was “the place to be if you were a writer, an artist, or a radical political activist”, claims Gyan Prakash in Mumbai Fables. As the political capital of the Presidency, Bombay emerged as one of the principal bastions of nationalist politics in the period. Most influentially, Mahatma Ghandi had rapidly transformed the landscape of nationalist politics in Bombay after World War I. Through his ceaseless efforts to raise up the weaker sections of Bombay society, Ghandi originated a kind of social activism that sought to transcend the identities of caste and creed.⁴³ With the Freedom Movement and corresponding social reform movements, Bombay in the 1930s was unlike its earlier incarnations. As Kaushik Bhaumik explained in his dissertation, from that point on the film industry put its productions in the service of nationalism and social reform.⁴⁴ In line with the popular reformist mindset, writers did not shrink from stories that attacked, implicitly and often explicitly, the tenets of Hindi society. Both Acchut Kanya and Hunterwali symbolize these reformist ideals and nationalism – explicitly and implicitly.

The social films of Bombay Talkies were mainly rural dramas with social reformist themes centering on the prejudice and exploitation that plagued village communities. For instance, Achhut Kanya tells the story of the love of a Brahmin youth (Ashok Kumar) for a Dalit – that is, Untouchable – girl (Devika Rani). Because of their village communities, they have to marry within their own castes. When the tragic lovers meet at the end of the film, the girl’s husband, provoked by the villagers, attacks the Brahmin. While trying to separate the two, the dalit girl, Kasturi, is killed by a train.⁴⁵ Between 1936 and 1939, Bombay Talkies was known for producing rurally based dramas with social reformist themes centering on the prejudices and exploitations of village communities.⁴⁶

The film was highly acclaimed for tackling the serious problems surrounding the caste system and untouchability – responding to contemporary discussions initiated by Gandhi and other reformists. Already during the later 19 ^th century, the problems of untouchability and a “social uplift of the depressed classes” were being discussed by the reformist Hindu upper classes. Many liberal and English-educated Hindus began to view “the caste system as a pernicious and irrational mode of social organization that was an impediment to the progress of the Hindu ‘nation’.” As reformist Hindu upper classes were discussing the problem of untouchability, “social uplift of the depressed classes” was brought forward.⁴⁷ At the same time, in Bombay, dalits began to demand civil and political rights and recognition as Hindus around the turn of the century.⁴⁸ Overall, the Untouchable became a powerful symbol of Indian reform.

While Bombay Talkies’ Achhut Kanya is the embodiment of the social film and Bombay Talkies’ nationalist tendencies, Wadia Movietone’s Hunterwali found itself at a crossroads between the popular action/stunt genre and higher social ambitions. Still, J.B.H Wadia proclaims that he always made sure to include social messages. While he admits that thrills, fast action, and slapstick comedy had a big impact on the success of his film, “there was always something more, something different in them.”⁴⁹ As such, he tried to raise their social value by weaving in burning problems of the day. Generally, Wadia Movietone’s films were given little critical respect, particularly compared to Bombay Talkies’. As author Rosie Thomas said, this was due to “not least sheer snobbery: their primary audiences were proletarian and the films were unabashed commercial entertainment.”⁵⁰ At the same time, the stunt film was regarded less as a genre of “ill repute” than a genre of little consequence. In its very essence then, the stunt film held carried little weight within context of contemporary national and social politics.⁵¹

Yet, like Achhut Kanya, the Fearless Nadia films have a place in the discourse of nationalism and the framework for social change. The 1935 film Hunterwali, “Woman with the Whip”, was the first of the successful Wadia Movietone’s “Fearless Nadia” series, starring the actress Mary Evans as “Fearless Nadia. The plot follows a princess who sets out to rescue her father, held captive by a scheming minister. Disguising herself as a man, she roams the countryside, robbing rich to feed the poor, and, in the course of her travels, meets a peasant boy and falls in love. Throughout the film, “Fearless Nadia” stuns the audience with stunt movements of various kinds. Coming at a time when India was struggling for independence, the Nadia films served as subtle nationalist propaganda, because the actress who played the heroine, as the daughter of a British soldier, became a cult cinematic symbol of the Indian struggle for freedom. As Nadia herself explained, “In all the pictures there was a propaganda message, something to fight for, for example for people to educate themselves or to become a strong nation.”⁵² Wenner, who has extensively written about the Fearless Naida series, claims that Nadia became the cult cinematic symbol of the Indian struggle for freedom. As German film scholar Dorothee Wenner further explains, there is an argument for the social potency of the genre itself. Under its seemingly frivolous veneer, the films hold socially and aesthetically serious motivations. The spectacle of the genre masks a serious articulation of nationalist aspirations toward independence in narratives of struggle against usurping authority. From this perspective, the films’ stunt genre status also disguised from British censors the real underlying intent of these films.⁵³ Thus, stunt films in general and Hunterwali in particular offered a nationalist anti-establishment allegory set safely in a legendary or fantasy space.

“The Queen of Indian Cinema” & “The Queen of the Box Office”

In 1930s Bombay, ideas of gender and womanhood were subject to vast social change. The nationalist project played an important role in this transformation, as it advocated both for the emancipation of Indian womanhood empowered by education. In this context, the good women, the chaste wife, and the mother became the iconic representation of the nation.⁵⁴ Formal education became not only acceptable, but, in fact requirement for the new respectable woman to acquire virtues of personal freedom. It was in this understanding of self-help and personal empowerment, that women increasingly entered the public gaze as workers, consumers, and students in the 1930s. As Debrashree Mukherjee explained in “Good Girls, Bad Girls”, there was a new breed of public women ranging from public workers to telephone operators, novelists to political activists.⁵⁵

In the earlier days of Indian cinema, no “decent” Indian woman would think of acting in a film. In fact, not even prostitutes would deign to appear on screen and Phalke, not able to find anyone to perform for his films, would rely on female impersonators.⁵⁶ Negative attitudes toward women as professional actors remained disapproving for decades after. As the 1928 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee observed, actresses in the late 1920s were “mainly recruited from the “dancing girl” class.” The report continued that “Indian women of the better class do not take up film-acting as a profession.”⁵⁷

Yet, the social context of an enormous influx of women into the public gaze in the 1930s made sexual reform in the film industry inevitable. In contrast to the low-class status aligned with public performance, a certain type of “acceptable female star”, merging from the educated upper classes was deemed acceptable.⁵⁸ Devika Rani, as an educated, respectable, upper-class Brahmin woman embodied the Nationalist gender ideal to perfection. She was the grandniece of the poet Tagore, had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and even worked on set with Marlene Dietrich. Her ancestry and impressive education not only validated her own film work, but rather asserted respectability to the entire industry.

As Devika Rani emerged as a respectable female actress in the early 1930s, she would often be called “queen of Indian cinema.”⁵⁹ One of her most important roles was her critical Bombay Talkies debut film Achhut Kanya, in which Rani was highly applauded for her selfless portrayal of a dalit girl. A classic beauty, in Achhut Kanya, even in the role of a dalit girl, she is coded as high-caste and female virtue. In fact, her status and ideal womanhood are so important that her real persona becomes indistinguishable from the roles she played in her films. At not time does she fall into the understanding of the “common woman”, who is understood as devoid of superior moral sense.⁶⁰ At the same time, she is never portrayed as sexual or a sex object on screen. On-screen sexuality was perceived as vulgar, courtship depicted in classical ways with the hero and heroine averting gazes or touching and embracing restricted to playful and tragic or tense situations. Thus, she was accepted by the nationalist male and educated elite.

While Devika Rani portrayed the ideas of respectable womanhood in the discourse of Nationalism, Nadia brought forward an alternative prototype outside this gender norm. In the role of “Fearless Nadia”, she served as a metaphor for emancipation, technological advancement, and modernity. As a blonde, big-boned stunt-woman who beat up evil men, swung from chandeliers, rode on top of speeding trains, and fought lions, Nadia sidestepped the alternatives of the “whore” and the respectable woman presented in colonial India.⁶¹ As Firoze Rangoonwalla has described Nadia, she was a figure deeply committed to overthrowing the oppressive male-dominated order. In effect, this made Nadia to one of the “first feminist icons of Hindi cinema.”⁶² Unmarried on- and off-screen, Nadia projected an image of independence contrary to the Nationalist ideal of womanhood.

At first, it seems paradoxical that Nadia emerged as the Indian queen of the box office. She was blonde, white, and spoke Hindi poorly. Still, she was easily accepted as an Indian heroine by audiences. In fact, as Prakash argues in Mumbai Fables, her whiteness was an asset, because it meant that she could be “shown scantily dressed and seen acting in nontraditional ways.”⁶³ As such, when women began to act in films by the 1920s, many were from an Anlgo-Indian background.⁶⁴ Due to their hybrid ethnic and cultural heritage, Anglo-Indians were seen as outside “normal society” and thus less bound to social conventions of respectability.⁶⁵ Nadia’s emancipation goes hand in hand with her portrayal of technological advancement and modernity. In her essay “Not Quite (Pearl) White”, Rosie Thomas describes Nadia as a “thoroughly post-modern wonderwoman ... an ebullient virangana in a modern world”, who is “empowered rather than crushed by technology.”⁶⁶ Being introduced in Hunterwali as the “protector of the poor and punisher of the evildoers”, Nadia serves as the Indian mythological warrior queen “virangana.” Historically, the virangana is of extraordinary moral and physical strength as well as restores order and justice.⁶⁷ Despite her sexual and erotic appeal, however, Nadia was never portrayed as a vamp. Within the moral conventions of the virangana, Nadia was coded as a “good girl”. Furthermore, Nadia signified modernity and technological advances. Whether she was driving a car or riding on the roof a hurtling train, Nadia would, entirely autonomous, master the thrills of industrial modernity.

Cinema spaces

The power of film in the 1930s was inherent to the medium: It could reach a vast audience. With the introduction of sound, its viewership increased significantly. This is evident in the theatrical success of both Bombay Talkie’s Achhut Kanya as well as Wadia Movietone’s Hunterwali. A 1936 Times of India article shows that Achhut Kanya was exhibited at the Roxy cinema in Bombay for more than twelve consecutive weeks, where “thousands have seen it, hundreds several times.” Already after running for only eight weeks, Achhut Kanya had attracted more than a “lakh of persons” (hundred thousand). Hunterwali was an even larger box-office sensation: It played to packed houses for more than 25 weeks. Though it never became a critical success, that film was the major moneymaker of 1935.⁶⁸ As the writer K.A Abbas asserts, “The Indian film was the one form of popular literature that came closest to the vast masses of the people.”⁶⁹

Amid Bombay’s socio-cultural transformation of the 1930s, as women increasingly entered the public sphere, through university co-education, political and social activities, urban public spaces facilitated encounters between the sexes that were hitherto uncommon. The cinema represented one of the more influential of these spaces; indeed, by recalibrating how men and women spent their leisure time, cinema attendance had a significant social impact. As the visual media theorist Giuliana Bruno has argued, the space of the cinema is a kind of democratic institution with larger social influence.⁷⁰ As she explains, it is a public place of “social mixing”, a term defined by Kracauer. Within the colonial Indian experience, as Bruno argues, cinema empowered women in particular by providing mobility and thereby bolstering their public presence. As Shah exhibits in Indian Film, at the end of then turn of the century the two sexes generally took their leisure separately. By bringing men and women together, the cinema served the cause of gender equality and allowed for greater inter-sexual understanding.⁷¹

As leisure grew and notions of the public and private discourse changed, the movie-going demographic broadened: Bombay’s films now attracted a more heterogeneous audience, which included members of the upper, middle, as well as working classes. The already-formulated heterogeneous audience for the Parsi theatre contributed substantially to the heterogeneity of Bombay film audiences.⁷² In the 1930s, the diversity of audiences only expanded. As a 1936 Times of India article declared, Achhut Kanya had enjoyed “extraordinary popularity with all classes of local filmgoers.” Another article added that Achhut Kanya even attracted minorities, such as European, who did not, in general, attend Indian cinemas.⁷³

While Bombay cinema was appealing to a heterogeneous cosmopolitan audience, however, the film distribution system of Bombay was based on a hierarchical system of first-run, second-run, and even third-run cinemas. According to this system, films were first released in more expensive, first-run cinemas. Then, depending on popularity they eventually made their way to suburban and mill-area halls. Thus, the more expensive halls saw films first and the cheaper ones later.⁷⁴ The effect was that as much as theaters gave all Indians a shared experience, the theaters themselves often reinforced traditional social hierarchies.

Achhut Kanya, which showcased at the Roxy cinema in Giragaum, tended to attract more middle to upper class audiences. This was partly due to the respectability and status Bombay Talkies and Devika Rani enjoyed. The film’s opening night was a “grand affair” and, testament to the film’s reputation, 1936 Congress President Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru went to see it.⁷⁵

There were also larger, structural reasons for the appeal to particular segments of society. Certainly, the location of its showcase influenced the demographic of Achhut Kanya’s audience. Located near the Royal Opera House in the historically middle-class neighborhood Girgaum, the Roxy cinema stood in what the historian R. K. Newman has explained, was a largely Brahmin area long favored by the old intellectual and professional classes, who moved from the city center because of the continuing influx of traders.⁷⁶ At the same time, Girgaum was home to chawls particularly built for the Marathi middle class, who had migrated to Bombay for education and white-collar jobs. In the 1930s, the neighborhood was known as a vital cultural center where educated lawyers, professors, and doctors made their homes.⁷⁷ In this “respectable” neighborhood, the Roxy naturally it attracted more “respectable” – read: middle and upper class – audiences.

It was not the location of the cinema alone that brought Achhut Kanya its middle and upper class audiences; the theater itself appealed to that viewership. Previously called the Wellington cinema, the Roxy was taken over and renovated by the Parsi distributor Kapurchand in 1934. It went on to become the premier first-run cinema for prestige productions in Bombay.⁷⁸ The Roxy’s 1,014 seats were divided into lower-level seating areas and terrace-like balconies, which had exclusive and more expensive seats.⁷⁹ Even in the “democratic” space of the cinema, different publics negotiated relationships that reinscribed traditional social distinctions and power dynamics. The “glittering Roxy” was, thus, also a “place to be seen.”⁸⁰

In contrast to Achhut Kanya, Hunterwali, premiered at the second-run Super cinema, which appealed more to middle and working classes. No distributor had come forward to buy it, as its storyline was seen as a risk. In fact, Hunterwali was offered to Wadia Movietone’s distributor Kapurchand twice and both times he had turned it down. Determined to show their film, the Wadias had to finance the distribution themselves.⁸¹The nature of Hunterwali as a film appealed to middle and lower classes, while the upper classes, which generally considered the stunt film genre to be lowbrow entertainment, stayed mostly away. Yet, the demographic for that film, similar to Achhut Kanya and Roxy Theater, was also determined by where it made its premier: Super Cinema.

Super Cinema was located in a bustling locale, with a constant circulation of people. Thus, it attracted a diverse working and middle class audience. Built in the 1850s, Grant Road cut through central areas of Bombay and opened way to transport, industry, and building in the area.⁸² It became locus for Bombay cinema precisely because it lay at the hub of all the main transport networks of the city and was conveniently close to tram junctions, such as Grant Road and Tardeo. Office workers, students, and shopkeepers who lived in the suburbs were important components of film audiences. They would pass cinema halls on their daily commute and, therefore, the location of the cinema made it possible for the theater itself to stand as advertisement for the films.⁸³ Further, located on Grant Road, Super cinema was close to Lamington Road, which in the 1920 and 1930s was a cosmopolitan local for students and journalists and went on to house a number of cinema halls. So rich was the cinema culture of the area that many early film actors lived in this locality. The immediate surroundings of Super Cinema were that of a swinging and shining milieu of music, billiard rooms, and bars.⁸⁴

While there was constant circulation and movement of people in the area surrounding Super Cinema, upper classes would avoid Grant Road. As a Royal Army Medical Corps official noted in 1921, “every subaltern and soldier in the British Army from Cape Wrath to Hong Kong knows of ‘Grant Road’”, given that it was the “first place of interest” they went to see when visiting Bombay.⁸⁵ Indeed, Grant Road itself was long known as Bombay’s prostitution hub. It is important to bear in mind that Grant Road also borders to various densely-packed residential and commercial neighborhoods, like Kamathipura, associated with lower classes and mill-workers.⁸⁶ With what the Census of 1931 noted was as many as 1,136 prostitutes, Kamathipura was known as the city’s red-light district.⁸⁷ The same laborers who frequented the area’s brothels made up a considerable portion of the audience for films like Hunterwali, Thus, the local audience in their very nature discouraged potential upper class audiences from attending such films.

Conclusion

The early sound period in Bombay cinema was, as Debrashree Mukherjee describes, “perhaps the most self-consciously utopian conjuncture in the history of Indian cinema.”⁸⁸ At their formation, both Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone and their “film families” stood at the crossroads of history. They pointed at a new direction for society—once with more enlightened social values. The Bombay film studios gave their workers a chance to imagine new selves and new ways of being in the world. In their mode of doing business, these studios shook up perceptions regarding labor, gender, and class. And their productions – evinced in films like Achhut Kanya and Hunterwali – engendered and embodied the socio-cultural transformations of the time. Where the older studios in the 1920s relied on exhibition-driven enterprise, the newer sound studios inclined toward a more cosmopolitan ethos evident in their willingness to experiment with film production techniques and casting. Overall, it was in the city itself that Indians encountered and came to terms with new definitions of public and private existence – and it was within these new defined spaces that the population began to recognize the transformational potential of novel modes of association and intercourse.

Yet, what is referred to as the “sound studio era” was actually only a short chapter in the history of Indian cinema. With World War II and an intensification of the freedom struggle, the film industry began to feel an economic pinch, primarily in the supply of raw film, rationed to 11,000 feet for a final print. Hindi film output fell from 154 features in 1935 to seventy-three features in 1945.⁸⁹ Further, the outbreak of WWII meant that the German technicians and directors, who represented a large segment of the Bombay Talkies’ production force, were interned. That fact, along with the death of Himansu Rai in 1940, crippled the studio. Still, under the leadership of Devika Rani, Bombay Talkies managed to produce one of the biggest hits of the pre-independence era: Kismet (1942). Meanwhile, by the end of the 1930s, as the stunt film genre began to lose favor with audiences, Wadia Movietone began experiencing heavy losses. Amidst an on-going conflict between principles J.B.H. and Homi Wadia, Wadia Movietone closed in 1941. Although Bombay Talkies survived until the 1950s, the "heyday of the studios" was the 1930s. All in all, the studio system of the early 1930s embodied an idealism that was lost once the one-big-family studio system was swept away in the post-war era.

Indian cinema has come a long way since the glory days of Bombay Talkies and Wadia Movietone. By 1981, India had produced more than 15,000 feature films and almost as many have been produced since.⁹⁰ Today’s post-colonial Mumbai is India’s entertainment capital par excellence: Home to Bollywood, it attracts the largest, most diverse audience worldwide with nearly 2.7 billion tickets sold yearly.⁹¹ Yet, one can argue that the overwhelming success of the industry lies in the very same foundations that allowed for the talkie to excel in Bombay’s colonial era. Just as the Parsi theater allowed for the sound studios of Bombay to flourish, the sound studio laid the structural foundations for the post-independence era.

Bibliography

Official Records Pertaining to Cinema

Census of India. (1931)

India. (1928). Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee: 1927-1928, Evidence. Calcutta: Govt. of India Central Publication Branch.

Books and Articles

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Newspaper Articles:

"Achhut kannya" in eighth week at Roxy. (1936, September 4). The Times of India (1861-Current) Retrieved from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/docview/346133295?accountid=10226

BOMBAY TALKIES' "ACHHUT KANNYA" NEARING END OF RECORD RUN. (1936, October 2). The Times of India (1861-Current) Retrieved from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/docview/613833017?accountid=10226

McCarthy, N. (2014, September 3). India’s Film Industry By The Numbers. Forbes Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/09/03/bollywood-indias-film-industry-by-the-numbers-infographic/#22422b5c7bf0

THE BOMBAY TALKIES; LIMITED. (1934, August 9). The Times of India (1861-Current). Retrieved from: http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/docview/324678213?accountid=10226

Vijayakar, R. M. (2005, June 10). Mumbai's roxy set to reopen. India – West.

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