| 'Bombay Modern' investigates the consolidation ¬¬of the Bombay film industry in the 1930s and 1940s by tracking the entanglements of cinematic practice and the city's multiple modernities. Specifically, I track the emergence of diverse players and protagonists seeking to articulate their relationship to the modern via the film-industrial apparatus. Individual and local relations to time play a central role in these articulations. By situating Bombay cinema at the intersection of historical debates on colonial surveillance, financial modernity, 'Indian' femininity, class struggle, and an urban public sphere, I argue that the early talkie industry played a crucial part in defining the textures and temporalities of the city's unique brand of modernity -- what I call a 'Bombay Modern'. My focus on Bombay city also implicitly questions the validity of a national framework for examining cinematic production.;Even as a consolidating film industry benefitted from the infrastructural advantages that Bombay offered, the city itself had to respond to a new type of urban worker, a stubbornly ambiguous mode of business, and challenging filmic fantasies of modern transformation. From film critics to junior artistes, actress-producers to speculative entrepreneurs -- we visit a variety of cultural players as they rehearse specific versions of modern selves on the cinematic arena. We also track specifically cinematic configurations of commercial uncertainty, bodily risk, literary modernity, and didactic print cultures. Thus, we encounter a range of historical protagonists and material processes hitherto marginalized from public view. In the process I hope to offer fresh perspectives on categories such as industry, labor, genre, and resistance as mediated by a local movie industry.;These are alternative histories of South Asian modernity, and they are to be found in alternative archives of cinematic memory. This dissertation brings original archival materials such as studio records and unpublished memoirs into dialogue with understudied primary sources such as court cases and trade magazines. Simultaneously, I emphasize the need to revisit official archives with new questions. For 'Bombay Modern', the new questions pertain to processes, experiences, and networks rather than truths, causes, and evidence. Thus, I attempt a historiography that is keenly aware of the shifting relations of power within any cultural-industrial form. Methodologically, I suggest that it is only from within a material context of industrial contestations and struggles over meaning that we can grasp the emerging dream of the cinematic modern. |
