Debashree Mukherjee is on a roll. Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press/Penguin), her sprawling book ...
Debashree Mukherjee is on a roll. Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press/Penguin), her sprawling book on cinema and the city during the tumultuous years of the transition from silent films to the talkies (1920s-1940s), has just been published. She is also the editor of the forthcoming Beyond the Silver Screen: Josef Wirsching and an Unseen History of Indian Cinema (Mapin). In an interview with Scroll.in, Mukherjee, an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, speaks about her work.
Tell us how ‘Bombay Hustle’ evolved.
The initial germ for the book – at which point I had no idea it was going to be a book – was actually when I was working in Bombay. I had just finished assisting Vishal Bhardwaj on Omkara (2006). I had been doing a parallel research project (with Sarai-CSDS in Delhi) on the ethnography of film production. And as someone who was actually practising in Bombay and really immersed in the life of the freelance struggler, I felt very keenly that this whole city is informed or shaped in some ways by its filmmaking practices and I started thinking about where did these film practices come from and how is that cinema has suffused the city in so many ways.
[Saadat Hasan] Manto was a...
