Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India

Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media

Monika Mehta, Madhuja Mukherjee

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367210588
• eBook ISBN: 9781000293319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume points to the limits of models such as regional, national, and transnational, and develops 'network' as a conceptual category to study cinemas of India. Through grounded and interdisciplinary research, it shows how film industries located in disparate territories have not functioned as isolated units and draws attention to the industrial traffic – of filmic material, actors, performers, authors, technicians, genres, styles, sounds, expertise, languages, and capital, across trans-regional contexts -- since the inception of cinema. It excavates histories of film production, distribution and exhibition, and their connections beyond regional and national boundaries, and between places, industrial practices, and multiple media.

The chapters in this volume address a range of themes such as transgressive female figures; networks of authors and technicians; trans-regional production links and changing technologies, and new media geographies. By tracking manifold changes in the contexts of transforming media, and inter-connections between diverse industrial nodal points, this book expands the critical vocabulary in media and production studies and foregrounds new methods for examining cinema.

A generative account of industrial networks, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, production studies, media sociology, gender studies, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.

PART I
The female star, traveling figures and transgressions

1
Fatma Begum, South Asia’s first female director

Resurrections from media and legal archives

Rashmi Sawhney

Like many women pioneers in cinema, Fatma Begum, British India’s first female director and producer who ran a production house in Bombay from 1926–29, has by and large been a spectral presence in film history. This chapter attempts to address this gap by bringing her into representation, trafficking her, so to speak, from a past historical time into a contemporary present. The account presented here is a result of several years of persistent probing, and while I have written about her elsewhere (Sawhney 2013), in this chapter, Fatma Begum functions as a point of departure to raise methodological questions for film historiography.¹ Given her absence in film archives, my account necessitates a turn to media and legal archives, indicating that mobility – or agility – is a fundamental requirement within cinema studies as well. The larger question at play that underwrites this work is how fluid and impermanent archives influence postcolonial and feminist historiographical approaches to history and its present.²

Fatma Begum wrote, directed, acted in and produced films in Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s, enacting multiple kinds of labour, a common practice during the early decades of cinema that continues to mark independent and women’s film work. She was no exception to the culture of innovation and enterprise embodied by better-known pioneers like Georges Melies, Auguste and Louis Lumiere or Dhundiraj Govind Phalke. Although Fatma was literate enough to write film scripts, unlike D.G. Phalke, the famous ‘father of Indian cinema’, neither she nor others seem to have found significance in preserving her scripts and papers. Colonial policies had forced the predominately oral cultures of the region to transition to the British idea of ‘literacy’ solely as ‘the ability to read and write’, and Fatma would have belonged to the 2.9% of female population listed as being literate in the 1921 Census of India. One notes that the devaluing of female work, including by women themselves, has had a long and persistent history, extending into present times.

To add to this, the indifference and hostility towards cinema in the early 20th C, seen by ‘respectable society’ as a wasteful and morally corrupting form, extended towards a general apathy towards film preservation. A large number of film prints and negatives were lost due to negligence, celluloid was often sold for extracting silver, and sometimes production houses were deliberately set on fire to claim insurance money (Kumar 2016). Prints of Fatma’s films too were a casualty of this neglect, and the impossibility of now viewing the cinematic object, the film print, gives rise to the need to not only find relevant archives but to construct our own archives.³ The methodological manoeuvres implied by these challenges to film historians have been debated at length, and therefore I will not dwell upon the pedagogic aspect here.⁴ However, it is worth pointing out that dispersed and fluid archives open up to us the possibility of seeing history as narratives in formation, rather than as fixed and stable accounts. Such archives, which I suggest might be call ‘improper archives’, are always in the process of being built and rebuilt, always self-reflectively incomplete, edging us to think of historical narratives as pulsating projections into present times, rather than as stable entities belonging to a distant and cut-off past.⁵

Figure 1.1Mother-daughter/Fatma-Sultana

Source: Digital art by Mishta Roy 2013

From princely state to Bombay cinema

Fatma’s story is remarkable but not entirely unusual within the film industry. She was ‘married’ to Ibrahim Mohammed Yakut Khan III Bahadur, the Prince of Sachin (part of what is now Surat, in Gujarat), in 1906 at the age of 14 and bore him three daughters: Zubeida, Sultana and Shehazadi, in that order. Fatma was an Urdu and Gujarati stage actor, who migrated to Bombay with her daughters to join the film industry. However, there isn’t much clarity about this narrative and not sufficient archival material to ratify claims about her stage career although Kaushik Bhaumik’s unpublished (as of 2020) PhD dissertation on early cinema upholds this claim.

Historical records reveal that the first wife of Ibrahim Mohammed Yakut Khan III Bahadur was indeed called Fatima Sultan Jahan Begum Sahiba. She was the daughter of his paternal uncle and the first of his three wives. However, the family records state that Fatima Begum died in 1913, at which time she would have been about 21 years of age. It is entirely imaginable that it may have been more convenient for Fatma to have been declared dead rather than for the Nawab’s family to face the public shame of having one of their clan join the film industry. There is not much clarity on the nature of the marriage contract either, and a couple of sources indicate that it may have been a morganatic marriage, which would have absolved Mohammed Yakut Khan from passing on his title or privileges to Fatma or their children. However, this cannot be established conclusively, as one of their daughters, Zubeida (famously the lead actress of the first Hindustani talkie film, Alam Ara, released in 1931, directed by Ardeshir Irani), went on to marry Raja Dhanraj Giri Narsinghji Gyan Bahadur of Hyderabad. His ancestors had migrated in the 15th C from Gandhar in present-day Afghanistan to settle initially in Pune, and then moved to Hyderabad in the 19th C, where they established a flourishing trade and rose to prominence as the bankers in the Nizam’s court. Possibly, Zubeida’s star status in the Bombay film industry secured her this social ‘elevation’.

In the absence of any conclusive evidence about the nature of Fatma’s ‘married’ life in Sachin and the sudden declaration of her death, I would like to suggest that 1913 – coincidentally the year that Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra – is also the year Fatma Begum might have migrated to Bombay along with her three daughters. On the linear scale of Indian film history, 1913 thus marks the year that the ‘father’ and the ‘mother’ of Indian cinema both made their own different forays and departures into the world of cinema. Therefore, Fatma’s entry into the film industry would necessarily have to be seen as an event that is relational to the rhythms and milieus of early cinema, including in relation to Phalke’s legacy and the start-up culture of the 1920s Bombay film industry.⁶ Interestingly, Phalke and Fatma both exit the world of cinema in 1937–38, cleaving out a 25-year period that marks something of an epoch in Indian film history, a point I return to later in this chapter.

There is a fair amount of literature available describing the difficulties and challenges Phalke had to face in order to materialize his dream of ‘images Indian in form and content’. Unfortunately, though, almost nothing is known about the early years of Fatma’s experiments in cinema. The first we hear of her is with reference to her film debut in Manilal Joshi’s Veer Abhimanyu in 1922, in which she played the role of Subhadra at the age of 30. However, what the story is for nine years, between 1913–22, will as of now, remain a mystery. Nonetheless, we know that somehow Fatma managed to get a foothold into the film industry and, from the beginning of her career as an actor, went on to become a writer, director and producer as well.

Veer Abhimanyu was produced by Ardheshir Irani before he set up Imperial and involved over 5,000 persons in the production. Fatma’s daughter, Sultana, made her debut in the same film. Two years later, the eldest daughter Zubeida started her acting career at the age of 14 playing the lead role of the fairy-princess, Bakavali, in the iconic film Gul-e-Bakavali (dir. Kanjibhai Rathod), also featuring Sultana. Zubeida became a leading star of the 1930s and an iconic star of the ‘talkies’ after her role in Alam Ara (1931). Fatma Begum’s career thus sits at the cusp of the transition from silent cinema to the talkies, represented by her daughters Sultana (a leading star of the 1920s) and Zubeida (who is reported to have had an impressively high income of Rs 2,000 per month in the 1930s).

Fatma’s first film as a director, Bulbul-e-Parastan (1926), was produced under her own banner. The Fatma Film Corporation went on to produce all the other films she directed, which included: The Goddess of Love (1927), Heer Ranjha (1928a), Chandravali (1928b), Kanaktara (1929a), Milan Dinar (1929b), Naseeb ni Devi (1929c) and Shakuntala (1929d). Ironically, 1929, the year of highest productivity for the studio, was also its last year; Fatma got embroiled in a number of legal cases and stopped directing or producing films, taking up only some acting roles in the 1930s, with the last one being in Duniya Kya Hai (1937). The last years of the 1920s were tumultuous for many in the film business as the arrival of the ‘talkies’ was imminent. In addition to the general confusion about what this new form of cinema would entail, the industry functioned in a greatly unorganized manner. It would be reasonable to assume that the pressure felt by the industry at large was experienced by its only female director and producer in a much more intense way. Such an assumption can be sustained on the basis of the many accounts provided even today by female actors, producers and directors who continue to struggle to raise finances or find distribution for their films (“Why are there so few female filmmakers?” 2010; “Hard for women filmmakers” 2018).

Legal twists and turns in film history

I look at the period between 1929–32, drawing upon newspaper reportage of the numerous court cases that Fatma was embroiled in, as indicative of the borderlines that she kept shifting across and in-between (The Times of India 1929–1934). While the absence of archival material appears to be an obstacle for historicism, it prompts one to look more carefully into the dispersed sites of ‘a possible history’, as I do in this chapter, by looking into archives of media and law. This indicates another kind ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: detouring networks
• Part I The female star, traveling figures and transgressions
• Part II Networks of circulation, production, and imaginings
• Part III Media geographies, agencies, and technologies
• Index