Doing Women's Film History

Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future

Christine Gledhill, Julia Knight, Christine Gledhill, Julia Knight

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780252081187
  9780252039683
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252097775
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Research into and around women's participation in cinematic history has enjoyed dynamic growth over the past decade. A broadening of scope and interests encompasses not only different kinds of filmmaking--mainstream fiction, experimental, and documentary--but also practices--publicity, journalism, distribution and exhibition--seldom explored in the past. Cutting-edge and inclusive, Doing Women's Film History ventures into topics in the United States and Europe while also moving beyond to explore the influence of women on the cinemas of India, Chile, Turkey, Russia, and Australia. Contributors grapple with historiographic questions that cover film history from the pioneering era to the present day. Yet the writers also address the very mission of practicing scholarship. Essays explore essential issues like identifying women's participation in their cinema cultures, locating previously unconsidered sources of evidence, developing methodologies and analytical concepts to reveal the impact of gender on film production, distribution and reception, and reframing film history to accommodate new questions and approaches. Contributors include: Kay Armatage, Eylem Atakav, Karina Aveyard, Canan Balan, Cécile Chich, Monica Dall'Asta, Eliza Anna Delveroudi, Jane M. Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Julia Knight, Neepa Majumdar, Michele Leigh, Luke McKernan, Debashree Mukherjee, Giuliana Muscio, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Rashmi Sawhney, Elizabeth Ramirez Soto, Sarah Street, and Kimberly Tomadjoglou.

PART I

Searching for Sources, Rewriting Histories

CHAPTER 1

Scandalous Evidence

Looking for the Bombay Film Actress in an Absent Archive (1930s–1940s)

DEBASHREE MUKHERJEE

Bombay city in the 1930s was visibly modern. From its art deco high-rises and jazz clubs to its teeming factories and stock exchange, the colonial port city embodied the creative energies of a dynamic metropolis. One of the key markers of Bombay's modernity was the public woman. The woman who went about her business in the public domain was no longer confined to the factories, bazaars, or the red light districts of the city. Evidenced in newspapers, novels, and films of the time was a palpable excitement about a new breed of white-collar woman worker, encompassing a new range of profiles such as typist, telephone operator, nurse, journalist, photographer, and even anti-imperial political activist.¹ The film professional was one of these new public women.

It is common knowledge that since cinema was considered a socially dubious medium, the early South Asian film industries relied on male actors to play female parts. By the 1930s, however, women were participating in Bombay's rapidly expanding film industry in diverse capacities. Female film professionals such as the producer-director Fatma Begum, music composer Jaddan Bai, screenwriter-actress Snehaprabha Pradhan, and film critic Clare Mendonca directly contradict the widespread notion that the only women working in the early talkie industries of the subcontinent were actresses or extras.

This misperception is hardly surprising given the serious gaps in the official archives of South Asian cinema. The National Film Archive of India was only set up in 1964, and scores of early films are lost to us for reasons ranging from problems with flammable nitrate film, a hesitant film archival culture, and the politics of preservation. Moreover, primary sources that film historians in parts of Europe and the United States take for granted—such as studio papers—are practically nonexistent in India. Research on women in the early decades of Indian cinema is severely affected by these absences, and basic profiles of even leading actresses are scarce. My initial attempts to look for direct accounts of women's film practice repeatedly drew a blank. Instead, what I found in relative abundance were suggestions about actresses embroiled in scandals. In this chapter I seek to explore the historiographic productivity of such speculation and talk as an entry point into understanding the status and work of women in the early Bombay film industry. I have reconstructed specific scandal narratives in a jigsaw fashion using a variety of sources, including film magazines, biographies, creative nonfiction writing, fan letters, and interviews I conducted in Bombay from 2008 to 2013.

Dictionary definitions of the terms rumor, gossip, and scandal point to their narrative unreliability and their shaky epistemological status. However, if historicized, these discursive practices offer important clues about cinema as an industrial as well as imaginative form. Tightly framed within a discourse of morality, film scandals are not only about the individual acts condemned but are also attempts to articulate the unsettling of studio and social hierarchies, including gender relations. This chapter attempts to demonstrate how the film historian might use these “illegitimate” sources of history to approach lived histories of Bombay cinema's work culture.

I approach scandal as a discursive form that proliferates textually and orally rather than as a temporally contained mediatized event. Hints of scandal are available in film magazines, but layers of the same incident fold back on the rumored event through time via interviews with colleagues and published memoirs. Taking two star-actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, Devika Rani and Naseem Banu, as case studies, and moving outward from the initial scandal narratives, this chapter re-imagines the possibilities and pressures that actresses encountered in the film studio as well as in the public eye. Further, it suggests that the early film actress be seen as a manifestation of, and model for, the urban working woman in 1930s and 1940s Bombay.

Very early into the life of cinema in India it became apparent that this new phenomenon would generate talk. In its affective manifestations, cinema was able to circulate more freely and widely than the physical film object. Letters demanding biographical information about stars regularly swamped fan magazines and tabloids. The studios that were associated with these glamorous names became sites of intense speculation and wonder. The film studio was exciting both as an emblem of technological modernity and as a thrilling heterosocial work space that brought men and women together under intimate conditions. This combined excitement can be glimpsed in a Filmindia description of the new Ranjit Studio: “Ah, the new studio—the new Ranjit studio! It is big and beautiful with such perfect acoustics that even if the director tried a tête-à-tête in whispers with the heroine it would all come out on the sound track as distinct as the song of a lark” (Judas 1938, 14).

The most overwhelming narrative that emerged around women's presence in the Bombay film studio was that of respectability and moral danger, the constant subtext being an anxiety about female sexuality. Women in studios were caught in a professional paradox: not only were they likely to perform the seductive huntress on screen, but they were also susceptible to the seductions of the studio itself. The film studio became the site of much anxiety both inside and outside the film industry. The public sphere was rife with discussions about studio reform among so-called “concerned” citizens and journalists. The rapidly mushrooming parallel industry of fanzines and tabloids was driven by the unconventional work atmosphere of film studios and the risqué content often being shot inside. Actresses routinely made claims in these very fanzines about the “wholesome” atmosphere of film studios or protested that moral integrity was the ultimate defense of a working woman (see S. Devi 1993; C. Devi 1993; Sunita 1939). The participation of Muslim courtesan-singers and Anglo-Indian actresses in the film industry's workforce created a different frisson. Both communities of women were popularly viewed as sexually suspect, the former for their traditional professions and the latter due to their conspicuously westernized lifestyles. Women's sexuality in South Asia has historically been the preferred ground for waging politico-religious battles. As decolonization became a future certainty and talks of a faith-based “Partition” exacerbated communal tensions, actresses’ bodies became contested territory. Studio bosses and celebrity journalists advocated a drive to recruit educated Hindu actresses who were tasked with changing the reputation of the industry and better embodying the nationalist ideal of the Indian woman on screen. Contemporary Indian film historians often argue that these hegemonic attempts at “improvement” were successful in their short-term aims (Majumdar 2009, Bhaumik 2001). However, the competing truths of film-scandal narratives complicate the dominant account of an industrial transition to “respectability.” Rather, I hope to demonstrate that actresses from all social strata were equally interpellated by the challenge of respectability and that complex negotiations with urban modernity, fandom, and stardom were at play during this critical moment in the history of Bombay cinema.

Devika Rani (1908–1994)

The first of the “scandals” in this study took place sometime in 1935–36.

When Najmul Hussain ran off with Devika Rani, the entire Bombay Talkies was in turmoil. The film they were making had gone on the floor and some scenes had already been shot…. The worst affected and the most worried man at Bombay Talkies was Himansu Rai, Devika Rani's husband and the heart and soul of the company. (Manto 2008, 447)

Details about the incident are reported in biographical sketches like the one above, in the innuendos of contemporaneous film magazines, and in memoirs. Bombay Talkies was founded in 1934 by the husband and wife team, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, who had both spent many years learning film craft in Germany and England. Their ambition was to reconfigure the indigenous Indian film industry by introducing cutting-edge technology, an international team of technicians, a rationalized studio work model, and transparent financing sources. The studio's recruitment policies were explicitly class-conscious. To quote Devika Rani herself, “In Bombay Talkies we were all one class of people—all our recruits were from those sent by the Vice-Chancellors of various universities” (Kak 1980, 73). Similarly, in a pre–Bombay Talkies interview, it was reported that “Devika Rani has great hopes in assisting her husband in creating an Indian Hollywood in Bombay where she hopes to train educated young Indian ladies who are desirous of joining the Cinema Industry” (Cinema Annual 1933, 36).

It is clear that Rai and Rani were keen to distance themselves from the prevailing reputation of Bombay's film studios, a reputation not only of clumsy, ad hoc production and bazaar-type financing, but also of sexual immorality (see Bhaumik 2001, especially 151–64). Given the nature of Bombay Talkies’ vision, how do we understand the scandalous elopement attempt by Devika Rani? Bombay Talkies’ first film, Jawani-ki-Hawa (Osten 1935), had featured Najmul Hussain and Devika Rani, and they proved a hit pair. At the time of the elopement, they were shooting Jeevan Naiya (Osten 1936), and true to the cliché, the onscreen couple smoothly transitioned into an offscreen one. However, such matters rarely become hard facts that can be recorded in the annals of history. A co-actor remembers: “Something happened; what, no one knew for sure. There were stories, rumors. Perhaps only four persons knew the truth. The others could only conjecture” (Valicha 1996, 15). Devika Rani was finally tracked down in Calcutta and persuaded to return to Bombay. Najmul Hussain was fired. The popular appeal and longevity of this scandal narrative derives from its moral structure; two individuals fell in love, ignored the dictates of society or common sense, committed adultery, and had to repent. Might there be another way to view this history?

FIGURE 1.1. Devika Rani poses for a publicity still on the set of Vachan (d. Franz Osten, pc. Bombay Talkies, 1938) (Courtesy Wolfgang Peter Wirsching and Georg Wirsching, Goa)

Born in 1908 into a privileged, upper-caste Bengali family, Devika Rani Choudhuri was famed as the grandniece of the poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Her fans were well aware of key biographical details, including the fact that she had spent several years in Europe pursuing educational and vocational studies. In London she met Himansu Rai, a charismatic film entrepreneur who was sixteen years her senior. He offered her a position in set design for an international venture he was producing, A Throw of Dice (Osten 1929). In 1929 Devika Rani married Himansu Rai and moved with him to Germany “where he was a producer with the famous UFA studios” (Malik 1958, 33). At UFA Rani learned art direction, costume, and makeup in Erich Pommer's unit; magazines like Filmfare subsequently reported that she worked with Marlene Dietrich, G. W. Pabst, and Fritz Lang (Malik 1958, 35; Narayan 1977, 42). With Hitler's increasing power in Germany, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani moved to Bombay, complete with a German crew, and set up their own studio in 1934. Can these details of a meticulously planned, shared enterprise be reconciled with Rani's supposedly spontaneous decision to elope with a co-star? According to studio insiders, there was another, more practical angle to the elopement narrative (Pal 2004; Valicha 1996).

Najmul Hussain and Devika Rani, though on contract with Bombay Talkies, had been trying to join an established Calcutta studio, New Theatres, where they hoped to be signed on as a package deal. This was an era before freelance acting became the norm, and producers often enforced contracts through expensive legal battles and even by boycotting recalcitrant artistes. Devika Rani was technically a stakeholder in Bombay Talkies Ltd., but to abandon her new company as well as her producer-husband was a highly controversial decision. Relocating to another regional film industry, far from the immediate professional networks and production infrastructures of Bombay city, might have been the only way to stall social and legal censure. New Theatres, in the mid-1930s, was one of the leading film studios in the subcontinent. Run by B. N. Sircar, the studio was an efficiently managed, commercially successful, “respectable” organization much like the studio Rai and Rani envisioned for Bombay Talkies (Gooptu 2010). Agreement to sign on Devika Rani, who had set up shop in Bombay with her husband amid much fanfare, meant that Sircar was willing to risk the potentially scandalous repercussions. Also, it meant that Rani already had enough star value to justify such a high-stakes deal. Thus, the rival scandal narrative contains crucial information about studio competition, individual ambition, and the status of the actress as valuable commodity. In the earliest decades of cinema, the actress embodied the chief attractions of the movies. The leading studios of the day were, in the public imagination, inextricable from their representative female stars, employed under rigid contracts. New Theatres, at the time, had famous actresses like Kanan Devi and Jamuna on its payroll and was looking to augment its reputation by hiring Devika Rani, who had achieved rare success in the West.² The fact that Himansu Rai successfully brought Rani back to his studio and to Bombay also foreshadowed the displacement of Calcutta by Bombay as the new power center of Hindustani film production.

In her essay on the modern girl in Bombay cinema, Priti Ramamurthy (2006) argues that “for acting to be recoded as acceptable, the ‘private’ lives of the stars had also to be aligned as respectably modern. So, unlike Sulochana, whose breakup with her on-and-off-screen lover was posited as one cause for her decline, Devika Rani was posed gardening at home” (217). Nuancing such binary logic, I suggest that the production of respectability was a more complex process and that actresses performed modes of respectability and Indian femininity in strategic ways. It is striking that just a few months before the release of Rani's next film, Achhut Kanya (1936), gossip columnists avidly discussed Devika Rani's elopement attempt and its denouement. For example, “Miss Kamala” directly addresses the star thus: “And then came the news that you had run away from the Bombay Talkies and that we would have no chance to see your pictures for a long time to come…only to discover that you had gone for a short change to Calcutta and on return you will be working in Jeevan Naiya. We were relieved and glad” (1936, 28). Scandal thus becomes significant in the way it is mediated to a star's audiences in a context that is fraught with anxieties about actresses’ virtue and family background. It seems that Devika Rani's elopement scandal hardly dented her star power; it might even have augmented it. Rani went on to star in some of Bombay Talkies’ most enduring hits and was the first-ever recipient of the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke national award.³ The commerce of star-making works on contradictory impulses. Rani consistently played the demure, good girl in Bombay Talkies’ films, even as she performed the role of the ideal Brahmin wife and partner to an influential studio boss, but her characters also flaunted fashionable sarees, Marcel-waved hair, and penciled eyebrows. Tradition negotiated with modernity as Rani performed c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue. Constellations: Past Meets Present in Feminist Film History
• Part I: Searching for Sources, Rewriting Histories
• Part II: Feminism, Politics, and Aesthetics
• Part III: Women at Work
• Contributors
• Index