On a rainy August evening in Mumbai, we hosted Dr. Debashree Mukherjee, Associate Professor, Columbia University, New York, for a public lecture. “Bombay Hustle: Cinema as a Modern Workplace for Women” is an exploration of the life and work of the earliest female professionals in Bombay cinema, based on the findings in Dr. Mukherjee’s riveting book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020).
Bombay of 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. The city played a significant role as an urban centre in drawing women into the public sphere and workforce, even in new professions that were not yet considered ‘respectable’, such as film. This illustrated talk, filled with rare production stills, posters, and song booklets, discusses how Bombay’s pioneering filmi women posed a challenge to Indian society in their newfound vocation as film professionals. Following her talk, Dr. Mukherjee is joined in conversation by filmmaker Paromita Vohra as the two speakers discuss urban modernity, Bombay cinema, and women claiming the public sphere in a modern metropolis.
About the speakers:
Dr. Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University, New York. Her book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. She is Editor-in-Chief of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. In a previous life, Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson, and she remains committed to industry-academy-public interfaces through exhibitions, curation, and digital humanities open-access projects.
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker whose work explores feminism, love and desire, urban life, and popular culture. Her work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and The Wellcome Trust. She is the Founder and Creative Director of AGENTS OF ISHQ, India’s best-loved website about sex, love and desire. Her documentaries include the landmark films Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Morality TV Aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani, among others. She writes a weekly column, ‘Paro-Normal Activity’ in the Sunday Midday.
DOP and Editing: Yagnesh Mehta
Assistant DOP: Akshay Mandhare
