It was not by coincidence that Mumbai became the principal centre of movie-making in India. Mumbai's monsoon climate, its status as a cosmopolitan port city, and its migrant workers were as important to Mumbai cinema as the filmi dreams and material employment generated by the movie business were important for the city. At our Online Talk #BombayTalkies, film and media scholar and researcher Debashree Mukherjee draws insights from her new book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), to show how a budding film industry and a modernizing city mutually shaped each other. We also get a glimpse into 1930s Mumbai through a range of film posters, song booklets, rare production stills, magazines, and film clips.

The talk link will be shared a couple of hours before the event

About the speaker Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in New York. Her first academic monograph, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practice and practitioners. In her new research she is developing a media history of indenture and South-South migrations, spanning photography, communications infrastructures, and film traffic.