Bombay's Studio Era: Building an Industry from Scratch

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Before Bombay was a byword for Indian cinema it was a port with cotton money, a large multilingual working population and a theatrical tradition in Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu and Parsi Gujarati that had already taught audiences to expect songs inside a drama. When film arrived, it arrived into that ready made market. What followed between the 1910s and the 1940s was the construction, from nothing, of a vertically integrated industry with its own laboratories, sound stages, contract artists and distribution networks, built largely without state support and often without banks.

From Phalke to sound

Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, known as Dadasaheb Phalke, made Raja Harishchandra in 1913 after seeing a life of Christ on screen and deciding that Indian gods deserved the same treatment. He learned his craft partly in London, built his own equipment, and cast men in female roles because respectable women would not appear on camera. The mythological genre he founded remained the industry's most reliable earner for decades, for the practical reason that its stories needed no explanation in any language.

Sound arrived in 1931 with Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara, produced by his Imperial Film Company. It changed the economics immediately. Silent films had circulated freely across linguistic boundaries; talkies did not, and the industry fragmented into language markets almost overnight. It also made music compulsory. Every Indian sound film was, from the beginning, a musical, and that convention has proved more durable than any studio.

The studios

Four organisations defined the studio period. Prabhat Film Company, founded in 1929 in Kolhapur by V. Shantaram with his partners Vishnupant Damle and S. Fattelal, moved to Pune in the 1930s and built a reputation for technical polish and social argument. Its Sant Tukaram, about the Marathi poet saint, was screened at the Venice film festival in the 1930s, and Duniya Na Mane attacked the marriage of young women to old men. When Prabhat wound down, its Pune campus was taken over by the government and became the Film and Television Institute of India, which is why India's most influential film school occupies a pre war studio lot.

Bombay Talkies was founded in 1934 by Himansu Rai and the actress Devika Rani, who had trained in London and brought back German technicians including the director Franz Osten and the cinematographer Josef Wirsching. The studio ran on salaried staff, fixed hours and a written script, which was unusual then and would be unusual now. Achhut Kannya in 1936 put Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar in a story about caste and love; Kismet in 1943 ran in a single Calcutta cinema for an extraordinary length of time and effectively invented the anti hero as a Hindi film commercial proposition. Devika Rani later became the first recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.

New Theatres in Calcutta, founded by B.N. Sircar in 1931, worked in Bengali and Hindi, developed playback singing under Nitin Bose and Rai Chand Boral, and made the 1935 Devdas that turned K.L. Saigal into the subcontinent's first recording superstar. Ranjit Movietone, run by Chandulal Shah, was the volume producer, turning out films at a rate that kept its distributors supplied.

Around these sat smaller houses with sharply defined identities. Sohrab Modi's Minerva Movietone made historical epics in sonorous Urdu, including Pukar and Sikandar. Wadia Movietone, run by the brothers J.B.H. and Homi Wadia, made stunt films starring the Australian born performer Fearless Nadia, who fought villains on top of moving trains in Hunterwali and its successors and who remains one of the strangest and most enjoyable figures in Indian film history.

Why it collapsed

The studio system depended on retaining talent cheaply and on predictable access to raw stock, and the Second World War destroyed both. Film stock was rationed and licensed, which made it valuable, and wartime profiteering created a class of investors looking for somewhere to put money that could not be declared. Independent producers could outbid studios for stars because they were spending on one film rather than maintaining a payroll. The salaried actor discovered he could earn several times as much freelancing. Within a few years the studios were left with the overheads and none of the assets, since their principal asset had walked out of the gate.

Deaths accelerated it. Himansu Rai died in 1940 and Bombay Talkies never fully recovered, splintering into factions. By the early 1950s the dominant unit was the independent producer assembling a cast and crew for a single picture, financed at punitive interest rates by lenders operating outside the banking system. The government's own Film Enquiry Committee, reporting in the early 1950s under S.K. Patil, described the situation bluntly and recommended institutional finance, which eventually produced the Film Finance Corporation at the end of that decade.

It is tempting to read the studio era as a lost golden age of discipline, and there is something to that: written scripts, rehearsed performances, in house music departments and a technical standard maintained by people who owned the equipment. It is worth being honest about the other side. Studio contracts were restrictive, wages for junior staff were poor, and the paternalism of the system was real. What replaced it, the freelance industry of the 1950s, produced some of the finest Hindi films ever made. Both things are true, and the transition is better understood as a change in the shape of risk than as a simple decline.

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