Polemics and Performance in Late Colonial Bombay: The Case of Film Actress Shanta Apte

• In Event: Colonial Spaces and Cultural Production in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

In 1940, at the height of her stardom, the film actress Shanta Apte published a fiercely polemical monograph denouncing the capitalist film industry of Bombay. This Marathi-language text was titled Jaau mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?), and was meant as a warning to glamor-struck film aspirants. Barely a year prior to this, Apte had staged a spectacular hunger strike against her employers – the Prabhat Film Company.

By keeping these two acts of agonistic critique at its center, this paper offers fresh perspectives on categories such as industry, labor, and resistance as mediated by a local movie industry. Against a backdrop of millworkers’ strikes and national lockdowns, could the film industry remain completely unaffected? I argue that Bombay’s circuits of cinematic practice were intricately entangled with the city’s struggles with modernity; a focused exploration of the contexts of film production can therefore expand our understanding of late colonial public culture, political mobilizations, and alternative public spheres. This paper locates one film actress’ performatively defiant gestures within the matrix of local cultural, ideological, and industrial currents in order to open up some themes crucial to the history of Bombay’s colonial modernity. These themes include the idea of gendered filmic precarity, the durational and corporeal nature of cinematic labor, the increasingly corporatized and extractive character of film studios, the affective seduction of the film machine for modernizing youth, and the social power of the film actress as a public professional.

Author

• Debashree Mukherjee, Columbia University