Ever since films became a popular medium of mass entertainment audiences have been intensely curious about life and work on a film set. How are films made, we have wondered, hoping that first-hand knowledge of a film set will explain and subdue the hold that cinema has on us. But, fortunately or unfortunately, that has rarely happened. The experience of the film set has historically confounded any straightforward process of demystification.

Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema presents a selection of photographs from the personal archive of Josef Wirsching, one of the pioneering film artistes of Indian cinema, who moved from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s to make India his workplace and his home. These photographs, most of them taken on film sets and outdoor locations for films produced by Bombay Talkies Ltd., show us a world of meaning that was never intended to be projected on the silver screen.

Seeing images of film practitioners immersed in the work of making movies, attempting to build a new local industry and shape an emerging art form, unsettles our assumptions about the past in fundamental ways. For one thing, these images show us that early filmmaking in India was often organisationally and technically robust despite the well-known challenges of finance and infrastructure.

We are also confronted with the fact that the earliest makers of Indian cinema belonged to many different classes, religions, castes, genders, even nationalities, and it is misguided to demand a superficial authenticity from the past. Instead, as the essays in this book suggest, the past continues to surprise us as new sources emerge, showing us that history itself is a vital ongoing project.

The work of reinstituting Josef Wirsching within the known history of Indian cinema offers us an expansive perspective on the contours of so-called national cinemas. How can a German cinematographer be considered a pioneer of Indian cinema? And what was he doing in the Bombay film industry in the first place?

Tracking these questions leads us to a fascinating network of people, places, and practices that converged on Bombay city in the 1930s. From London to Lahore, Calcutta to Berlin, the Bombay film industry was built by people and resources from across the world. When one enquires after the ethnicities, linguistic identities and nationalities of the pioneers of Bombay Talkies, it becomes clear that the category “Indian cinema” is a tenuous construct and includes a wide array of transregional and transnational influences, borrowing equally from Hollywood and Parsi theatre even as its practitioners crossed the borders of old and new nation states.

Bombay Talkies was set up by producer Himansu Rai and his actress wife, Devika Rani Chaudhuri, in 1934. This Bengali couple met and married in London in the late 1920s, moved to Germany to work at the UFA Studios, worked on a couple of international co-productions, and finally set up their own studio in Bombay in 1934.

In Europe, Himansu Rai and Devika Rani had strategically positioned themselves as authentically Indian filmmakers who wanted to accurately narrate Indian stories to Western audiences. Their early co-productions showcase a spectacular, spiritual and ahistorical India, which might seem exotic, even self-Orientalizing to viewers today.

But Bombay Talkies’ mission was different. Envisioned as an Indian studio producing films for an Indian market, it sought to establish itself as a swadeshi business with a definite regional voice and location. Further, the studio consciously modelled itself as a national institution that would train a creative workforce at par with international standards. Bombay Talkies’ team of European personnel headed the main departments at the studio and simultaneously doubled as mentors to young recruits. Joseph Wirsching was the head of the Camera Department.

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Josef Wirsching’s decision to move to Bombay in the 1930s seems mainly motivated by the fact that film studios in Germany were being taken over by the Nazi Party and non-Jewish filmmakers were being compelled to make propaganda films. This coercive atmosphere made artistic production very difficult for many independent-thinking filmmakers. Unlike many others who made the eastward journey to India during the Nazi years, Wirsching was neither Jewish nor a political exile. Still, his decision to migrate to India is significant. Bombay Talkies offered Wirsching the professional status and creative freedom that was not possible in Germany’s crowded and politicized film scene. Moreover, the content and themes of Bombay Talkies’ films, with their emphasis on progressive reform and the socially marginalized, offered a worthy vision of an inclusive future that was the antithesis of the Nazi project.

Bombay cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s reveals a strong influence of German Expressionism and Josef Wirsching played a pioneering role in popularising this stylised film form. German Expressionism, in the cinema of the 1920s (e.g. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), was a strongly non-naturalistic style in which sets, costumes, acting and lighting all took on the role of “expressing” complex and dark human psychology.

You see this influence most strongly in Bombay Talkies’ debut feature film, Jawani ki Hawa (1935), a romantic thriller. In it, Wirsching composed frames with huge pools of darkness, sharp highlights, eerie shadows, distorted angles and sets which appear to overwhelm the humans. These Expressionist techniques lent themselves beautifully to Bombay Talkies’ early melodramatic screenplays, where socially transgressive emotions found visual expression in song and mise-en-scène. The crisis of the alienated individual in post-war Europe was thus transferred, via melodramatic Expressionism, to the crisis of the modernising self in a colonised nation.

While the Indian founders of Bombay Talkies were largely from the Bengali upper castes, from the first year of its operation, the studio employed a demographically diverse roster of creative personnel. Across the departments of acting, writing, sets, make-up, camera, costume and lighting, the studio hired persons from various strata of Indian society. About 300 “students” were interviewed in the first year itself. A whole generation of film industrywallahs “graduated” from Bombay Talkies, which became a veritable film school with experienced practitioners as well as newbie recruits amongst its ranks: Saraswati Devi (née Khorshed Homji) as music director, Mumtaz Ali as choreographer, Madame Azurie as dancer, Niranjan Pal as scriptwriter, K.A. Abbas as publicist, Gyan Mukherjee as director, Sashadhar Mukherjee as producer, Najam Naqvi as script supervisor, Savak Vacha as sound engineer, Madame Andrée as make-up person, J.S. Casshyap as dialogue writer, Dattaram N. Pai as editor, and R.D. Pareenja as cameraperson.

Himansu Rai and Devika Rani insisted that all salaried staff be housed near the studio complex in Malad and ran an on-site medical facility, canteen and recreation room to foster a sense of community and collegiality. The studio’s top-notch equipment, multiple sound stages, processing laboratory and cross-departmental training requirements made it a prime destination for film aspirants who wanted to learn the ropes of production. At its zenith, Bombay Talkies had about 400 employees on its rolls.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Bombay Talkies’ German employees abruptly found themselves branded “enemy aliens.” It is said that Himansu Rai’s premature death in 1940 might have been partly due to the great shock of losing his best personnel and friends. After Rai’s death, Devika Rani took over the studio and some of the biggest hits of the period were produced under her watch. However, dissatisfactions were brewing in the studio and two rival factions were formed, with Ashok Kumar, Sashadhar Mukherjee, Savak Vacha, and Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall all leaving in 1943 to form their own studio, Filmistan.

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In 1945, Devika married the Russian artist Svetoslav Roerich and retired from the film industry, paving the way for Ashok Kumar’s return to Bombay Talkies as producer. Josef Wirsching did not participate in any of these power tussles or transitions as he spent the entire war period, and longer, in internment camps. Upon his release he once again decided to stay on in India. In the post-war years, Wirsching scaled greater artistic heights with Mahal (1949), Dil Apna aur Preet Parai (1960) and Pakeezah (1972), the last completed after his death in 1967.

This is an excerpt from Introduction: What Photography Can Tell Us About Cinema’s Past by Debashree Mukherjee in Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, edited by Mukherjee and published by Mapin Publishing, in association with the Alkazi Collection of Photography.

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