Why a 17-Year-Old Novel on Bombay Cinema Rings True Even Today

There are non-fiction books galore on the history of Bollywood. Many of them become Bollywood films. But has the film industry itself ever been turned into a novel? To some extent, the Netflix series Jubilee did that. But it focussed more on the period immediately after independence. Tabish Khair’s Filming: A Love Story (Picador, 2007), located in the period 1920 to 1948 – from silent bioscopes to the black-and-white era of film studios – shows not only the history of Bombay cinema, but makes it a metonym for the history of the sub-continent’s modernity, nationalism, freedom struggle and Partition. 

Set in the cosmopolitan, multicultural world of our nascent film industry, Filming is framed as a love story. The main narrator of this book is an immigrant Indian PhD scholar who, in search of an easy research project, reaches out to an ageing movie scriptwriter from 1920s-30s Bombay. The story he tells is of Rajlkunwar Studio, whose celebrated stars Saleem and Bhuvaneshwari and director and producer Hari and Rajkunwar, are trying to can the reels of their dream project, Akhiri Raat, as communal tensions escalate around Partition. A studio team’s dream of making a movie is defined, impacted, and in the end destroyed as the socio-political dream of freedom blooms majestically from home rule to poorna swaraj but gets blighted by communal hatred, Partition and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

Hari and Bhuvaneshwari, who used to be bioscope-wallahs in 1920s, roaming the countryside on a bullock-cart, reach Bombay with the help of a rich, rasik thakur, Rajkunwar, where early black-and-white era enthrals them. This is a Bombay of chawls, textile mills, movies and upward mobility. A city where dreamers from every walk of life gravitate, “a mix of bohemians as well as artist from traditional backgrounds…united by the dream of revolution and art, independence and success…” Yet caste, community and religious prejudice also flavour every interaction and all power flows along these lines. 

At a time when the rest of the country is reeling under famines, war-time rationing, and communal tensions, the Bombay film industry remains a cosmopolitan, glamorous island. To realise this dream of making an immortal movie, the protagonists set up a studio in Dallam village on the Bombay-Pune highway by making cold bargains. Possible only in Bombay, the city of dreams, deception, shedding of old identities – no cost is too much.  

As they race to can the movie, a chanting mob surrounds the studio, calling it a den of vice. The inmates keep denying danger as each of them has a dream to hold onto. The dilemmas of the characters bear striking relevance to the dilemmas we face today. 

The story is told from multiple viewpoints and the reading experience is one of nested dolls being unpacked. The chapter numbering is aptly in reels and rasas, not in chapters and sections, as the researcher interprets the disjointed and rambling stories told by the ageing scriptwriter. The researcher-narrator is not entirely convinced by the scriptwriter’s version, so he explores another narrator – a lady gynaecologist in Gaya who seems to hold a key to Bhuvaneshwari’s story. The author takes breathtaking narrative leaps from one point of view to another but because we are so deep in the mind of the characters, the trust placed on the reader is tested as well as proved. 

The fractured thought process of the Hindutva nationalist mob-leader, who leads the attack on the studio, is brilliantly portrayed  in a breathless, punctuation-less style. His dreams are thoughts colliding, unravelling and gathering without logic – at once macho and cowardly, righteous and unsure, always in need of fuelling himself with the power of disgust and hate to hold himself together. Identity is defined only by one’s name religion and foreskin for him and nothing is more threatening than a place like the Film studio, where people coolly shed identities and pick up new ones; creating new selves with a change of costume. Pure sorcery. 

In the end, the dream of making an immortal movie gets swallowed by a tide of hate. As the narrator says, “the fused light of our dreams struck the prism of 1947,  and refracted into the orange and yellow of Hinduism, the green of Islam, the red of violence, the blue of disappointed hope and the indigo and violet of subtle unredeemable differences.” The country became free and partitioned. People became Hindus and Muslims first. The creative dream was snuffed, the studio  burned down in a communal attack led by villagers who saw them as morally depraved heathens. Only grotesque remains of the studio remind of the glory that once was. This hate brings righteous “moral victory,”  and an easy land-grab for the Seths, and their booming business in barbed wire. 

But does the story end here? What happens to the disrupted dreams and the dreamers? Should they have stuck to the dream or chosen love? Should they have chosen a nation based on their religion or just chosen to live?  Who can judge whom for these choices? And what of the cynical politics that forces such choices on ordinary human beings? The novel eventually brings out how the blooming or withering of our individual dreams is often contingent on larger dreams/fictions of the nation and society of our times. And the shadow of politics can make or mar them.

Impressive as the theme and the scope is, one is seldom taken in by a book because of the large canvas. It is the small, intimate moments, strung together by a narrative logic, that makes the reader soar above the little stories of the character’s lives without losing sight of any detail.

Also read: Has the Indian Film Industry Forgotten Its Secular Identity?

Khair’s prose excels in closely observed, intimate details of the Indian landscape that root it to the setting – birds and trees (peepul, heddi, amha, naral, palas); summer-storms, foods, ceremonies, gestures. The loo wailing in the afternoons; the moment in time between dusk and night called Godhuli, visible only in the Indian countryside; the bleakness and complete absence of possibility that defines small towns; sugarcane juice that looks like trapped, dirty sunshine; what working in  cramped, fabric ridden grey rooms of textile mills reverberating with noisy machinery felt like in 1930’s Bombay, where workers had to keep the windows shut so that the precious fabric wouldn’t get soiled; the little known card games played by mill-workers; or the extraordinary pull of a bioscope-wallah in rural Bihar; the ordinary pleasures of a village bahrupiya, the guy with multiple makeups and mannerisms; and the rules of caste and privilege that defined village interactions in the era of whip-wielding Thakurs of rural Bihar.

Above all, readers experience how othering operates – what it feels like to a Muslim, a person just like anyone else in the group and just as much in love with films, innocently confident that no one here could ever harm him. They learn hat happens when a group of people are made to feel that there is no future for them anymore in the city they love. That there is nothing for them except “stones and screams in the night.” 

The strange thing about great fiction is that like an oracle, it speaks to us over time. In 2007, Filming might have been seen as only a cracking story set in a dead and buried past. But as politics of hate relentlessly lengthens over young people’s dreams today, this story, set in a time 100 years ago, feels uncannily relevant.