Picture the Past

A mass hero should be the mouth­piece of the government,” says a government functionary to the star. “For the national cause.” And what is that, asks the star. Any agenda the government wants, comes the reply, it could be making dams, heavy in­dustries, or declaring war on another country. Soldier, engineer, selfless doctor, an honest and patriotic freedom fighter. And then the functionary quotes legendary Hollywood producer David O Selznick saying that films are the best American ambassadors abroad.

This could be a conversation between representatives of the government and the film industry now. But it isn’t. Among the many joys to be discovered on Amazon Prime Video’s new series, Jubilee, is how relevant its discourse on the power of cinema is. Set in the Mumbai of the 1940s and 1950s, with charac­ters from the Hindi film industry of the 1930s, Vikramaditya Motwane’s series celebrates the magnificence of Hindi cinema at a time when it has lost much of its confidence in itself. As Motwane says, “Just the sheer ambi­tion of storytelling, the portrayal of women, the social issues they covered, and the worlds they created with what we consider to be inferior technology was dazzling.”

With its studio owners who would sacrifice anything for their movies, to its male actors who were articulating the identity of the post-Independence Indian man, to its beautiful women, some courtesans, others from privileged or foreign backgrounds, Jubilee presents Bombay cinema at its best. Centred around Roy Talkies, it focuses on Sumitra Kumari and Srikant Roy, a couple in a tumultuous relationship, who run the studio. That’s not much of a stretch. Bombay Talkies in its heyday was run by Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai, and just as in the series, her real-life elopement with a co-star creates consequences for the studio.

From its stunning sets recreated in contemporary Mumbai, to its railway station scenes shot in Sri Lanka, the refugee camp scenes in Lucknow, to its exquisite costumes on women singing smoky nightclub songs, this is a Bombay of mystery, of dreams, of possibilities as refugees land from Karachi, mingling with the established film elite of the city who grudgingly give them space to create a new kind of cinema. It is where movie moguls choose movies over lovers, studios over women, and passionately declaim about the power of movies. As Prosenjit Chatterjee’s brooding Srikant Roy says: “Power lies in wield­ing the weapon of cinema with all its might, of raising public standards by giving them a taste of poetry, of photography, of music, of aspiration. Cinema can empower people.”

There is a mix of fact and fiction in the ten episodes here, with a potential star in Jubilee being removed by the man who would eventually replace him as the star of Bombay Talkies. In reality, it was a lab assistant Ashok Kumar (supposed to be Binod Das here), who replaced Najmul Hasan (Jamshed Khan in the series), Devika Rani’s co-star and lover. As Motwane says, “The process of launching a star hasn’t changed much. A Sidharth Malhotra or a Ranveer Singh were propelled into stardom just as Madan Kumar is created, complete with a freshly minted name, new look, and certain mannerisms.”

Binod Das, Sumitra Kumari, Srikant Roy, and Jamshed Khan are obviously styled on Ashok Kumar, Devika Rani, Himanshu Rai and Najmul Hasan. The main differences, though points out Columbia University film scholar Debashree Mukherjee, are that Ashok Kumar was extremely reluctant to act and even shaved his hair to avoid shoot­ing after Hasan was dismissed; Hasan and Rani were in Kolkata most likely in negotiations with a Kolkata studio for a contract; it was Sashadhar Mukherjee (Ashok’s brother-in-law and Ayan Mukerji’s grandfather) who brought Rani back; Hasan went on to have a middling career in Lahore.

Mumbai cinema was also the site of a lot of jockeying around during the Cold War. “Stars were a major catalyst of globalisation of Hindi cinema and as non-state actors they played a key role in diplomacy,” says University of Michigan film scholar Swapnil Rai. During the 1950s, there were attempts by both the Soviets and the Americans to assert control over the Indian film industry. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru first realised the power of Mumbai cinema when he went on a vis­it to the USSR in 1955 and was struck by the popularity of Raj Kapoor’s Awaara, which had sold 64 million tickets and had become the third highest among Soviet imports. He returned to tell Prithviraj Kapoor, his father and also MP, about it. Jubilee shows the Russians making overtures to stars in Mumbai to act in movies with socialist propaganda as well lobbying powerful people for Russian movies to be released in India.

As Mukherjee writes: “Americans, Germans, and Italians were involved with Indian filmmaking since the 1910s. While the Italians actively co-produced films in Calcutta, the Russian involvement in production dates to the Cold War era. More indirectly, Bombay’s socialist and left-inclined filmmakers like Chetan Anand, Balraj Sahni, and KA Abbas were very inspired by Soviet filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. So you can track the influence of Soviet cinema on Bombay filmmakers from the 1940s onwards. Some of them—Abbas and Raj Kapoor—also actively marketed their films in the USSR.”

Jubilee, however, does a disservice to the women of Bollywood. As a govern­ment functionary tells Sumitra Kumari in the film, when she offers her services in a film instead of Madan Kumar, “Masses follow male heroes. Not wom­en.” That’s one of the many myths about the Hindi film industry that Jubilee continues to propagate. Among the series of collaborative efforts with the Soviet Union was an Indo-Soviet co-production Pardesi (1957), directed by Abbas and Russian director Vasili Pronin that starred Nargis as the female lead.

As for Rani, as Swapnil Rai has written, “She was a managing agent and part-owner along with Rai in Bombay Talkies. Within the pre-independence context Bombay Talkies became a successful film studio alongside others like Prabhat Film Co of Pune and New Theatres of Calcutta. And the real test of her position in the English-speaking, pedigreed elite network came after her husband’s death in 1940, when she assumed complete control of Bombay Talkies.” Rai says during the early ’40s, she successfully managed the studio, guiding the production of hits and her power continued even after her self-imposed retirement in 1945. It was most evident in the Film Seminar of 1955, which addressed one of the key issues faced by the industry post-inde­pendence—legitimisation. Inaugurated by Nehru, it was possible only because of Devika Rani’s insistence, and no less than the prime minister said so.

Yet the women of Jubilee play supporting and reacting roles, which is a real shame, points out Mukherjee, because if there was any moment in Indian cinema history when women were calling the shots it was the 1930s. For example, at Bombay Talkies, there was a female music composer, else­where there were female film journal­ists, and there were important women directors and writers. More interesting was the fact that, at least until the 1940s, top-billed female actors were often drawing higher salaries than their male counterparts.

We get no sense of any of this though there is a lot to enjoy. The carpetbagger financiers who wanted a star on the poster and the government seal on cur­rency notes, like Shamsher Singh Walia (played with delicious exaggeration by Ram Kapoor) in Jubilee. The eventual disenchantment with the studio system is captured well, as stars begin to feel they are “Azaad desh ke ghulam (slaves in a free country)”. This is brought out with director K Asif draining the reserves of Pallonji with his seven-year extrav­aganza of Mughal-e-Azam (1960). And ruthless men like Srikant Roy who can say with complete candour: “Wives and mistresses come and go, but stars and studios come once in a lifetime.”

Jubilee gets the magic of filmmaking and its changing technology just right, from the advent of playback singing, which allowed actors to move around on the set, to the coming of cinemascope that encouraged filmmakers to go big and shoot outdoors. Motwane says he was lucky in that he assisted Sanjay Leela Bhansali on Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), which was one of the last films to be edited in 35 mm, so that world of black-and-white cinema was not new to him.

Motwane mixes legacy filmmaking with the chutzpah of indie filmmaking. His family owned Chicago Radio, which manufactured public address systems while his filmmaking has swerved from thoughtful movies such as Udaan (2010) and Lootera (2013) to the bang bang boom boom Netflix series Sacred Games (2018) with co-creator Anurag Kashyap.

There is a sequence in the series that suggests it was Americans who helped set up Radio Ceylon, which played Hindi film music when then Information and Broadcasting Minister BV Keskar banned it on All India Radio in 1952. Perhaps the Motwane family-owned Chicago Radio may have had some role in it as well. That is a relationship Motwane may well want to explore in another work that mines the past to show us how the present came to be.

Aditi Rao HydariAparshakti KhuranaBollywoodcinemaJubileeVikramaditya Motwane