From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Columbia Global Centers invites you to a lecture and panel discussion featuring Debashree Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Columbia University as she draws on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach to offer a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s from her new book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press and Penguin Random House 2020). Professor Mukherjee will be joined by leading film scholars who will discuss the history of Indian cinema and its material practices, bringing insights to studies of media and modernity in the context Bombay’s burgeoning film industry that embodied the late colonial city’s spirit of 'hustle'.
Speakers:
● Debashree Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Film and Media, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University
● Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
● Tejaswini Ganti, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, New York University
Moderator:
● Ravina Aggarwal, Director, Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai
About the Speakers: