Mumbai Fables Page 11
The centerpieces of the Art Deco glorification of modernity were the grand new cinema theaters: Regal, Eros, and Metro.47 Situated on the most visible corner of Colaba Causeway, the Regal was owned by Framji Sidhwa, a Parsi businessman, and designed by Charles Stevens Jr., the son of F. W. Stevens, the architect of Bombay’s magnificent Gothic Revival buildings. With a simple, streamlined facade, a curved form, an underground parking garage, a bar, two soda fountains, and a gorgeous interior designed by the Czech artist Karl Schara, this 1,200-seat theater opened in 1933 and received an enthusiastic response from Bombay’s elite. Five years later, the Eros opened across from Churchgate Station, on a triangular site on reclaimed land. Owned by S. C. Cambata, also a Parsi businessman, it was designed by Bhedwar and Sorabji Architects. After settling on a design, Cambata went on a six-month world tour, during which he visited more than one thousand theaters to learn the refinements that could be made to his plan. On his return, he proudly noted that most theater owners told him the Eros’s design was more advanced than anything they knew.48
The four-story shiplike building had a stepped-up octagonal tower in front, with walls swept into curves to create an impression of motion and length. White-veined black marble and sleek chromeplated metalwork added a rich grandeur to the imposing three-story entry foyer, while silver-painted murals depicting the process of filmmaking decorated the auditorium walls. This flamboyant encasing of modern technological entertainment, in layers of resplendent luxury, could also be witnessed in the Metro, a theater owned by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. It was designed by Thomas W. Lamb of New York, in association with the Bombay architectural firm Ditchburn and Mistri. Located on the border between the city’s European and Indian districts, the Metro represented an attempt to draw a broader cinema audience, with its entrance through a brightly lit tower leading into the gorgeous two-story lobby with Italian marble floors.
3.7. Eros Cinema. Courtesy: Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: The Cities Within (Bombay: India Book House, 1995).
As in the West, the surge in Art Deco’s popularity in Bombay went hand in hand with the burgeoning capitalism of the interwar period. Louis Bromfield’s best-selling novel, Night in Bombay (1939), registers this connection, noting that all the “American firms in Bombay had launched into marble and art moderne.”49 But the rage to dress industrial modernity in the new aesthetics had its limits. In the staggeringly unequal society of the colonial metropolis, the vast population of poor workers and casual laborers could not even dream of making the beautiful Art Deco objects a part of their daily lives. Only the elites could afford to be lured by the fantasy of the novel life that the new designs promised. This included, in addition to the Europeans, the rulers of the so-called Native States, that is, those principalities that enjoyed nominal internal autonomy under British rule. Shorn of real power but left with their coffers intact, these decorative chiefs expressed their hollow majesty in pomp and splendor. They hunted, played sports, bred racehorses, traveled, and collected and patronized European art objects. Art Deco’s decorative motifs struck a chord in their lifestyle. They built their Bombay mansions and apartment blocks in this style, which they visited regularly for shopping and the races and en route to Europe.50
The new style’s deepest impact, however, was felt among Bombay’s princes of commerce and industry. Bombay was a colonial metropolis, but it was here, more than anywhere else, that Indian merchants and industrialists possessed substantial resources and exerted great influence. The wartime interruption of commerce with Britain had offered business opportunities that they eagerly exploited to carve out a position, one they never completely relinquished once the hostilities were over. Enriched and emboldened by their economic expansion, these commercial and industrial magnates assumed a prominent role in the city, financing the construction of apartment blocks, office buildings, and cinema theaters. Bombay’s modernity acquired an Art Deco gloss.
Art Deco’s exuberant spirit broke from the stern and monumental medievalism of the colonial Gothic. The new style was meant to “reflect the image of the modern, ocean voyaging/jet-setting, international Indian, emerged from the shackles of backwardness and ignorance, seeking his place in the New World as an equal.”51 It rejected both colonial aesthetics and the anti-industrialism of Gandhian nationalism. Prominent architects like G. B. Mhatre adopted Art Deco as a modern style without any explicit ideological reference. For him, it was a form of aesthetic modernism that was fashioned in relation to international influences and styles, deployed to introduce industrial designs and methods in architecture. In this sense, Deco’s adoption and adaptation to Bombay heralded an Indian modern, nursed by capital, and not by anticolonial nationalism. Out of this aesthetic modernism, deeply rooted in the promise of the industrial age and confidently engaged with Western culture, emerged Bombay’s mythic image in the 1930s and the 1940s as a metropolis on the move, a swinging city. Art Deco not only rescued the city from the muck of the Backbay but also applied on it the shining polish of industrial modernity.
THE SHINING, SWINGING CITY
The winds of cultural change were also in the air. The improvements in transportation enabled a regular flow of visitors who brought with them contemporary European culture and fashion. The city’s hotels and theaters regularly hosted performances of Western music, with the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel serving as the top venue. Opened in 1903 by Sir Jamsetji Tata, apparently in response to the insult of being denied entry to a Europeans-only hotel, the Taj was the city’s best and most opulently appointed hotel. In 1907 it permanently engaged the Taj Mahal Orchestra.52 In 1930 it hired its first foreign band. A few years later, it became the Mecca for the city’s jazz aficionados. African American jazz musicians from the United States, by way of Paris and Shanghai, descended on the Island City. These included star trumpeters like Crickett Smith and Bill Coleman, the famous tenor-sax stylist Castor McCord, the ace drummer Oliver Tines, and the versatile Leon Abbey Band. The sounds of their trumpets, saxophones, drums, pianos, and clarinets, showcased at the Taj, also became the craze at other venues, such as the nearby Green’s and Majestic. Indian bands, manned largely by Goans, took enthusiastically to the enthralling new sounds from New Orleans and Chicago.
3.8. The Crickett Smith Band, Taj Mahal Hotel, 1936. Courtesy: Naresh Fernandes.
Jazz, ballroom dancing, cabarets, and the screening of Hollywood films created an atmosphere of fun, fashion, and frivolity that was receptive to the lure of Art Deco modernity.53 Advertisements in newspapers and magazines, promoting Western culture and entertainment, portrayed the city as an exciting place. Typical advertisements in the May 1936 issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, for example, invited readers to the screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, playing simultaneously at the Regal and the Capitol to “cope with the rush,” and to watch “Love-Making Sothern Style” (punning on the actress Ann Sothern’s name) in The Girl Friend at Central. The Taj enticed those looking for exciting entertainment with a “non-stop cocktail dance” to the sounds of Crickett Smith and the Raj Symphonians and Leon Abbey and His Boys.54 The use of clever copywriting and illustrations to wrap entertainment choices in an attractive package formed part of the broader tendency to aestheticize commerce.
3.9. Teddy and His Plantation Quartet, Taj Mahal Hotel, 1939. Courtesy: Naresh Fernandes.
Boxed classified advertisements continued to appear in print, but purple prose, eye-catching graphics, and illustrations gained favor. J. Walter Thompson (JWT), who had the General Motors account, set up shop in Bombay in 1929, soon becoming the leading agency under the creative eye of E. J. Peter Felden.55 The artists and copywriters of JWT’s agency, as well as other agencies such as Stronach and Lintas, showcased the novelty and design of buildings, furniture, bathroom fixtures, lighting, automobiles and tires, and everyday objects. In putting a glossy sheen on the products, they infused advertising with the aesthetic spirit of Art Deco. Appropriately, Tata Steel also got into the act, using Art Deco motifs to embo
ss its image in advertisement (see plate 1). Advertisers also began to use cinema. JWT, for example, produced a twenty-minute film in 1931 showing a Chevrolet racing against the Deccan Queen train from Poona to Bombay and winning!
Cinema added to the image of exuberance. Beginning with the sensational exhibition of cinématographie by the Lumière Brothers at the Watson Hotel on July 7, 1896, cinema had come a long way in the city. In 1913 Dadasaheb Phalke had screened the first Indian motion picture, and Western films were a regular feature of entertainment. By 1926–27 the Bombay Presidency had the largest number of cinema theaters—seventy-seven—in the colonial territory, of which twenty were in the city.56 Foreign films, chiefly from Hollywood, dominated at this time, constituting nearly 85 percent of the footage until 1927–28. But the production of Indian films was growing. The arrival of sound proved to be their trump card. After the first synchronized sound film, Alam Ara in 1931, Indian films, using Indian music and languages, developed a large market that foreign-language films could not enter. Studios were established in different parts of India. Increasingly producing films in Hindi—the biggest market—Bombay emerged as the leading center.
The Indian film industry grew, but Hollywood and European films continued to be screened, and Indian cinema developed in conversation with its Western counterparts. Like them, it projected the novelty and excitement of the new industrial medium. Even though many of the early film stories were derived from Indian mythology, they addressed their audience through a modern medium. For example, Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913), which was inspired by the Life of Christ, told a mythological tale, but it did so with industrial technology. It was also not long before modern settings appeared alongside mythological themes in Indian films. Chandulal Shah made several box-office hits in Hindi, including Devoted Wife (1932)—a remake with sound of his 1925 film Gun Sundari (Why Husbands Go Astray)—Typist Girl (1932), and Miss 1933 (1933), which placed elements of Westernized urban life and modern technological products in an Indian setting.57 Himansu Rai established Bombay Talkies in 1934, drawing on his experience of working with German producers. Starring Devika Rani and using German and British technicians, Rai began to produce a steady stream of films with modern themes.
Cinema signified not just industrial modernity but also its thrill and excitement. The stunt films of the 1920s expressed this phenomenon most fully, none more so than those starring Master Vithal. The publicity material often called Vithal an “Indian Douglas Fairbanks.” Fairbanks’s name offered commercial advantages, and America represented a better face of the West than the colonial British, but this was not a simple case of Hollywood influence; Indian stunt films drew on deeply rooted traditions of physical culture and performance.58 These were often encased in Hindu religious ideas, but they also had a secular presence in such activities as wrestling and bodybuilding. Nationalism had also secularized Hindu discourses on the body, championing physical discipline and vigor as signs of nation building. Though stunt films drew on a mix of religious and secular discourses, the long-term tendency was toward secularization. As the religious gave way to the secular and the mythological to the historical, cinema projected stunt as pure excitement.
The exhilarating spirit of stunt found its most spectacular and popular expression in Wadia Movietone’s Fearless Nadia series.59 The unlikely stardom of Mary Evans, also known as Fearless Nadia, began with Hunterwali, or The Lady with the Whip (1935). Born in 1908 in Perth to a Greek mother and a British father, she came to India in 1911. After Evans’s father’s death in 1915, her mother lived in Bombay, before moving to Peshawar. It was in Peshawar that Mary Evans became a fan of Pearl White films and learned dancing and horse riding. Returning to Bombay in 1926 with a baby boy in tow and finding office work too dull, she tried to earn a living by dancing, singing, and the circus. She also adopted the name Nadia.
In 1934 Nadia met J.B.H. Wadia and his younger brother, Homi Wadia. The Wadias belonged to a wealthy Parsi family in Bombay. J.B.H. had studied English literature and law but was a film buff from a young age. His decision to become a filmmaker created a crisis in the respectable Parsi family. “How dare I ever entertain the very idea of plunging into a ‘low’ profession like film making? How could I ever think of becoming a home wrecker?”60 But he won his mother’s acquiescence and even managed to calm the frayed family nerves when his younger brother, Homi, decided to join him in the despised profession. The brothers were passionate about cinema. A fan of Douglas Fairbanks, J.B.H. made sure that he met the Hollywood star when he visited the city in the 1920s. He acquired the Indian distribution rights to The Mark of Zorro and went on to adapt it as Diler Daku, or Thunderbolt. Not content with adapting it once, he remade the action film as Dilruba Daku, or Amazon, this time with a Bengali actress in the lead as an avenger with a mask and sword.
The Wadias’ taste for stunt films also proved to be commercially profitable. Action films ran to packed houses in the mill-district cinemas. But even then, they could not have predicted that the blue-eyed, buxom blonde they had first met in 1934 would become a box-office queen a year later. They initially tried her out in small roles in a few films. Then, in 1935, they chose her as the star of Hunterwali, a film inspired by The Mark of Zorro and The Perils of Pauline. The film was a box-office hit and catapulted the masked avenger Nadia into instant stardom. From then on, there was no stopping Fearless Nadia. A stream of films flowed—Miss Frontier Mail (1936), Hurricane Hansa (1937), Lutaru Lalna (1938), Punjab Mail (1939), Diamond Queen (1940), Bambaiwali (1941), and many others. In each one, the plump but athletic blonde essayed the role of a confident, self-sufficient woman who fought injustice vigorously and decisively. Each one was a hit.
Nadia was white and spoke Hindi poorly. Yet, she became a Hindi film star. Typically, Western women in Indian films appeared as ultramodern and corrupt vamps. But the Wadias were careful to define her as an Indian whose whiteness signified cosmopolitanism.61 She could beat up evil Indian men, and yet arouse no nationalist backlash because cultural modernity, rather than race, defined her identity. In fact, her whiteness was a plus. She could be shown scantily dressed and seen acting in nontraditional ways. The modern action queen in skimpy, tight shorts was an attractive commodity. The swashbuckling blonde who beat up evil men, cracked a whip, swung from chandeliers, rode on top of speeding trains, and fought lions was a thoroughly modern woman. Unmarried on- and off-screen, Fearless Nadia projected an image of independence that sidestepped the alternatives of the whore and the housewife presented to women in contemporary Hindi cinema. Even as her heroic exploits resonated with the traditional figure of the brave veerangana (female warrior), she exuded the autonomy and individuality of a modern woman. Her stunts were sensational. Technology—planes, trains, and automobiles—figured prominently in her films. The whole package radiated the thrills of industrial modernity, circulated widely by the mass medium of cinema, itself an industrial form. While the elites had their beautiful Art Deco buildings and objects, ballroom dances, cabaret, and jazz, the masses were treated to the excitement of the action queen’s stunts.
3.10. Fearless Nadia. Courtesy: Wadia Movietone / Roy Wadia.
THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN
“Yes, Bombay was fantastic and romantic and extraordinary things happened there, if you didn’t notice the coolies, the women and the children sleeping on sidewalks and in gutters as you drove home from a good party about sunrise.” So observes Bill Wainright, the American protagonist in Bromfield’s Night in Bombay as his ship docks in the city.62 Later, traveling in a taxi through the poor quarters of the city, he notes the difference between those and the elite world of the Taj Hotel and Malabar Hill. It was full of “smells and sweat and dust.” “The district grew shabbier, the houses a little taller, the burning streets filled with sweating people. The smells of garlic and cow dung and filth became overpowering.” He wonders: “How do people manage to keep alive in such a world? How do children ever survive?”63
No one could miss the contr
ast between the fashionable, elite precincts and the mill district. Time and again, British officials depicted the poor living on top of each other in chawls, somehow squeezing out space and air in extremely congested and poorly ventilated quarters to survive in the big city.64 They often commented on the dank and dark tenements and on the puddles of water and sewage festering all around their living quarters. When visiting them for inspections, the filth and the stench would “compel a hurried exit.”65 The stench, the dirt, and the diseases of the tenements cast the mill districts in the official eye as the other city, set apart from the elite precincts, yet receiving the benefits of progress and civilization. They failed to see the dismal tenements as reflections of the particular conditions of Bombay’s industrialization, the other side of progress. It was as if the poor were fated to live in wretched dwellings. Their lot was the chawls, just as the rich were destined to soak up the Art Deco style, with no structural connection between the two opposite fortunes. All that could be done was to build more tenements and call it development.
Accordingly, at the same time that it used the alibi of a housing shortage to undertake the Backbay reclamation, the government built tenements for the workers in the central districts of the city, the largest cluster being the Bombay Development Department (BDD) chawls at Worli. Constructed without consulting either architects or the intended residents, these three- to five-story chawls were cheerless structures in concrete, or at least so thought the workers, who initially refused to occupy them. The renowned Bombay architect Claude Batley described them in the 1930s as “single-room tenements with concrete-louvered verandahs, from which neither heaven nor earth could be seen.”66 Whatever the architectural judgment, the chawl as working-class housing had acquired the status of normality in Bombay’s spatial map. Official reports on tenement construction displayed none of the breathless enthusiasm that they reserved for the Backbay buildings; with a matter-of-fact tone, they dryly listed the number of rooms built, the facilities provided, and their occupancy. The 1931 census came close to expressing an airy optimism when it applauded the rise in the number of chawls as a significant improvement. If the municipal rules could only ensure that the design of chawls would include a satisfactory number of privies and faucets on each floor, then what could be better for workers and the lower middle classes than the development of these tenements?67 This was the extent of fervor that the colonial officials could work up for workers’ housing.