Women's experiences of Bombay cinema, 1920s-1940s

Abstract

This thesis expands on the social history of Indian women’s experiences of cinema in the earlier decades of the Bombay film industry, by focusing on the development of women audiences, strategies of women-centric film publicity, the public discourse around women's cinemagoing, and cinema’s various encounters with women. I examine women’s interactions with the film industry within the socio-political and legal contexts in the 1920s-1940s, particularly with regard to the women's reform movement. I use primary sources such as newspaper advertisements, government reports, magazines, and film publicity materials such as song booklets and script booklets, to analyse several non-extant and under-analysed films from the period.

The first chapter reframes the relationship between women and early cinema in Bombay in the 1920s by foregrounding women’s collective work towards ‘sanitising’ the cinematic medium during this period. I demonstrate that Indian women in 1920s Bombay were not only watching cinema but also using cinema strategically, as an instrument to further public well-being and women’s rights. Chapter two undertakes the first detailed study of zenana screenings or ‘women only’ film screenings in Bombay in the 1930s. The chapter looks at how the Bombay film industry used exhibition strategies and promotional strategies to attract women audiences. I also evaluate the social, political and cultural impact of women’s cinemagoing, and how women audiences helped to change the public sphere in 1930s Bombay. The third chapter uses three previously under- researched films to examine how cinema mediated and influenced public opinion on three socio- political movements: Prohibition, male celibacy and birth control. The final chapter examines cinema’s varied encounters with the modern Indian woman of the 1930s-40s. This chapter amplifies women's voices -- from multiple sources such as speeches, biographies, interviews, opinion pieces and fan letters - to understand how the Bombay film industry celebrated, as well as resisted, the modern Indian woman.