Bombay Talkies

Bombay Talkies, film studio founded by Himansu Rai in Malad, Bombay, in 1934. One of the biggest sound studios in the pre-World War II Indian film industry, it was also the only major private-sector enterprise launched as a fully-fledged corporate body, with a board of directors featuring several well-known industrialists and investment bankers.

The studio's origins lie in the several silent Indo-European co-productions initiated by Rai and his colleague Niranjan Pal. Pal was a London-based playwright and scenarist, who probably originated the idea of filming Edwin Arnold's epic poem The Light of Asia, which Rai co-produced in 1925 with Emelka Film, Munich. A spectacular film, directed by the German Franz Osten, in which Rai himself played Gautama Buddha, it launched a successful genre of Indian orientalist exotica, followed by films such as Shiraz (1928), about the builder of the Taj Mahal.

The failure of Karma (1933), featuring Devika Rani, prompted Rai to abandon his European market and make exclusively Indian films for a local audience, although much of the European crew—including Osten—remained key members of the studio, as did Pal. The group made one of the most famous melodramas of Indian cinema, Achhut Kanya (1936; The Untouchable Girl), featuring the star duo of Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani. The tragic love story of an untouchable (or Dalit) girl and a Brahmin youth remains a landmark not only for what came at the time to be understood as progressive cinema, but also for a formula of musical love stories set in the feudal Zamindari system that the studio repeatedly filmed, initially with Devika Rani, but then even more successfully with Ashok Kumar and Leela Chitnis: Kangan (1939; The Bracelet), Bandhan (1940; The Bond), and Jhoola (1941; The Swing).

The death of Rai and the arrest of Osten (who had joined the Nazi Party) with the outbreak of World War II caused two camps to emerge: one led by Devika Rani, the other by producer S. Mukherjee. Mukherjee is credited with the biggest-ever hit of the studio, the Ashok Kumar thriller Kismet (1943; Fate), inspired by the Warner Bros. style of film noir in telling the tale of a pickpocket and criminal who turns out to be the long-lost son of the villain Indrajit. Another key production from this group was the film Naya Sansar (1941; The New Age), featuring the debut of radical journalist and playwright K. A. Abbas. Mukherjee, Ashok Kumar, and others went on to launch the Filmistan studio in 1942. Devika Rani eventually retired in the early 1940s, but before she left, she discovered one of India's biggest stars, Dilip Kumar, who debuted in Amiya Chakravarty's Jwar Bhata (1944).

Bombay Talkies declined for some years, but in a third phase, Ashok Kumar returned along with Savak Vacha in 1947 to reinvigorate the ailing studio, hiring independent directors to produce several remarkable films, including Kamal Amrohi's debut, the ghost story Mahal (1949; The Palace), and Nitin Bose's interpretation of the Rabindranath Tagore story Milan (1946; The Meeting). The studio once again went into decline, and the idea was formed of launching it as a workers' enterprise, but it eventually closed down shortly after its last film, Phani Majumdar's Baadbaan (1954; The Sail).