ARTICLE

Bomby Tlkies, the fist Indin compny to publicly issue shes in 1934

Eighty-three years ago, the film studio founded by Himanshu Rai, offered the shares of its company to
the public.
Mumbai - 26 Feb 2017 9:00 IST

SONAL PANDYA

In 1934, Bombay Talkies became the first Indian studio to introduce its shares to the public. Himanshu Rai,
its founder, received a European film education, picking up most of what he knew from the German film
industry. His first feature, The Light of Asia aka Prem Sanyas (1926) was a silent film directed by Franz Osten,
a co-production with the Emelka Film Company of Munich.

Prøv Fiken
It was the beginning of manygratis i 30 dager
co-productions with the country with Shiraz (1928) and A Throw of Dice (1930)
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which were released
Fiken later. Rai got the help of Sir Richard Temple, a son of the former Governor of Bombay to
form the Himanshu Rai Indo-International Talkies in England. The company produced Karma (1933), co-
starring Rai’s wife Devika Rani, to great reception internationally and later back home as well.

HIMANSHU RAI AND DEVIKA RANI IN KARMA (1933)

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Rai had great plans for his newly found company and launched Bombay Talkies in 1934 in India. Using a
capital of Rs25 lakh, Rai formed the first public limited film company and issued the shares on 26 February
1934 to the public. The company’s board of directors boasted of the who’s who of Bombay society with FE
Dinshaw, a businessman who lent his summer mansion in Malad for the studios to form a base, Sir
Chimanlal Setalvad, the famed barrister, Sir Chunilal B Mehta, the bullion broker and financier, Sir Phiroze
Sethna, head of the Central Bank of India and Sir Cawasji Jehangir, an eminent member of Bombay’s Parsi
community.

The states of Hyderabad and Jaipur also supported the studio, with the Nizam of Hyderabad commissioning
Bombay Talkies to produce instructional films. The August issue of Silver Screen magazine stated: The
company has been floated with an authorised capital of Rs25 lakh and an issued capital of Rs10
lakh... Cumulative participating shares of Rs100 each. Shares of the face value of Rs2,52,900 have been
applied for by the directors and their friends; the subscription list is open and will be closed on or before 13
August 1934. The company will be commencing its activities, it is expected, with six films during the first
twelve months at an estimated average cost of rupees one lakh per film. A net profit of Rs35,000 per film
exploited. The company expects additional income from its production of educational and advertising
films.

Following the international model, the studio was fully formed by 1935. Rafique Bagdadi wrote in his
definitive article on the studio’s 50th anniversary in 1984 for Screen magazine, “A sound and echo-proof
stage was built along with dressing rooms, laboratory workshops, offices, a restaurant and a theatre. Rai
bought the best equipment available – several modern cameras, the latest sound recording apparatus, a
triple set of automatic film developing and printing machines, editing tables, several batteries of high-
powered arcs and the only set in India of the newly-invented playback apparatus.

Bagdadi spoke to Cinestaan.com about the studio’s rise and fall. “They ran Bombay Talkies as a factory, as
a company. You had to go in the morning at 9 o’clock, come back at 6 o’clock and you had all the facilities
in the studio itself,” he said They gave a dividend till some time and then by the time the war had come
close, in 1939, most of the German workers were detained at Deolali.”
The loss of international talent initially hurt the company and Rai, under a lot of stress, was hospitalised
and later died in 1940. Bombay Talkies bounced back with Kismet (1943) directed by Gyan Mukherjee and
starring Ashok Kumar and Mumtaz. The
Thefilm
film ran
ran for
for three
threestraight years at Kolkata’s Roxy Theatres. But in its
straight years
aftermath there was a split in the core group of initial creators who left to form their own companies.

But when the shares of the company were first introduced, they flourished. Bagdadi says, “A lot of people
had an understanding of the market, what they should do and what they should not do. Because the studio
system was throughout the world and Bombay Talkies was very much influenced by USA and the German
studios, they had an idea of what they were doing.”

Later on, when the company fell on hard times, shareholders were offered tickets to Bombay Talkies films
instead of dividends. Bagdadi had come across some share certificates during his research of the Screen
article. “The people who lost a lot of things were the people who were working. In 1955, the company closed
down and it was in bankruptcy. They sold out the rights of their films. There was no money coming in. The
shares, initially for five or six years were very good,” he explained.
After the studio shut down, the Malad compound was turned into an industrial estate and the workers who
were part and parcel of Bombay Talkies’s legacy were out of a job. Phani Majudar's Baadbaan (1954) starring
Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar and Meena Kumari became their last film.

People in this stoy

HIMANSHU RAI
Producer, Actor

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DEVIKA RANI
Actor, Singer
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