At long last, THE STAR FROM CALCUTTA has arrived!
Three busy years of writing, editing and marketing have brought the wisps of my old film fantasies to life as the fifth Perveen Mistry historical mystery novel. Here’s my elevator pitch:
Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s first woman lawyer, gets her most glamorous client yet: Subhas Ghoshal, the director and founder of Champa Films, a silent film studio that features his wife, the beautiful daredevil actress Rochana, as headliner. The couple is threatened by a rival film company in Calcutta as well as the omnipresent British government censors.
Perveen brings her best friend, Alice Hobson-Jones, to a preview party for the studio’s next film. Amid the drunken revelry, arguments and liaisons develop. The morning after brings death, a disappearance, and much more of a legal challenge for Perveen, especially since Alice seems to be holding secrets from her. Sailing, a menagerie of performing animals, romance and international intrigue mark the novel. It's onsale in the USA now, and the Indian edition will appear in all South Asian territories in the last week in March. Here's what the Penguin India edition will appear:
One of the challenges in writing about film was locating old Indian films to study and inspire the fictional film (a story within a story) that I dreamed up for Rochana and others from Champa Films. Due to the fragile nature of old film rolls, much of it is gone, although I found some clips online. It looks like many films were about women, and I found myself wondering quite often about the female-centric plots for films like Barrister's Wife.
One film you can easily find on YouTube is Karma, an Indo-German-British production from 1933 starring Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani, the Bengali filmmaking couple that inspired my fictional characters of Subhas and Rochana Ghoshal. Karma is a fascinating film that features a 4-minute kissing scene, which served as the longest lip-lock world-wide for many decades.
I adored learning about old studios in India and traveled to Bombay, where I visited the very old Mehboob Film Studios and the vacant Imperial Theater as well as the National Museum of Indian Cinema, a fantastic group of buildings that house artifacts of many eras and screen old films as well.
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| The old Imperial Cinema |
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| In Mumbai with historians Amrit Gangar and Sifra Lentin |
The museum’s founding curator, Amrit Gangar, graciously met with me and answered my obscure questions. One of the most interesting things I learned was that early Indian film audiences were crazy for action heroines whose physicality expressed rebellion against authority. These films showed stars like Durga Khote and The Fearless Nadia racing cars, swimming rivers and fighting with swords were very popular in the 1920s and ‘30s. Many actresses were of mixed South Asian-European ancestry or came from families who had immigrated from the Middle East, including those of Jewish heritage.
The nation of Germany also plays a surprising role in the book. One of Bombay’s greatest studios, Bombay Talkies, had both a German director and a cinematographer, colleagues that Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani met at Emelka Films in Germany during the 20s and 30s. Being German in British-controlled India between the two wars was a discreet operation due to lingering resentments and suspicion. I had fun talking with Sneha Mathan, narrator of the audiobook, as we worked out what the novel’s character Hans Becker might have sounded like. I myself am Indo-German, so it was very heartwarming for me to bring this aspect into the novel.
You can’t make a film without a team; and I certainly found the same was true in writing a book about film. I close with resounding applause to the off-camera real life crew and of course, my beloved fictional characters and old Bombay locations who will continue in upcoming Perveen Mistry productions.
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| Royal Bombay Yacht Club bar |
Sujata has upcoming events to celebrate and sign The Star From Calcutta. Coming up soon are appearances at The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore on 3/18; Politics and Prose in Washington DC on 3/22; Queen Takes Book in Columbia, MD on 3/27, and Backwater Books in Ellicott City on 4/10; and McIntryres Books, Pittsboro, NC, on 5/9.
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