Archives and Heartbreaks: Piecing Together the Lost Lives of Baghdadi Jewish Actresses in Early Hindi Cinema
Speaker: Dr. Manjari Mukherjee, President’s Postdoctoral Scholar, The Ohio State University
Date: Thursday, September 24, 12:30–1:30 p.m.
Location: 198 Hagerty Hall
This talk introduces archival jugaad, a resourceful, community-centered methodology for reconstructing the fragmented histories of the South Asian diaspora through oral histories, family albums, studio photographs, cinema ephemera, and films dispersed across India and the United States. Applying this method, Dr. Mukherjee examines the on- and off-screen lives of Baghdadi (Iraqi) Jewish actresses—among them Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), and Nadira (Florence Ezekiel)—who played a formative yet critically overlooked role in early Hindi cinema (1920s–1950s). This talk centers the lives of these women not as ancillary anecdotes but as a key constitution of Indian modernity. That is, their racial and religious ambiguity embodied the contradictions of an aspirational unified nation, simultaneously as their gendered and racialized labor shaped the film industry’s growth across the inter-war and late colonial period.
In foregrounding the improvisational logic that the archive itself demands, the talk positions jugaad not merely as a strategy for locating sources but as a broader lens onto the relationship between cultural producers and the nations that produce and remember them. Long dismissed as “mere actresses,” these figures emerge as central to India’s ongoing negotiations of gender, sexuality, race, and religion–a throughline extending from the early twentieth century to the present.
Manjari Mukherjee is a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar (2026–28) at the Ohio State University, working across the Department of Dance, Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures (NESA), and the Melton Center for Jewish Studies. She received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University. Her dissertation, Yahudi Ki Ladki (The Daughter of a Jew): Baghdadi Jews on the Indian Stage and Screen from the 1920s to the 1950s, examines Baghdadi (Iraqi) Jewish actresses in early Hindi cinema, tracing how they navigated racial, religious, and gendered identities within colonial and national contexts. Drawing on oral histories, family archives, studio photographs, and film media across India, Israel, and the United States, her work reconstructs histories from the ground up that often elude institutional archives.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Dance, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Melton Center for Jewish Studies
Feel free to bring your lunch! We will have soft drinks and some small snacks.
