What is it like to live in Bombay’s Cinema?
An exploration of Mumbai’s housing crisis through a reading of Bollywood
Mumbai, India’s densest and largest city, is home to one of the world’s biggest housing crises; one that leaves real intimacy and shelter only accessible to a small privileged class. Ever since the days of a newly-independent India that saw rapid urbanisation, finding a place to call home in the city has been fiercely demanding.
Today, Mumbai continues to spin with an unconstrained velocity, a condition that would have one hoping that its housing market were highly operational. The reality, sadly, is far from it. However, the 22 million people that currently inhabit the city have managed to create a booming economy, one of the fastest growing in the world. One such success story is the 2.5-billion-dollar film industry, popularly called Bollywood, that churns out some 400 films annually. As it happens, this film industry through its cinema has often alluded to the city’s housing crisis. However, is there perhaps something to learn about this housing crisis from scrutinising Bombay cinema? Perhaps there is a narrative that is yet to be explored behind what Bollywood simply projects on screen.
Let us deliberately begin our exploration naively by looking to Danny Boyle’s award-winning Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) who shows us Mumbai from an occidental lens. Boyle appears to have run into no shortage of transition cutscenes with a skyline like Mumbai’s and its photogenic poverty that allowed him to switch between the film’s parallel narratives and construct the non-linear storytelling that makes the film so absorbing.
In one particular scene we see how a one-point perspective frame is used, punctuated by a static hazy pink billboard and the emblematic red BEST (Mumbai Electric Supply & Tramway Company Limited) bus slowly pushing through pedestrian traffic, driving us deep into a hypnotic Mumbai-esque dynamism. We are being set up absorbingly, symbolising perhaps the hopelessness with which we observe Jamal Malik, the main character played by Tanay Chheda, subsequently scurry through countless urban landscapes in search of his lost love.
However, the haste of Mumbai’s streets and its frenzied urban fabric is all too easily contrasted by the typical minimalist middle-class home of present-day Mumbai. A prototypical instance of such a home can be found in the Zoya Akhtar segment of the anthology film Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee, Johar), a Netflix production from 2018. The film introduces a peculiar relationship between a woman and a man through a series of scenes that summarise a typical workday in their lives. After a stream of jump cuts, we arrive at a point where the house is empty. The maid has just left the house. A low angle shot of the living space shows her put on her shoes and leave out the front door and there is now silence; a silence that is characteristic of upper middle-class houses during a significant part of the day in a city like Mumbai that features a large employed population.
The characters of the story that Zoya Akhtar recounts are both employed, and we are allowed glimpses of their financial prosperity from this same low angle shot. Furniture made of coconut fibre (or coir), a carpentered set of dining table and chair and a living room that sports not only natural light, but also cross-ventilated windows. We then are served an array of shots of a stainless-steel-clad kitchen, a perfectly made bed seen through a doorway that occupies no more than a third of the frame, and a wash basin set against pale-green tiles and lit softly by the morning light of a hazy day. As we begin to digest these restricted shots, we are subsequently permitted an exhalation, returning to the living room now through a wider lens that reveals minimal walls and functional furniture that conventionally divide the urban home into their predefined inelastic spaces that traditional housing in India perhaps proactively intended to avoid.
At the beginning of the film, we are shown an intimate sexual scene between the two characters. However, as the film develops, the emotions fade, and the viewer sobers up into the true nature of their relationship: the male is a single, working bachelor and the woman is his maid. As we step out of the reality of their sexual relationship and into that of a broken labour and housing market, we understand that the woman’s role might be an unconventional one for Indian cinema, but it is one that is narrowly different not only from that of a typical Mumbaikar maid, but also from that of the a typical Indian housewife.
To live in Mumbai is to deal with a wide range of domestic discomforts similar to the ones we find in Zoya Akhtar’s segment in Lust Stories. However a wide range of such typologies can be found in Bombay cinema. The homes oscillate between modest homes and large mansions, often even telling stories of those who grew up on the trying footpaths of Mumbai. Among the different versatile options, a particularly extravagant film set is found within a palatial, surreal home in the film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… (Johar, 2001), having a majority of its melodramatic domestic scenes shot at the Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England. At other times, a home is realistically re-constructed as in Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) or even borrowed as in Dhobi Ghat (Rao, 2011). The countless stories are often told in slums and sometimes directly the contested public spaces like streets and footpaths.
In Mira Nair’s Salaam Mumbai! (1988), the city’s scattered domestic functions become home to Chaipau (played by child actor Shafiq Syed) and his friends who sleep on the footpath. The street becomes the bedroom, the train tracks the toilet, a hotel room a bed for sex, and whatever cosy pocket the city has to offer a place to smoke. Perhaps conforming to the paradigm of a “good” city, Mumbai’s public space is seen continually to substitute for its lack of housing and provide the domestic services that the poor cannot afford.
In the social-crime drama entitled Dharavi (Mishra, 1992), it becomes evident how urban space is navigated in order to construct the narrative while being constantly contrasted with domestic space. Raj Karan Yadav (Om Puri) plays a taxi driver struggling to steer between his career as a driver and his ambitions to buy a factory. In a scene where he splashes water on his taxi while cleaning it, we are subsequently introduced to his immediate neighbourhood; one similar in scale to a piazza of an Italian village, populated however by slightly shabbier asbestos roofs.
This rural nature of the city, although succintly and academically pointed out in the three-part documentary The Peacock Screen (Jamal, 1991) as well as by psychologist Ashis Nandy (1998), can be observed both through the indisposition in migrant communities to accept the morality of the urbanised city and also in the very architecture of the city. The footpath in Mumbai has been seen to embody this rural Indianness which is the fundamental reason that it has repeatedly allowed Bombay cinema’s imagination to create enthralling narratives around this urban element.
The city itself is marked and even scarred by the fuzziness of lines between the “urban” and the “rural.” In imaginative terms, the “village” is never absent from everyday life in the city. The narrative of migration and departure from home is a key part of urban life.
In the much studied Deewaar (Chopra, 1975), the site of familial conflict defined the idea of domesticity for the protagonist, Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan). Vijay and his brother Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) are brought to the city by their mother in a frantic reaction to an air of hopelessness inflicted upon them by political riots in their hometown. Mumbai was to be their saviour and its footpath beneath a bridge, their new home. Vijay confronts various instances of violence throughout the film and throughout the city, but the origin of this violence can be traced back to domestic tensions he experiences as a child who has lost his father to communal violence in a small town, subsequently moving to Mumbai, a city that has caused him to turn to crime and give up his own education in order to support his brother’s.
Vijay’s confused morality is completely justified, allowing the viewer to empathise with the decisions he is forced to take as the plot develops. The consistency between his intense furiousness and his violent childhood allows his homelessness to work as an enabling metaphor that empowers Vijay’s cathartic fights against the structures of power within the film. The movie is a three-hour epic metaphor about what it is like to grow up in a city like Mumbai. However, films like Deewaar and Parinda (Chopra, 1989) were released between the 1970s and 1990s By the turn of the millennium, the biggest Bollywood hits told a different story.
What Bombay’s cinema shows us is not an aleatory collection of objects for study. Rather it is a collective vision of the city. When viewed through its context, the vision reveals a particular urban domestic condition to the observer. The image of the house presented to us in Bombay’s films is that of a constantly evolving domestic space, something that goes on to be reflected again in the city. Actually addressing the housing crisis was something that was always left to the documentaries.
However, every protagonist that navigates urban space in order to resolve their respective conflicts, wafts through a variety of spaces within the urban landscape that all symbolise their own particularities. The villain might symbolise corruption or the protagonist’s internal battles. The streets may represent memory, childhood and nostalgia. And the home may represent security, conflict and reconciliation. One can always delve into what the cinema is trying to to say, but one can only criticise these cinematic objects once we observe what it is that cinema as a medium of communication is trying to say. Slowly we see that the cinema and the city evolve together constantly, therapeutically emerging as a single vehicle for social introspection.
