City On Screen: Bombay to Mumbai
A megacity seen through the eyes of its dreamers - Ankur Choudhary writes about dreams, nightmares, hope, and despair at interplay in some of the best cinema about Mumbai.
Returning to Bombay after the success of her first feature film Salaam Bombay! at Cannes, Mira Nair recalled her inspiration, “One of my first images was of kids surrounding my taxi at a traffic junction—blowing bubbles, singing, a maimed kid on a makeshift skateboard. These were clearly children living in a world where fate had given them nothing but life.”
Nair, along with her two assistants, began with strolls around the city centre and interviewed kids at different hang-out spots. A workshop was further conducted in a small, inner-city church where 130 kids showed up, out of whom the filmmakers selected 24. Sooni Taraporavela (co-writer) and Nair developed their idea into a screenplay. It left people sobbing, shouting, and clapping in movie theatres across the country.
In Salaam Bombay!, Krishna (Shafiq Syed) plays the hero who is left by his mother at a circus, with the condition to return home only after earning Rs. 500. He runs an errand for his master to bring cigarettes from a nearby village, and when he returns, the circus is gone with the barren land left for bleak leer. He goes to a nearby village and takes a train to Bombay, which will soon become his reality and adventure.
We see the vibrant and ancient sophistication about Bombay’s redolent streets as we follow Krishna through Sandi Sissel’s lens into the crowded lanes, full of noise and movements, passing the Falkland Road’s red-light area—the prostitution causeway—every day to sell tea. “At times we shot from rooftops or from inside a bus so that our actors could mix in with real people," Sissel said. The Bombay seen through her Arriflex 4S 35mm camera is a tough city, with its own rules.
“Sone ke time teri bohat yaad aati hain ma,” Krishna writes to his mother. I miss you most when I’m about to sleep. There are moments of agony and despair. “Tu kya sochta hain gaanv jake phirse thandi hawa kha sakega?” Chillum says to Krishna, laying bare the reality. You think you’ll ever be able to experience the cool breeze of the village again?
And as the lives of characters are abraded by greed, deceit and betrayal and innocence lost in the streets, Bombay swirls madly, leaving her children to riddle in the chaos, unattended and unloved.
And as the lives of characters are abraded by greed, deceit and betrayal and innocence lost in the streets, Bombay swirls madly, leaving her children to riddle in the chaos, unattended and unloved.
The year is 1998 and Bombay is now Mumbai. Ram Gopal Verma gives us his acclaimed gangster drama Satya, the story of a migrant who comes in search of work and finds himself at the centre of the Mumbai underworld. A young man with no past, he finds a job at the dance bar, doing whatever it takes to stay in the city. Unlike Krishna in Salaam Bombay!, he does not long for an escape. His struggle is to stay and rule the city.
Satya befriends mafia leader Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj Bajpayee) and ends up joining his gang after proving loyalty with an executed murder. Roving streets with friends is not the carefree pleasure as it was in Salaam Bombay!. Satya is an untamed force, taking a different survival route when the city doesn’t sync with his ways. Cameraman Mazhar Kamran captures the city heart through Bandra fort as Bhiku introduces himself, “Mumbai ka king kaun? Bhiku Mhatre!”
The Mumbai of Satya is a boiler where streets have blood, innocence fades to stark reality, and ethics has its modus operandi. It is more welcoming to the titular character, but as it was with Krishna, there is no going back, and when you embark to separate ways, the cost is decided by the city.
British director Danny Boyle had never heard of any of these movies until he started working on his next project. He cited Satya’s sharp, often enthralling portrayal of Mumbai’s underworld as a reference for exploring Mumbai through his lens in Slumdog Millionaire. Jamal (the adult version played by Dev Patel) and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) lose their mother in a mob attack and are forced to the streets to make a living. As they go around committing petty crimes, they find a co-partner in Latika (Freida Pinto), forming their Dharavi triumvirate. Boyle tells us this story from Mumbai slums through flashback intercuts as Jamal plays to be a millionaire on a quiz show.
The most fascinating facet of the feature is Boyle’s unabated focus into the realities of the Mumbai. We see Jamal working in chock-full call centre cubicles where operatives convince callers that they are not speaking from a foreign land. Slumdog Millionaire operates in dreamlike fashion, where the city serves as a backdrop for our hero’s rags-to-riches story: Jamal earned a living as a chai-wallah, worked in a call centre, and the magic wand gives the last whiff to land him on the hot seat of the quiz show.
I wish the city was this kind to Krishna or Satya.
Since 1890, a white-clothed army of delivery men called “Dabbawallahs” have conveyed ten million lunch boxes every day in Mumbai, making their way through the Local trains, roads, and streets to deliver piping hot lunch on office desks. In Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, Ila (Nimrat Kaur) complains that her box is not reaching her husband. The Dabbawallah replies with confidence, “Harvard people came to study us. They said we don’t deliver wrong.”
It is claimed that one out of a million lunchboxes wind up on the wrong desk. Batra’s 2013 film is about that one.
Ila’s lunch arrives on the desk of Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), a widowed accountant working in the same department for 35 years. Doubting the enhancement of food quality from his lunch service, Fernandes realises that he is being delivered with the wrong tiffin daily, so he slips an appreciation note complimenting and also critiquing the preparation. As the reply arrives in the closed tin the next day, a relationship begins to yarn.
Amidst teeming trains and jammed cubicles, The Lunchbox celebrates food, connections, and fate. It is a symbolic portrayal of Mumbai, a city coming of age, where loneliness unites the main characters and gives them hope to build something which lasts through the chaos.
If films are a reflection of reality then Mumbai has declined to become a rough, vile place. If at one time, earnings came through hard work, a decade later the city turns to mean streets, where the course to earning Rs. 500 is not by selling tea but by pressing triggers. In Hansal Mehta’s City Lights (2014), we are introduced to Deepak Singh (Rajkumar Rao), a farmer who moves to Mumbai with his wife to make a living. The couple soon discover that the city’s fabled streets aren’t paved with gold.
The migrants spiral straight into a tainted existence, struggling to find a spot to eat, work and live. The kindness of an office senior comes at a cost to Deepak, who, in desperation is goaded to steal a deposit box full of cash. The result is a sour spread, which frightens the viewers and gives us a pause.
What we see in these films, all made in different decades, is the gritty realism of the city. It refuses to be beaten, even by its celebrated spirit, or by pious hope. But as the sun rises and waves hit the city shores, another dream is born, another day, another day - dum dum!
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Ankur Choudhary is a writer and Delhi-based Structural Engineer. He writes about movies in his blog, fridayreviewer.com. You can reach out to him on Instagram: @_ankurchoudhary or mail at user.ankur@gmail.com
