Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Dwelling 

In (On) 

Bombay Cinema 

Analysing Postcolonial Domesticity in Bombay 

through a Reading of Bombay Cinema 

Author: 

Akshid Rajendran 

Tutored by: 

Atxu Amann y Alcocer 

Samuel Fuentes 

Trabajo Fin de Máster 

Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica 

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

ii

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema 

https://youtu.be/wMxVQrqA1XY

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema is an experimental research into the 

domestic condition of Bombay through a reading of Bombay cinema. 

It composes of an audio-visual product and the following textual documentation 

of the investigation methodology. These two entities are 

intended to be archived together digitally and physically. 

This work is part of the final assignment (trabajo fin de máster) of the 

masters programme in architectural communication or MAca (Máster 

Universitario en Comunicación Arquitectónica ) in the Superior Technical 

School of Architecture of Madrid (Escuela Técnica Superior de 

Arquitectura de Madrid) under the Technical University of Madrid 

(Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). 

The following document is to accompanied by the digital essay-film 

available through the following link: 

https://youtu.be/wMxVQrqA1XY 

The investigation is authored by Akshid Rajendran. 

And tutored by Atxu Amann y Alcocer and Samuel Fuentes. 

January 2019. 

iv


To an inaccessible domesticity from the past, 

obsessed with Bollywood. 

v

vi

Dwelling In(On) Bombay Cinema 

Acknowledgements 

As an architect, I began this investigation with the intention of gaining 

insight into an already well-studied and documented topic while 

swaying away from the traditional, academic and disciplined methodologies 

customarily proposed in architecture schools. For initially believing 

in these ideas and offering to tutor me, I am grateful to Atxu. 

Atxu played a vital role in this research by constantly trying to push 

me out of my rational and logical boundaries yet remain in control 

of a dazzling intuition within me that at times was difficult to grasp. 

Sam, unfortunately can’t be thanked enough. While initially agreeing 

to help me with only the audiovisual aspects of my research, he 

became a much more intrinsic part of the project involving himself 

with everything from skimming through books with me at the library 

to sending me shiba memes at 3am to pacify my pre-deadline stress. 

This research would be lacking in essence without Sam’s constant 

presence. 

Perhaps she would say it is merely her job, but Antonella, throughout 

the investigation, has been an incredible guiding force helping me to 

find direction during every moment of the investigation from precisely 

hypothesising to preparing the final presentation down to the last 

word. 

Lastly, I owe this work to the MACA-3 family without whom, the last 

year-and-a-half would be unrecognisable. 

vii

Contents 

Part A: An Extended Prologue 

Preface to the Study 1 

Hypothesis and Objectives 3 

Project Scope 4 

Theoretical Framework 5 

To Dwell in Bombay is to Survive 5 

Domesticity in Bombay Cinema 15 

Confronting the Archives 19 

The Image on the Screen 19 

Postcolonial Bombay 20 

Identifying Parameters 22 

Communication Strategy and Methodology 27 

The Formats 29 

The Narrative 30 

Part B: The Film-Essay 

Constructing the Narrative 33 

Finding a Home in the City 33 

The City is not Wholeheartedly Urban 35 

Scattered Domesticity 38 

Maids, Housewives and Queens of the Havelis 40 

Storytelling in the Scenic Haveli 43 

Another Surrealist Escape from Urban Claustrophobia 46 

Social Reform in Bombay and Cinema 49 

The Deeply Political Lives of the Urban Poor 53 

The Antagonist and Personifying Power 56 

Structuring the Essay 59 

Achieving Narrative Fluidity 59 

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Guided and “Free” Storytelling 60 

The Verbal Essay 63 

Prelude to the Text 63 

The Text 63 

Music and Soundtrack 68 

Minimalism and Hindustani Classical Music 68 

Vande Mataram 69 

M.I.A. and the Slum as a Labyrinth 70 

City Slums Slums 71 

Pacing with the Storyboard 74 

Editing 74 

Cuts and Transitions 74 

Transitioning Sound 75 

Part C: Conclusions 

Reflections 81 

Studying the Narrative 83 

Revisiting the Video Essay 83 

Looking for Balance 84 

Roleplaying 85 

Final Meditations 85 

Appendices 

Bibliography 91 

Online References 96 

Audiovisual References 98 

Films Referenced 98 

Online Audiovisual References 106 

Documentaries and T.V. Series 107 

ix

List of Figures 

Figure 1.1: An aerial view that depicts the asymmetry of housing in Bombay. 

Source: businessinsider. (2018, October 2). Drone photos of Mumbai reveal the 

places where extreme poverty meets extreme wealth. Retrieved January 14, 2019, 

from https://www.businessinsider.es/aerial-drone-photos-mumbai-extreme-wealthslums-2018-9 

Figure 1.2: An archetypical street in the slums of Bombay. Source: https://www. 

flickr.com/photos/urbzoo/29001316384/ 

Figure1.3: A still from ‘Vertical City’ (Kishore, 2010) depicting the dystopia of slum 

rehabilitation architecture and obsolete buildings. https://www.d-word.com/images/film_images/04.jpg?1304577183 

Figure 1.4: A still from the viral song, “Mere Gully Mein” performed by DIVINE 

and Naezy, rappers from the “streets” of Dharavi and proponents of Bombay’s hiphop 

culture. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bK5dzwhu-I 

Figure 1.5: A chart showing the chronological organisation of Bombay Cinema 

from the 1950s to the 2000s (Wright, 2017, p. 22) 

Figure 1.6: Diagram depicting the seven parameters idetified, classified into environmental, 

social and economic parameters and their corresponding observations enlisted. 

Figure 2.1: A still from Lust Stories depicting, from a low-angle shot, the silence that 

populates a middle-class house during a typical working day. 

Figure 2.2: A scene from Salaam Bombay! depicting the amalgamated nature of the 

footpath 

Figure 2.3: A scene from Salaam Bombay! showing a young girl who is asked to 

wait outside her house as her mother, an escort, is teasing a client 

Figure 2.4: Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham... used spatial vastness to reinforce ideas of 

social and familial hierarchy. Source: Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham... 

Figure 2.5: Rohan Raichand (Hrithik Roshan) struts down a street in London with 

a dozen women assisting him in forgetting the urban chaos in Bombay, but remembering 

the colours of the Indian flag. Source: Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... 

Figure 2.6: Vicky’s father storms towards him as he dances, cross-dressed, his family 

watching him amused and unsuspecting. Source: Bombay Talkies. 

8 

9 

11 

13 

21 

25 

34 

29 

39 

44 

47 

51 

x

Figure 2.7: Krishna from Salaam Bombay! buys a ticket to Bombay before he becomes 54 

Chaipau, the teaboy. Source: Salaam Bombay! 

Figure 2.8: A scene featuring Anil Kapoor being watched in a theatre in Dharavi 56 

reclaiming the life of his mother and his destroyed criminal lifestyle from Babia, a 

random underworld don. Source: Dharavi 

Figure 2.9: The newly created chapters interconnect with the initial parameters in a 49 

seamless fashion 

Figure 2.10: Structuring the linear narrative 67 

Figure 2.11: The crossfade transition used to move to London 76 

Figure 2.12: The water-splashing-transition used to exit the title screen 76 

Figure 2.13: Silence and a dusty afternoon before Paper Planes by M.I.A. 76 

Figure 2.15: Final storyboard 78

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xiii

Part A: 

An Extended 

Prologue


Preface to the Study 

With the intention of addressing the condition of the “dwelling” 

in the city of Mumbai 1 (India), through an analytical criticism of 

the cinema shot and produced in the city, Dwelling In (On) Bombay 

Cinema elaborates an experiment in architectural communication 

involving a practical undertaking, succeeded by a theoretical reflection. 

The film industry of Bombay, not including its success as a diverse 

and interdisciplinary medium of mass entertainment, has 

been an object of academic scrutiny for decades (Chakravarty, 

1989; Prasad, 2000; Mishra, 2002; Wright, 2017). The film industry 

produces close to 400 films every year, accounting to about 

43% of the net turnout of Indian cinema (“Bollywood revenues 

may cross Rs 19,300 cr by FY17,” 2016). It is this vast number 

of films that constitutes the alternate realm of the “cinematic 

Bombay” 2 and it is precisely this “Bombay” that will be explored 

throughout this investigation. 

The following study deals with the symbolic relationship between 

cinema and city. While much has been written about this “power-couple” 

(Leigh & Kenny, 1996; Clarke, 1997; Sawhney, 2012; 

Edelman, 2016), the precise nature of their relationship is constantly 

in flux. Cinema is known to influence cities and their visual 

identities, economies and built environments (Shiel, 2011, 

p.2). The city, on the other hand, simultaneously gives place to 

the movie, helps in storytelling, and in some cases, as does Rome 

in The Great Beauty (Sorrentino, 2013), Hiroshima in Hiroshima, 

My Love (Resnais, 1959) and the fictitious Gotham city in the film 

adaptations of the Batman DC comic book series, the city is found 

to seemingly become a vital part of the original cast. 

1. Bombay was renamed 

to Mumbai in an attempt 

to ethnicise urban space 

in 1993 by the Hindu 

political right as part 

of the Hindu-Muslim 

riots that gripped 

the city in December 

1992. In this study, the 

“Bombay” referred to 

is the cinematic urban 

space that has defined 

Bombay cinema since its 

inception. 

2. Bollywood is part 

of a larger Indian film 

industry. Hindi cinema 

is often metonymously 

referred to as Bollywood. 

In this study, Bombay 

cinema refers to the 

body of Hindi cinema 

produced in Bombay. 

1


3. The term “dwell” 

has been defined by 

Heidegger in ‘Building 

Dwelling Thinking’ 

(2009, p. 145) and 

referred to in the 

‘Theoretical Framework’ 

chapter of this 

document. 

The object of concern in this study is not the entire city, rather it 

focusses on the domestic scale. The house, although emphatically 

varying in typology both in cinema, is often the primary seat 

of the character’s urban adventures. The characters are found to 

scale the urban arena in an attempt to combat the sociocultural 

dynamics found both within the city and the film, only to return 

home repeatedly as a necessary means of recovery. Curiously, to 

actually find a house in the city is a demanding process that films 

generally assume for granted. It is well known that housing in 

developing cities like Bombay is a multifarious social issue. Bombay 

experiences wide disparities in housing conditions between 

the affluent and the lower-middle income groups living in the city. 

Despite a vibrant economic growth in the city since independence 

(“GDP growth (annual %) | Data,” 2019), housing conditions have 

not improved proportionately in postcolonial Bombay (Appadurai, 

2000, p. 629). With comfortable living conditions accessible 

at a premium and the working class often residing in cramped 

and poor-quality spaces, the poor inevitably take to the footpaths. 

Notwithstanding this crippling housing crisis, Bombay continues 

to attract migrants in search of new opportunities (“2018 Revision 

of World Urbanization Prospects,” 2018), causing further 

demands in housing, thereby contributing to a cycle that becomes 

increasingly difficult to disrupt. 

To dwell 3 “in” Bombay is to confront this reality of urban claustrophobia. 

It is to innocently step into the city, attempting to search 

for order from within the chaotic, oily machine that is Bombay. 

To dwell “on” Bombay is to reflect on its cinema. It is to confront 

an alternate reality and therefore to dive into the depths of one 

the largest resources available to use for social introspection in 

the city. 

2


The study is carried out in a manner that facilitates its own communication. 

There are two components to the envisioned final 

product: 

a. A film-essay combining content from a selection of Bombay 

films is to help create a narrative wherein the viewer 

is to glimpse the “dwelling” in Bombay solely through its 

story told by Bombay cinema. 

b. A verbal or textual account of the investigation process. 

Owing to cinema’s complexity and the absence of an instruction 

manual, in order to attain its full functioning capacity as a legitimate 

resource, the tools used to interpret cinema need to be constantly 

reinvented. Although the final audio-visual product can 

exist on its own, it must, whenever possible, be accompanied by a 

pictorial, graphic or the following textual account of the process 

of investigation as a necessary means to facilitate the use of cinema 

as an archival resource in urban study. 

Hypothesis and Objectives 

Although the issue of housing in Bombay is complex and distressing, 

there is a certain clarity that arises from consolidating the relationship 

between city and cinema. The city is clearly not perfect. 

In its entirety, the city is a damaged organism because its constituent 

units are damaged. The city is thus required to regularly heal 

itself through various methods of introspection. Out of precisely 

this triangular link between cinema, city and introspection, one 

can thereby hypothesize the following: 

Bombay cinema can function as an effective, valuable 

and interdisciplinary resource in order to better 

visualize the city’s urban domestic condition 

and its various facets. 

3


4. The components and 

academic framework of 

this work is outlined on 

page ii. 

Synthesizing the need to communicate the analytical study in order 

to create knowledge that contributes to the body of academic 

investigations into housing in Bombay and additionally, if Bombay 

cinema were to indeed be a legitimate means of social introspection, 

the primary objective becomes evident: 

To communicate the domestic condition of the 

“dwelling” in Bombay through a reading of its cinema 

using an audio-visual discourse to an urban 

and academic audience. 

Project Scope 

The following study is developed within the Master in Architectural 

Communication programme at the Technical University in 

Madrid. 

The project 4 proposed is an experimental exercise in architectural 

communication wherein the product (the audio-visual) is designed 

to convey the findings of an analytical study to a partly 

pre-defined public. The study doesn’t merely involve communicating 

existing observations. Rather, the observations themselves 

are organised with an awareness of their capability of being communicated. 

Although the archives are required to be filtered and 

navigated in a logical way, there is no unique method that can be 

followed in order to filter the films that are to be analysed. The 

filtering and selection methodology is outlined in the chapter1.3 

entitled: “Confronting the Archives.” 

The project shall consist of two phases: the first including the research 

within the realm of Bombay’s cinematic universe including 

popular cinema shot and recording in Bombay. Consequently, the 

second phase involves production of the communicative product 

using digital film editing proceeded by an analytical critique of 

the same product in order to arrive at the relevant conclusions. 

4


The communicative product, in this case from a constructionist 

perspective, should include both the product and the developmental 

process within the product itself. Thereby the entirety of the 

product is not restricted to the audio-visual film. It is the audio-visual 

film, the physical object that stores a digital version of the 

audio-visual film, a textual account of the investigation process, 

and wherever necessary, a verbal presentation of the investigation 

process that all constitute the entirety of the product. 

Theoretical Framework 

To Dwell in Bombay is to Survive 

Those few people who have had the privilege to find a home in 

Bombay would recognise merely by stepping out of their houses 

that to find intimacy and shelter in the city is not undemanding. 

Paradoxically, a city like Bombay, with its unconstrained urban velocity, 

is precisely one that requires more than any other, that the 

city’s housing market be highly operational. Observing the city’s 

traits, immediately what we find is an eccentric disjunction; one 

that has often been attributed to the coalescing between the dynamisms 

of corrupt politics, real-estate investors or arbitragers, and 

organised crime networks (Appadurai, 2000, p. 648). To address 

this asymmetry in the availability of the basic human necessity 

of a dwelling is to demand that the city self-medicate, that it consciously 

take on a process of self-inquiry and introspection, one 

that the city is evidently already engaged with. However, delving 

deeper into this process, we find that there are innumerable 

tools that can be used to help us with our task of introspection. 

On one hand we have oceans of academic scientific literature on 

the domestic condition of Bombay (Sen, 1976; Appadurai, 2000; 

Dwivedi, 2001; Padora, 2016). On the other hand, we have an im- 

5


mense, alternate archive of documentation of an altered reality 

of Bombay in the form of literary and cinematic fiction. These 

alternate imaginaries have repeatedly given us insight into a Bombay 

that we previously struggled to find access to (Upstone, 2007; 

Mazumdar, 2007; Raj & Sreekumar, 2017). Consequently, finding 

ourselves strung between two universes we can enable ourselves 

to bring a more meditated and considerate discernment into the 

complex matter of what it means to dwell in Bombay. 

When Heidegger, in the setting of the poetics of domesticity, 

morphologically analysed the German word “bauen” (2009, p. 145), 

what this meant for readers was a consolidation of two concepts, 

i.e., to “dwell” and to “exist.” The act of inhabiting the earth became 

the very meaning of human existence and thereby, the verb 

“to inhabit” began to assume a similar connotation as the verb “to 

be.” To dwell however is not simply to occupy space. To confront 

the complexities of manifesting one’s own shelter in flawless harmony 

with one’s environment is to begin to dwell. 

This very hypothesis of shelter is one that postulates the moral 

superiority of order over chaos. The house tends to, in addition 

to providing technological shelter from nature’s climatic turmoil, 

create order against nature’s spatiotemporal sense. Houses permit 

orderly human activity not only spatially within the city but also 

temporally within human lives. It has been pointed out that the 

phrase “to go back home” uses the word “back” in a non-instinctive 

fashion to express future arrival (Dovey, 1985, p. 37). What Dovey 

emphasised as the house’s sinusoidal nature along a constant 

time continuum was further explored in the same issue of Home 

Environments centring on several dimensions of domestic temporality 

(Werner, Altman, & Oxley, 1985). While the house clearly 

occupies infinite places on a linear timeline, perhaps in the context 

of domesticity, time is not meant to be seen as linear. The periodic 

temperament of time is perhaps tremendously more significant to 

6


human life and its cyclicity. Salman Rushdie, in his magical realist 

masterpiece, Midnight’s Children (1981) which was set partly in 

postcolonial Bombay and furthermore through later essays (Rushdie, 

1991, p. 12), has emphasized how our homes can become a 

temporal place from the past. Affectionately, he identifies his readers 

as immigrants of this distant country that presently manages 

to share a common humanity. The identity of the “home” thereby 

becomes amorphous over time, rendering perhaps its momentary 

functions more stable objects of observation insofar as they be 

viewed outside of their larger context of human life. 

Phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has argued that the primary 

function of home is to allow the human being to observe or to 

“daydream”, going on further to verbalise his objective (Bachelard, 

Jolas, & Stilgoe, 1994, p. 6) as: 

I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers 

of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of 

mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the 

daydream. Past, present and future give the house different 

dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at 

others, stimulating one another. 

5. Tononi’s theory is 

mathematical framework 

to understand the 

subject-object duality 

of experience. For 

Bachelard, experience 

didn’t have this 

character. Consiousness 

in the external domestic 

space didn’t “feel” like 

something in the inside, 

nor did it appear to be 

perceivable from another 

standpoint. Rather, it just 

directly “felt”. The space 

appeared directly “on the 

inside.” His first-person 

observations were coming 

from the object istelf. 

The role that the house is to assume in Bachelard’s study, and 

his principle of integration is reminiscent of the experientialist, 

mathematical theory of information integration of consciousness 

5 (Tononi, 2008). Tononi does not speak of domesticity. He 

does however assist us in verbalising what philosophers like Descartes 

were confused about in their meditations, i.e., that there is 

an “internal” subjective experience that can be observed while observing 

the “outside” world. For Bachelard, it was the same role 

that daydreaming would play. So important for him was this role, 

that the entire function of the house was to provide the peacefulness 

necessary to conduct this daydreaming. What appears to be 

7


6. Bombay’s socioeconomic 

hierarchies 

are not the traditional 

Indian ones. Traditional 

rural Hindu India is 

known for its temple 

towns wherein social 

identities are based on 

religious roles and family 

history. Bombay however, 

is a globalised capitalist 

metropolitan city. 

an experientialist view of domestic space reveals itself to be compatible 

with a utilitarian one wherein the domestic space is seen as 

a space for shelter. In effect, not only was the utilitarian view compatible, 

it was rudimentary for Bachelard. The spatiotemporal order 

that the house intends to impose arises from a predictable set 

of human necessities. Cleanliness, nurture, nutrition, self-identity 

and belongingness all have a footing in domestic space. 

After independence, in a Bombay subject to a multitude of socio-political 

tensions after independence, what it meant it have 

some place in the city to “go back to” and to sleep at was in constant 

flux. Urbanisation simply meant urgently moving into the 

most affordable home in the city, irrespective of its discomfort, 

and building one’s way up a familiar social hierarchy, found today 

in most globalised metropolitan cities. For some, this openness 

and scalability of the social hierarchy was a new liberation 

in contrast to rural religious ideologies that assigned hierarchical 

positions by the mere luck of birth 6 (Dumont & Sainsbury, 2010, 

p.83). For others it was just a matter of confronting the city’s cha- 

8 

Figure 1.1: An aerial view that 

depicts the asymmetry of housing 

in Bombay 

Source: businessinsider. (2018, 

October 2). Drone photos of 

Mumbai reveal the places where 

extreme poverty meets extreme 

wealth. Retrieved January 

14, 2019, from https://www. 

businessinsider.es/aerial-dronephotos-mumbai-extremewealth-slums-2018-9


Figure 1.2: An archetypical 

street in the 

slums of Bombay. 

Source: https://www. 

flickr.com/photos/urbzoo/29001316384/ 

otic answers to the question of basic human necessities. However, 

the experientialist fragment of Bachelard’s notion of daydreaming 

was out of question. Even as the city was populated with millions 

of comfortable houses and apartments, the spaces between 

these homes came to shelter not an insignificant proportion of the 

population, but half of the city’s population (Lewis, 2015). They 

lived either in shanty, ad-hoc, handmade (not the romantic kind) 

shelters or directly on the streets. Today footpaths accommodate 

a large percent of Bombay’s residential as well as commercial activity. 

9


According to the World’s Cities data booklet published by the 

UN, Bombay houses 21.4 million people at a density of around 

21,000 /sq.km (2016). However about 60% of this figure consists 

of regular citizens living in informal housing, slums and other 

unhygienic living conditions. This 60% population is concentrated 

on parcels of land that cover a mere 6-8% of the city’s land. Dharavi, 

a slum located in the heart of Bombay, is Asia’s largest slum 

and informally houses between 300,000 to 1 million people, the 

exact number being unknown (“Dharavi,” 2019). Many of these 

dwellers simply occupy footpaths and construct chawls (informal 

houses), sometimes incrementally over decades. 

Although, the majority of research on housing in Bombay has focussed 

on the current poignant state of affordability, there is a 

real lacking in architectural study on the homeless. In Bombay, 

the homeless have been handled in literature and film through a 

depiction of inner conflict (Nandy, 2007, p. 25). 

However Nandy’s exposing of the celebration of homelessness in 

the Bombay’s imaginaries does not substitute the need for ethnographic 

study of the homeless in Bombay. A recent study (Dutta, 

Lhungdim, & Prashad, 2016) pointed out that more than four out 

of five homeless persons, defined as those who reside not within a 

census house, are migrants. For a city whose urban space is occupied 

by migrants who have been unsuccessful in finding a home, 

Bombay doesn’t seem to slow down its rate of urbanisation or 

increase availability within its housing market. 

Migration however is merely a correlation, not the cause of the 

housing crisis in Bombay. Attempts to point fingers in complex 

issues such as housing shortage are easily thwarted by opposing 

stakeholders (Shlay & Rossi, 1992, p. 132). Nevertheless, homelessness 

seems to only be approached socio-politically while it is 

really a story of familial conflict, social oppression, inaccessibility 

10


Figure1.3: A still from ‘Vertical City’ (Kishore, 2010) depicting the dystopia of slum rehabilitation 

architecture and obsolete buildings. 

https://www.d-word.com/images/film_images/04.jpg?1304577183 

to hygiene or basic infrastructure, and a largely overlooked exclusion 

from their communities. Psychologically, the homeless are often 

described as lacking identity (Nair & Raghavan, 2014) but the 

“pavement” and “slum” dwellers are empowering labels that have 

fuelled social movements within localities like Dharavi. 

It is not usually the homeless’ lives that are of academic interest. 

Various documentaries and video essays have been produced exposing 

the lives within the slums of Bombay; some professionally 

made while others have been published on YouTube by curious 

tourists. Dharavi, Slum for Sale (Konermann, 2010) introduces 

Dharavi to strangers, from its origins to its rise as an economic 

powerhouse in Bombay. The documentary exposes the perceived 

futility of the lives of the people of Dharavi and their threat of 

eviction favouring the Maharashtrian government’s decision to 

11


use Dharavi land for economic benefit in public-private partnership 

projects under the image of slum rehabilitation. A similar 

story is told in Vertical City (Kishore, 2010), a film-essay that outlines 

the dystopic vertical rehabilitative architecture proposed for 

slum dwellers. The documentary successfully communicates the 

spatial oppression and repetitive failure of the government in 

dealing with the issue of rehabilitating slums. In many ways, the 

documentary demolishes any hope that government-run projects 

that relocate the poorly housed can benefit anyone with the exception 

of private investors. The replaced houses are often far from 

useful infrastructure like water, building maintenance usually not 

included as part of the contract, and houses are usually provided 

miles from their original workplaces, thereby disrupting an otherwise 

regular economy. Days of malfunctioning elevators eventually 

become years of malfunctioning elevators, resulting finally 

in paralysed dystopic buildings that have come to symbolise the 

displaced, economically-paralysed urban poor. 

Many a time, foreign intervention has helped reveal unique and 

otherwise concealed aspects of slum life. Notwithstanding the 

work done by Danny Boyle in his Oscar-nominated Slumdog Millionaire 

(2008), the most popular of such work is the two-part 

Kevin McCloud series called Slumming It (Simpson, 2010). Slumming 

It is one of the first such audio-visual investigation to have 

been labelled “poverty porn” (Thompson, 2010). Perhaps under 

the same label, one can categorize the new wave of YouTube videos 

that have surfaced such as the video by the channel “bald and 

bankrupt” called “Exploring An Indian Slum // Dharavi Mumbai”: 

the video features an adventurous western male walking 

around the Bombay streets attempting to comprehend the chaotic 

organisation of Dharavi. Similar videos have been made as part of 

foreign research interests or personal documentary interests like 

“We Spent A Day In The Largest Slum In India | ASIAN BOSS” 

12


Figure 1.4: A still from the viral song, “Mere Gully Mein” performed by DIVINE and Naezy, rappers 

from the “streets” of Dharavi and proponents of Bombay’s hip-hop culture 

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bK5dzwhu-I 

by “Asian Boss”, “Documentary - The Way Of Dharavi 2014” by 

“Sse Productions bvba” and “My Daily Life in the SLUMS OF 

MUMBAI (Life-Changing 5 Days)” by “Jacob Laukaitis”. 

Films dealing with the community-empowering hip-hop and “gully 

rap” culture of Dharavi that has gripped the city in the previous 

decade have also emerged in the last few years such as, “Dharavi 

Hustle: Official Documentary” by “Bajaao”, and the slightly more 

comprehensive “Vice Asia” documentary, “Kya Bolta Bantai? - The 

Rise of Mumbai Rap”. The Zoya Akhtar film Gully Boy (2019) (unreleased 

at the time of writing) tackles the same social aspect of 

life in Dharavi. What one finds is that there is plenty of informal 

sociological study on the issue of Dharavi and plenty of formal 

study on the typological and architectural matter but seldom are 

the governing bodies writing policy out of a synthesis of the two. 

13


7. For more information, 

watch the YouTube video 

entitled, “Why Mumbai 

Has Slums” by “Scroll. 

in”(https://youtu.be/ 

jPZp_ICmfhE). We are 

explained how politics 

and slum rehabilitation 

have interplayed to 

perpetuate the housing 

crisis of Bombay. 

According to the Economic Survey of India 2017-18, Bombay’s 

housing market tolerated about 0.48 million vacant houses 7 (“Economic 

survey says not many people are taking up houses in Mumbai”, 

2018). “The phenomenon of high vacancy rates is not fully 

understood, but unclear property rights, weak contract enforcement 

and low rental yields may be important factors. The spatial 

distribution of the new real estate may also be an issue, as the vacancy 

rates generally increase with distance away from the denser 

urban core,” the Survey pointed out. 

Clearly the issue of housing in Bombay, as with any other globalised 

city of such scale in developing countries, is one that requires 

a rigorously multi-disciplinary approach to solution. The issue is 

not merely one to do with influencing the governing bodies in the 

right manners. Rather it is to do with recognising urban vulnerabilities 

(Parthasarathy, 2009, p. 116) and thereby studying the 

spatial consequences of the capitalist pyramid that defines cities 

like Bombay. Although many have pointed toward global trends 

that have influenced Bombay’s asymmetric growth, the true culprits 

are the open market policies that changed Indian in the late 

80s and early 90s (Nijman, 2000, p.582). Liberalism in the new 

urbanised Indian city fermented a hierarchy that the poor were 

perhaps used to but only beginning to accept. On the other hand, 

the working upper-middle-class in search of a complacent city life 

largely ignored these struggles while the academics and intellectuals 

wrote books and made films about them. Perhaps most accurately 

described in the scientific study on the “Matthew Effect” 

and allocation of resources (Merton, 1968, p.62), as the rich get 

bigger houses, the poor have to fight to keep the shanty structures 

they currently own. Ethnographic studies of Bombay’s poor and 

homeless have helped us understand to a limited extent the nature 

of the city’s chaotic street life but have not given us insight 

comparable to that received from the fictions produced in Bombay. 

14


This is partly because the architects and sociologists studying the 

housing crisis in Bombay are not storytellers. The storytellers, 

on the other hand, do know how to graciously combine interdisciplinary 

study with compelling narratives and produce popular 

media that eventually is understood by the masses. Consequently, 

investigation into Bombay’s domestic condition would remain incomplete 

without turning to its massive produce of films. Ranjani 

Mazumdar has aptly called Bombay cinema an “archive of the 

city” (2007), emphasising how cinema in Bombay is a momentous 

cultural force that not only documented the city as it flourished 

but also participated in the “feedback loop” that allowed cultural 

transformation to occur. Looking into this archive, we begin to 

comprehend the true complexity of domesticity in Bombay. 

Domesticity in Bombay Cinema 

Since the first silent film was released in Bombay in 1913, the city’s 

cinema industry mastered the art of sensorial communication and 

accumulated a wealth of subjective insights into Bombay’s urban 

life film by film. The movie-making business in India is the world’s 

largest 8 by measure of its quantity of output 9 (Punathambekar, 

2013, p.51). By the 1930s, Indian cinema was already producing 

more than 200 films a year. Today that figure is close to 2000 including 

all Indian languages. Bombay and its cinema have grown 

significantly over the last century; however, it would be difficult to 

assert which influenced the other to a greater degree. 

8. Bollywood has often 

been called the world’s 

largest film industry. 

However, Bollywood is 

restricted to the Hindi 

film industry. What 

is being referred is 

generally a combined 

“Indian film industry” 

that comprised in 2017 

of 1986 films in 27 

different languages. 

(Film Feredation of 

India, 2017) 

9. The measure here is 

the output of the film 

industry. In terms of 

ticket sales, the Indian 

film industry outsells 

Hollywood by about 

900,000 tickets (“Cinema 

of India,” 2019). 

However Hollywood is a 

higher-grossing industry. 

Bombay cinema has not attained its scholastic position in modern 

sociological and filmographic study by simply following a preconceived 

blueprint of an appropriate social trajectory. To say that 

the industry does not have its own purpose, would likely make it 

difficult to identify common patterns of intentionality over any 

single period of time, but it is not to say that there have not been 

any trends in film genre evolution. Bombay cinema commenced 

15


with projection the silent films broadcasting culturally familiar 

religious narratives (Jamal, 1991) but as a postcolonial India 

struggled to find its place globally, and urbanisation began slowly 

altering century-long rural conventions, numerous films like 

Mother India (Khan, 1957) began to change the social perception 

of suppressed sections of society and even empowering urban 

women. These nationalist themes began to find themselves in a 

progressively socio-politically-tense India and consequently, the 

working-class’ long-muffled anger was personified in the “angry 

man” genre, as in Deewaar (Chopra, 1975) and Zanjeer (Mehra, 

1973). Subsequent to the communal tensions of the early 90s, 

Bombay Cinema would continue to secularly publicise the damage 

caused by the fundamentalist communal terror inflicted upon the 

city in Bombay (Ratnam, 1995), Black Friday (Kashyap, 2007), and 

the The Attacks of 26/11 (Varma, 2013). While film has obviously 

influenced popular culture, fashion and the music industry alike, 

the film industry has served as an archive “deeply saturated with 

urban dreams” of the city’s history (Mazumdar, 2007, p. xxxv). 

Bombay Cinema has been shown by numerous scholars to be the 

greatest reservoir of the urban experience of Bombay at our disposal, 

and with good reason. From high-budget to low-budget, 

every film representing the city of Bombay has recreated or rethought 

urban space to craft a unique cinematic archive of the city. 

Not only has Bombay cinema successfully acted as a sort of escape 

from the troubles of a city-life, it has acted as a self-reflexion 

of the collective urban vision of Bombay. Bombay cinema has remained 

through the turn of the millennium as the clearest, most 

immediate and entertaining medium of communication with the 

masses. 

Owing to its characteristic captivating nature, Bombay cinema as 

a medium of communication for social change has been explored 

by various filmmakers. Bombay cinema since its inception has 

16


stuck close to social issues and interpreted them through visual 

art, drama, song and dance. 

In the introduction to The Secret Politics of our Desires (Nandy, 

1999), the author cleverly recognizes the metaphorical relation between 

Indian cinema and the slum, claiming that the political climate 

in India is influenced by the sheer power of numbers of the 

slum and their closeness to the realities of urban life. The slum 

and the cinema thereby become not only a mirror of each other, 

but effective tools of study for introspection. As has been demonstrated 

(Young, 1969), in the late 60s and early 70s, fictional film 

was often devoid of any sort of complicated socio-cultural statement. 

Such a conclusion comes from a quick analysis of films such 

as Weekend (1967) by Godard or Shame (Bergman, 1968). Young 

goes on to criticise filmmakers such as Godard stating that although 

later films tackled social issues, they have done so in a quasi-journalistic 

style using characters that overshadowed the real 

issues themselves. In an ethnographic study (2007), Shakuntala 

Rao recognises the relation of the slum to its larger social and urban 

context. She argues like Nandy that Indian cinema represents 

the tastes and longings of the slums which dominate the urban 

public sphere. However, she goes on to assert, using various interviews 

to back up her ethnography, that social messages often get 

lost in the commercialisation of Bombay cinema. 

Today, cinema deals with a far more composite society. While a 

voluminous quantity of films tackle a broad assortment of social 

issues, others feed into an assortment of social desires for specific 

genres including everything from breakneck-speed action sequences 

to pseudo-pornographic item numbers, often effortlessly 

combining the two in the same genre. In this sense, the cinema 

industry was the first open marketplace, in its true sense for the 

proliferation of ideas, that India ever managed to create. Although 

the entire cinematic archive can be easily regarded as a single or- 

17


ganisation or entity, it is more precisely a collective reflection of 

the city’s subjectivities (Mazumdar, 2007, p. 1). At times, Bombay 

cinema performed the role of a drug, providing an escape from 

the unruly troubles of a chaotic city life, while at others, it acted 

successfully as a tool for mass introspection. In the following 

study, Bombay cinema shall be scrutinised thoroughly with the intention 

of gaining insight into the city’s peculiar urban domestic 

condition. To create a framework within which we can analyse the 

two-dimensional moving images of this cinematic archive, and in 

addition, as the archive is composed of around 400 annual films on 

average since the inception of the artform, the process of selection 

of our cases for study is of primary importance. 

18


Confronting the Archives 

The Image on the Screen 

It has been shown that to be lost in space has only to do with our 

humane objectives (Tuan, 2011, p.36). If we find ourselves within 

an unfamiliar density of a thick forest with tall canopies and darkness 

in every direction, the notions of front and back are rendered 

meaningless. However, the moment a flickering light appears in 

the distance, we find that we are immediately oriented to a common 

spatial objectivity. 

The human being, by his mere presence, imposes a schema 

on space. Most of the time he is not aware of it. He notes 

its absence when he is lost. 

In cinema, distances and angles remind us of our worldly three-dimensional 

spaces on a constrained two-dimensional area. However, 

what we define as “spaces” is a metonymic expression for a 

complex set of experiential characteristics. In the natural environment, 

we see objects located in “space”. This spatiality comes 

from a unification of the location of the eye and the location of 

the object. However, the location of the subject need not be equivalent 

to the location of the eye. In fact, the subject has no defined 

location. The “becoming aware” of the object is separate from the 

function and position of the eye. 

As the camera mimics the eye in cinema, the location of the camera 

needn’t signify the location of the subject. The subject-object 

distinction is easily broken in cinema and what is experienced is 

not a duality but rather a single final image on screen that communicates 

space not as an object or background to be observed 

but rather as a characteristic symptom of existence. Hence, our 

outlook is inevitably that of a child who is still trying to focus 

19


on what the outside world is trying to show us; a child who does 

not necessarily feel the need to approach reality from a dualist 

perspective. Essentially, cinema is not a set of images of the real 

world projected on a screen in a dark room. Rather it is a constantly 

evolving multi-dimensional reality with its own spatial 

and temporal parameters. 

Postcolonial Bombay 

Bombay cinema shows us its people, its environments and its stories 

as we are reading them not as scholars but as citizens of this 

cinematic city. Following Tuan’s ideas, the vastness of Bombay’s 

cinematic space need be no cause for disorientation. Our focus remains 

on the cinematic representation of the domestic space of 

Bombay in all possible senses within the realm of audio-visual 

communication. This means that we shall only restrict our focus 

to cinematic production that occurs within Bombay and the general 

group of films that use the “Bombay house” as a part of the 

cinematographic set and/or as a character within the movie. The 

following step is to place chronological constraints. 

The very task of classifying Bombay cinema has been attempted 

in the past through varying methodologies resulting in a large 

spectrum of insightful sub-genres. Perhaps the most ambiguous 

yet documented genre is the masala genre that surged in popularity 

from the 60s onwards (Wright, 2017, p. 23). Wright provides us 

with a flowchart that begins at the inception of Bombay cinema in 

the first decade of the 20 th century to the current postmodern era 

of Bombay cinema warning however that “the decades that tend 

to be skimmed over in Indian cinema timelines are the ones that 

have produced less politically oriented and more populist films.” 

Although, our initial filter is the temporal characteristic of postcolonial 

Bombay, a purely chronological view of Bombay cinema 

20


1910s–20s Mythologicals (Films like Raja Harichandra, 

based on Hindu texts: Ramayana, Mahabharata) 

1930s–40s Stunt movies (Star persona: Fearless 

Nadia) 

1950s Socials: the ‘Golden Era’ (Directors: Raj Kapoor, 

Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy) 

Figure 1.5: A chart 

showing the chronological 

organisation 

of Bombay Cinema 

from the 1950s to the 

2000s (Wright, 2017, 

p. 22) 

[1960s: overlap with 1950s] 

1970s ‘Angry Man’ era and Parallel Cinema movement 

peak (Social retribution action films; directors 

Shyam Benegal and Ritwik Ghatak) 

[1980s: overlap with 1970s. Dip in cinema-going due 

to rise of television] (Doordarshan channel launches 

successful Ramayana TV series) 

1990s NRI and Family Movies (Diaspora-oriented 

productions; patriotic, traditionalist, family-oriented 

‘multi-starrers’) 

[2000s: continuation of 1990s?] 

does not help classify films, rather it helps perhaps simply gather 

an understanding of various trends. The postcolonial city begins 

with the “Golden Age” of Bombay cinema. This has been shown 

in Vitali’s Not a Biography of “Indian Cinema” to be an era where 

cinematic trends were began to be influenced by western and external 

sources, thereby rendering film study problematic (as cited 

in Wright, 2017, p. 26). 

Taking on a more humanist perspective, Mazumdar divided her 

book, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) into five 

chapters namely, ‘Rage on Screen’, ‘The Rebellious Tapori’, ‘Desiring 

Women’, ‘The Panoramic Interior’ and ‘Gangland Bombay’. 

21


Brilliantly, she walks us through a non-chronological winding 

path through the multiple thematical subjects that she finds the 

cinema of Bombay to archive only to reveal how these five subjects 

have been of utmost social importance to Bombay as a megapolis. 

Bombay is an enormous city, but perhaps not as large as the 

fictional reality created by its film industry. Bombay’s cinematic 

archive is one that spans thousands of films in a multitude of 

genres and multi-genres. 

The following list can be compiled taking into account merely the 

temporal “postcolonial” period, and the use of the city-scape as a 

space for production and/or setting. Further parameters can be 

examined in order to create a balance between, independent and 

popular films, foreign and national productions, female and male 

producers and directors, etc. 

Identifying Parameters 

Our question of domesticity involves a wide range of cinematic 

objects. From women to footpaths to large doors. The intention 

mustn’t be to merely meditate on architectural and domestic 

elements visible on the screen. Rather it is to use cinema as the 

inter-disciplinary, narrative medium it was designed to be. The 

idea is to observe the full spectrum of cinematic objects and their 

context with the intent to identify the elements that help tell the 

story of housing in Bombay. Looking for apt objects for studying 

the “dwelling”, Bombay cinema is seen to talk generously about 

the following facets. 

The #interiors of the house are spatially insulated from the dense 

claustrophobic city. This is vital not only architecturally for the 

city to function, but also in cinema as the characters tackle the 

complexities of the various realms of cinematic spatial reality. 

Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (Barjatya, 1994) shows us how through 

22


clever production, the modern consumerist, globalised aesthetic 

can coexist with tradition and nostalgia. This is the same juxtaposition 

that was further explored and seemed to work well commercially 

in the millennial family films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie 

Gham… (Johar, 2001), Baghban (Chopra, 2003) or Kabhi Alvida 

Naa Kehna (Johar, 2006). Non-Resident Indians (NRI) audiences 

received these high-budget productions with open arms and 

revelled in the nostalgia they deeply identified with (Mazumdar, 

2007). Cinema finds ways to tackle this either through surreal 

filming locations or through extravagant panoramic sets. The 

family film movie genre could not have succeeded without the 

architecture of vastness of the #Haveli(mansion). They allowed 

space for Bombay to disappear and for the new modern Indian to 

dream the ideal lifestyle. 

Often the spatial separation exists around the abode, but urban 

chaos manages to bleed into the home. This is especially true for 

the slums of Bombay. The #lower_middle-class dwells in this 

blended city space uninsulated from the chaotic synergies of Bombay. 

The house is often shared by large joint families. And the private 

space, although successfully separated from the public, ironically 

becomes almost as dense as it. In Dharavi (Mishra, 1992), 

the #protagonist is seen vigorously battling the puppet strings 

attached to him within the socio-economic hierarchy. His plans to 

open his own factory while supporting his family by being a Bombay 

taxi-driver are expectedly thwarted as the plot develops. But 

we see that as his mother visits his house in the city, how a shanty 

one-room house with a temporary roof quickly becomes crowded 

with conflicting interests and narratives. 

The #people of the house are often the central focus of domestic 

narratives. Female roles although domestic tend to be experimental 

within the domestic realm. Cinematic experimentation 

was seen from the very beginning of Indian cinema, to defy so- 

23


ciety’s preconceptions of femininity. Fearlessness and women’s 

anger were often the expected domestic character in cinema. The 

females played often authoritative mothers who sought to climb 

the power hierarchy of the family tree. As individualism rose, and 

women stopped playing queens of the Haveli, owning a housemaid 

instead became the new middle-class aspiration. 

The house is often deeply tied to the #livelihoods of the lower 

middle class. It is used by cinema to describe a specific socio-economic 

story. The #homeless protagonist negotiates the political 

landscape and often uses their living-on-the-#footpath as a metaphor 

that justifies the use of violence as therapy. For their suffering 

needs no justification. It is the city that is harsh. And the 

domestic condition of the slums verily fuels anger against the established 

systems of power in the inevitably corrupt city. When 

cinema shows us instead the settled-abroad, complacent lives of 

the “middle-class” what we find is a socio-economic ambiguity that 

opposes the rural tendency to rely on livelihoods for storytelling. 

The Bombay home is #private insofar that it separates public spaces 

of the city from the familial, protected space of a home. However, 

the city’s density means that intimacy is not always achieved 

easily. In fact, while the city is populated with an extremely large 

number of houses, the amount of intimate spaces is scarce. They 

are scattered into various pockets of the city where intimacy is 

either rented or borrowed. Sexual expression is a constant slave 

of this domestic situation. 

In Life in a... Metro (Basu, 2007), the character Rahul, played by 

Sharman Joshi, owns a lavish apartment space in downtown Bombay. 

We get a glimpse of Rahul’s job as one that exerts diligence 

and discipline and his home inevitably, a luxuriant 2- or 3-bedroom 

apartment with wide corridors and floor-to-ceiling windows. 

Rahul, being a single successful man, lives alone. His house 

24


Figure 1.6: Diagram depicting the seven parameters idetified, classified into environmental, 

social and economic parameters and their corresponding observations enlisted. 

functions as a #flexible_space that accommodates him and friends 

of his that are trying to find a place to have sex in the city. Because 

even hotels in Bombay moral polices. Various characters in the 

movie borrow the keys to Rahul’s apartment and use his bedroom 

as an intimate space, including by his boss who cheats on his wife 

and sleeps with a friend of Rahul’s. The home thus makes itself 

25


intimate only temporarily in concentrated pockets of the city’s 

housing spectrum. 

The idea of the #scattered_domus transforms the city into a single 

domestic space where toilets, dining and intimacy are all outsourced 

to the available infrastructure. The home eventually becomes 

the city itself. 

In Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee & Johar, 2018), the segment 

directed by Karan Johar shows us how the typical Bombay 

home houses a joint family. And the newly-married couple doesn’t 

necessarily obtain the intimacy that they would expect when 

starting a new life together. Rather, the bride typically shares 

space with the groom’s extended family. This becomes even more 

challenging when the houses are smaller in the denser areas of 

the city. 

When the dwelling is an integral part of the film, the #political 

discourse also tends to be. The new #slum_architecture was 

inextricably tied to politics in the city. Films don’t tell us what 

the newspapers do. But Kaala (Ranjith, 2018), a film featuring 

the Tamil superstar Rajinikanth, talks extensively about how the 

slum dwellers of Bombay constantly struggle with a navigation 

problem within the political field; one that their day-to-day existence 

is based on. The film goes on to ostentatiously criticise the 

top-down approach to affordable housing in the city. 

Looking broadly at the parameters identified, Bombay cinema 

presents itself as an assortment of thematically varied audio-visual 

resources. The parameters can be grouped into spatial and 

socio-economic tags. In order to organise our archival material, 

the following tags can be utilised to better classify the footage. 

There might be #economic factors such as the livelihoods of the 

characters, often the central synopsis of the film. #environmental 

factors like housing typologies and housing interiors that can but 

26


not necessarily point towards other socioeconomic markers. Lastly, 

there are #social themes that generally occupy a large portion 

of screen-time and eye-tracked area of the frame. They are usually 

the basic cog work of storytelling and generally function as the 

mirror through which the viewer enters the cinematic world, and 

thereby the vehicle through which she can explore this universe. 

Communication Strategy 

and Methodology 

Film study has in recent years, through the ease of technological 

requirements for video-editing and the incentivising of fan-made 

content, has grown popular steadily. Cinema being an audio-visual 

artform, can be communicated effectively through a reincarnated 

medium that uses images, audio and language to communicate 

the proposed ideas. This reinvented medium, the essay film, video 

essay, or essay video must combine a set of selected audio-visual 

elements in a particular order to tell a story or to sew the observations 

together. 

The investigation is to be carried out in an experimental fashion 

wherein the film-essay does not serve as a means to communicate 

the product of a thorough investigation. Rather the film-essay itself 

is part of the investigation process insofar that it integrates 

various methods of reflecting on the state of cinema as a means 

both of social interpretation and mass communication. The film 

essay does not guarantee a unique method of conveying a rigid 

investigation. Instead, it is the outcome of a particular selection 

of precise criteria. Owing to the wide subjectivity built within the 

cinematic format, the study would be perhaps radically different 

yet equally valid if it were to be carried out with a different set of 

parameters. 

27


The targeted audience can be tagged loosely into two groups. On 

one hand, the resident of Bombay and its cinematic world; one 

who has visited the city physically or through any of its films, one 

who has formed a mental image of the city. On the other hand, we 

have the curious scholar to whom the city-cinema relationship is 

of academic interest. 

As the observations are reorganised, a linear, parallel multi-linear, 

non-linear or circular narrative can be found in order to link up 

the observations. Using the same audio-visual tools used in cinema 

may not always bring a positive outcome, however since film is 

the primary medium being recycled, the potential tools need to be 

given enough attention. 

Whether the narrative is visual, aural or verbal, we have hypothesized 

that Bombay cinema can be studied as a resource to understand 

housing in the city and hence the study is inevitably always 

a subjective view of the city through cinema, an already subjective 

view of the city. 

These urban subjectivities cannot be presented as axioms. They 

are indeed perspectives from multiple points of view, tied together 

by a single point of view. Subjective observations out of a subjective 

medium are always haphazard. Hence it is this single point of 

view that can guide an audience through the cacophonic assortment 

of films that talk about the homes of Bombay. 

The following process inevitably requires the researcher to take 

up various roles. The researcher needs to be aware of an extremely 

large cinematic archive and use specialised knowledge to make 

a primary selection. Simultaneously, the same person is required 

to assume the role of the producer and organise the necessary 

resources, permissions, music and other skills necessary to complete 

the task. As the pieces come together, the director is required 

verify the script and prepare the tonality of the voice-over while 

28


guiding the editor to correctly organise the collected data all while 

constantly verifying the same with the researcher. 

The Formats 

The essay video is a medium that incorporates theoretical framework, 

citations and references, and employs an audio-visual rhetoric 

to communicate ideas (van den Berg, 2013). One of the primary 

objectives being to generate an effective means to communicate 

the study, carefully deciding the medium of communication becomes 

vital. Uploading the finished product onto an online video 

streaming service like “vimeo” can allow it to blend seamlessly 

into a pre-existing academic realm of audio-visual and film study. 

This would require for the video to be as consumable as possible. 

A length between 12 - 15 minutes should prove enough to communicate 

the observations. Longer than this would equate to appealing 

to a more academic audience and shorter would not suffice 

to cover the relevant observations. 

In order to step out of the finished essay video product and attempt 

to also communicate the process, the format for process-communication 

becomes equally important. Accommodating for flexibility 

of format here can become essential to obtain the largest reach. 

The communication of the process can also happen in an audio-visual 

format, but in the case that there is a live screening to a public, 

the presentation can be made personal depending on the needed 

situation. The format can vary from a written account, to schematic 

illustrations of processes to a short video summarising the 

relevant rhetoric. This can then be attached to the uploaded file, 

to the disc, or uploaded along with the finished video onto a social 

media platform. However, in order to effectively consolidate both 

elements of the final product, the seamlessness between formats, 

media and circulation methods is vital. 

29


The Narrative 

The narrative encompasses two main categories: the audio-visual 

and the verbal. The audio-visual builds its narrative power relying 

heavily on the selection of scenes as well as the video-editing that 

ties them together. The verbal narrative, on the other hand, must 

be thought of as part of the whole in order to successfully blend. 

The verbal narrative works only to create a unified product working 

in conjunction with (and against wherever necessary) the cinema’s 

audio and image. The point of the verbal narrative mustn’t 

be to enforce a presupposed point of view of the cinematic content. 

Neither should it be to help focus the viewer’s attention on 

any one part of the image. Rather it should work as a guide that 

fortifies links between relevant parts of the audio-visual narrative. 

The essay video’s ability to tell a story relies heavily on successful 

editing. And editing relies heavily on memory. It becomes necessary 

to keep a whole project in one’s head. (M. Alter, 2003). In 

order to complete the single, consistent product that communicates 

the necessary audio-visual and verbal narrative, the process 

of editing needs to assist the fluidity, rigidity and coarseness, pace 

and rhythm of the essay video. Once the video and its audio have 

a coherent narrative that links up all the relevant observations, the 

next step would be to identify musical elements that can encompass 

the necessary mood for the necessary duration. Sound effects 

can be used to transition smoothly between films of differing aesthetic 

sensibilities. Once the voice-over is recorded, the audio must 

be compressed and allowed to sit within a steady frequency range, 

unaffected by the background music. Depending on the kind of 

scene and its central focus, the cuts and transitions will define the 

pace and rhythm of the essay video. The idea is to unify various 

ideas using a common aesthetic and graphic identity to create the 

essay film, that consists of smaller elements that were not intended 

to fit together but somehow do.


31

Part B: 

The Film-Essay 

32


Constructing the Narrative 

Finding a Home in the City 

Now finding ourselves residents of this cinematic city, it seems 

clearly that we can travel within films and between them in order 

to look for what we need within this matrix and eventually leave 

before it’s too late. In order to assure a smooth entry, perhaps we 

can look for an outsider’s view of Bombay given that right now we 

indeed feel like outsiders. 

Perhaps Danny Boyle’s award-winning Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 

2008) can show us Bombay from a critical occidental lens, seeing 

as it gathered significant critical success within western audiences. 

A large number of the transition scenes, that appear to frame 

the city of Bombay when switching between the film’s parallel 

narratives that construct the non-linear storytelling, can perhaps 

guide us into the concealed image-making that Boyle allows for 

with these scenes. In one particular scene (01:03:52:00), we see 

how the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle uses a one-point 

perspective punctuated by a static hazy pink billboard and the emblematic 

red BEST (Bombay Electric Supply & Tramway Company 

Limited) bus slowly pushing through pedestrian traffic to drive 

us deep into Bombay’s hypnotic dynamism. He absorbingly set us 

up symbolising the hopelessness with which the viewer watches 

the main character Jamal Malik (played by Tanay Chheda), during 

his early adolescence, subsequently scurry through the countless 

urban landscapes in search of his lost love. 

However, the haste of Bombay’s streets and its frenzied urban 

fabric mustn’t lead us to tolerate disorientation from our primary 

focus on domesticity. Thus, we find ourselves looking at a present-day 

home or what perhaps looks like a modest middle-class 

home in the Zoya Akhtar segment of the anthology film Lust Sto- 

33


Figure 2.1: A 

still from Lust 

Stories depicting, 

from a 

low-angle shot, 

the silence that 

populates a middle-class 

house 

during a typical 

working day. 

ries (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee, Johar, 2018). The 

film introduces a peculiar relationship (explored 

later in this essay) between a maid and a working, 

single, bachelor through a series of scenes 

that describe a typical work day in their lives. After 

a stream of jump cuts, we arrive at a point 

that the house is empty (00:38:46:13). The maid 

has just left the house; we know of this because 

the camera through 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. This 

silence is perhaps characteristic of the upper 

middle-class house during a significant part of 

the day in a city like Bombay that sports a large 

employed population. The characters of the story 

that Zoya Akhtar recounts are both employed, 

and we see signs of prosperity from this 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 

34


light, but also cross-ventilated windows. We then are allowed to 

glimpse restricted shots of an aluminium-and-stainless-steel-clad 

kitchen, a perfectly made half of a bed through a doorway that 

occupies a third of the frame, and a wash basin against pale-green 

tiles, softly lit by the morning light. As we inhale these restrictive 

shots, we exhale 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 proactively avoided. 

The City is not Wholeheartedly Urban 

To live in Bombay is to deal with a wide range of domestic discomforts 

similar to the ones we find in Zoya Akhtar’s segment in 

Lust Stories. At the same time, we know that Bombay’s domestic 

discomfort is not always confined within the comfort of a one-bedroom 

apartment. Bombay Cinema often utilises versatile typologies 

to tell their stories. Sometimes, the film set is planted within a 

palatial, surreal home as was done 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 by the film as in Dhobi 

Ghat (Rao, 2011). Often, the stories are told in slums, or on even 

directly the street. In Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (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. 

We see (00:38:14:15) how Chillum, another character who inhabits 

the streets of Bombay, smoking a cigarette within the pseudo-domestic 

comfort of a suburban train station. Perhaps conforming 

to the paradigm of a healthy city, Bombay is seen continually to 

substitute the human functions that the poor cannot afford to possess. 

In the social-crime drama entitled Dharavi (Mishra, 1992), it 

35


becomes evident how urban space is continually recycled in order 

to accommodate traditionally domestic functions. 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. As he splashes 

water on his taxi to clean it (00:05:50:06), we are subsequently 

introduced to his immediate neighbourhood; one similar in scale 

to a plaza of an Italian village, populated however by shabbier 

asbestos ceilings. 

This rural nature of the city although pointed out in the threepart 

documentary The Peacock Screen (Jamal, 1991) as well as by 

psychologist Ashis Nandy (1998, p. 7), can be observed not only 

through the indisposition in migrant communities to accept the 

morality of the urbanised city but also in the very architecture 

of the city. The footpath in Bombay has been seen to embody this 

rural Indianness to the extent that it allows for Bombay Cinema’s 

imagination to create enthralling narratives around this urban element 

(Mazumdar, p.4). 

The city itself is marked, 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. Bombay 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 

36


Figure 2.2: A scene from Salaam Bombay! depicting the amalgamated nature of the footpath 

the origin of this violence can be traced back to 

domestic tensions he experiences as a child who 

has lost his father during communal violence in a 

small town and subsequently moving to Bombay, 

a city that has caused him to turn to crime and 

give up 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 homelessness 

to work as an enabling metaphor that empowers 

Vijay’s cathartic fights against the structures of 

power within the film. 

37


Scattered Domesticity 

Vijay plays a character who belongs to a section of society whose 

domus is scattered in urban space. As their homes scantily occupy 

the interim spaces between the “normal” houses and built environment 

of Bombay, it becomes difficult to centralise the facilities 

provided to them by the city space as one would observe inside 

a typical house. A range of sexual, hygienic and nutritional necessities 

are thereby scattered precariously in urban space. In Salaam 

Bombay!, one of the street children is seen urinating onto 

train tracks a railway station platform (01:13:02:17) as a train 

approaches him in what appears to be an unequivocal metaphor 

for the urban poor’s impending doom. The toilets of the poor are 

the footpaths, urban wastelands and compound walls. In the 2008 

drama, Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle), international audiences were 

able to glimpse the comfort that lay in the world of open urination 

and defecation as child Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) screamed 

exhilaratingly, “Amitabh Bachchan!” jumping from a suspended 

public toilet stall, through an absent water closet into a pool of 

human faeces in an attempt to catch a catch sight of the star landing 

in a helicopter in the nearby vicinity. Politically, the question 

of hygiene for the urban poor seems to always have occupied a 

position of complacency. 

Similarly, for the homeless, one finds that privacy is only enjoyed 

as an erratic luxury and is often outsourced. The spaces that can 

be defined as intimate are concentrated into a few pockets in the 

city often a dark corner of urban space as Chameli (Kareena Kapoor) 

offers Aman Kapoor (Rahul Bose) in a dark sheltered alley 

while it rained heavily in the film Chameli (Balani and Mishra, 

2004), a brothel or a pimp’s house as in Salaam Bombay!, an 

apartment borrowed from a friend as in Life in a... Metro (Basu, 

2007), or simply a holiday home that the city’s upper-class residents 

seem to own for a far more eased accessibility to intimacy 

38


Figure 2.3: A scene 

from Salaam Bombay! 

showing a young girl 

who is asked to wait 

outside her house as 

her mother, an escort, 

is teasing a client 

as seen in the Dibakar Banerjee segment in Lust 

Stories. In Life in a... Metro, we observe how a single 

apartment starts to play a duplicitous character 

as one of the protagonists lends his domestic 

space to close friends as a safe place to have sex. 

The city’s automatic moral policing forces seem 

to prohibit even well-to-do people from spending 

a night at a hotel. The characters of the movie 

earn and spend money in excess compared to the 

average city-dweller but when it comes to intimacy, 

the city doesn’t seem to sport the amenities 

necessary to satisfy the demand it generates. 

Consequently, private spaces are restricted to a 

few concentrated spots that are recycled or flexible 

spaces that accommodate for more than one 

primary function. 

In the Karan Johar segment of Lust Stories, the 

climactic scene involves a semi-public orgasm in 

the living room of a joint-family. Megha (Kiara 

Advani) has just married Paras (Vicky Kaushal) 

39


and moved into what appears to be a prestigious and spacious 

home. However, the domestic claustrophobia Megha experiences 

is not defined by spatial parameters, rather familial. As the grandmother 

mistakes a remote for a vibrating sexual toy (already concealed 

by Megha between her legs) for the television remote and 

continues to increase the vibration strength, Megha manages to 

convince the viewers that the orgasm she is about to have is so 

important that it didn’t matter that she was in the same room as 

her husband, and two other women from her husband’s family. 

The film builds up to this scene with a series of unsatisfactory 

sexual sessions between Megha and Paras, with Paras orgasming 

in a matter of five seconds, as Megha, counting on her fingers, 

would accurately document. Karan Johar, the director is trying 

to express a certain dynamic of modern sexuality from the urban 

woman’s point of view. 

Maids, Housewives and Queens of the Havelis 

In the aforementioned Zoya Akhtar segment of Lust Stories, we 

are led through a different perspective on the role of the contemporary 

urban woman. The story is that of a maid named Sudha 

(Bhumi Pednekar) who manages household activities at a single-bedroom 

house of an upper middle-class working man named 

Amit (Neil Bhoopalam). Firmly cementing the viewer’s confusion 

of the nature of their relationship, the film starts with front and 

side-angled cuts of passionate and sweaty lovemaking between 

the two characters. A few short moments later, as Amit scrubs his 

armpits clean, he yells to be brought a towel. Amit steps out of the 

shower, and in a friendly taunt indicates that Sudha hasn’t showered. 

She throws him his towel casually calling him a naked dog. 

Until the following scene her role as the maid has not been established. 

Furthermore, as she starts to forcefully scrub an already 

spotless floor, we begin to doubt her originally assumed role as a 

40


housewife. It is only when she prepares some tea for Amit and his 

family, that the viewer is gently baptised into the reality, not only 

of the peculiar relationship between the principal actors, but also 

of the sociocultural debris of institutionalised economic power in 

the capitalist city. Sudha’s body is exploited not just to do physical 

work as a cleaner, sexually she is subjected to a similar oppression. 

Since she cannot scale the economic arena, neither is there any 

question that she have a say in the kind of relationship she can 

hope to find with Amit, the nature of which appears both predetermined 

and whimsical. As Amit’s families meet his future bride’s 

family in order to decide on a wedding, we do not see Sudha being 

informed of what is happening. Zoya Akhtar is merely brilliantly 

describing an atypical situation by pointing us non-linearly to a 

set of facts that do not leave space to fully grasp the hideousness 

of the situation until the film closes. 

Female sexuality in the domestic context has only recently been 

explored through cinema in Bombay. However, since the birth of 

independent India in 1947 and until the turn of the millennium, 

an engulfing majority of Bombay films have had men as their lead 

characters and women playing supporting roles that help ground 

the lead male role as they make sense of the cinema’s plot. Women 

have been seen to generally play domestic roles like housewives or 

mothers that supplement the role of the house as one that serves 

as a reference point within the chaotic urban navigation of the 

male lead. In Deewaar, when Vijay in all his frustration boasts of 

his achievements to his brother demanding what he had achieved 

in comparison exclaiming, “I have all this, what do you have?”, 

we see how their mother is somehow affectionately objectified as 

Ravi responds passionately, “I have my mother with me”. Nirupa 

Roy who played their mother popularised the meme of the Indian 

mother in a number of films following Deewaar like Amar Akbar 

Anthony (Desai, 1977), Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Mehra, 1978), Su- 

41


haag (Desai, 1979), Inqilab (Rao, 1984), and Mard (Desai, 1985). 

At the turn of the century, Farida Jalal became filmmakers’ go-to 

actress for her impeccable portrayal of the Indian mother, often 

scooping the Filmfare Award for best supporting actress. Perhaps 

most popularised by her role as Lajwanti “Lajjo” Singh in Dilwale 

Dulhania Le Jayenge (Chopra, 1995). Capitalising on positive 

critical feedback she received for her role, filmmakers continued 

to cast Jalal in numerous other films offering her analogous roles 

as Ajay’s mother in Dil To Pagal Hai (Chopra, 1997), Rahul’s 

widowed mother in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Johar, 1998), Rahul and 

Rohan’s nanny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (Johar, 2001), and 

recently Abhimanyu’s grandmother in Student of the Year (Johar, 

2012). 

In Bombay Cinema, the meme of the Indian mother emerged in 

the 70s, roughly around the same time that the country experienced 

socio-political tensions with Indira Gandhi as prime minister. 

Before and after this period, female roles were highly experimental. 

With roles such as those played by Nargis Dutt in 

Mother India and Waheeda Rehman in Guide (Anand & Danielewski 

1965). At the turn of the 2000s, the experimental female role 

emerged in a large number of films like the roles played by Vidya 

Balan in Kahaani (Ghosh, 2012), Dirty Picture (Luthria, 2011) and 

No One Killed Jessica (Gupta, 2011), but still a drop in the ocean 

of male-dominated blockbuster films. Women stopped playing the 

predictable domestic roles that was seen as the role that gave life 

to the lifeless mansion or Haveli, as is Jaya Bachchan’s character 

in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... and the queen of the haveli that 

enabled the male lead slowly became the queen of the city that enabled 

herself. The female roles played by the likes of Vidya Balan, 

Alia Bhatt, Anushka Sharma, and Rani Mukherjee started to portray 

the individualist urban woman. What has been the evolution 

of the female role since the birth of independent India appears to 

42


have slid from experimental roles at the beginning to completely 

defining domesticity for the urban independent Indian man and 

finally as the social libertarian movements gathered momentum, 

returned to experiment with the constantly evolving globalised 

society. 

Storytelling in the Scenic Haveli 

Towards the turn of the new millennium, a new modern India began 

to reflect a globalised, urban space in cinema, and the domestic 

space started to accumulate all notions of tradition within itself. 

The Haveli was the natural outcome of years of evolution in the 

cinematic domestic space. Palatial interiors shot using wide-angle 

lenses allowed “cameras to sweep through panoramic interiors” 

(Mazumdar, 2007, p. 124). Mazumdar goes on to indicate how 

the “panoramic interior” is part of the larger urban virtual city 

that allows the reality of urban chaos in India to disappear. In the 

family-film genre, what the house was perhaps most significantly 

playing the role of the set or of the background. While dramatic 

films tended to use domestic space as an objectified character, family 

films personified this domesticity in family bonds, an open display 

of religious traditions and rituals, permissible romance and 

the commitment of family as a holy object. 

Just as a temple is decorated, the family film set is extravagantly 

ornamented in layers of drapery, coloured interiors, carpets, sofas 

and chandeliers. The consumerist interiors populate a vast space 

that grants a spatial liberty not available on the streets of the 

city. The space allowed domesticity to be redefined and calibrated 

to the new ideals of the modern Indian. The experimentation 

ensued with the surreal spaces being used not only for dramatic 

scenes that mimicked the medieval spaces of palaces where the 

royalty would settle their disputes, but also for jovial celebration. 

There has been a large number of films that recounted stories of 

43


Figure 2.4: Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham... used spatial vastness to reinforce ideas of social and 

familial hierarchy. Source: Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham... 

ancient empires of the Indian subcontinent like 

Jodhaa Akbar (Gowariker, 2008), Bajirao Mastani 

(Bhansali, 2015), and Padmaavat (Bhansali, 

2018). What the royal domesticity actually consists 

of is coherent with the societal power often 

held by the dwellers of these residences. What is 

reflected in the globalised Haveli of modern Indian 

film is not a perverted attraction to the idea 

of power, rather it is the aesthetic of success that 

is to be reflected by the interiors of the house. 

The films’ plots are never about their livelihoods 

or socioeconomic dynamics. 

Historically, a monumental space symbolised 

power hierarchy in the immediate society but in 

the globalised virtual city, the space symbolises 

the family’s economic success and an internal 

44


power structures within the family. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., 

one of the scenes shows Rahul begging not for forgiveness, but 

for his father to not be hurt by his actions. As the son continues 

to disobey his father’s commands of the girl he wants to marry, 

he reluctantly, yet furiously tells his son that he has lost his right 

to call him “Papa”. The scene goes on to utilise the monumental 

interiors as a space that represents the wealth and familial power 

acquired by Yash Raichand as we see four figures occupying 

one of the halls of their home. The home isn’t questioned for its 

surrealist appearance as a palatial space with redundant couches 

under the stairway space, random collections of photos on their 

walls, flowing peach and white drapery, eclectic columns or its repetitive 

staircase railing. Neither do we question the hierarchy of 

paternalist authority. Rather the viewer, dropped into a space that 

dictates both spatial organisation and familial hierarchy simultaneously, 

is expected to have her eyes dashing across the wide space 

between the various characters and their conflicting objectives. 

The same space is the reference point that the characters return to 

where Yash Raichand is seen in a similar pose as aforementioned. 

He turns around only to face his previously disowned son with 

tears and a hint of remorse in his eyes. 

An exterior shot of the mansion shows us Rohan Raichand 

(Hrithik Roshan) departing his home in a Bentley leaving behind 

two proud yet concerned parents as he leaves for London. Yashvardhan 

“Yash” Raichand (Amitabh Bachchan) and Nandini Raichand 

(Jaya Bachchan) are belittled by the three-storeyed mansion 

as a low angled camera enables us to feel the monumentality of 

this scene. If the mansion was already an escape from urban chaos 

in Bombay, then moving to London is escaping the already perfect 

escape. 

45


Another Surrealist Escape from Urban Claustrophobia 

In what happens to be the most blatantly rebellious replacement 

for a taking-off airplane to communicate the idea international 

travel and the passage of time, Rahul Raichand’s transition to 

London is by no means subtle. It happens in the middle of the 

film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... and the director Karan Johar, 

completely embraces both the neoclassical architecture of various 

monuments through diagonally angled helicopter shots and 

the aesthetic of the globalised city that London has become. It is 

almost as though we are being shown a wistful longingness that 

the city of Bombay also be as such. The camera flashes between 

various famous brands that seem almost too explicit to be placed 

into the film’s marketing programme. And the camera flashes 

quite literally also as each shot blindingly fades into the next and 

the viewer consequently bombarded by icons that symbolise modern 

London. The symbols are not merely commercial. In fact, we 

are first shown the London Underground logo in first a far shot 

succeeded by a close shot. Virgin, Starbucks, and other cafés are 

shown in the space of a short second. Then we are shown a few 

signboards for upcoming cultural events in the city. With a final 

shot of the logo of Dolce & Gabbana smeared discretely onto a 

glass wall that appears to enclose a mannequin sporting a minimal 

white shirt, we are allowed to finally glance our “hero” Rohan 

walking in slow motion between a dozen faceless young women 

running across him dressed in shalwar kameez, a traditional Indian 

casual clothing, generally not in the colours of the tricolour flag 

unless to symbolise a patriotic event. Here, the saffron, white and 

green are bouncing away from Rohan as he walks in slow-motion 

with a curious gaze onto the urban landscape of London. There is 

an obvious fetishizing of the city as Rohan makes his way exploring 

the city. We continue to see symbols of modernity, with occasional 

references to nostalgia for Indian tradition, from the women 

dressed in Indian clothing bearing the Indian flag, to women 

46


Figure 2.5: Rohan Raichand (Hrithik Roshan) struts down a street in London with a dozen 

women assisting him in forgetting the urban chaos in Bombay, but remembering the colours of the 

Indian flag. Source: Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... 

performing a Bharatanatyam choreography to the 

song Vande Mataram or a group of scantily-clad 

English women walking alongside Rohan, half of 

whom dressed in saffron and the other in green, 

colours of the Indian flag once again. 

As the song Vande Mataram ends, we see Rohan 

looking online for his long-lost brother’s home 

address in London. As the camera shifts from Rohan’s 

new reality to the more established environment 

of Rahul’s home, we are introduced first to 

an elegant name plate that bears the name “Rahul 

Raichand”. We are made to listen to a rendition of 

Sare Jahan se Accha, a patriotic song that proclaims 

47


the longevity and greatness of the land of Hindustan. Their house 

is inhabited by Rahul, his wife, their son, the nanny, and Anjali’s 

sister, Pooja. 

The space that each one of the characters is presented within, has 

a unique characteristic to it. Anjali introduces the house to us as 

she nostalgically finishes the song mouthing the words “Hindustan 

hamara”, which loosely translates to “our India”. Although 

the hypermodern contemporary aesthetic of the home doesn’t reflect 

this, we are again allowed glimpses of the characters’ nostalgia 

by positioning of religious iconography, a picture of Rahul’s 

parents, and other verbal references. Anjali claims that it is a legitimate 

concern to her that their 10-year old son learn the traditions 

and values of his country that he has only heard of, lest he turn 

into their neighbours’ daughter, a typical English schoolgirl. 

The scene here is one that demonstrates the typical morning in 

the Rahul Raichand home to the viewer. Rahul wakes up in a bed 

with his son, and they rush down once ready for their morning 

routines. The table is already laid with an assortment of breakfasts: 

Frosties, fruits, and a fat-free “Feel Special” cereal. We them 

sitting in not a dining room, but a dining table placed in an intermediary 

space that overlooks a gigantic living space with trees 

outside. Anjali and Rahul seem to engage in a playful argument 

about how their son needs to hear her singing the traditional Indian 

songs. As though out of despair, Anjali in apparent despair exclaims 

how their son, “knows nothing about our country, religion, 

or traditions”. The son retaliates, saying, “Stop it Mummy, what 

is this country you keep talking about”. To which Anjali replies, 

“The best country in the world is our India… Don’t ever forget!”. 

Rahul’s home seems to once again mimic his own father’s tendencies 

in ownership and familial hierarchies. Although arguments 

between Rahul and his wife Anjali seem to be more playful and 

48


diluted, Rahul seems to have the final say on many issues, but the 

members of this joint-family seem to find their way around his 

authority as did Pooja, his sister-in-law, surprise his taste when 

she walks down from her bedroom wearing a backless, pink croptop, 

or when Pooja asks his permission to bring a friend over to 

stay. She is successful in convincing him after multiple attempts by 

Rahul to deny her the right, claiming that the house was his, and 

that it didn’t matter to anyone else. 

Pooja, on the other hand, is introduced in her bedroom that appears 

to be what looks like a brightly-lit dance club. As the song 

“It’s Raining Men” plays, we are first introduced as is customary 

in Bollywood’s portrayal of women, to her body moving to the 

background music. Pooja’s cultural influences are explicitly shown 

to be tabloid and fashion magazines, as a sweeping horizontal shot 

of a row of magazines reveal to us, only to end with her face, 

covered in a beauty face mask, sending a kiss in the direction of 

the camera. The characters in Bombay do not completely ignore 

the Indian way of life as they move abroad, rather they express a 

constant nostalgia, as though guilty of having left their homeland 

behind. The domestic space, on the contrary, represents a state of 

complacency. 

Social Reform in Bombay and Cinema 

To watch Katrina Kaif sway her hips as does a Persian belly dancer 

surrounded by excited men and a fiery backdrop that resembles 

the Tinder logo is not what one expects a child to have the opportunity 

to do. However, in the Zoya Akhtar segment called Sheila 

Ki Jawaani in the 2014 anthology film, Bombay Talkies (Kashyap, 

Banerjee, Akhtar & Johar, 2014), this is precisely where the 

film grounds its plot. As Vicky, a 12-year-old boy who aspires to 

become a Bollywood dancer watches intently absorbing the cinema, 

he is unconsciously disobeying his father’s plans for him. The 

49


film presents an atypical hero in that he doesn’t navigate an urban 

landscape and fight underworld villains. Rather his battle is rooted 

in the domestic life. We get to understand as viewers what it 

is like to face one’s worst nightmare within the pseudo-safety of 

one’s home. 

Inspired, Vicky returns home, tries on a dress that belongs to his 

sister, wears his mother’s jewellery and lipstick, and blasts, Aaj Ki 

Raat, a song from the 2006 action-thriller film Don (Akhtar, 2006), 

featuring the female stars Isha Koppikar and Priyanka Chopra 

dancing in a night club to serve as audio-visual distraction to the 

main plot, which is communicated as much more important and 

“high-stakes” than a dance. Vicky is trying to see the Bollywood 

dancing diva in him, a role that young boys in Bombay are not 

often seen desiring to fantasize about. Nonetheless, Vicky walks 

down his living room with the innocent intention of pleasantly 

surprising his sister. She indeed is surprised and exclaims with 

laughter, “What are you doing?!”! As they continue to laugh and 

revel in the moment, we hear the sound of a door unlocking and 

shortly after, the house’s front door bursts open. The frame shows 

the outer side of the door that bears the family name, “A. Sharma”. 

The parents are staring down in shock at Vicky with clearly 

contrasting opinions. Once again, we see how familial conflict appears 

to take a certain trickle-down route as Vicky’s father walks 

towards him and slaps him across the face while he is still smiling, 

innocently assuming he would be able to continue enjoying his 

night of cross-dressing. 

What we see is how secrets are kept in different parts of the house 

and different people that occupy the domestic terrain. Vicky is 

mesmerised with his childlike vision by an advertisement that 

stars his idol, Katrina. She appears to come to life in a vision saying 

how one must strive for their dreams by fighting societal conventions 

and that one must sometimes keep their dreams a se- 

50


Figure 2.6: Vicky’s 

father storms towards 

him as he dances, 

cross-dressed, his 

family watching him 

amused and unsuspecting. 

Source: Bombay 

Talkies. 

cret at the start. Vicky decides to confront the 

established familial hierarchy and fight for his 

dream of becoming a Bollywood dancer. What 

the short film shows us is not merely that social 

issues in Bombay such as the one addressed by 

Akhtar start at the domestic scale, but also that 

children in Bombay’s homes carry the burden of 

tackling complex social issues right within their 

familial hierarchy. Unlike the angry man, their 

frustration can only be suppressed and kept a secret 

until the moment is right; often this moment 

never comes. The home thus acts as a space that 

consolidates the entire storyline instead of being 

a mere reference point within an urban plot. The 

domestic space nonetheless continues to be a 

space for self-reflection and hiding from the city. 

As the social issues that are dealt with at home 

are inevitably urban social issues and depending 

on the social strata that the character belongs to, 

the issues vary in their political affiliation and social 

engrossment. 

51


The domestic space directly reflects in its architecture the proximity 

to social tension. In Dharavi, the protagonist’s family resides 

in a space suspended above an unpretentious food stall. The space 

is pictured often from a lower angle as though to ironically project 

the space as one that is superior. The protagonist, Raj Karan 

Yadav, is a man who mimics this non-transparent portrayal of the 

self-image. He boasts of his big ambitions and returns home often 

drunk at the plight of his inability to achieve the goals he sets 

himself. His home is a space that he admits detesting; one that 

is confined within four perpendicular walls, one of which is not 

plastered and exposed as though to be shared as a common wall 

with a building that was never built. A wooden framework holds 

a steep staircase that leads up to a scanty deck from where the 

front door can be accessed. The other walls are white and small 

openings with bars in them allow an acceptable amount of light 

to enter. The roof seems to be an above average timber-framed 

steady roof that is often a rare sight in the dense asbestos-clad 

homes of Dharavi. 

Raj’s home is a site of frequent conflict. Perhaps best represented 

in a scene where the house is first shown tranquilly during a 

quiet night first from a low-angle shot on the exterior, followed 

by another low-angled shot of the interior where we see the protagonist 

sleeping on his mother’s lap and his wife, sleeping bent 

over their son. In almost half-a-second, their night is disrupted by 

a stranger who has managed to enter and inflict havoc as depicted 

in the scenes to follow. Raj struggles to push them away and his 

wife, holds her son close in fear for their life. A table fan falls to the 

floor, the elderly lady is pushed onto a bed, and the married couple 

attempt to push away the attacker as the son hides between the 

bed and a cupboard. Their lives continue to hang a breath away 

from the turmoil that is depicted in this moment. 

52


The Deeply Political Lives of the Urban Poor 

In 2018, Rajinikanth starred in a film named Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) 

that tackled the housing crisis of migrants from Tamil Nadu who 

lived in Bombay. The film deals directly with the politics of the 

daily lives of the slum dwellers and shows the viewers a view of 

the slum with the legislative complexities that it often comes with. 

On one hand, there are corrupt government officials that refuse to 

provide the people who have illegally occupied land homes and instead 

intend to evict them for the commercial potential the evicted 

land could have. One the other hand, there are the dwellers of the 

slum that cannot be displaced as their economies would be damaged 

beyond repair. And finally, the NGOs who do the government’s 

job of upgrading the existing hygienic and infrastructural 

condition of the slums. Rajinikanth plays Karikaalan who vows to 

protect his people and is revered as a hero for his commitment to 

the people of his neighbourhood. He is also respected by the police 

and feared by the corrupt politicians for the power structure 

that he is in control of through the underworld. 

Before the film begins, we are first shown a preview of the difficulty 

of the typical slum life in Bombay. During the film, what 

occurs is a reversal of expectations and typical roles assumed by 

the people of the slums. We are shown participatory processes 

where Karikaalan is able to defend for the rights of the original 

occupants of the land. Because it is clear from the beginning that 

uprooting the inhabitants could never be the solution to the existing 

urban claustrophobia. Neither could selling the land to commercial 

interests be of any use. The only possible outcome was 

a bottom-up upgradation and a governmental sacrifice. Because 

Bombay never claimed to be poor. It was only every greedy for an 

ever-increasing generation of wealth. Bombay had become a machine 

and the poor were fighting a losing battle not only to change 

the organisation of the social strata, but also to protect what they 

53


Figure 2.7: Krishna from Salaam Bombay! buys a ticket to Bombay before he becomes Chaipau, 

the teaboy. Source: Salaam Bombay! 

indeed had. Yet Bombay never stops attracting 

the rest of India. The opportunity and charm 

that comes alongside is far more tempting than 

any other city the country has seen. To go to 

Bombay is to become a hero. Not merely a movie 

star, which is what a large amount of migration 

is caused by, but also to become the hero of one’s 

own life. As is Krishna (or Chaipau) told when he 

asks for a ticket to ay big city where he can earn 

a living. Upon presenting the money to the ticket 

officer, he is told, “Go my friend. Go to Bombay. 

Come back a hero!”. Krishna looks up in wonder 

and the scene cuts to the arrival of a train in 

what appears to be Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus 

railway station in the south of Bombay. A song is 

54


playing on the railway station television. The mist clears as a train 

arrives and Krishna walks into the frame, disoriented. What is 

about to happen to him is nothing he would have imagined before 

moving to the city. And this is why the cinematic world of Bombay 

never stops receiving visitors. In Laaga Chunari Mein Daag 

(Sarkar, 2007), Badki (Rani Mukherji) moves to Bombay to find 

a job. In fact, to the viewer the distress she encounters through 

not finding a job seems expected for a woman of her experience. 

However, Badki is desperate and when she finds out that she could 

possibly earn a job if she slept with her future employer, she calls 

home in a mixture of fright and disbelief. The film talks about yet 

another migration to the city and initially walks us through an 

economic landscape from the perspective of a female protagonist. 

However, as the film concludes, Badki’s happiness comes not from 

coming to terms with her journey as a character, rather it is when 

her love interest (Abhishek Bachchan) expresses his acceptance of 

her despite knowing her role as a call girl. 

Whenever a character moves to Bombay, the contrasts are communicated 

through shots of the busy train station, or traffic just 

outside. In the Anurag Kashyap segment in Bombay Talkies, entitled 

Murabba, we are enticed by a different aspect of the migration 

process. Vijay (Vineet Kumar Singh) is originally from Allahabad, 

1310 kilometers from Bombay. His father’s dying wish is that his 

son, Vijay, meet the famed film star Amitabh Bachchan and feed 

him a handmade murabba (fruit preserve). The surreal request is 

met with bewilderment but determination. Vijay is prepared to 

remain in Bombay for as long as it takes. However, he comes to 

terms with this fact only after realising how difficult of a task it is 

to get a hold of a man like Amitabh Bachchan. 

For Krishna, Badki, Vijay, and many other migrants like them, 

Bombay is a space that is not expected to be welcoming. The decision 

to migrate is often taken in order to fix a rural conflict that 

55


has nothing to do with Bombay. Bombay merely 

becomes one of the many possible solutions. 

Ironically, Bombay often makes things more difficult 

than they need to be. Economically and politically, 

the poor who come to the city in search 

of solutions are left stranded. However, the journey 

is always worth making a film about and the 

hierarchies that the heroines and heroes confront 

are often dismantled, leaving the viewer satisfied 

at the end of the movie. Because movies have to 

indeed end in some way. 

The Antagonist and Personifying Power 

To confront Bombay’s chaos is to confront one’s 

own internal battles. This metaphor of the battle 

has been utilised in Bombay cinema right 

from the very first crime-thriller movie. The an- 

Figure 2.8: A scene 

featuring Anil Kapoor 

being watched in 

a theatre in Dharavi 

reclaiming the life of 

his mother and his 

destroyed criminal 

lifestyle from Babia, a 

random underworld 

don. Source: Dharavi 

56


tagonist is often a character that is respected by critics and the 

film industry alike for the finesse required to represent the city’s 

darkest sides. In the family movies, the antagonist often seems to 

not be present. This is far however from the reality of domestic 

storytelling. The antagonist is typically presented as a menace in 

a dark, illegal part of the city away from the real lives of the citizens 

of Bombay. In the film Parinda (Chopra, 1989), the initial 

scenes are that of the skyline of an evening in Bombay. The aerial 

shots of the city might merely appear to resemble the set backdrops 

of American late-night talk shows that used the New York 

skyline as an artificial background in a closed studio as though to 

demonstrate prosperity. 

Anna Seth, the underworld don and villain is presented immediately 

after. First, he is shown taking the blessings from a photograph 

of what appears to be members of his family, a wife and 

young child. They have probably passed away in an accident that 

we are not aware of yet. In no time, we are plunged into the darkness 

of Anna’s economic activity. Anna’s domesticity resembles 

no other in the city of Bombay. The spatial relationship between 

his house, his office, and the factories that hide illegal substances, 

dead bodies and black money are blurry. The camera follows the 

characters in a maze-like space deliberately in order to confuse 

the viewers, perhaps accurately communicating their wit in hiding 

from the police. As the film’s initial minutes progress, we see how 

Anna’s henchmen frantically try to hide a murder victim inside a 

pile of clay. Moments later, the police arrive and begin to raid the 

factory, only to leave without any evidence gathered. 

Anna is introduced first in the film, yet the story revolves around 

the character Karan (Anil Kapoor). Karan is the innocent brother 

of one of Anna’s closest men, Kishen (Jackie Shroff). Karan 

and Kishen both grew up on the streets of Bombay. What Anna 

represents to Karan is the corrupt, evil that has driven the city to 

57


ruin. In fact he ends up becoming no different from Anna as he 

pledges to avenge the death of his friend Prakash (Anupam Kher). 

Karan then navigates the urban turmoil that ensues and finds that 

he has to face conflicts that he finds himself to arrive at. In a parodic 

remake for the movie Dharavi, Anil Kapoor plays a character 

similar to the one played by Jackie Shroff in Parinda. In order to 

find the antagonist, Kapoor is seen making his way up a tower as 

though to convey the unreachability of the Bombay underworlds. 

The villain’s name is Babia. He screams in anger reminding Babia 

how he had thrown his mother and him when he had first come to 

the city out onto the street inconsiderately. Kapoor claims to represent 

all the people of the slum as he points his gun at Babia. He 

claims to be the uncrowned king of the city, which is supposedly 

every slum-dweller’s deepest longing. The scene in the movie is 

being watched in an ad-hoc movie theatre in the slum of Dharavi 

with the spectators screaming in appreciation and admiration of 

Kapoor’s performance. Chopra shows us how the poor relate to 

the literally unrelatable and how cinema reflects the dreams of 

the masses. Because, perhaps they never would really point a gun 

at the corrupt officials who occupy the higher positions in the hierarchy, 

but they certainly understand the idea of overturning a 

hierarchy. 

As Kapoor fires his gun, the screen implodes in red and the opening 

credits begin to roll. However shortly after, the theatre is set 

on fire; Chopra effectively demonstrating the brevity and triviality 

of these desires. Because in a city like Bombay, to fight the already 

upside-down established hierarchies of power is to entangle oneself 

in knots that can never be untied. 

58


Structuring the Essay 

Achieving Narrative Fluidity 

In view of the fact that we are to speak about a number of parameters 

from spatial ideas like interiors and privacy to sociological 

factors like livelihoods and sexuality, what becomes of primary 

importance is to discover a method to interlink seemingly opposing 

constituents of the study. It is precisely this that Bombay cinema 

also does very effectively. Scripts of films are written many a 

time based on the urban realities and the prevailing subjectivities 

at the time inevitable interweaving a large number of social parameters 

that are worth examination. Our task here is similar. To 

arrive at an appropriate narrative interweaving the various parameters 

we had initially identified. 

The parameters initially identified, although interrelate in multiple 

aspects like sexual expression being defined as a challenge 

within a certain socio-economic category and feminine roles in 

domesticity defining how interior spaces are designed, do not necessarily 

correlate effortlessly. In order to bring about the necessary 

correlation, the expanded parameters need to be taken into 

account. The succeeding correlation must therefore become a narrative 

that is linear or cyclic in order to sew the various elements 

into place. This does not exclude parallel narratives. As a matter 

of fact, creating a linear narrative that flows freely between our 

seven parameters, automatically creates seven parallel narratives. 

Each of these narratives can be perpendicular to the initially identified 

parameters. Bringing ourselves to allow this linear narrative 

to flow freely, we find that we can easily organise a necessary 

to define these narratives as we did in the previous chapter i.e.: 

Finding a Home in the City; The City is not Wholeheartedly Urban; 

Scattered Domesticity; Maids, Housewives and Queens of 

59


the Havelis; Storytelling in the Scenic Haveli; Another Surrealist 

Escape from Urban Claustrophobia; Social Reform in Bombay 

and Cinema; The Deeply Political Lives of the Urban Poor; and 

The Antagonist and Personifying Power. The interconnections 

between our new chapters and the seven parameters are countless 

but on expansion of the parameters we find that they can be reorganised 

into a new structure as follows. 

The ensuing step is two-fold: firstly, we are to expand the seven 

parameters into their composite aspects, in chapter 1; and secondly, 

we are to each ending card of one chapter with the beginning 

card of the succeeding chapter. On expanding the seven parameters 

on the right-hand side, the narrative is found to expand itself, 

thereby allowing us to begin considering how to generate a visual 

story based on the linear narrative. We can start to analyse the 

filtered archive in order to find the pertinent portions of films 

that communicate the ideas we are interested in. The knack to 

a fluid narration lies within the second step, achieved by simply 

rearranging the cards within each chapter to allow for maximum 

significance. Following these lines, we arrive at a linear narrative 

that begins with introductory remarks and ends with conclusive 

reflections. These remarks are subjectivities that are concreted at 

the end of the study, and so are shown here in the grey colour. The 

remaining colour-coding follows the initial colours corresponding 

to the three categories of the seven parameters. 

Guided and “Free” Storytelling 

Identifying the film segments we are to use to narrate the domestic 

story of Bombay, we find that they are varying in formats i.e., 

between clips that send a visual message alone, clips that communicate 

an audio-visual message through performing actors, dialogue, 

music, environments, and lastly, clips that solely communicate 

an audio message, either a performed dialogue, environmental 

60


sounds, or music. The following films have been selected to communicate 

the majority of the narrative in long-scene formats: 

Deewaar (Chopra, 1975) 

Salaam Bombay! (Nair, 1988) 

Dharavi (Mishra, 1992) 

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (Johar, 2001) 

Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) 

Bombay Talkies (Kashyap, Banerjee, Akhtar & Johar, 2014) 

Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee & Johar, 2018) 

Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) 

The majority of the selected clips have been selected to tell a predominantly 

visual story without excessive dialogue because firstly, 

dialogue often requires context, replicating which is unnecessarily 

cumbersome and secondly, the film-essay’s fluidity relies heavily 

on cinematic continuity which can only be achieved through aural 

continuity. While the vice-versa would be an interesting audio-visual 

experiment, navigating the archives in search of widely 

varying audio to fit a single visual narrative is counterproductive. 

While environmental cinematic sound has been used in order to 

bring some of the scenes to life, the initial dialogue depicting the 

recently-migrated mother and two young boys in Deewaar, the 

transition to London playing the song Vande Mataram in Kabhi 

Khushi Kabhie Gham... the scene included from the Zoya Akhtar 

segment of Bombay Talkies, the scene depicting Krishna buying 

a train ticket to go to “any big city” in Dharavi, and the concluding 

scene from Dharavi depicting the monologue of Anil Kapoor 

watched in a lower-class informal theatre. 

Defining the abovementioned portions as the “free” segments 

61

62 

Part B: The Film-Essay


leaves us to conclude the remainder of the “guided” segments 

utilising transition clips, an overlaid verbal narrative and music in 

order to finalise the film essay. 

The Verbal Essay 

Prelude to the Text 

The primary function of the overlaid verbal narrative is to weave 

together the concepts illustrated in figure 2.10. The narrative is 

constructed within the same structure previously defined and is 

to be delivered vocally in an engaged manner. The delivery is not 

meant to be completely neutral, nor overtly biased. Rather, stress 

is made where necessary in moments that the video transitions do 

not absolutely communicate the necessary ideas. 

The Text 

The typical #Bombay_home is not only one that sustains life in the city. 

It is also that which sustains the #story_of_Bombay_Cinema. 

The idea of the house has been constantly #fluid. Between films and 

within films. 

The house oscillates between footpaths, slums, modest homes, and palaces 

that magically occupy city land. 

The city, however, is not wholeheartedly urban. 

Although the city is densely populated by houses, the spaces between these 

homes are also homes. 

The #footpath is an amalgamated space that intertwines #rural tendencies 

with modern #urbanism. 

#Homelessness is often celebrated as a metaphor 

63


A metaphor that helps us empathise with the protagonist’s suffering. 

This is the same suffering that justifies the use of #violence as therapy. 

The hero or anti-hero navigates an urban space and a #socio-political 

landscape in search of justice. 

The home is simply a reference to allow the viewer to digest this urban 

struggle. 

But the home is not concentrated to one point. 

For this section of society, the domestic functions are #scattered in urban 

space. 

#Toilets are not even a question. 

The real question is always ‘Where to have sex?’. 

And the answer lied charmingly on various beds, sprinkled into a few 

concentrated, #intimate spaces around the city. 

Intimacy can’t be guaranteed just by owning a house. 

Families are joint and large. 

Houses in Mumbai are small and dense. 

The affluent are constantly trying to own #bigger_houses. 

There are numerous things they want own. 

Like a #housewife. 

But sometimes the #maid was the ultimate housewife. 

She could be rented in Mumbai’s extensive market of household labourers. 

Female roles were not always experimental. 

Although women played strong characters, and #fearlessness was celebrated 

They were almost always domestic, enabling the male lead to navigate 

his urban quests. 

64


By the turn of the millennium, #individualism was on the rise. 

Woman paid their own rents and stopped playing the queens of the Havelis 

(mansion). 

The #Haveli, or mansion, was the organic outcome of years of evolution 

in the domestic space. 

Like a temple, the home was not only decorated, it was also worshipped. 

With designer drapes and eclectic consumerism. 

The #vastness of a new surreal domesticity granted spatial liberty. 

It granted a certain familial #hierarchy. 

It granted space for the new modern Indian to dream of an ideal lifestyle. 

Life could be extravagantly celebrated: through song and dance; 

The Haveli helped forget about the chaotic realities of Bombay. 

The other option was to move to London. 

Abroad, the story was somehow never about their livelihoods. 

The characters’ socio-political backgrounds were always #mysterious. 

Rather the story was about #nostalgia. 

And so was the architecture 

#Religious_Iconography simultaneously symbolised traditional Indian 

virtues and middle-class complacency. 

Today cinema deals with an immensely more complex society. 

And housing is a multifarious social issue in Bombay 

One that is tethered within a thick fabric of politics and spatial constraints. 

The majority of cinema shows us instead how the slums make for a 

charming #labyrinth for a hot a urban chase 

In 2018, #Kaala a film featuring the Tamil Superstar Rajnikanth speaks 

intensely about the slums of Mumbai and the housing crisis that the city 

65


faces. 

We delves into the deeply #political lives of the people of the slums. 

We begin to fight the established #top-down_approach to affordable 

housing. 

Because uprooting these slum dwellers could never be the solution 

Disruption of this housing meant disruptions of their economic backbone. 

Perhaps there never was anything wrong with the slums. 

Bombay kept looking at it like a reflection on a bad hair day. 

Hoping not to accidentally run into any mirrors on the way to work. 

The ideological shift from rehabilitation to upgradation marks a change 

in public attitude. 

The broad #complacency towards the lack of housing in Mumbai is 

waning. 

And the city the city is a black hole, forever ingesting migrants from rural 

India. 

Perhaps affordably housing all of the city’s 23 million inhabitants is a 

far-off challenge. 

What Bombay’s cinema shows us is not merely a collection of apt objects 

for study. 

Rather it is a #collective_vision_of_the_city 

And when viewed through its context reveals a peculiar urban domestic 

condition. 

Bombay’s houses continue to evolve recounting a different story each time. 

And the protagonist navigates the urban landscape, fighting the established 

hierarchies 

The home awaits in the background; ready to reconcile the difficult paths 

the hero has treaded. 

66


67


Music and Soundtrack 

Minimalism and Hindustani Classical Music 

The principle theme soundtrack that is to be used was selected 

from Passages the joint chamber music album between released in 

1990 by Pandit Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass. The counter-intuitive 

album written by the two maestros using arrangements 

by the other combines various musical styles into a single record. 

The album’s first song begins the film essay and is called Offering. 

A track that features multiple layers of minimalist saxophone 

from a classical Hindustani intuition eases us into the world of 

Bombay’s domestic spaces. We are somehow not intimidated by 

the breadth of the cinematic archive, nor the urban chaos that 

Bombay promises. The Shankar raga (“Shankar scale”) permits a 

rise in intensity towards the middle before strings subsume the 

entirety of the composition. Through the pensive respirations of 

the saxophones gradually increasing in tempo, it becomes evident 

how this track can be apt for a slow-paced minimalist meditation 

on the spaces of Bombay cinema. 

The second track to be introduced after the Bombay Talkies segment 

that ends with a father slapping his 8-year-old’s face is Ragas 

in Minor Scale. Composed by Glass, a veena is overlaid with cellos 

resulting in the steady cultivation of a mysterious mood. The 

dissonant orchestrations complement a mixture of the viewers’ 

confusion and discernment as the succeeding scenes depicting the 

haywire at the house of Raj Karan Yadav in Dharavi. The song 

appears to invoke through its minor scale a wistfulness for a space 

that could have been otherwise. The experiential lives of people 

like Raj Karan Yadav are deeply political and hang a breath away 

from turmoil. It is this futility of existence that the song communicates 

through its heavy strings and complex veena arrange- 

68


ments when superimposed over the visuals. 

Vande Mataram 

To use the original soundtrack from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... 

is to accept what is perhaps an unexpected transition from the 

dramatic Haveli on the festive day of Diwali of an aging Raichand 

family, to the city of London where Rohan Raichand arrives in 

search of his long-lost brother. Rohan is sporting a pair of jeans 

and a tight long-sleeved black t-shirt with a slit along the chest 

that exposes a faux orange inner-shirt. However while bombarded 

with new cultural images and multinational brands, he seems to be 

immediately nostalgic as he runs into classical dancers and women 

dressed in the Indian tricolours, saffron, white and green. The immediate 

yet recurring nostalgia, characterised by the film’s slogan 

“It’s all about loving your parents,” has been studied by multiple 

scholars (Mazumdar, 2007; Basu, 2010). However, it is perhaps 

best conveyed by the translation by Shri Aurobindo Ghosh of 

the original lyrics of the song redocumented in the book “Vande 

Mataram and Islam” by Aurobindo Mazumdar (2007): 

বন্দে মাতরম্৷ 

সুজলাং সুফলাং 

মলয়জশীতলাম্ 

শস্যশ্যামলাং 

মাতরম্! 

বন্দে মাতরম্৷. 

Mother, I praise thee! 

Rich with thy hurrying streams, 

bright with orchard gleams, 

69


Cool with thy winds of delight, 

Dark fields waving Mother of might, 

Mother free 

The theme of Vande Mataram recurs constantly in the film. The 

children born abroad are constantly reminded by their mothers 

of what the greatest country in the world is. As a matter of fact 

immediately after the song ends, we are transitioned to another 

patriotic song being sung by Anjali, Sare Jahan se Accha. The song, 

written by the poet Muhammad Iqbal in the ghazal style of Urdu 

poetry, is translated as follows (“Sare Jahan se Accha,” 2019): 

Better than the entire world, is our Hind, 

ارامہ ںاتسودنہ اھچا ےس ںاہج ےراس 

ارامہ ںاتسلگ ہی ‏،یک سا ںیہ ںیلبلب مہ 

ںیم نطو لد ےہ اتہر ‏،مہ رگا ںوہ ںیم تبرغ 

ارامہ ںاہج وہ لد یھب ںیمہ ںیہو وھجمس 

We are its nightingales, and it (is) our garden abode 

If we are in an alien place, the heart remains in the homeland, 

Know us to be only there where our heart is. 

M.I.A. and the Slum as a Labyrinth 

When London-born artist M.I.A. published the song Paper Planes 

in 2008, it achieved commercial success instantly. The song, included 

in numerous films, topping charts and being the number 2 

song on the Rolling Stone’s 100 songs for the 21 st century (Hermes 

et al., 2018), is apt here as when it was used by director Danny 

Boyle in a scene where five-year-old Salim says to five-year-old 

Jamal, “Let’s go. I’m starving,” both sitting atop a moving train in 

the middle of a rural India. As the song engulfs the aural environ- 

70


ment, we see Jamal and Salim, resourcefully making their way to 

earning a few rupees in order to buy food, playfully stealing food 

from a richer middle-class family’s train compartment and supposedly 

enjoying the poetry of the varying landscapes of rural 

India. 

Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Asia is famous also for its 

cinematic representation of its psychedelic spatial organisation. 

Capitalising on this maze-like structure various films have succeeded 

in bringing spatial interest to their films as in: the initial 

playful chase between slum children and a police officer in Slumdog 

Millionaire, a hypnotic and multi-paced chase between the Bombay 

police and Imtiaz Gawate a criminal suspect in Black Friday, and a 

chase between a policeman and a random thief in the song Dharavi 

Rap in Boothnath Returns. Although in Slumdog Millionaire, 

during the chase we hear the track O... Saya composed by famed 

Indian composer A.R. Rahman M.I.A., the downtempo slow rap 

of Paper Planes proves adequate for the compilation of the chase 

sequences. 

City Slums Slums 

Svetha Yellapragada Rao and Vivian Fernandes known respectively 

by their stage names, Raja Kumari and DIVINE, released a track 

named City Slums in 2017 through Sony Music Entertainment 

India Private Limited. The track takes off with a classic downtempo 

Los Angeles hip-hop beat sliding into the chorus performed 

by Raja Kumari, “It’s coming from the gully; It’s coming from the 

city slums slums.” The song pays homage to the underground hiphop 

culture that has gripped Dharavi and the slums of Bombay in 

the last two decades. Although first introduced in Hindi by Baba 

Sehgal, a rap artist from Lucknow (India), the underground scene 

exploded when songs like Aafat by Naezy and Mere Gully Mein 

by DIVINE featuring Naezy were uploaded onto YouTube for all 

71


of India to observe the exertion that life in the slums of Bombay 

denoted. The film Gully Boy (Akhtar, 2019) (slated to release February 

2019) outlines a fictional story played by Ranveer Singh and 

Alia Bhatt based on the lives of DIVINE and Naezy. What the 

hip-hop culture represents in Bombay is not only the extent and 

effects of globalisation on the lower class in Bombay, but also the 

temperament of the urban poor in the city. The rappers have been 

mocked for appropriating a culture that is far from theirs, but the 

identities of Bombay’s rappers stand resilient and unquestionable. 

The song can be utilised to end the film-essay at a higher tempo 

the from the climactic scene. 

Pacing with the Storyboard 

Contextualising the essay, we find ourselves with the scenes initially 

identified in chapter 2.1.1. In the film Slumdog Millionaire, 

Jamal is also looking for something, i.e., his lost love. As observers 

of the cinematic universe, we are looking for a place to begin 

within the dense, chaotic world of Bombay cinema. Similar to the 

identified frames, we are to find within the cinematic archive a 

series of relevant clips to both set a particular context or to transition 

between contexts. For instance, in order to set the idea of a 

Bombay home, the scene from the Zoya Akhtar segment on Lust 

Stories is used. To demonstrate the variability in housing typology, 

street scenes from Deewaar, a typical house from The Lunchbox, 

and shots from the scenic Haveli in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... 

can be utilised. In order to transition from the idea of the footpath 

as a home, to the scattering of domestic functions, the scene from 

Salaam Bombay! where one of Chaipau’s peers is urinating onto 

train tracks as an incoming train approaches. 

In a synthesis of the elements from the previous chapters, a graphically 

organised storyboard can function as a plan to begin the ed- 

72


iting process. Systematizing the relevant film segments onto the 

linear narrative defined in chapter 2.2, overlaid next with a recording 

of a voice-over performance of the text from chapter 2.3 

and reinforced lastly by the film and environmental music defined 

in chapter 2.4, we arrive at a linear story board (figure 2.14). The 

same figure can be used in order to revise the film-essay and make 

further cuts transitions. 

While it serves as a tool to systematically execute the editing process, 

the storyboard also serves as a tool for analysis and consequent 

adjustment of its composite elements. If we are to plot the 

tempo of the various audio tracks utilised throughout the film 

essay, we can arrive at a graph that reveals a precise trend over the 

presupposed 14-minute length. As clearly observable, the film-essay 

begins at a logically slow pace slightly less than 80 bpm (beats 

per minute) and works its way up to the middle where the pace rises 

to around 200 beats per minute, falls again and gradually rises 

until the climax where music is not played until the last moment. 

Hence, the pace chart does not provide us with an accurate image 

of the film-essay’s intensity. However, the chart does allow us to 

understand whether or not sufficient room is allotted between the 

various peaks in the bpm variations. 

Another valuable insight that the storyboard provides us with 

is the ability to visually recognise the equilibrium between the 

“guided” voice-over narratives and the “free” audio-visual-only 

narrative. The voice-over bar identified in red in figure 2.15 represents 

the balance between narrated segments and non-narrated 

segments. Although arriving at a rule of thumb is needless, it is 

patent that more than half of the film-essay must not be covered 

by the verbal narrative. Summing the total time engaged by 

the voice-over we find that it occupies around 8 minutes including 

reasonable interims for inhaling and exhaling, around 61% of 

the total length of the film-essay. Retaking the voice-over perfor- 

73


mance and re-adjusting the essay bringing the duration to around 

6 minutes, one finds a clearer flexibility granted to the visual as a 

communicative instrument. 

Editing 

Following the storyboard, the film was compiled on Premiere Pro, 

stitching together the elements outlined in chapter 2.6, creating 

a single, harmonious narrative. Five layers of video tracks were 

utilised as follows. V1: cinema segments, V2: overlapping cinema 

segments, V3: graphic elements (black boxes used to manage 

changes in aspect ratio between films) V4: subtitles and V5: APA 

style connotations that announce the film, director and year of 

release of each film. Three layers of audio tracks were utilised as 

follows. A1: the verbal narrative, A2: the voice-over and A3: the 

background music. 

Cuts and Transitions 

A variety of cutting techniques were utilised in order to transition 

between chapters and transitions. In a majority of cases, the 

most viable transition is the jump cut between two scenes of the 

same film, or two segments of different films. The technique lies 

in viewing the entire film essay as a series of cuts and transitions 

irrespective of lack of variation of the film, i.e., if a we are to 

transition into a 2-minute clip from a film that includes within it 

several jump cuts and crossfades, the corresponding transitions 

are to be regarded as transitions not within the film but within 

the film-essay itself. While typical cinematic jump cuts on action 

wouldn’t communicate the same idea as jumping between different 

films distorts the continuity that is being sought in jump cutting 

on action, it is still possible to implement them in order to transition 

between topics. 

74


The scene from Dharavi where the protagonist is seen using his 

public space outside his home in the slums of Dharavi to clean 

his car can be used to begin the film-essay as it contextualises the 

narrative and at the same time, allows us to exit the title screen 

at a different pace than what it was approached with. A similar 

technique would perhaps not be applicable for transitions that last 

longer durations such as the transition to London at the 5 minute 

45 second timestamp. The entire transition lasts around 4 seconds 

and features crossfading audio to gradually communicate what 

would otherwise be 15 hours of air travel. 

Transitioning Sound 

Audio transitions occur at key points as indicated on the storyboard 

in Figure 2.13. While in order to balance changes in key or 

scale as well as tempo, audios can be crossfaded, sudden changes 

if not accompanied by a corresponding visual or verbal change 

in the narrative sound forced. As the film ends and Anil Kapoor 

fires his handgun at Babia, calling out his misdeeds, the credits 

are played to the song City Slums by Raja Kumari featuring the 

Bombay rapper DIVINE. In this moment the gunshot warrants 

an abrupt start to the downtempo hip-hop beat as an opposing 

mood to the previously dramatic and tense crime-drama strings. 

On the contrary, the beginning to the slum-chases allows space for 

a fresh aural environment to be laid out. Paper Planes by M.I.A. 

is perhaps best begun in the silence of a dusty, warm afternoon in 

the city’s slums rather than transitioned to from a different song. 

This leads us to leave sufficient space before the start of the song 

without a different background soundtrack as shown in Figure 

2.13. 

75


Figure 2.11: The water-splashing-transition used to exit the title screen 

Figure 2.12: The crossfade transition used to move to London 

Figure 2.13: Silence and a dusty afternoon before Paper Planes by M.I.A. 

76


77

78


79

Part C: 

Conclusion 

80


Reflections 

What Bombay’s cinema shows us is not merely a collection of apt 

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 idea of the house is not 

one that is static throughout Bombay Cinema. What we observe 

as a constantly evolving domestic space is what is reflected also 

in the city. The various typologies that have been identified can 

be linked to various eras of Bombay’s growth as a city and Bollywood 

as a medium. Perhaps the first decade of the 21 st century 

was defined by unrealism and stars such as Shah Rukh Khan 

masquerading their societal roles as stars. Khan although at times 

claiming to be as unreal as his roles (Chopra, 2007, p. 221-2), and 

at other times claiming to be the king of the Bollywood itself 

(“Shah Rukh Khan,” 2019), is not the star of the hour as the second 

decade comes to a close. The newfound trends are changing 

rapidly in Bombay and its cinema. Social films that directly dealt 

with the domestic condition in Bombay never made it to the top 

of the box office. Films such as Traffic Signal, Chandni Bar, and 

Laaga Chunari Mein Daag tackled social issues but failed to grab 

large-scale national attention. It was with the beginning of underground 

success of the less popular anthology films such as 

Bombay Talkies and Lust Stories that stories that dealt directly 

with housing and Dharavi emerged. As of 2019, films like Kaala 

and Gully Boy (Akhtar, 2019) have begun to talk about the domestic 

condition of Bombay from a realist perspective. The complacency 

that was seen in popular films to social inequality at the turn 

of the century is waning and Indian cinema appears to trace its 

steps back to a period where it was a medium for social engagement 

and criticism. 

Every protagonist that navigates urban space in order to resolve 

81

Part C: Conclusion 

their respective conflicts, social metaphors or not, wafts through 

a variety of spaces within the urban landscape that all symbolise 

their own particular functions. The villain might symbolise corruption 

or internal battles. The streets may represent memory, 

childhood and nostalgia. And the home may represent security, 

conflict or reconciliation. 

One can always observe what the cinema tries 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. And 

slowly we see that the cinema and the city evolve together constantly, 

therapeutically emerging as a single vehicle for social introspection. 

Although the study is not chronological, the story builds itself 

around a timebound vision of Bombay Cinema. Introducing the 

city with its cinema to a global academic audience requires a 

well-structured narration that can combine both the wide extent 

of housing typology Bombay offers and the innumerable aspects 

of the city’s domesticity. The study skims over the various eras 

of Bollywood. Each era invariably brings its own observations. 

For instance, the “Golden Era” of Bombay Cinema with films like 

Mother India defining the cinematic aesthetic for decades to come 

was an age marked by experimentation within the stereotypical 

roles of women and men in storytelling where domesticity was 

not openly spoken about. Whether or not feminist roles were introduced 

were far from the important questions concerned with 

nation building at hand. This period was succeeded immediately 

both by socio-political unrest in the nation as well as a reflection of 

it in Bombay Cinema. The “classic” period that saw the rise of the 

“angry man” and the homeless or the “poor man”. The home functioned 

as a space that reconciled various urban synergies along the 

course of the film. The home functioned as a space to contextualise 

and punctuate an urban story. When Deewaar’s Vijay goes back 

82


to his mother after defeating a goon who runs a corrupt factory 

business, she mirrors the internal battles that Vijay fears; ones we 

as viewers are exempted from as Vijay stares blankly into space 

as his mother scolds him for getting into undue trouble. In Kabhi 

Khushi Kabhie Gham… the home, although flagrantly opposing in 

visual styles, plays a similar role. The Haveli denotes a different 

reality where wealth is overtly celebrated, but the hero’s struggle 

is similar. His urban journey corresponds to a different scale and 

his villain is perhaps the familial hierarchy itself. The hero’s father 

merely executes the hierarchy and the hero never despises him 

like the angry man despised the villain. The home however is the 

space that is meant to welcome transformation in characters’ personalities 

as well as keep up with the realist cinema aesthetic and 

ever-evolving plot. It measures and tracks progress in the hero’s 

journey. As the cinema industry continues to evolve, what is seen 

after the postmodern cinema from 1990-2010 is a return to an 

experimental view of the domestic space, used to reflect a more 

realist interpretation of the plight of housing in Bombay. 

Studying the Narrative 

Revisiting the Video Essay 

The audio-visual product published along with this written manual 

is one that captures the highlights of the observational study 

and transcribes it onto video from the specific movies being referred 

to in each chapter. As the essay film walks us through the 

various topics of interest, what is observed are truncated portions 

of films that are overlapped by a verbal narrative that introduce a 

variety of certain viewpoints that are outlined within a predefined 

theoretical framework and project scope. The essay film itself 

shares the very format it is assessing. And just as Bombay films 

83


are punctuated with drama, dance, music and silence, so is the essay 

film. 

Contending with an assortment of domestic parameters, housing 

typologies and film genres, the film essay organises the extracted 

archive clips in a manner that doesn’t communicate any single one 

of the organising structures, rather what is communicated is a single 

amalgamated is done so through a unique product that intertwines 

the three. Although not divided exhaustively into chapters, 

the film essay can be divided into sub-topics that are addressed or 

tagged in a recurring manner. However, the effectiveness of the 

film-essay as a medium lies in its ability to transmit the observed 

ideas and bring them to a conclusion through a well-balanced audio-visual 

and verbal dialogue. 

Looking for Balance 

Although the film essay is a medium that is composed of multiple 

media elements, the final audio-visual is in itself its own media, 

and this could require scrutiny from a similar perspective. However, 

what one finds when continuing this exercise is that there is 

a weighted interplay between the various overlaid elements that 

defines the communicative potential of the essay film. Visually, 

the essay film is more consistent. There is seldom overlap between 

multiple videos let alone there be a specific necessity to demonstrate 

a comparison between multiple clips. However, within the 

aural arrangement, there is a more convoluted dynamic. The clips 

from cinema, while found to generally contain audio punctuated 

with dialogue and silence, often contain music. This needs to fare 

well with the common thread that ties together all the selected 

clips. While moments of silence appear to come from within the 

studied film, they are actually part of the essay film. As the gears 

work together, a variety of mechanisms appear to arise. Firstly, 

there is the reflexive function of silence that brings the viewer 

84


into the image on the screen. Then there is the ambient function 

of music that defines a particular emotion or a mixture thereof. 

And finally there is dialogue that either uses language to directly 

provoke thought, or indirectly. 

Roleplaying 

Upon watching the essay film, the viewer is aware of its nature 

as a compilation video. However, the essay-film functions just as 

any other complete storytelling means and the proportions of 

audio-visual to verbal narration were negotiated in order to arrive 

at a suitable balance. However, throughout the investigation, 

what was repeatedly necessary was a constant and fluid switching 

between various roles that needed to be adopted as a researcher. 

Primarily, the researcher was to play the data collector and archivist. 

But once, the data was organised, immediately, the means of 

production were to permit that the researcher also play the director 

who would then coordinate between the editor, the writer, the 

narrator and the music director. 

Final Meditations 

Concluding the film essay, the film depicts a movie scene being 

watched by a public from Dharavi. The scene being watched is an 

action sequence that involves a preamble delivered by Anil Kapoor. 

It is a speech overflowing with anger and cathartic frustration. 

Perhaps this scene accurately positions Bombay cinema, housing 

in Bombay and the everyday struggles of the common people of 

the city into light. As one of the women wistfully watch a scene 

bursting with emotion, we see the extent of the crisis of modernity 

in the globalised city of Bombay; one that is riddled with 

fear, hunger and corruption. And as the public watch the story of 

their own lives told through furious style, what pretends to be an 

85


auspicious and historic event is easily burned down by fire. The 

common person is snapped out of a fantasy, and the laborious machinery 

of city life retakes its familiar course. Along the already 

explored lines, there is still much research to be conducted in order 

to come to a conclusion of the precise nature of the ever-evolving 

relationship between home and cinema. Ethnographic studies that 

involve Bombay’s citizens and the film they interact with are key. 

Such studies have already been carried out (Rao, 2007; Massoumi, 

2017) but they are lacking in their focus on the socio-economic 

weight that housing in Bombay warrants in sociological studies. 

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema intends to reveal how film study 

can work as a means of social development and introspection. 

What is attempted throughout the study is both a comprehensive 

and open approach to urban study and in this case in particular, 

domesticity in the city of Bombay. The post-globalised city with 

its bustling dynamic and ever-growing technological capabilities 

will be one that either grows close or away from the society that 

inhabits it. The cinema industry, that has long been tied to the 

society as a social means of reflection, should continue to remain 

a social medium as it is made either by or for the very society that 

consumes the media in vast magnitudes. While the both evolve together 

gradually, what will be observed is either a symmetrical development, 

or developments that drift apart from one another. In 

either case, the evolution of the relationship between cinema and 

city is of paramount academic value, providing the observer with 

a logic to scrutinise both the society, and the society’s reflection of 

itself through a medium that it produces. Unquestionably, what is 

most obvious from Bombay’s films is that an archetypical Bombay 

home doesn’t exist. The domestic space of the typical Bombay 

home instead constantly awaits the next appropriate script wherein 

it can be reflected as the outspoken yet ordinary space that its 

proports to be. 

86


87

88 

Appendices


89

90


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Audiovisual References 

Films Referenced 

Following is a list of all cinema referenced within the study. 

Raja Harishchandra (1913) 

Directed: Dadasaheb Phalke 

Produced: Dadasaheb Phalke 

Written: Dadasaheb Phalke 

98


Duniya Na Mane (1937) 

Directed: V. Shantaram Rajaram, Vankudre Shantaram 

Produced: Prabhat Film Company 

Written: Narayan Hari Apte (novel & screenplay), Munshi Aziz 

(dialogue) 

Mother India (1957) 

Directed: Mehboob Khan 

Produced: Mehboob Khan 

Written: Mehboob Khan, Wajahat Mirza, S. Ali Raza 

Hiroshima, My Love (1959) 

Directed: Alain Resnais 

Produced: Samy Halfon, Anatole Dauman 

Written: Marguerite Duras 

Guide (1965) 

Directed: Vijay Anand 

Produced: Dev Anand 

Written: Vijay Anand 

Weekend (1967) 

Directed: Jean-Luc Godard 

Written: Jean-Luc Godard 

Shame (1968) 

Directed: Ingmar Bergman 

Produced: Ingmar Bergman 

Zanjeer (1973) 

Directed: Prakash Mehra 

Produced: Prakash Mehra Productions 

Written: Salim Khan, Javed Akhtar 

99

Deewaar (1975) 

Directed: Yash Chopra 

Produced: Gulshan Rai 

Written: Gulshan Rai 

Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) 

Directed: Manmohan Desai 

Produced: Manmohan Desai 

Written: Kader Khan (dialogue), K.K. Shukla (scenario) 

Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978) 

Directed: Prakash Mehra 

Produced: Prakash Mehra 

Written: Kader Khan, Vijay Kaul, Laxmikant Sharma 

Suhaag (1979) 


Produced: Rajinder Kumar Sharma, Ramesh Sharma, Shakti Subhash 

Sharma, Prakash Trehan 

Written: Kader Khan, Prayag Raj, K.K. Shukla 

Inquilaab (1984) 

Directed: Rama Rao Tatineni 

Produced: N. Veeraswamy, V. Ravichandran 

Written: M.D. Sunder 

Mard (1985) 


Produced: Manmohan Desai 

Written: Inder Raj Anand, Pushpa Raj Anand, Sohel Don, Anil 

Nagrath, Prayag Raj, K.K. Shukla 

Salaam Bombay! (1988) 

Directed: Mira Nair 

Produced: Mira Nair, Gabriel Auer 

100


Written: Mira Nair, Sooni Taraporevala 

Parinda (1989) 

Directed: Vidhu Vinod Chopra 

Produced: Vidhu Vinod Chopra 

Written: Shiv Kumar Subramaniam, Vidhu Vinod Chopra 

Dharavi (1992) 

Directed: Sudhir Mishra 

Produced: Ravi Malik 

Written: Sudhir Mishra 

Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994) 

Directed: Sooraj Barjatya 

Produced: Ajit Kumar Barjatya, Kamal Kumar Barjatya, Rajkumar 

Barjatya 

Written: Sooraj Barjatya 

Bombay (1995) 

Directed: Mani Ratnam 

Produced: S. Sriram, Mani Ratnam (Uncredited), Jhamu Sughand 

Written: Mani Ratnam 

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) 

Directed: Aditya Chopra 

Produced: Yash Chopra 

Written: Aditya Chopra 

Dil To Pagal Hai (1997) 

Directed: Yash Chopra 

Produced: Yash Chopra, Aditya Chopra 

Written: Aditya Chopra, Tanuja Chandra, Pamela Chopra, Yash 

Chopra 

101

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) 

Directed: Karan Johar 

Produced: Yash Johar 

Written: Karan Johar 

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… (2001) 


Produced: Yash Johar 

Written: Karan Johar, Sheena Parikh 

Baghban (2003) 

Directed: Ravi Chopra 

Produced: B. R. Chopra 

Written: B. R. Chopra, Achala Nagar, Satish Bhatnagar, Ram Govind, 

Shafiq Ansari 

Black Friday (2004) 

Directed: Anurag Kashyap 

Produced: Arindam Mitra 

Written: Anurag Kashyap 

Chameli (2004) 

Directed: Anant Balani, Sudhir Mishra 

Produced: Pritish Nandy Communications 

Written: Anant Balani, Swanand Kirkire 

Don (2006) 

Directed: Farhan Akhtar 

Produced: Ritesh Sidhwani, Farhan Akhtar 

Written: Javed Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar 

102


Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006) 


Produced: Hiroo Yash Johar, Karan Johar 

Written: Karan Johar, Shibani Bathija, Niranjan Iyengar 

Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007) 

Directed: Pradeep Sarkar 

Produced: Aditya Chopra 

Written: Rekha Nigam, Aditya Chopra 

Life in a... Metro (2007) 

Directed: Anurag Basu 

Produced: Ronnie Screwvala 

Written: Sanjeev Dutta (dialogue), Anurag Basu 

Jodhaa Akbar (2008) 

Directed: Ashutosh Gowariker 

Produced: Ronnie Screwvala, Ashutosh Gowariker 

Written: K. P. Saxena, Haidar Ali, Ashutosh Gowariker 

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 

Directed: Danny Boyle 

Produced: Christian Colson 

Written: Simon Beaufoy 

Dhobi Ghat (2011) 

Directed: Kiran Rao 

Produced: Tshephel Namgyal, Aamir Khan, Dhillin Mehta 

Written: Anil Mehta, Kiran Rao 

The Dirty Picture (2011) 

Directed: Milan Luthria 

Produced: Ekta Kapoor, Shobha Kapoor 

103

Written: Rajat Aroraa 

No One Killed Jessica (2011) 

Directed: Raj Kumar Gupta 

Produced: Ronnie Scewvala 

Written: Raj Kumar Gupta 

Kahaani (2012) 

Directed: Sujoy Ghosh 

Produced: Sujoy Ghosh, Kushal Kantilal Gada 

Written: Sujoy Ghosh 

Student of the Year (2012) 


Produced: Hiroo Yash Johar, Gauri Khan 

Written: Niranjan Iyengar (dialogue), Rensil D’Silva 

Bombay Talkies (2013) 

Directed: Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, Anurag 

Kashyap 

Produced: Ashi Dua 

Written: Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, Anurag 

Kashyap, Reema Kagti 

The Attacks of 26/11 (2013) 

Directed: Ram Gopal Varma 

Produced: Parag Sanghvi 

Written: Ram Gopal Varma, Rommel Rodrigues 

The Great Beauty (2013) 

Directed: Paolo Sorrentino 

Produced: Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Fabio Conversi 

Written: Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello 

104


The Lunchbox (2013) 

Directed: Ritesh Batra 

Produced: Arun Rangachari, Anurag Kashyap, Guneet Monga, 

Karan Johar, Siddharth Roy Kapur, Meraj Shaikh, Vikramjit Roy, 

Danis Tanovic 

Written: Ritesh Batra 

Bhoothnath Returns (2014) 

Directed: Nitesh Tiwari 

Produced: Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar, Renu Ravi Chopra 

Written: Nitesh Tiwari, Piyush Gupta, Vivek Sharma 

Bajirao Mastani (2015) 

Directed: Sanjay Leela Bhansali 

Produced: Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Kishore Lulla 

Written: Prakash R. Kapadia 

Kaala (2018) 

Directed: P. Ranjith 

Produced: Dhanush 

Written: Pa. Ranjith, Aadhavan Dheetchanya, Makizhnan B. M. 

(Dialogues) 

Lust Stories (2018) 

Directed: Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan 

Johar 

Produced: Ronnie Screwvala, Ashi Dua 

Padmaavat (2018) 

Directed: Sanjay Leela Bhansali 

Produced: Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Sudhanshu Vats, Ajit Andhare 

Written: Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Prakash Kapadia 

105

Gully Boy (2019) 

Directed: Zoya Akhtar 

Produced: Ritesh Sidhwani, Zoya Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar 

Written: Vijay Maurya (Dialogue), Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti 

Online Audiovisual References 

Dharavi Hustle: Official Documentary - YouTube. (2016). Retrieved 

January 12, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/ 

watch?v=ecuJVG0zPl0&t=4s 

Documentary - The Way Of Dharavi 2014 - YouTube. (2015). 

Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/ 

watch?v=s_0X0wIvqVM&t=919s 

Kya Bolta Bantai? - The Rise of Mumbai Rap - YouTube. (2019). 

Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/ 

watch?v=pbH0PV5BLNI&list=PLWb3Myrd0SaUMY63lsg3aFaMXPgGYVndz 

Mere Gully Mein - DIVINE feat. Naezy | Official Music Video 

With Subtitles - YouTube. (2015). Retrieved January 12, 2019, 

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bK5dzwhu-I 

My Daily Life in the SLUMS OF MUMBAI (Life-Changing 5 

Days) - YouTube. (2018). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8AnqSOih0 

We Spent A Day In The Largest Slum In India | ASIAN BOSS 

- YouTube. (2018). Retrieved January 12, 2019, from https:// 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJylLFoJmxA 

106


Documentaries and T.V. Series 

The Peacock Screen (1991) 

Directed: Laurens C. Postma 

Produced: Phillip Bartlett Mahmood Jamal 

Written: Firdous Ali 

Dharavi, Slum for Sale (2010) 

Directed: Lutz Konermann 

Produced: Pierre Assouline, Christof Neracher, Thomas Thümena, 

Helmut Weber 

Written: Robert Appleby 

Kevin McCloud: Slumming It (2010) 

Directed: Helen Simpson 

Produced: Channel 4 

Written: Kevin McCloud 

Vertical City (2011) 

Director: Avijit Mukul Kishore 

Producer: Rajiv Mehrotra 

107


A

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

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