Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
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
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