Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
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