Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
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
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