Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
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
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