Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
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
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