Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
ciety’s preconceptions of femininity. Fearlessness and women’s
anger were often the expected domestic character in cinema. The
females played often authoritative mothers who sought to climb
the power hierarchy of the family tree. As individualism rose, and
women stopped playing queens of the Haveli, owning a housemaid
instead became the new middle-class aspiration.
The house is often deeply tied to the #livelihoods of the lower
middle class. It is used by cinema to describe a specific socio-economic
story. The #homeless protagonist negotiates the political
landscape and often uses their living-on-the-#footpath as a metaphor
that justifies the use of violence as therapy. For their suffering
needs no justification. It is the city that is harsh. And the
domestic condition of the slums verily fuels anger against the established
systems of power in the inevitably corrupt city. When
cinema shows us instead the settled-abroad, complacent lives of
the “middle-class” what we find is a socio-economic ambiguity that
opposes the rural tendency to rely on livelihoods for storytelling.
The Bombay home is #private insofar that it separates public spaces
of the city from the familial, protected space of a home. However,
the city’s density means that intimacy is not always achieved
easily. In fact, while the city is populated with an extremely large
number of houses, the amount of intimate spaces is scarce. They
are scattered into various pockets of the city where intimacy is
either rented or borrowed. Sexual expression is a constant slave
of this domestic situation.
In Life in a... Metro (Basu, 2007), the character Rahul, played by
Sharman Joshi, owns a lavish apartment space in downtown Bombay.
We get a glimpse of Rahul’s job as one that exerts diligence
and discipline and his home inevitably, a luxuriant 2- or 3-bedroom
apartment with wide corridors and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Rahul, being a single successful man, lives alone. His house
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