Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part B: The Film-Essay
becomes evident how urban space is continually recycled in order
to accommodate traditionally domestic functions. Raj Karan Yadav
(Om Puri) plays a taxi driver struggling to steer between his
career as a driver and his ambitions to buy a factory. As he splashes
water on his taxi to clean it (00:05:50:06), we are subsequently
introduced to his immediate neighbourhood; one similar in scale
to a plaza of an Italian village, populated however by shabbier
asbestos ceilings.
This rural nature of the city although pointed out in the threepart
documentary The Peacock Screen (Jamal, 1991) as well as by
psychologist Ashis Nandy (1998, p. 7), can be observed not only
through the indisposition in migrant communities to accept the
morality of the urbanised city but also in the very architecture
of the city. The footpath in Bombay has been seen to embody this
rural Indianness to the extent that it allows for Bombay Cinema’s
imagination to create enthralling narratives around this urban element
(Mazumdar, p.4).
The city itself is marked, even scarred, by the fuzziness
of lines between the “urban” and the “rural.” In
imaginative terms, the “village” is never absent from
everyday life in the city. The narrative of migration
and departure from home is a key part of urban life.
In the much studied Deewaar (Chopra, 1975), the site of familial
conflict defined the idea of domesticity for the protagonist, Vijay
(Amitabh Bachchan). Vijay and his brother Ravi (Shashi Kapoor)
are brought to the city by their mother in a frantic reaction to an
air of hopelessness inflicted upon them by political riots in their
hometown. Bombay was to be their saviour and its footpath beneath
a bridge, their new home. Vijay confronts various instances
of violence throughout the film and throughout the city, but
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