Dwelling in (on) Bombay Cinema

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema An Analysis of Postcolonial Domesticity in Bombay Through a Reading of Bollywood

Author: Akshid Rajendran Tutors: Atxu Amann y Alcocer & Samuel Fuentes Trabajo Fin de Máster Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

To an inaccessible domesticity from the past, obsessed with Bollywood.

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Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Table of Contents PART A: Foundations ....................................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Preface to the Study ........................................................................................................... 8 1.1.1 Hypothesis and Objectives ....................................................................................................9 1.1.2

Project Scope ......................................................................................................................... 10

1.2 Theoretical Framework .................................................................................................. 11 1.2.1 To Dwell in Bombay is to Survive ................................................................................... 11 1.2.2

Domesticity in Bombay Cinema........................................................................................ 17

1.3 Confronting the Archives ............................................................................................... 20 1.3.1 The Image on the Screen.................................................................................................... 20 1.3.2

Selecting and Identifying Films ........................................................................................ 21

1.3.3

Identifying Parameters ....................................................................................................... 21

1.4 Communication Strategy and Methodology .............................................................. 25 1.4.1 The Format............................................................................................................................ 26 1.4.2

The Narrative........................................................................................................................ 26

1.4.3

Editing .................................................................................................................................... 27

PART B: The Film-Essay .............................................................................................................. 28 2.1 Constructing the Narrative............................................................................................ 29 2.1.1 Finding a Home in the City ............................................................................................... 29 2.1.2

The City is not Wholeheartedly Urban .......................................................................... 30

2.1.3

Scattered Domesticity ......................................................................................................... 32

2.1.4

Maids, Housewives and Queens of the Havelis ............................................................. 34

2.1.5

Storytelling in the Scenic Haveli ...................................................................................... 35

2.1.6

Another Surrealist Escape from Urban Claustrophobia ............................................. 37

2.1.7

Social Reform in Bombay and Cinema ............................................................................ 40

2.1.8

The Deeply Political Lives of the Urban Poor .............................................................. 42

2.1.9

The Antagonist and Personifying Power ....................................................................... 44

2.2 Structuring the Essay...................................................................................................... 47 2.2.1 Achieving Narrative Fluidity ............................................................................................ 47 2.2.2

Guided and “Free” Storytelling ........................................................................................ 50

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2.3 The Verbal Essay ............................................................................................................. 52 2.3.1 Prelude to the Text.............................................................................................................. 52 2.3.2

The Text ................................................................................................................................ 52

2.4 Music and Soundtrack .................................................................................................... 56 2.4.1 Minimalism and Hindustani Classical Music ................................................................ 56 2.4.2

Vande Mataram .................................................................................................................... 56

2.4.3

M.I.A. and the Slum as a Labyrinth ................................................................................. 58

2.4.4

City Slums Slums ................................................................................................................. 58

2.5

Setting and Transitioning .............................................................................................. 59

2.6

Pacing with the Storyboard ........................................................................................... 60

2.7 Editing ............................................................................................................................... 62 2.7.1 Cuts and Transitions ........................................................................................................... 62 2.7.2

Transitioning Sound............................................................................................................ 63

PART C:

Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 65

3.1

Reflections......................................................................................................................... 66

3.2 Studying the Narrative ................................................................................................... 68 3.2.1 Revisiting the Video Essay ................................................................................................ 68 3.2.2 3.3

Looking for Balance ............................................................................................................. 68

Final Meditations............................................................................................................. 69

List of Annexes ................................................................................................................................ 71 3.1

Bibliography...................................................................................................................... 72

3.2

Webpages .......................................................................................................................... 76

3.3

Film Database ................................................................................................................... 78

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List of Figures Figure 1.1: An archetypical street in the slums of Bombay.

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Figure1.2: A still from ‘Vertical City’ (Kishore, 2010) depicting the dystopia of slum rehabilitation architecture and obsolete buildings.

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Figure 1.3: A still from the viral song, “Mere Gully Mein”

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performed by DIVINE and Naezy, rappers from the “streets” of Dharavi and proponents of Bombay’s hip-hop culture Figure 2.1: A still from Lust Stories depicting, from a low-

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angle shot, the silence that populates a middle-class house during a typical working day.

Figure 2.2: A scene from Salaam Bombay! depicting the amalgamated nature of the footpath

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Figure 2.3: A scene from Salaam Bombay! showing a young girl who is asked to wait outside her house as her mother, an

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escort, is teasing a client Figure 2.4: Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham... used spatial vastness to reinforce ideas of social and familial hierarchy

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Figure 2.5: Rohan Raichand (Hrithik Roshan) struts down a street in London with a dozen women assisting him in forgetting the urban chaos in Bombay, but remembering the colours of the Indian flag. Source: Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham...

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Figure 2.6: Vicky’s father storms towards him as he dances, cross-dressed, his family watching him amused and

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unsuspecting. Source: Bombay Talkies.

Figure 2.7: Krishna from Salaam Bombay! buys a ticket to Bombay before he becomes Chaipau, the teaboy.

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Figure 2.8: A scene featuring Anil Kapoor being watched in a

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theatre in Dharavi reclaiming the life of his mother and his destroyed criminal lifestyle from Babia, a random underworld don.

Figure 2.9: the initially identified parameters have interconnections that can assist in finding narrative fluidity

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Figure 2.10: The newly created chapters intertwine the initial parameters in a seamless fashion

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Figure 2.11: Structuring the linear narrative

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Figure 2.12: Initial Structure of the narrative

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Figure 2.13: Final storyboard

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Figure 2.14: The water-splashing-transition used to exit the title screen

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Figure 2.15: The crossfade transition used to move to

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London Figure 2.16: Silence and a dusty afternoon before Paper Planes by M.I.A.

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Figure 3.1: A chart showing the chronological organisation of Bombay Cinema from the 1950s to the 2000s (Wright, 2017, p. 22)

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Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

PART A:

Foundations Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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1.1 Preface to the Study With the intention of addressing the condition of the “dwelling” in the city of Bombay, now Mumbai (India), through an analytical criticism of the cinema shot and produced in the city, Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema elaborates an experiment in architectural communication involving a practical undertaking, succeeded by a theoretical reflection.

The film industry of Bombay, not including its success as a diverse and interdisciplinary medium of mass entertainment, has been an object of academic scrutiny for decades (Chakravarty, 1989; Prasad, 2000; Mishra, 2002; Wright, 2017). The film industry produces close to 400 films every year, accounting to about 43% of the net turnout of Indian cinema (“Bollywood revenues may cross Rs 19,300 cr by FY17,” 2016). It is this vast number of films that constitutes the alternate realm of the “cinematic Bombay” and it is precisely this “Bombay” that will be explored throughout this investigation.

The study deals with the symbolic relationship between cinema and city. While much has been written about this “power-couple” (Leigh & Kenny, 1996; Clarke, 1997; Sawhney, 2012; Edelman, 2016), the precise nature of their relationship is constantly in flux. Cinema is known to influence cities and their visual identities, economies and built environments (Shiel, 2011, p.2). The city, on the other hand, simultaneously gives place to the movie, helps in storytelling, and in some cases, as does Rome in The Great Beauty (Sorrentino, 2013), Hiroshima in Hiroshima, My Love (Resnais, 1959) and the fictitious Gotham city in the film adaptations of the Batman DC comic book series, the city is found to seemingly become a vital part of the original cast.

The object of concern in this study is not the entire city, rather it focusses on the domestic scale. The house, although assertively varying in typology both in cinema, is often the primary seat of the character’s urban adventures. The characters are found to scale the urban arena in an attempt to combat the sociocultural dynamics found within the city and the film, only to return home repeatedly as a necessary means of recovery. Puzzlingly, to actually find a house in the city is a challenging process that films generally assume for granted. It is well known that housing in developing cities like Bombay is a multifarious social issue. Bombay experiences wide disparities in housing conditions between the affluent and the lower-middle income groups living in the city. Despite a vibrant economic growth in the city since independence (“GDP growth (annual %) | Data,” 2019), housing conditions have not improved proportionately in postcolonial Bombay (Appadurai, 2000, p. 629). With comfortable living conditions accessible at a premium and the working class often residing in cramped and poor-

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quality spaces, the poor inevitably take to the footpaths. Notwithstanding this crippling housing crisis, Bombay continues to attract migrants in search of new opportunities (“2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects,” 2018), causing further demands in housing, thereby contributing to a cycle that becomes increasingly difficult to disrupt.

To dwell “in” Bombay is to confront this reality of urban claustrophobia. It is to innocently step into the city, attempting to search for order from within the chaotic, oily machine that is Bombay.

To dwell “on” Bombay is reflect on its cinema. It is to confront an alternate reality and therefore to dive into the depths of one the largest resources available to use for social introspection in the city.

The study is carried out in a way that facilitates its own communication. There are two components to the envisioned final product: a. An audio-visual product combining content from a selection of Bombay films is to help create a narrative wherein the viewer is to glimpse the “dwelling” in Bombay solely through its story told by Bombay cinema. b. A verbal or textual account of the investigation process.

Owing to cinema’s complexity, and the absence of an instruction manual, in order to attain full functioning capacity as a legitimate resource, the tools used to interpret cinema need to be constantly reinvented. Although the final audio-visual product can exist on its own, it must, whenever possible, be accompanied by a pictorial, graphic or the following verbal account of the process of investigation as a necessary means to facilitate the use of cinema as an archival resource in urban study.

1.1.1 Hypothesis and Objectives Although the issue of housing in Bombay invokes is complex and distressing, there is a certain clarity that arises from consolidating the relationship between city and cinema. The city is clearly not perfect. In its entirety, the city is a damaged organism because its constituent units are damaged. The city is thus required to regularly heal itself through various methods of introspection. Out of precisely this triangular link between cinema, city and introspection, one can thereby hypothesize the following: Bombay cinema can function as an effective, valuable and interdisciplinary resource in order to better visualize the city’s urban domestic condition and its various facets.

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Synthesizing the need to communicate the analysis in order to create knowledge that contributes to the body of academic investigations into housing in Bombay and additionally, if Bombay cinema were to indeed be a legitimate means to study the same, the primary objective becomes evident: To communicate the domestic condition of the “dwelling” in Bombay through a reading of its cinema using an audio-visual discourse to an urban and academic audience.

1.1.2 Project Scope The following study is developed within the Master in Architectural Communication programme at the Technical University in Madrid.

The project proposed is an exercise in architectural communication wherein the product (the audio-visual) is designed to convey the findings of an analytical study to a partly pre-defined public. The study doesn’t merely involve communicating existing observations. Rather, the observations themselves are organised with an awareness of their capability of being communicated.

The communication message, in this case from a constructionist point of view, should include both the product and the developmental process within the product itself.

The project shall consist of two phases: the first including the research within the realm of Bombay’s cinematic universe including popular cinema shot and recording in Bombay.

Consequently, the second phase involves production of the communicable product using digital film editing proceeded by an analytical critique of the same product in order to arrive at the relevant conclusions.

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1.2 Theoretical Framework 1.2.1 To Dwell in Bombay is to Survive Those few people who have had the privilege to find a home in Bombay would recognise merely by stepping out of their houses that to find intimacy and shelter in the city is not undemanding.

Paradoxically, a city like Bombay, with its unconstrained urban velocity, is precisely one that requires, more than any other, that the city’s housing market be highly operational. By simply observing the city’s traits, immediately what we find is an eccentric disjunction; one that has often been attributed to the coalescing between the dynamisms of corrupt politics, real-estate investors or arbitragers, and organised crime networks (Appadurai, 2000, p. 648). To address this asymmetry in the availability of the basic human necessity of a dwelling is to demand that the city self-medicate, that it consciously take on a process of self-inquiry and introspection, one that the city is evidently already engaged with. However, delving deeper into this process, we find that there are innumerable tools that can be used to help us with our task of introspection.

On one hand we have oceans of academic scientific literature on the domestic condition of Bombay (Sen, 1976; Appadurai, 2000; Dwivedi, 2001; Padora, 2016). On the other hand, we have an immense, alternate archive of documentation of an altered reality of Bombay in the form of literary and cinematic fiction. These alternate imaginaries have repeatedly given us insight into a Bombay that we previously struggled to find access to (Upstone, 2007; Mazumdar, 2007; Raj & Sreekumar, 2017). Consequently, finding ourselves strung between two universes we can enable ourselves to bring a more meditated and considerate discernment into the complex matter of what it means to dwell in Bombay.

When Heidegger, in the setting of the poetics of domesticity, morphologically analysed the German word “bauen” (2009, p. 145), what this meant for readers was a consolidation of two concepts, i.e., to “dwell” and to “exist.” The act of inhabiting the earth became the very meaning of human existence and thereby, the verb “to inhabit” began to assume a similar connotation as the verb “to be.” To dwell however is not simply to occupy space. To confront the complexities of manifesting one’s own shelter in flawless harmony with one’s environment is to begin to dwell. This very hypothesis of shelter is one that postulates the moral superiority of order over chaos. The house tends to, in addition to providing technological shelter from nature’s climatic turmoil, create order against nature’s spatiotemporal sense. Houses permit orderly human activity not only spatially within the city but also temporally within human lives. It has been pointed out that the phrase “to go back home” uses the word “back” in a non-instinctive fashion to express future arrival (Dovey, 1985, p. 37). What Dovey emphasised as the house’s sinusoidal nature along a constant time continuum was further explored in the same issue of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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Home Environments centring on several dimensions of domestic temporality (Werner, Altman, & Oxley, 1985). The house occupies infinite places on a linear timeline. But perhaps time is not meant to be seen as linear. The periodic temperament of time is perhaps tremendously more significant to human life and its cyclicity. The author, Salman Rushdie, in his magical realist masterpiece, Midnight’s Children (1981) which was set partly in postcolonial Bombay and furthermore through later essays (Rushdie, 1991, p. 12), has emphasized how our homes can become a temporal place from the past. Affectionately, he identifies his readers as immigrants of this distant country that presently manages to share a common humanity. The identity of the “home” thereby becomes amorphous over time, rendering perhaps its momentary functions more stable objects of observation insofar as they be viewed outside of their larger context of human life.

Phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has argued that the primary function of home is to allow the human being to observe or to “daydream”, going on further to verbalise his objective as (Bachelard, Jolas, & Stilgoe, 1994, p. 6): Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another.

The role that the house is to assume in Bachelard’s study, and his principle of integration is reminiscent of the experientialist, mathematical theory of information integration of consciousness (Tononi, 2008). Tononi does not speak of domesticity. He does however assist us in verbalising what Descartes was confused about in his meditations, i.e., that there is an “internal” subjective experience that can be observed while observing the “outside” world. For Bachelard, this was the role that daydreaming would play. So important was this role that the entire function of the house was to provide the peacefulness necessary to conduct this daydreaming. Concurrently, a utilitarian view of the primary function of the house as shelter was not incompatible with the phenomenological view. Rather it was rudimentary. The spatiotemporal order that the house intends to impose arises from a predictable set of human necessities. Cleanliness, nurture, nutrition, self-identity and belongingness all have a footing in domestic space.

Subject to a multitude of socio-political tensions in the Bombay after independence, what it meant it have some place in the city to “go back to” and to sleep at was in constant flux.

Urbanisation simply meant urgently moving into the most affordable home in the city, irrespective of its discomfort, and building one’s way up a familiar social hierarchy, found today in most globalised metropolitan cities. For some, this openness and scalability of the social

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hierarchy was a new liberation in contrast to rural religious hierarchies that assigned hierarchical positions by the mere luck of birth (Dumont & Sainsbury, 2010, p.83). For others it was just a matter of confronting the city’s chaotic answers to the question of basic human necessities. However, Bachelard’s notion of daydreaming was out of question. Even as the city was populated with millions of comfortable houses and apartments, the spaces between these homes came to shelter not an insignificant proportion of the population, but half of the city’s population (Lewis, 2015). They lived either in shanty, ad-hoc, handmade (not the romantic kind) shelters or directly on the streets. Today footpaths accommodate a large percent of Bombay’s residential as well as commercial activity.

Figure 1.1: An archetypical street in the slums of Bombay.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/urbzoo/29001316384/ 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, 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, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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the homeless have been handled in literature and film as the definition of inner conflict (Nandy, 2007, p. 25). However Nandy exposing the celebration of homelessness in the Bombay’s imaginaries cannot consist of the substantial ethnographic study on the topic of homelessness that is so necessary in cities like 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 generally easily thwarted by opposing stakeholders (Shlay & Rossi, 1992, p. 132). Nevertheless, homelessness seems to only be approached sociopolitically while it is really a story of familial conflict, social oppression, inaccessibility to hygiene or basic infrastructure, and a largely overlooked exclusion from their communities.

While psychologically, the homeless are often described as lacking identity (Nair & Raghavan, 2014), the “pavement” and “slum” dwellers are empowering labels that have fuelled social movements within localities like Dharavi.

It is not usually the homeless’ lives that are of academic interest. Various documentaries, videoessays and film essays have been produced exposing the lives of the slums of Bombay, some professionally made while others made by tourists. Dharavi, Slum for Sale (Konermann, 2010) introduces Dharavi to strangers, from its origins to its rise as an economic powerhouse in Bombay. The documentary exposes the perceived futility of the lives of the people of Dharavi and their threat of eviction favouring the Maharashtrian government’s decision to use Dharavi land for economic benefit in public-private partnership projects under the image of slum rehabilitation.

A similar story is told in Vertical City (Kishore, 2010), a visual essay that outlines the dystopic vertical rehabilitative architecture proposed for slum dwellers. The documentary successfully communicates the spatial oppression and repetitive failure of the government in dealing with the issue of rehabilitating slums. In many ways, the documentary demolishes any hope that government-run projects that relocate the poorly housed can help anyone with the exception of the private investors involved. The replaced houses are often far from useful infrastructure like water, building maintenance is usually not included as part of the contract, and houses are located often far from the original workplaces thereby disrupting the regular economic activity.

Days of malfunctioning elevators become years of malfunctioning elevators, finally resulting in a paralysed building that merely symbolises the economically paralysed urban poor.

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Figure1.2: A still from ‘Vertical City’ (Kishore, 2010) depicting the dystopia of slum rehabilitation architecture and obsolete buildings. https://www.d-word.com/images/film_images/04.jpg?1304577183 Many a time, foreign intervention has helped reveal a unique and otherwise concealed aspects of slum life. Notwithstanding the work done by Danny Boyle in his Oscar-nominated Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the most popular of such work is the two-part Kevin McCloud series called Slumming It (Simpson, 2010) which has been labelled as “poverty porn” (Thompson, 2010).

Perhaps under the same label, we can categorize the new wave of YouTube videos that have surfaced such as the video by the channel “bald and bankrupt” called “Exploring An Indian Slum // Dharavi Mumbai”. The video features an adventurous western male walking around the Bombay streets attempting to comprehend the chaotic organisation of Dharavi. Similar videos have been made as part of foreign research interests or personal documentary interests like “We Spent A Day In The Largest Slum In India | ASIAN BOSS” by “Asian Boss”, “Documentary - The Way Of Dharavi 2014” by “Sse Productions bvba” and “My Daily Life in the SLUMS OF MUMBAI (Life-Changing 5 Days)” by “Jacob Laukaitis”.

Films dealing with the community-empowering hip-hop and “gully rap” culture of Dharavi that has gripped the city have also emerged in the last few years such as, “Dharavi Hustle: Official Documentary” by “Bajaao”, and the slightly more comprehensive “Vice Asia” documentary, “Kya Bolta Bantai? - The Rise of Mumbai Rap”. The Zoya Akhtar film Gully Boy (2019)

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(unreleased at the time of writing) tackles the same social aspect of life in Dharavi. What one finds is that there is plenty of informal sociological study on the issue of Dharavi and plenty of formal study on the typological and architectural matter but seldom are the governing bodies writing policy out of a synthesis of the two.

Figure 1.3: A still from the viral song, “Mere Gully Mein” performed by DIVINE and Naezy, rappers from the “streets” of Dharavi and proponents of Bombay’s hip-hop culture Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bK5dzwhu-I According to the Economic Survey of India 2017-18, Bombay’s housing market tolerated about 0.48 million vacant houses ("Economic survey says not many people are taking up houses in Mumbai", 2018). “The phenomenon of high vacancy rates is not fully understood, but unclear property rights, weak contract enforcement and low rental yields may be important factors. The spatial distribution of the new real estate may also be an issue, as the vacancy rates generally increase with distance away from the denser urban core,” the Survey pointed out.

Clearly the issue of housing in Bombay, as with any other globalised city of such scale in developing countries, is one that requires a rigorously multi-disciplinary approach to solution.

The issue is not merely one to do with influencing the governing bodies in the right manners.

Rather it is to do with recognising urban vulnerabilities (Parthasarathy, 2009, p. 116) and thereby studying the spatial consequences of the social pyramid of the capitalist hierarchy that defines cities like Bombay. Although many have pointed toward global trends that have influenced Bombay’s asymmetric growth, the true culprits are the open market policies that

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changed Indian in the late 80s and early 90s (Nijman, 2000, p.582). Liberalism in the new urbanised Indian city fermented a hierarchy that the poor were used to but beginning to accept.

The working upper-middle-class on the other hand largely ignored these struggles in search of a complacent city life, while the academics and intellectuals wrote books and made films about them. Perhaps most accurately described in the scientific study on the “Matthew Effect” and allocation of resources (Merton, 1968, p.62) as the rich get bigger houses, the poor have to fight to keep the shanty structures they currently own. Ethnographic studies of Bombay’s poor and homeless have helped us understand to a limited extent the nature of the city’s chaotic street life but have not given us insight comparable to that received from the fictions produced in Bombay. This is partly because the architects and sociologists studying the housing crisis in Bombay are not storytellers. The storytellers, on the other hand, do know how to graciously combine interdisciplinary study with compelling narratives and produce popular media that eventually is accepted by the masses. Consequently, investigation into Bombay’s domestic condition would remain incomplete without turning to its massive produce of films. Ranjani Mazumdar has aptly called Bombay Cinema an “archive of the city” (2007), emphasising how cinema in Bombay is a momentous cultural force that not only documented the city as it flourished but also participated in the feedback loop that allowed cultural transformation to occur.

1.2.2 Domesticity in Bombay Cinema Since the first silent film was released in Bombay in 1913, the city’s cinema industry, while mastering the art of sensorial communication over a century, has accumulated a wealth of subjective insights into Bombay’s urban life film by film. The movie-making business in India is the world’s largest by measure of its quantity of output (Punathambekar, 2013, p.51). By the 1930s, Indian cinema was already producing more than 200 films a year. Today that figure is close to 2000 including all Indian languages. Bombay and its cinema have grown significantly over the last century; however, it would be difficult to assert which influenced the other to a greater degree.

Bombay Cinema has not attained its scholastic position in modern sociological and filmographic study by simply following a preconceived blueprint of an appropriate social trajectory. To say that the industry does not have its own purpose, would likely make it difficult to identify common patterns of intentionality over any single period of time, but it is not to say that there have not been any trends in film genre evolution. Bombay Cinema launched with the silent films broadcasting culturally familiar religious narratives (Jamal, 1991) such as in Raja Harishchandra (Phalke, 1913). As postcolonial India struggled to find its place globally, and urbanisation began slowly altering century-long rural conventions, numerous films like Duniya Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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Na Mane (Shantaram, 1937) and Hunterwali (Wadia, 1935), 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, for e.g. 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 terror inflicted upon the city in Bombay (Ratnam, 1995), Black Friday (Kashyap, 2007), and the The Attacks of 26/11 (Varma, 2013).

The exhibition of films in India existed from the late 19th century although entirely dependent on imported films until 1912 (Hutchinson, 2013). This was also around the time that Bombay began to undergo fundamental structural transformation as the city went on a drive to clean up the city and align urban spaces to well-connected networks Bombay cinema grew from the in the early twentieth century as demand and supply raced to meet each other. In the year 1925, the first upmarket cinema hall to show exclusively Bombay films was inaugurated at the Dubash Theatre on Charni Road (Bhaumik, 2001, p. 36).

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 citylife, 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 stuck close to social issues and interpreted them through visual art, drama, song and dance. In the introduction to The Secret Politics of our Desires (Nandy, 1999), the author cleverly recognizes the metaphorical relation between Indian cinema and the slum, claiming that the political climate in India is influenced by the sheer power of numbers of the slum and their closeness to the realities of urban life. The slum and the cinema thereby become not only a mirror of each other, but effective tools of study for introspection. As has been demonstrated (Young, 1969), in the late 60s and early 70s, fictional film was often devoid of any sort of complicated socio-cultural statement. Such a conclusion

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comes from a quick analysis of films such as Weekend (1967) by Godard or Shame (1968).

Young goes on to criticise filmmakers such as Godard stating that although later films tackled social issues, they have done so in a quasi-journalistic style using characters that overshadowed the real issues themselves. In an ethnographic study (2007), Shakuntala Rao recognises the relation of the slum to its larger social and urban context. She argues, like Nandy, that Indian cinema represents the tastes and longings of the slums which dominate the urban public sphere.

She goes on to assert, using various interviews to back up the ethnography, that social messages often get lost in the commercialisation of Bombay cinema. However, Bombay cinema and the themes that it deals with are not solely influenced by market trends. Perhaps the international and urban demands have contributed to a certain influence.

Today, cinema deals with a far more composite society. While a voluminous quantity of films tackle a broad assortment of social issues, others feed into an assortment of social desires for specific scenes including everything from breakneck-speed action sequences to quasipornographic item numbers, often effortlessly combining the two in the same genre. In this sense, the cinema industry was the first truly open marketplace in its true sense for the proliferation of ideas that India created.. Although the entire cinematic archive can be easily regarded as a single organisation or entity, it is more precisely a collective reflection of the city’s subjectivities (Mazumdar, 2007, p. 1). At times, Bombay Cinema performed the role of a drug, providing an escape from the unruly troubles of a chaotic city life. At others, it has acted successfully as a tool for mass introspection. In the following study, Bombay Cinema shall be scrutinised thoroughly with the intention of gaining insight into Bombay’s peculiar urban domestic condition. To create a framework within which we can analyse the two-dimensional moving images of this cinematic archive, and in addition, as the archive is composed of around 400 annual films on average since the inception of the artform, the process of selection of our cases for study is of primary importance.

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1.3 Confronting the Archives 1.3.1 The Image on the Screen It has been shown that to be lost in space has only to do with our humane objectives (Tuan, 2011, p.36). If we find ourselves within an unfamiliar density of a thick forest with tall canopies and darkness in every direction, the notions of front and back are rendered meaningless.

However, the moment a flickering light appears in the distance, we find that we are immediately oriented to a common spatial objectivity.

The human being, by his mere presence, imposes a schema on space. Most of the time he is not aware of it. He notes its absence when he is lost.

In cinema, distances and angles remind us of our worldly three-dimensional spaces on a constrained two-dimensional area. However, what we define as “spaces” is a metonymic expression for a complex set of experiential characteristics. In the natural environment, we see objects located in "space". This spatiality comes from a unification of the location of the eye and the location of the object. However, the location of the subject need not be equivalent to the location of the eye, in fact, the subject has no defined location. The "becoming aware" of the object is separate from the function of the eye. As the camera mimics the eye in cinema, the location of the camera needn't signify the location of the subject perhaps most obviously demonstrated by utilising varying depth-of-fields for a multitude of storytelling purposes. The subject-object distinction is easily broken in cinema and what is experienced is not a duality but rather a single final image on screen that communicates space not as an object or background to be observed but rather as a characteristic symptom of existence. Hence, our outlook is inevitably that of a child who is still trying to focus on what the outside world is trying to show us; a child who does not necessarily feel the need to approach reality with 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. Bombay cinema shows us its people, its environments and its stories and we are reading them not as scholars but as citizens of this cinematic city. The vastness of Bombay’s cinematic archive mustn’t make us feel “lost” in the same sense that Tuan prompted as we clearly do have an objective we are looking for within the archive. Our focus remains on the cinematic representation of the domestic space of Bombay in all its senses within the possible realm of audio-visual communication. This means that we shall restrict our focus onto cinematic production that occurs within Bombay and the general group of films that use the “house” as a part of the cinematographic set and/or as a character within the movie.

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The 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). Mazumdar divided her book, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) into five chapters namely, ‘Rage on Screen’, ‘The Rebellious Tapori’, ‘Desiring Women’, ‘The Panoramic Interior’ and ‘Gangland Bombay’. Brilliantly, she walks us through a non-chronological winding path through the multiple thematical subjects that she finds the cinema of Bombay to archive only to reveal how these five subjects have been of utmost social importance to Bombay as a megapolis. Bombay is an enormous city but perhaps not as large as the fictional reality created by its film industry. Bombay’s cinematic archive is one that spans thousands of films in a multitude of genres and multi-genres.

1.3.2 Selecting and Identifying Films Our question of domesticity involves a wide range of cinematic objects. From women to footpaths to large doors. The intention mustn’t be to merely meditate on architectural and domestic elements visible on the screen. Rather it is to use cinema as the inter-disciplinary, narrative medium it was designed to be. The idea is to observe the full spectrum of cinematic objects and their cinematic context with the intent to identify the elements that help tell the story of housing in Bombay.

With this perception of the cinematic archive, the task at hand escalates in difficulty quite rapidly. Because solely to analyse a set of architectural elements is a concrete task, but to scan the entire range of movies from Indian cinema that merely help tell the story we are looking for is asking of lavishness. To begin, we shall define Bombay cinema as the cinema produced or shot in Bombay, wherein the city appears as an environmental element or the protagonist itself.

It thereby ensues that what needs to be defined first is what precise parameters can possibly help tell the story of Bombay’s domestic condition. If Bombay Cinema does present itself of use as an urban archive it might do so in a multitude of possible ways. To understand them, we need to ask ourselves what part of the cinematic product will lend itself as an apt object for study. These cinematic parameters may be of many modes.

1.3.3 Identifying Parameters Looking for apt objects for studying the “dwelling”, Bombay cinema is seen to talk generously about the following facets.

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The #INTERIORS of the house are spatially insulated from the dense claustrophobic city. This is vital not only architecturally for the city to function, but also in cinema as the characters tackle the complexities of the various realms of cinematic spatial reality.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (Barjatya, 1994) shows us how through clever production, the modern consumerist, globalised aesthetic can coexist with tradition and nostalgia. This is the same juxtaposition that was further explored and seemed to work well commercially in the millennial family films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… (Johar, 2001), Baghban (Chopra, 2003) or Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Johar, 2006). Non-Resident Indians (NRI) audiences received these highbudget productions with open arms and revelled in the nostalgia they deeply identified with (Mazumdar, 2007).

Cinema finds ways to tackle this either through surreal filming locations or through extravagant panoramic sets. The family film movie genre could not have succeeded without the architecture of vastness of the #HAVELI(MANSION). They allowed space for Bombay to disappear and for the new modern Indian to dream the ideal lifestyle.

Often the spatial separation exists around the abode, but urban chaos manages to bleed into the home. This is especially true for the slums of Bombay. The #LOWER_MIDDLE-CLASS dwells in this blended city space uninsulated from the chaotic synergies of Bombay. The house is often shared by large joint families. And the private space, although successfully separated from the public, ironically becomes almost as dense as it.

In Dharavi (Mishra, 1992), the #PROTAGONIST is seen vigorously battling the puppet strings attached to him within the socio-economic hierarchy. His plans to open his own factory while supporting his family by being a Bombay taxi-driver are expectedly thwarted as the plot develops. But we see that as his mother visits his house in the city, how a shanty one-room house with a temporary roof quickly becomes crowded with conflicting interests and narratives.

The #PEOPLE of the house are not necessarily the central focus of the narratives about domesticity revolve often around the female character. Roles tend to be experimental and began, from the very beginning of Indian cinema, to defy society’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 #JOINT-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 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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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 functions as a #FLEXIBLE_SPACE that accommodates him and friends of his that are trying to find a place to have sex in the city. Because even hotels in Bombay are risky business thanks to the moral policing tone adopted by various hotel’s privacy policies. Various characters in the movie borrow the keys to Rahul’s apartment and use his bedroom as an intimate space, including by his boss who cheats on his wife and sleeps with a friend of Rahul’s.

The home thus makes itself intimate only temporarily in concentrated pockets of the city’s housing spectrum.

The idea of the #SCATTERED_DOMUS transforms the city into a single domestic space where toilets, dining and intimacy are all outsourced to the available infrastructure. The home eventually becomes the city itself.

In Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee & Johar, 2018), the segment directed by Karan Johar shows us how the typical Bombay home houses a joint family. And the newly-married couple doesn’t necessarily obtain the intimacy that they would expect when starting a new life together. Rather, the bride typically shares space with the groom’s extended family. This becomes even more challenging when the houses are smaller in the denser areas of the city.

When the dwelling is an integral part of the film, the #POLITICAL discourse also tends to be. The new #SLUM_ARCHITECTURE was inextricably tied to politics in the city. Films don’t tell us what

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the newspapers do. But Kaala (Ranjith, 2018), a film featuring the Tamil superstar Rajinikanth, talks extensively about how the slum dwellers of Bombay constantly struggle with a navigation problem within the political field; one that their day-to-day existence is based on.

The film goes on to ostentatiously criticise the top-down approach to affordable housing in the city.

Looking broadly at the parameters identified, Bombay cinema presents itself as an assortment of thematically varied audio-visual resources. The parameters can be grouped into spatial and socio-economic tags. In order to organise our archival material, the following tags can be utilised to better classify the footage. There might be #ECONOMIC factors such as the livelihoods of the characters, often the central synopsis of the film. #ENVIRONMENTAL factors like housing typologies and housing interiors that can but not necessarily point towards other socioeconomic markers. Lastly, there are #SOCIAL themes that generally occupy a large portion of screen-time and eye-tracked area of the frame. They are usually the basic cog work of storytelling and generally function as the mirror through which the viewer enters the cinematic world, and thereby the vehicle through which she can explore this universe.

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1.4 Communication Strategy and Methodology Film study has in recent years, through the ease of technological requirements for videoediting and the incentivising of fan-made content, has grown popular steadily. Cinema being an audio-visual artform, can be communicated effectively through a reincarnated medium that uses images, audio and language to communicate the proposed ideas. This reinvented medium, the essay film, video essay, or essay video must combine a set of selected audio-visual elements in a particular order to tell a story or to sew the observations together.

The investigation is to be carried out in an experimental fashion wherein the film-essay does not serve as a means to communicate the product of a thorough investigation. Rather the filmessay itself is part of the investigation process insofar that it integrates various methods of reflecting on the state of cinema as a means both of social interpretation and mass communication. The film essay does not guarantee a unique method of conveying a rigid investigation. Instead, it is the outcome of a particular selection of precise criteria. Owing to the wide subjectivity built within the cinematic format, the study would be perhaps radically different yet equally valid if it were to be carried out with a different set of parameters.

The targeted audience can be tagged loosely into two groups. On one hand, the resident of Bombay and its cinematic world; one who has visited the city physically or through any of its films, one who has formed a mental image of the city. On the other hand, we have the curious scholar to whom the city-cinema relationship is of academic interest.

As the observations are reorganised, a linear, parallel multi-linear, non-linear or circular narrative can be found in order to link up the observations. Using the same audio-visual tools used in cinema may not always bring a positive outcome, however since film is the primary medium being recycled, the potential tools need to be given enough attention.

Whether the narrative is visual, aural or verbal, we have hypothesized that Bombay cinema can be studied as a resource to understand housing in the city and hence the study is inevitably always a subjective view of the city through cinema, an already subjective view of the city.

These urban subjectivities cannot be presented as axioms. They are indeed perspectives from multiple points of view, tied together by a single point of view. Subjective observations out of a subjective medium are always haphazard. Hence it is this single point of view that can guide an audience through the cacophonic assortment of films that talk about the homes of Bombay.

The following process inevitably requires the researcher to take up various roles. The researcher needs to be aware of an extremely large cinematic archive and use specialised

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knowledge to make a primary selection. Simultaneously, the same person is required to assume the role of the producer and organise the necessary resources, permissions, music and other skills necessary to complete the task. As the pieces come together, the director is required verify the script and prepare the tonality of the voice-over while guiding the editor to correctly organise the collected data all while constantly verifying the same with the researcher.

1.4.1 The Format The essay video is a medium that incorporates theoretical framework, citations and references, and employs an audio-visual rhetoric to communicate ideas (van den Berg, 2013).

One of the primary objectives, being to generate an effective means to communicate the study, carefully deciding the medium of communication becomes vital. Uploading the finished product onto an online video streaming service like “vimeo” can allow it to blend seamlessly into a preexisting academic realm of audio-visual and film study. This would require for the video to be as consumable as possible. A length between 10 - 18 minutes should prove enough to communicate the observations. Longer than this would equate to appealing to a more elite audience of scholars and researchers, and shorter would not suffice to cover the relevant observations.

In order to step out of the finished essay video product and attempt to also communicate the process, the format for process-communication becomes equally important. Accommodating for flexibility of format here can become essential to obtain the largest reach. The communication of the process can also happen in an audio-visual format, but in the case that there is a live screening to a public, the presentation can be made personal depending on the needed situation.

The format can vary from a written account, to schematic illustrations of processes to a short video summarising the relevant rhetoric. This can then be attached to the uploaded file, to the disc, or uploaded along with the finished video onto popular social media where audio-visuals can easily be circulated like “Instagram” or “Facebook”. However, in order to effectively consolidate both elements of the final product, the seamlessness between formats, media and circulation methods is vital.

1.4.2 The Narrative The narrative encompasses two main categories: the audio-visual and the verbal.

The audio-visual builds its narrative power relying heavily on the selection of scenes as well as the video-editing that ties them together. The verbal narrative, on the other hand, must be thought of as part of the whole in order to successfully blend. The verbal narrative works only to create a unified product working in conjunction with (and against wherever necessary) the

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cinema’s audio and image. The point of the verbal narrative mustn’t be to enforce a presupposed point of view of the cinematic content. Neither should it be to help focus the viewer’s attention on any one part of the image. Rather it should work as a guide that fortifies links between relevant parts of the audio-visual narrative.

1.4.3 Editing The essay video’s ability to tell a story relies heavily on successful editing. And editing relies heavily on memory. It becomes necessary to keep a whole project in one’s head. (M. Alter, 2003).

In order to complete the single, consistent product that communicates the necessary audiovisual and verbal narrative, the process of editing needs to assist the fluidity, rigidity and coarseness, pace and rhythm of the essay video.

Once the video and its audio have a coherent narrative that links up all the relevant observations, the next step would be to identify musical elements that can encompass the necessary mood for the necessary duration. Sound effects can be used to transition smoothly between films of differing aesthetic sensibilities. Once the voice-over is recorded, the audio must be compressed and allowed to sit within a steady frequency range, unaffected by the background music. Depending on the kind of scene and its central focus, the cuts and transitions will define the pace and rhythm of the essay video. The idea is to unify various ideas using a common aesthetic and graphic identity to create the essay film, that consists of smaller elements that were not intended to fit together but somehow do.

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PART B:

The Film-Essay 2

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2.1 Constructing the Narrative 2.1.1 Finding a Home in the City Now finding ourselves as residents of this cinematic city, it seems clearly that we can travel within films and between them in order to look for what we need within this matrix and eventually leave before it’s too late. In order to assure a smooth entry, perhaps we can look for an outsider’s view of Bombay given that right now we indeed feel like outsiders.

Perhaps Danny Boyle’s award-winning Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) can show us Bombay from a critical occidental lens, seeing as it gathered significant critical success within western audiences. A large number of the transition scenes, that appear to frame the city of Bombay when switching between the film’s parallel narratives that construct the non-linear storytelling, can perhaps guide us into the concealed image-making that Boyle allows for with these scenes. In one particular scene (01:03:52:00), we see how the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle uses a one-point perspective punctuated by a static hazy pink billboard and the emblematic red BEST (Bombay Electric Supply & Tramway Company Limited) bus slowly pushing through pedestrian traffic to drive us deep into Bombay’s hypnotic dynamism. He absorbingly set us up symbolising the hopelessness with which the viewer watches the main character Jamal Malik (played by Tanay Chheda), during his early adolescence, subsequently scurry through the countless urban landscapes in search of his lost love.

However, the haste of Bombay’s streets and its frenzied urban fabric mustn’t lead us to tolerate disorientation from our primary focus on domesticity. Thus, we find ourselves looking at a present-day home or what perhaps looks like a modest middle-class home in the Zoya Akhtar segment of the anthology film Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee, Johar, 2018). The film introduces a peculiar relationship (explored later in this essay) between a maid and a working, single, bachelor through a series of scenes that describe a typical work day in their lives. After a stream of jump cuts, we arrive at a point that the house is empty (00:38:46:13).

The maid has just left the house; we know of this because the camera through a low-angle shot of the living space, shows her put on her shoes and leave out the front door and there is now silence. This silence is perhaps characteristic of the upper middle-class house during a significant part of the day in a city like Bombay that sports a large employed population. The characters of the story that Zoya Akhtar recounts are both employed, and we see signs of prosperity from this low-angle shot. Furniture made of coconut fibre (or coir), a carpentered set of dining table and chair and a living room that sports not only natural light, but also crossventilated windows. We then are allowed to glimpse restricted shots of an aluminium-and-

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stainless-steel-clad kitchen, a perfectly made half of a bed through a doorway that occupies a third of the frame, and a wash basin against pale-green tiles, softly lit by the morning light. As we inhale these restrictive shots, we exhale returning to the living room, now through a wider lens that reveals minimal walls and functional furniture that conventionally divide the urban home into their predefined inelastic spaces that traditional housing in India proactively avoided.

Figure 2.1: A still from Lust Stories depicting, from a low-angle shot, the silence that populates a middle-class house during a typical working day.

2.1.2 The City is not Wholeheartedly Urban To live in Bombay is to deal with a wide range of domestic discomforts similar to the ones we find in Zoya Akhtar’s segment in Lust Stories. At the same time, we know that Bombay’s domestic discomfort is not always confined within the comfort of a one-bedroom apartment.

Bombay Cinema often utilises versatile typologies to tell their stories. Sometimes, the film set is planted within a palatial, surreal home as was done in the film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham...

(Johar, 2001), having a majority of its melodramatic domestic scenes shot at the Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England. At other times, a home is realistically re-constructed as in Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) or even borrowed by the film as in Dhobi Ghat (Rao, 2011). Often, the stories are told in slums, or on even directly the street. In Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988), the city’s scattered domestic functions become home to Chaipau (played by child actor Shafiq Syed) and his friends who sleep on the footpath. We see (00:38:14:15) how Chillum, another character who inhabits the streets of Bombay, smoking a cigarette within the pseudo-domestic comfort of a suburban train station. Perhaps conforming to the paradigm of a healthy city, Bombay is seen continually to substitute the human functions that the poor cannot afford to possess. In the social-crime drama entitled Dharavi (Mishra, 1992), it becomes evident how urban space is continually recycled in order to accommodate traditionally domestic functions.

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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.

Figure 2.2: A scene from Salaam Bombay! depicting the amalgamated nature of the footpath This rural nature of the city although pointed out in the three-part 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 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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footpath beneath a bridge, their new home. Vijay confronts various instances of violence throughout the film and throughout the city, but the origin of this violence can be traced back to domestic tensions he experiences as a child who has lost his father during communal violence in a small town and subsequently moving to Bombay, a city that has caused him to turn to crime and give up education in order to support his brother’s. Vijay’s confused morality is completely justified, allowing the viewer to empathise with the decisions he is forced to take as the plot develops. The consistency between his intense furiousness and his violent childhood allows homelessness to work as an enabling metaphor that empowers Vijay’s cathartic fights against the structures of power within the film.

2.1.3 Scattered Domesticity Vijay plays a character who belongs to a section of society whose domus is scattered in urban space. As their homes scantily occupy the interim spaces between the “normal” houses and built environment of Bombay, it becomes difficult to centralise the facilities provided to them by the city space as one would observe inside a typical house. A range of sexual, hygienic and nutritional necessities are thereby scattered precariously in urban space. In Salaam Bombay!, one of the street children is seen urinating onto train tracks a railway station platform (01:13:02:17) as a train approaches him in what appears to be an unequivocal metaphor for the urban poor’s impending doom. The toilets of the poor are the footpaths, urban wastelands and compound walls. In the 2008 drama, Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle), international audiences were able to glimpse the comfort that lay in the world of open urination and defecation as child Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) screamed exhilaratingly, “Amitabh Bachchan!” jumping from a suspended public toilet stall, through an absent water closet into a pool of human faeces in an attempt to catch a catch sight of the star landing in a helicopter in the nearby vicinity.

Politically, the question of hygiene for the urban poor seems to always have occupied a position of complacency.

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Figure 2.3: A scene from Salaam Bombay! showing a young girl who is asked to wait outside her house as her mother, an escort, is teasing a client Similarly, for the homeless, one finds that privacy is only enjoyed as an erratic luxury and is often outsourced. The spaces that can be defined as intimate are concentrated into a few pockets in the city often a dark corner of urban space as Chameli (Kareena Kapoor) offers Aman Kapoor (Rahul Bose) in a dark sheltered alley while it rained heavily in the film Chameli (Balani and Mishra, 2004), a brothel or a pimp’s house as in Salaam Bombay!, an apartment borrowed from a friend as in Life in a... Metro (Basu, 2007), or simply a holiday home that the city’s upper-class residents seem to own for a far more eased accessibility to intimacy as seen in the Dibakar Banerjee segment in Lust Stories. In Life in a Metro, we observe how a single apartment starts to play a duplicitous character as one of the protagonists lends his domestic space to close friends as a safe place to have sex. The city’s moral police forces seem to prohibit even well-to-do people from spending a night at a hotel. The characters of the movie earn and spend money in excess compared to the average city-dweller but when it comes to intimacy, the city doesn’t seem to sport the amenities necessary to satisfy the demand it generates. Consequently, private spaces are restricted to a few concentrated spots that are recycled or flexible spaces that accommodate for more than one primary function.

In the Karan Johar segment of Lust Stories, the climactic scene involves a semi-public orgasm in the living room of a joint-family. Megha (Kiara Advani) has just married Paras (Vicky Kaushal) and moved into what appears to be a prestigious and spacious home. However, the domestic claustrophobia Megha experiences is not defined by spatial parameters, rather familial. As the grandmother mistakes a remote for a vibrating sexual toy (already concealed by Megha between her legs) for the television remote and continues to increase the vibration strength, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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Megha manages to convince the viewers that the orgasm she is about to have is so important that it didn’t matter that she was in the same room as her husband, and two other women from her husband’s family. The film builds up to this scene with a series of unsatisfactory sexual sessions between Megha and Paras, with Paras orgasming in a matter of five seconds, as Megha, counting on her fingers, would accurately document. Karan Johar, the director is trying to express a certain dynamic of modern sexuality from the urban woman’s point of view.

2.1.4 Maids, Housewives and Queens of the Havelis In the aforementioned Zoya Akhtar segment of Lust Stories, we are led through a different perspective on the role of the contemporary urban woman. The story is that of a maid named Sudha (Bhumi Pednekar) who manages household activities at a single-bedroom house of an upper middle-class working man named Amit (Neil Bhoopalam). Firmly cementing the viewer’s confusion of the nature of their relationship, the film starts with front and side-angled cuts of passionate and sweaty lovemaking between the two characters. A few short moments later, as Amit scrubs his armpits clean, he yells to be brought a towel. Amit steps out of the shower, and in a friendly taunt indicates that Sudha hasn’t showered. She throws him his towel casually calling him a naked dog. Until the following scene her role as the maid has not been established. Furthermore, as she starts to forcefully scrub an already spotless floor, we begin to doubt her originally assumed role as a housewife. It is only when she prepares some tea for Amit and his family, that the viewer is gently baptised into the reality, not only of the peculiar relationship between the principal actors, but also of the sociocultural debris of institutionalised economic power in the capitalist city. Sudha’s body is exploited not just to do physical work as a cleaner, sexually she is subjected to a similar oppression. Since she cannot scale the economic arena, neither is there any question that she have a say in the kind of relationship she can hope to find with Amit, the nature of which appears both predetermined and whimsical. As Amit’s families meet his future bride’s family in order to decide on a wedding, we do not see Sudha being informed of what is happening. Zoya Akhtar is merely brilliantly describing an atypical situation by pointing us non-linearly to a set of facts that do not leave space to fully grasp the hideousness of the situation until the film closes.

Female sexuality in the domestic context has only recently been explored through cinema in Bombay. However, since the birth of independent India in 1947 and until the turn of the millennium, an engulfing majority of Bombay films have had men as their lead characters and women playing supporting roles that help ground the lead male role as they make sense of the cinema’s plot. Women have been seen to generally play domestic roles like housewives or mothers that supplement the role of the house as one that serves as a reference point within the chaotic urban navigation of the male lead. In Deewaar, when Vijay in all his frustration boasts Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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of his achievements to his brother demanding what he had achieved in comparison exclaiming, “I have all this, what do you have?”, we see how their mother is somehow affectionately objectified as Ravi responds passionately, “I have my mother with me”. Nirupa Roy who played their mother popularised the meme of the Indian mother in a number of films following Deewaar like Amar Akbar Anthony (Desai, 1977), Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Mehra, 1978), Suhaag (Desai, 1979), Inqilab (Rao, 1984), and Mard (Desai, 1985). At the turn of the century, Farida Jalal became filmmakers’ go-to actress for her impeccable portrayal of the Indian mother, often scooping the Filmfare Award for best supporting actress. Perhaps most popularised by her role as Lajwanti "Lajjo" Singh in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Chopra, 1995). Capitalising on positive critical feedback she received for her role, filmmakers continued to cast Jalal in numerous other films offering her analogous roles as Ajay’s mother in Dil To Pagal Hai (Chopra, 1997), Rahul’s widowed mother in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Johar, 1998), Rahul and Rohan's nanny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (Johar, 2001), and recently Abhimanyu's grandmother in Student of the Year (Johar, 2012).

In Bombay Cinema, the meme of the Indian mother emerged in the 70s, roughly around the same time that the country experienced socio-political tensions with Indira Gandhi as prime minister. Before and after this period, female roles were highly experimental. With roles such as those played by Nargis Dutt in Mother India and Waheeda Rehman in Guide (Anand & Danielewski 1965). At the turn of the 2000s, the experimental female role emerged in a large number of films like the roles played by Vidya Balan in Kahaani (Ghosh, 2012), Dirty Picture (Luthria, 2011) and No One Killed Jessica (Gupta, 2011), but still a drop in the ocean of maledominated blockbuster films. Women stopped playing the predictable domestic roles that was seen as the role that gave life to the lifeless mansion or Haveli, as is Jaya Bachchan’s character in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... and the queen of the haveli that enabled the male lead slowly became the queen of the city that enabled herself. The female roles played by the likes of Vidya Balan, Alia Bhatt, Anushka Sharma, and Rani Mukherjee started to portray the individualist urban woman. What has been the evolution of the female role since the birth of independent India appears to have slid from experimental roles at the beginning to completely defining domesticity for the urban independent Indian man and finally as the social libertarian movements gathered momentum, returned to experiment with the constantly evolving globalised society.

2.1.5 Storytelling in the Scenic Haveli Towards the turn of the new millennium, a new modern India began to reflect a globalised, urban space in cinema, and the domestic space started to accumulate all notions of tradition

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within itself. The Haveli was the natural outcome of years of evolution in the cinematic domestic space. Palatial interiors shot using wide-angle lenses allowed “cameras to sweep through panoramic interiors” (Mazumdar, 2007, p. 124). Mazumdar goes on to indicate how the “panoramic interior” is part of the larger urban virtual city that allows the reality of urban chaos in India to disappear. In the family-film genre, what the house was perhaps most significantly playing the role of the set or of the background. While dramatic films tended to use domestic space as an objectified character, family films personified this domesticity in family bonds, an open display of religious traditions and rituals, permissible romance and the commitment of family as a holy object.

Just as a temple is decorated, the family film set is extravagantly ornamented in layers of drapery, coloured interiors, carpets, sofas and chandeliers. The consumerist interiors populate a vast space that grants a spatial liberty not available on the streets of the city. The space allowed domesticity to be redefined and calibrated to the new ideals of the modern Indian. The experimentation ensued with the surreal spaces being used not only for dramatic scenes that mimicked the medieval spaces of palaces where the royalty would settle their disputes, but also for jovial celebration. There has been a large number of films that recounted stories of ancient empires of the Indian subcontinent like Jodhaa Akbar (Gowariker, 2008), Bajirao Mastani (Bhansali, 2015), and Padmaavat (Bhansali, 2018). What the royal domesticity actually consists of is coherent with the societal power often held by the dwellers of these residences.

What is reflected in the globalised Haveli of modern Indian film is not a perverted attraction to the idea of power, rather it is the aesthetic of success that is to be reflected by the interiors of the house. The films’ plots are never about their livelihoods or socioeconomic dynamics.

Figure 2.4: Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham... used spatial vastness to reinforce ideas of social and familial hierarchy

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Historically, a monumental space symbolised power hierarchy in the immediate society but in the globalised virtual city, the space symbolises the family’s economic success and an internal power structures within the family. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., one of the scenes shows Rahul begging not for forgiveness, but for his father to not be hurt by his actions. As the son continues to disobey his father’s commands of the girl he wants to marry, he reluctantly, yet furiously tells his son that he has lost his right to call him “Papa”. The scene goes on to utilise the monumental interiors as a space that represents the wealth and familial power acquired by Yash Raichand as we see four figures occupying one of the halls of their home. The home isn’t questioned for its surrealist appearance as a palatial space with redundant couches under the stairway space, random collections of photos on their walls, flowing peach and white drapery, eclectic columns or its repetitive staircase railing. Neither do we question the hierarchy of paternalist authority. Rather the viewer, dropped into a space that dictates both spatial organisation and familial hierarchy simultaneously, is expected to have her eyes dashing across the wide space between the various characters and their conflicting objectives. The same space is the reference point that the characters return to where Yash Raichand is seen in a similar pose as aforementioned. He turns around only to face his previously disowned son with tears and a hint of remorse in his eyes.

An exterior shot of the mansion shows us Rohan Raichand (Hrithik Roshan) departing his home in a Bentley leaving behind two proud yet concerned parents as he leaves for London.

Yashvardhan "Yash" Raichand (Amitabh Bachchan) and Nandini Raichand (Jaya Bachchan) are belittled by the three-storeyed mansion as a low angled camera enables us to feel the monumentality of this scene. If the mansion was already an escape from urban chaos in Bombay, then moving to London is escaping the already perfect escape.

2.1.6 Another Surrealist Escape from Urban Claustrophobia In what happens to be the most blatantly rebellious replacement for a taking-off airplane to communicate the idea international travel and the passage of time, Rahul Raichand’s transition to London is by no means subtle. It happens in the middle of the film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... and the director Karan Johar, completely embraces both the neoclassical architecture of various monuments through diagonally angled helicopter shots and the aesthetic of the globalised city that London has become. It is almost as though we are being shown a wistful longingness that the city of Bombay also be as such. The camera flashes between various famous brands that seem almost too explicit to be placed into the film’s marketing programme.

And the camera flashes quite literally also as each shot blindingly fades into the next and the viewer consequently bombarded by icons that symbolise modern London. The symbols are not merely commercial. In fact, we are first shown the London Underground logo in first a far shot Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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succeeded by a close shot. Virgin, Starbucks, and other cafés are shown in the space of a short second. Then we are shown a few signboards for upcoming cultural events in the city. With a final shot of the logo of Dolce & Gabbana smeared discretely onto a glass wall that appears to enclose a mannequin sporting a minimal white shirt, we are allowed to finally glance our “hero” Rohan walking in slow motion between a dozen faceless young women running across him dressed in shalwar kameez, a traditional Indian casual clothing, generally not in the colours of the tricolour flag unless to symbolise a patriotic event. Here, the saffron, white and green are bouncing away from Rohan as he walks in slow-motion with a curious gaze onto the urban landscape of London. There is an obvious fetishizing of the city as Rohan makes his way exploring the city. We continue to see symbols of modernity, with occasional references to nostalgia for Indian tradition, from the women dressed in Indian clothing bearing the Indian flag, to women performing a Bharatanatyam choreography to the song Vande Mataram or a group of scantily-clad English women walking alongside Rohan, half of whom dressed in saffron and the other in green, colours of the Indian flag once again.

As the song Vande Mataram ends, we see Rohan looking online for his long-lost brother’s home address in London. As the camera shifts from Rohan’s new reality to the more established environment of Rahul’s home, we are introduced first to an elegant name plate that bears the name “Rahul Raichand”. We are made to listen to a rendition of Sare Jahan se Accha, a patriotic song that proclaims the longevity and greatness of the land of Hindustan. Their house is inhabited by Rahul, his wife, their son, the nanny, and Anjali’s sister, Pooja.

Figure 2.5: Rohan Raichand (Hrithik Roshan) struts down a street in London with a dozen women assisting him in forgetting the urban chaos in Bombay, but remembering the colours of the Indian flag.

Source: Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham...

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The space that each one of the characters is presented within, has a unique characteristic to it.

Anjali introduces the house to us as she nostalgically finishes the song mouthing the words “Hindustan hamara”, which loosely translates to “our India”. Although the hypermodern contemporary aesthetic of the home doesn’t reflect this, we are again allowed glimpses of the characters’ nostalgia by positioning of religious iconography, a picture of Rahul’s parents, and other verbal references. Anjali claims that it is a legitimate concern to her that their 10-year old son learn the traditions and values of his country that he has only heard of, lest he turn into their neighbours’ daughter, a typical English schoolgirl.

The scene here is one that demonstrates the typical morning in the Rahul Raichand home to the viewer. Rahul wakes up in a bed with his son, and they rush down once ready for their morning routines. The table is already laid with an assortment of breakfasts: Frosties, fruits, and a fat-free “Feel Special” cereal. We them sitting in not a dining room, but a dining table placed in an intermediary space that overlooks a gigantic living space with trees outside. Anjali and Rahul seem to engage in a playful argument about how their son needs to hear her singing the traditional Indian songs. As though out of despair, Anjali in apparent despair exclaims how their son, “knows nothing about our country, religion, or traditions”. The son retaliates, saying, “Stop it Mummy, what is this country you keep talking about”. To which Anjali replies, “The best country in the world is our India… Don’t ever forget!”.

Rahul’s home seems to once again mimic his own father’s tendencies in ownership and familial hierarchies. Although arguments between Rahul and his wife Anjali seem to be more playful and diluted, Rahul seems to have the final say on many issues, but the members of this jointfamily seem to find their way around his authority as did Pooja, his sister-in-law, surprise his taste when she walks down from her bedroom wearing a backless, pink crop-top, or when Pooja asks his permission to bring a friend over to stay. She is successful in convincing him after multiple attempts by Rahul to deny her the right, claiming that the house was his, and that it didn’t matter to anyone else.

Pooja, on the other hand, is introduced in her bedroom that appears to be what looks like a brightly-lit dance club. As the song “It’s Raining Men” plays, we are first introduced as is customary in Bollywood’s portrayal of women, to her body moving to the background music.

Pooja’s cultural influences are explicitly shown to be tabloid and fashion magazines, as a sweeping horizontal shot of a row of magazines reveal to us, only to end with her face, covered in a beauty face mask, sending a kiss in the direction of the camera. The characters in Bombay do not completely ignore the Indian way of life as they move abroad, rather they express a

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constant nostalgia, as though guilty of having left their homeland behind. The domestic space, on the contrary, represents a state of complacency.

2.1.7 Social Reform in Bombay and Cinema To watch Katrina Kaif move like a Persian belly dancer surrounded by excited men and a fiery backdrop that resembles the Tinder logo is not what one expects a child to have the opportunity to do. However, in the Zoya Akhtar segment called Sheila Ki Jawaani in the 2014 anthology film, Bombay Talkies (Kashyap, Banerjee, Akhtar & Johar, 2014), this is precisely where the film grounds is a 12-year-old boy who aspires to become a Bollywood dancer.

However, his father has different plans for him. The film presents an atypical hero in that, he doesn’t navigate an urban landscape and fight underworld villains. Rather his battle is rooted in the domestic life. We understand what it is like to face one’s worst nightmare within the pseudo-safety of one’s home.

Inspired, Vicky returns home, tries on a dress that belongs to his sister, wears his mother’s jewellery and lipstick, and blasts, Aaj Ki Raat (Nigam, Chinai & Iyer, 2006), a song from the 2006 action-thriller film Don (Akhtar, 2006), featuring the female stars Isha Koppikar and Priyanka Chopra dancing in a night club to serve as audio-visual distraction to the main plot, which is communicated as much more important and “high-stakes” than a dance. Vicky is trying to see the Bollywood dancing diva in him, a role that young boys in Bombay are not often seen desiring to fantasize about. Nonetheless, Vicky walks down his living room with the innocent intention of pleasantly surprising his sister. She indeed is surprised and exclaims with laughter, “What are you doing?!”! As they continue to laugh and revel in the moment, we hear the sound of a door unlocking and shortly after, the house’s front door bursts open. The frame shows the outer side of the door that bears the family name, “A. Sharma”. The parents are staring down in shock at Vicky with clearly contrasting opinions. Once again, we see how familial conflict appears to take a certain trickle-down route as Vicky’s father walks towards him and slaps him across the face while he is still smiling, innocently assuming he would be able to continue enjoying his night of cross-dressing.

What we see is how secrets are kept in different parts of the house and different people that occupy the domestic terrain. Vicky is mesmerised with his childlike vision by an advertisement that stars his idol, Katrina. She appears to come to life in a vision saying how one must strive for their dreams by fighting societal conventions and that one must sometimes keep their dreams a secret at the start. Vicky decides to confront the established familial hierarchy and fight for his dream of becoming a Bollywood dancer. What the short film shows us is not merely that social issues in Bombay such as the one addressed by Akhtar start at the domestic

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scale, but also that children in Bombay’s homes carry the burden of tackling complex social issues right within their familial hierarchy. Unlike the angry man, their frustration can only be suppressed and kept a secret until the moment is right; often this moment never comes. The home thus acts as a space that consolidates the entire storyline instead of being a mere reference point within an urban plot. The domestic space nonetheless continues to be a space for self-reflection and hiding from the city. As the social issues that are dealt with at home are inevitably urban social issues and depending on the social strata that the character belongs to, the issues vary in their political affiliation and social engrossment.

Figure 2.6: Vicky’s father storms towards him as he dances, cross-dressed, his family watching him amused and unsuspecting. Source: Bombay Talkies.

The domestic space directly reflects in its architecture the proximity to social tension. In Dharavi, the protagonist’s family resides in a space suspended above an unpretentious food stall. The space is pictured often from a lower angle as though to ironically project the space as one that is superior. The protagonist, Raj Karan Yadav, is a man who mimics this nontransparent portrayal of the self-image. He boasts of his big ambitions and returns home often drunk at the plight of his inability to achieve the goals he sets himself. His home is a space that he admits detesting; one that is confined within four perpendicular walls, one of which is not plastered and exposed as though to be shared as a common wall with a building that was never built. A wooden framework holds a steep staircase that leads up to a scanty deck from where the front door can be accessed. The other walls are white and small openings with bars in them allow an acceptable amount of light to enter. The roof seems to be an above average timberframed steady roof that is often a rare sight in the dense asbestos-clad homes of Dharavi.

Raj’s home is a site of frequent conflict. Perhaps best represented in a scene where the house is first shown tranquilly during a quiet night first from a low-angle shot on the exterior, followed Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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by another low-angled shot of the interior where we see the protagonist sleeping on his mother’s lap and his wife, sleeping bent over their son. In almost half-a-second, their night is disrupted by a stranger who has managed to enter and inflict havoc as depicted in the scenes to follow. Raj struggles to push them away and his wife, holds her son close in fear for their life. A table fan falls to the floor, the elderly lady is pushed onto a bed, and the married couple attempt to push away the attacker as the son hides between the bed and a cupboard. Their lives continue to hang a breath away from the turmoil that is depicted in this moment.

2.1.8 The Deeply Political Lives of the Urban Poor In 2018, Rajinikanth starred in a film named Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) that tackled the housing crisis of migrants from Tamil Nadu who lived in Bombay. The film deals directly with the politics of the daily lives of the slum dwellers and shows the viewers a view of the slum with the legislative complexities that it often comes with. On one hand, there are corrupt government officials that refuse to provide the people who have illegally occupied land homes and instead intend to evict them for the commercial potential the evicted land could have. One the other hand, there are the dwellers of the slum that cannot be displaced as their economies would be damaged beyond repair. And finally, the NGOs who do the government’s job of upgrading the existing hygienic and infrastructural condition of the slums. Rajinikanth plays Karikaalan who vows to protect his people and is revered as a hero for his commitment to the people of his neighbourhood. He is also respected by the police and feared by the corrupt politicians for the power structure that he is in control of through the underworld.

Before the film begins, we are first shown a preview of the difficulty of the typical slum life in Bombay. During the film, what occurs is a reversal of expectations and typical roles assumed by the people of the slums. We are shown participatory processes where Karikaalan is able to defend for the rights of the original occupants of the land. Because it is clear from the beginning that uprooting the inhabitants could never be the solution to the existing urban claustrophobia. Neither could selling the land to commercial interests be of any use. The only possible outcome was a bottom-up upgradation and a governmental sacrifice. Because Bombay never claimed to be poor. It was only every greedy for an ever-increasing generation of wealth.

Bombay had become a machine and the poor were fighting a losing battle not only to change the organisation of the social strata, but also to protect what they indeed had.

Yet Bombay never stops attracting the rest of India. The opportunity and charm that comes alongside is far more tempting than any other city the country has seen. To go to Bombay is to become a hero. Not merely a movie star, which is what a large amount of migration is caused by, but also to become the hero of one’s own life. As is Krishna (or Chaipau) told when he asks

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for a ticket to ay big city where he can earn a living. Upon presenting the money to the ticket officer, he is told, “Go my friend. Go to Bombay. Come back a hero!”. Krishna looks up in wonder and the scene cuts to the arrival of a train in what appears to be Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station in the south of Bombay. A song is playing on the railway station television. The mist clears as a train arrives and Krishna walks into the frame, disoriented.

What is about to happen to him is nothing he would have imagined before moving to the city.

And this is why the cinematic world of Bombay never stops receiving visitors. In Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (Sarkar, 2007), Badki (Rani Mukherji) moves to Bombay to find a job. In fact, to the viewer the distress she encounters through not finding a job seems expected for a woman of her experience. However, Badki is desperate and when she finds out that she could possibly earn a job if she slept with her future employer, she calls home in a mixture of fright and disbelief. The film talks about yet another migration to the city and initially walks us through an economic landscape from the perspective of a female protagonist. However, as the film concludes, Badki’s happiness comes not from coming to terms with her journey as a character, rather it is when her love interest (Abhishek Bachchan) expresses his acceptance of her despite knowing her role as a call girl.

Figure 2.7: Krishna from Salaam Bombay! buys a ticket to Bombay before he becomes Chaipau, the teaboy.

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Whenever a character moves to Bombay, the contrasts are communicated through shots of the busy train station, or traffic just outside. In the Anurag Kashyap segment in Bombay Talkies, entitled Murabba, we are enticed by a different aspect of the migration process. Vijay (Vineet Kumar Singh) is originally from Allahabad, 1310 kilometers from Bombay. His father’s dying wish is that his son, Vijay, meet the famed film star Amitabh Bachchan and feed him a handmade murabba (fruit preserve). The surreal request is met with bewilderment but determination. Vijay is prepared to remain in Bombay for as long as it takes. However, he comes to terms with this fact only after realising how difficult of a task it is to get a hold of a man like Amitabh Bachchan.

For Krishna, Badki, Vijay, and many other migrants like them, Bombay is a space that is not expected to be welcoming. The decision to migrate is often taken in order to fix a rural conflict that has nothing to do with Bombay. Bombay merely becomes one of the many possible solutions. Ironically, Bombay often makes things more difficult than they need to be.

Economically and politically, the poor who come to the city in search of solutions are left stranded. However, the journey is always worth making a film about and the hierarchies that the heroines and heroes confront are often dismantled, leaving the viewer satisfied at the end of the movie. Because movies have to indeed end in some way.

2.1.9 The Antagonist and Personifying Power To confront Bombay’s chaos is to confront one’s own internal battles. This metaphor of the battle has been utilised in Bombay cinema right from the very first crime-thriller movie. The antagonist is often a character that is respected by critics and the film industry alike for the finesse required to represent the city’s darkest sides. In the family movies, the antagonist often seems to not be present. This is far however from the reality of domestic storytelling. The antagonist is typically presented as a menace in a dark, illegal part of the city away from the real lives of the citizens of Bombay. In the film Parinda (Chopra, 1989), the initial scenes are that of the skyline of an evening in Bombay. The aerial shots of the city might merely appear to resemble the set backdrops of American late-night talk shows that used the New York skyline as an artificial background in a closed studio as though to demonstrate prosperity.

Anna Seth, the underworld don and villain is presented immediately after. First, he is shown taking the blessings from a photograph of what appears to be members of his family, a wife and young child. They have probably passed away in an accident that we are not aware of yet. In no time, we are plunged into the darkness of Anna’s economic activity. Anna’s domesticity resembles no other in the city of Bombay. The spatial relationship between his house, his office, and the factories that hide illegal substances, dead bodies and black money are blurry. The

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camera follows the characters in a maze-like space deliberately in order to confuse the viewers, perhaps accurately communicating their wit in hiding from the police. As the film’s initial minutes progress, we see how Anna’s henchmen frantically try to hide a murder victim inside a pile of clay. Moments later, the police arrive and begin to raid the factory, only to leave without any evidence gathered.

Anna is introduced first in the film, yet the story revolves around the character Karan (Anil Kapoor). Karan is the innocent brother of one of Anna’s closest men, Kishen (Jackie Shroff).

Karan and Kishen both grew up on the streets of Bombay. What Anna represents to Karan is the corrupt, evil that has driven the city to ruin. In fact he ends up becoming no different from Anna as he pledges to avenge the death of his friend Prakash (Anupam Kher). Karan then navigates the urban turmoil that ensues and finds that he has to face conflicts that he finds himself to arrive at. In a parodic remake for the movie Dharavi, Anil Kapoor plays a character similar to the one played by Jackie Shroff in Parinda. In order to find the antagonist, Kapoor is seen making his way up a tower as though to convey the unreachability of the Bombay underworlds. The villain’s name is Babia. He screams in anger reminding Babia how he had thrown his mother and him when he had first come to the city out onto the street inconsiderately. Kapoor claims to represent all the people of the slum as he points his gun at Babia. He claims to be the uncrowned king of the city, which is supposedly every slumdweller’s deepest longing. The scene in the movie is being watched in an ad-hoc movie theatre in the slum of Dharavi with the spectators screaming in appreciation and admiration of Kapoor’s performance. Chopra shows us how the poor relate to the literally unrelatable and how cinema reflects the dreams of the masses. Because, perhaps they never would really point a gun at the corrupt officials who occupy the higher positions in the hierarchy, but they certainly understand the idea of overturning a hierarchy.

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Figure 2.8: A scene featuring Anil Kapoor being watched in a theatre in Dharavi reclaiming the life of his mother and his destroyed criminal lifestyle from Babia, a random underworld don.

As Kapoor fires his gun, the screen implodes in red and the opening credits begin to roll.

However shortly after, the theatre is set on fire; Chopra effectively demonstrating the brevity and triviality of these desires. Because in a city like Bombay, to fight the already upside-down established hierarchies of power is to entangle oneself in knots that can never be untied.

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2.2 Structuring the Essay 2.2.1 Achieving Narrative Fluidity In view of the fact that we are to speak about a number of parameters from spatial ideas like interiors and privacy to sociological factors like livelihoods and sexuality, what becomes of primary importance is to discover a method to interlink seemingly opposing constituents of the study. It is precisely this that Bombay cinema also does very effectively. Scripts of films are written many a time based on the urban realities and the prevailing subjectivities at the time inevitable interweaving a large number of social parameters that are worth examination. Our task here is similar. To arrive at an appropriate narrative interweaving the various parameters we had initially identified.

Figure 2.9: the initially identified parameters have interconnections that can assist in finding narrative fluidity The parameters initially identified, although interrelate in multiple aspects like sexual expression being defined as a challenge within a certain socio-economic category and feminine roles in domesticity defining how interior spaces are designed, do not necessarily correlate effortlessly. In order to bring about the necessary correlation, the expanded parameters need to be taken into account. The succeeding correlation must therefore become a narrative that is linear or cyclic in order to sew the various elements into place. This does not exclude parallel narratives. As a matter of fact, creating a linear narrative that flows freely between our seven parameters, automatically creates seven parallel narratives. Each of these narratives can be perpendicular to the initially identified parameters. Bringing ourselves to allow this linear narrative to flow freely, we find that we can easily organise a necessary to define these narratives as we did in the previous chapter i.e.: Finding a Home in the City; The City is not Wholeheartedly Urban; Scattered Domesticity; Maids, Housewives and Queens of the Havelis; Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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Storytelling in the Scenic Haveli; Another Surrealist Escape from Urban Claustrophobia; Social Reform in Bombay and Cinema; The Deeply Political Lives of the Urban Poor; and The Antagonist and Personifying Power. The interconnections between our new

and

the seven parameters are countless but on expansion of the parameters we find that they can be reorganised into a new structure as follows.

Figure 2.10: The newly created chapters intertwine the initial parameters in a seamless fashion The ensuing step is two-fold: firstly, we are to expand the seven parameters into their composite aspects, in chapter 1; and secondly, we are to each ending card of one chapter with the beginning card of the succeeding chapter. On expanding the seven parameters on the righthand side, the narrative is found to expand itself, thereby allowing us to begin considering how to generate a visual story based on the linear narrative. We can start to analyse the filtered archive in order to find the pertinent portions of films that communicate the ideas we are interested in. The knack to a fluid narration lies within the second step, achieved by simply

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rearranging the cards within each chapter to allow for maximum significance. Following these

Figure 2.11: Structuring the linear narrative

lines, we arrive at a linear narrative that begins with introductory remarks and ends with conclusive reflections. These remarks are subjectivities that are concreted at the end of the study, and so are shown here in the grey colour. The remaining colour-coding follows the initial colours corresponding to the three categories of the seven parameters.

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2.2.2 Guided and “Free” Storytelling Identifying the film segments we are to use to narrate the domestic story of Bombay, we find that they are varying in formats i.e., between clips that send a visual message alone, clips that communicate an audio-visual message through performing actors, dialogue, music, environments, and lastly, clips that solely communicate an audio message, either a performed dialogue, environmental sounds, or music. The following films have been selected to communicate the majority of the narrative in long-scene formats: Deewaar (Chopra, 1975) Salaam Bombay! (Nair, 1988) Dharavi (Mishra, 1992) Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (Johar, 2001) Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) Bombay Talkies (Kashyap, Banerjee, Akhtar & Johar, 2014) Lust Stories (Kashyap, Akhtar, Banerjee & Johar, 2018) Kaala (Ranjith, 2018) The majority of the selected clips have been selected to tell a predominantly visual story without excessive dialogue because firstly, dialogue often requires context, replicating which is unnecessarily cumbersome and secondly, the film-essay’s fluidity relies heavily on cinematic continuity which can only be achieved through aural continuity. While the vice-versa would be an interesting audio-visual experiment, navigating the archives in search of widely varying audio to fit a single visual narrative is counterproductive. While environmental cinematic sound has been used in order to bring some of the scenes to life, the initial dialogue depicting the recently-migrated mother and two young boys in Deewaar, the transition to London playing the song Vande Mataram in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... the scene included from the Zoya Akhtar segment of Bombay Talkies, the scene depicting Krishna buying a train ticket to go to “any big city” in Dharavi, and the concluding scene from Dharavi depicting the monologue of Anil Kapoor watched in a lower-class informal theatre.

Defining the abovementioned portions as the “free” segments leaves us to conclude the remainder of the “guided” segments utilising transition clips, an overlaid verbal narrative and music in order to finalise the film essay.

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Figure 2.12: Initial Structure of the narrative

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2.3 The Verbal Essay 2.3.1 Prelude to the Text The primary function of the overlaid verbal narrative is to weave together the concepts illustrated

. The narrative is constructed within the same structure previously

defined and is to be delivered vocally in an engaged manner. The delivery is not meant to be completely neutral, nor overtly biased. Rather, stress is made where necessary in moments that the video transitions do not absolutely communicate the necessary ideas.

2.3.2 The Text

The typical #BOMBAY_HOME is not only one that sustains life in the city.

It is also that which sustains the #STORY_OF_BOMBAY_CINEMA. The idea of the house has been constantly #FLUID. Between films and within films.

The house oscillates between footpaths, slums, modest homes, and palaces that magically occupy city land.

The city, however, is not wholeheartedly urban.

Although the city is densely populated by houses, the spaces between these homes are also homes.

The #FOOTPATH is an amalgamated space that intertwines #RURAL tendencies with modern #URBANISM. #HOMELESSNESS is often celebrated as a metaphor A metaphor that helps us empathise with the protagonist's suffering.

This is the same suffering that justifies the use of #VIOLENCE as therapy.

The hero or anti-hero navigates an urban space and a #SOCIO-POLITICAL landscape in search of justice.

The home is simply a reference to allow the viewer to digest this urban struggle.

But the home is not concentrated to one point.

For this section of society, the domestic functions are #SCATTERED in urban space. #TOILETS are not even a question.

The real question is always ‘Where to have sex?’.

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And the answer lied charmingly on various beds, sprinkled into a few concentrated, #INTIMATE spaces around the city.

Intimacy can’t be guaranteed just by owning a house.

Families are joint and large.

Houses in Mumbai are small and dense.

The affluent are constantly trying to own #BIGGER_HOUSES. There are numerous things they want own.

Like a #HOUSEWIFE. But sometimes the #MAID was the ultimate housewife.

She could be rented in Mumbai’s extensive market of household labourers.

Female roles were not always experimental.

Although women played strong characters, and #FEARLESSNESS was celebrated They were almost always domestic, enabling the male lead to navigate his urban quests.

By the turn of the millennium, #INDIVIDUALISM was on the rise.

Woman paid their own rents and stopped playing the queens of the Havelis (mansion).

The #HAVELI, or mansion, was the organic outcome of years of evolution in the domestic space.

Like a temple, the home was not only decorated, it was also worshipped.

With designer drapes and eclectic consumerism.

The #VASTNESS of a new surreal domesticity granted spatial liberty.

It granted a certain familial #HIERARCHY. It granted space for the new modern Indian to dream of an ideal lifestyle.

Life could be extravagantly celebrated: through song and dance; The Haveli helped forget about the chaotic realities of Bombay.

The other option was to move to London.

Abroad, the story was somehow never about their livelihoods.

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The characters' socio-political backgrounds were always #MYSTERIOUS. Rather the story was about #NOSTALGIA. And so was the architecture #RELIGIOUS_ICONOGRAPHY simultaneously symbolised traditional Indian virtues and middle-class complacency.

Today cinema deals with an immensely more complex society.

And housing is a multifarious social issue in Bombay One that is tethered within a thick fabric of politics and spatial constraints.

The majority of cinema shows us instead how the slums make for a charming #LABYRINTH for a hot a urban chase In 2018, #KAALA a film featuring the Tamil Superstar Rajnikanth speaks intensely about the slums of Mumbai and the housing crisis that the city faces.

We delves into the deeply #POLITICAL lives of the people of the slums.

We begin to fight the established #TOP-DOWN_APPROACH to affordable housing.

Because uprooting these slum dwellers could never be the solution Disruption of this housing meant disruptions of their economic backbone.

Perhaps there never was anything wrong with the slums.

Bombay kept looking at it like a reflection on a bad hair day.

Hoping not to accidentally run into any mirrors on the way to work.

The ideological shift from rehabilitation to upgradation marks a change in public attitude.

The broad #COMPLACENCY towards the lack of housing in Mumbai is waning.

And the city the city is a black hole, forever ingesting migrants from rural India.

Perhaps affordably housing all of the city’s 23 million inhabitants is a far-off challenge.

What Bombay's cinema shows us is not merely a collection of apt objects for study.

Rather it is a #COLLECTIVE_VISION_OF_THE_CITY

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And when viewed through its context reveals a peculiar urban domestic condition.

Bombay's houses continue to evolve recounting a different story each time.

And the protagonist navigates the urban landscape, fighting the established hierarchies The home awaits in the background; ready to reconcile the difficult paths the hero has treaded.

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2.4 Music and Soundtrack 2.4.1 Minimalism and Hindustani Classical Music The principle theme soundtrack that is to be used was selected from Passages the joint chamber music album between released in 1990 by Pandit Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass. The counterintuitive album written by the two maestros using arrangements by the other combines various musical styles into a single record. The album’s first song begins the film essay and is called Offering. A track that features multiple layers of minimalist saxophone from a classical Hindustani intuition eases us into the world of Bombay’s domestic spaces. We are somehow not intimidated by the breadth of the cinematic archive, nor the urban chaos that Bombay promises.

The Shankar raga (“Shankar scale”) permits a rise in intensity towards the middle before strings subsume the entirety of the composition. Through the pensive respirations of the saxophones gradually increasing in tempo, it becomes evident how this track can be apt for a slow-paced minimalist meditation on the spaces of Bombay cinema.

The second track to be introduced after the Bombay Talkies segment that ends with a father slapping his 8-year-old’s face is Ragas in Minor Scale. Composed by Glass, a veena is overlaid with cellos resulting in the steady cultivation of a mysterious mood. The dissonant orchestrations complement a mixture of the viewers’ confusion and discernment as the succeeding scenes depicting the haywire at the house of Raj Karan Yadav in Dharavi. The song appears to invoke through its minor scale a wistfulness for a space that could have been otherwise. The experiential lives of people like Raj Karan Yadav are deeply political and hang a breath away from turmoil. It is this futility of existence that the song communicates through its heavy strings and complex veena arrangements when superimposed over the visuals.

2.4.2 Vande Mataram To use the original soundtrack from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... is to accept what is perhaps an unexpected transition from the dramatic Haveli on the festive day of Diwali of an aging Raichand family, to the city of London where Rohan Raichand arrives in search of his long-lost brother. Rohan is sporting a pair of jeans and a tight long-sleeved black t-shirt with a slit along the chest that exposes a faux orange inner-shirt. However while bombarded with new cultural images and multinational brands, he seems to be immediately nostalgic as he runs into classical dancers and women dressed in the Indian tricolours, saffron, white and green. The immediate yet recurring nostalgia, characterised by the film’s slogan “It’s all about loving your parents,” has been studied by multiple scholars (Mazumdar, 2007; Basu, 2010). However, it is perhaps

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best conveyed by the translation by Shri Aurobindo Ghosh of the original lyrics of the song redocumented in the book “Vande Mataram and Islam” by Aurobindo Mazumdar (2007): বন্দে মাতরম্৷ সুজলা​াং সুফলা​াং মলয়জশীতলাম্ শসযশযামলা​াং মাতরম্! বন্দে মাতরম্৷.

Mother, I praise thee!

Rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with orchard gleams, Cool with thy winds of delight, Dark fields waving Mother of might, Mother free The theme of Vande Mataram recurs constantly in the film. The children born abroad are constantly reminded by their mothers of what the greatest country in the world is. As a matter of fact immediately after the song ends, we are transitioned to another patriotic song being sung by Anjali, Sare Jahan se Accha. The song, written by the poet Muhammad Iqbal in the ghazal style of Urdu poetry, is translated as follows (“Sare Jahan se Accha,” 2019): ‫سارے جہاں سے اچھا ہندوستاں ہمارا‬ ‫ یہ گلستاں ہمارا‬،‫ہم بلبلیں ہیں اس کی‬ ‫ رہتا ہے دل وطن میں‬،‫غربت میں ہوں اگر ہم‬ ‫سمجھو وہیں ہمیں بھی دل ہو جہاں ہمارا‬ Better than the entire world, is our Hind, We are its nightingales, and it (is) our garden abode If we are in an alien place, the heart remains in the homeland, Know us to be only there where our heart is.

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2.4.3 M.I.A. and the Slum as a Labyrinth When London-born artist M.I.A. published the song Paper Planes in 2008, it achieved commercial success instantly. The song, included in numerous films, topping charts and being the number 2 song on the Rolling Stone’s 100 songs for the 21st century (Hermes et al., 2018), is apt here as when it was used by director Danny Boyle in a scene where five-year-old Salim says to five-year-old Jamal, “Let’s go. I’m starving,” both sitting atop a moving train in the middle of a rural India. As the song engulfs the aural environment, we see Jamal and Salim, resourcefully making their way to earning a few rupees in order to buy food, playfully stealing food from a richer middle-class family’s train compartment and supposedly enjoying the poetry of the varying landscapes of rural India.

Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Asia is famous also for its cinematic representation of its psychedelic spatial organisation. Capitalising on this maze-like structure various films have succeeded in bringing spatial interest to their films as in: the initial playful chase between slum children and a police officer in Slumdog Millionaire, a hypnotic and multi-paced chase between the Bombay police and Imtiaz Gawate a criminal suspect in Black Friday, and a chase between a policeman and a random thief in the song Dharavi Rap in Boothnath Returns. Although in Slumdog Millionaire, during the chase we hear the track O... Saya composed by famed Indian composer A.R. Rahman M.I.A., the downtempo slow rap of Paper Planes proves adequate for the compilation of the chase sequences.

2.4.4 City Slums Slums Svetha Yellapragada Rao and Vivian Fernandes known respectively by their stage names, Raja Kumari and DIVINE, released a track named City Slums in 2017 through Sony Music Entertainment India Private Limited. The track takes off with a classic downtempo Los Angeles hip-hop beat sliding into the chorus performed by Raja Kumari, “It's coming from the gully; It's coming from the city slums slums.” The song pays homage to the underground hiphop culture that has gripped Dharavi and the slums of Bombay in the last two decades.

Although first introduced in Hindi by Baba Sehgal, a rap artist from Lucknow (India), the underground scene exploded when songs like Aafat by Naezy and Mere Gully Mein by DIVINE featuring Naezy were uploaded onto YouTube for all of India to experience the exertion that life in the slums of Bombay denoted. The film Gully Boy (Akhtar, 2019) (slated to release February 2019) outlines a fictional story played by Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt based on the lives of DIVINE and Naezy. What the hip-hop culture represents in Bombay is not only the extent and effects of globalisation on the lower class in Bombay, but also the temperament of the urban poor in the city. The rappers have been mocked for appropriating a culture that is far from theirs, but the identities of Bombay’s rappers stand resilient and unquestionable.

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2.5 Setting and Transitioning Contextualising the essay, we find ourselves with the scenes initially identified in chapter 2.1.1.

In the film Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal is also looking for something, i.e., his lost love. As observers of the cinematic universe, we are looking for a place to begin within the dense, chaotic world of Bombay cinema. Similar to the identified frames, we are to find within the cinematic archive a series of relevant clips to both set a particular context or to transition between contexts. For instance, in order to set the idea of a Bombay home, the scene from the Zoya Akhtar segment on Lust Stories is used. To demonstrate the variability in housing typology, street scenes from Deewaar, a typical house from The Lunchbox, and shots from the scenic Haveli in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... can be utilised. In order to transition from the idea of the footpath as a home, to the scattering of domestic functions, the scene from Salaam Bombay! where one of Chaipau’s peers is urinating onto train tracks as an incoming train approaches.

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2.6 Pacing with the Storyboard In a synthesis of the elements from the previous chapters, a graphically organised storyboard can function as a plan to begin the editing process. Systematizing the relevant film segments onto the linear narrative defined in chapter 2.2, overlaid next with a recording of a voice-over performance of the text from chapter 2.3 and reinforced lastly by the film and environmental music defined in chapter 2.4, we arrive at a linear story board

. The same figure can be

used in order to revise the film-essay and make further cuts transitions.

While it serves as a tool to systematically execute the editing process, the storyboard also serves as a tool for analysis and consequent adjustment of its composite elements. If we are to plot the tempo of the various audio tracks utilised throughout the film essay, we can arrive at a graph that reveals a precise trend over the presupposed 14-minute length. As clearly observable, the film-essay begins at a logically slow pace slightly less than 80 bpm (beats per minute) and works its way up to the middle where the pace rises to around 200 beats per minute, falls again and gradually rises until the climax where music is not played until the last moment. Hence, the pace chart does not provide us with an accurate image of the film-essay’s intensity. However, the chart does allow us to understand whether or not sufficient room is allotted between the various peaks in the bpm variations.

Another valuable insight that the storyboard provides us with is the ability to visually recognise the equilibrium between the “guided” voice-over narratives and the “free” audiovisual-only narrative. The voice-over bar identified in red in

2 represents the balance

between narrated segments and non-narrated segments. Although arriving at a rule of thumb is needless, it is patent that more than half of the film-essay must not be covered by the verbal narrative. Summing the total time engaged by the voice-over we find that it occupies around 8 minutes including reasonable interims for inhaling and exhaling, around 61% of the total length of the film-essay. Retaking the voice-over performance and re-adjusting the essay bringing the duration to around 6 minutes, one finds a clearer flexibility granted to the visual as a communicative instrument.

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Figure 2.13: Final storyboard

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2.7 Editing Following the storyboard, the film was compiled on Premiere Pro, stitching together the elements outlined in chapter 2.6, creating a single, harmonious narrative. Five layers of video tracks were utilised as follows. V1: cinema segments, V2: overlapping cinema segments, V3: graphic elements (black boxes used to manage changes in aspect ratio between films) V4: subtitles and V5: APA style connotations that announce the film, director and year of release of each film. Three layers of audio tracks were utilised as follows. A1: the verbal narrative, A2: the voice-over and A3: the background music.

2.7.1 Cuts and Transitions A variety of cutting techniques were utilised in order to transition between chapters and transitions. In a majority of cases, the most viable transition is the jump cut between two scenes of the same film, or two segments of different films. The technique lies in viewing the entire film essay as a series of cuts and transitions irrespective of lack of variation of the film, i.e., if a we are to transition into a 2-minute clip from a film that includes within it several jump cuts and crossfades, the corresponding transitions are to be regarded as transitions not within the film but within the film-essay itself. While typical cinematic jump cuts on action wouldn’t communicate the same idea as jumping between different films distorts the continuity that is being sought in jump cutting on action, it is still possible to implement them in order to transition between topics.

Figure 2.14: The water-splashing-transition used to exit the title screen

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The scene from Dharavi where the protagonist is seen using his public space outside his home in the slums of Dharavi to clean his car can be used to begin the film-essay as it contextualises the narrative and at the same time, allows us to exit the title screen at a different pace than what it was approached with.

Figure 2.15: The crossfade transition used to move to London A similar technique would perhaps not be applicable for transitions that last longer durations such as the transition to London at the 5 minute 45 second timestamp. The entire transition lasts around 4 seconds and features crossfading audio to gradually communicate what would otherwise be 15 hours of air travel.

2.7.2 Transitioning Sound

Figure 2.16: Silence and a dusty afternoon before Paper Planes by M.I.A.

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Audio transitions occur at key points as indicated on the storyboard in Figure 2.13. While in order to balance changes in key or scale as well as tempo, audios can be crossfaded, sudden changes if not accompanied by a corresponding visual or verbal change in the narrative sound forced. As the film ends and Anil Kapoor fires his handgun at Babia, calling out his misdeeds, the credits are played to the song City Slums by Raja Kumari featuring the Bombay rapper DIVINE. In this moment the gunshot warrants an abrupt start to the downtempo hip-hop beat as an opposing mood to the previously dramatic and tense crime-drama strings. On the contrary, the beginning to the slum-chases allows space for a fresh aural environment to be laid out. Paper Planes by M.I.A. is perhaps best begun in the silence of a dusty, warm afternoon in the city’s slums rather than transitioned to from a different song. This leads us to leave sufficient space before the start of the song without a different background soundtrack as shown in Figure 2.16.

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PART C:

Conclusions 3

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3.1 Reflections What Bombay's cinema shows us is not merely a collection of apt objects for study. Rather it is a collective vision of the city. When viewed through its context, the vision reveals a particular urban domestic condition to the viewer. The idea of the house is not one that is static throughout Bombay Cinema. What we observe as a constantly evolving domestic space is what is reflected also in the city. The various typologies that have been identified can be linked to various eras of Bombay’s growth as a city and Bollywood as a medium. Perhaps the first decade of the 21st century was defined by unrealism and stars such as Shah Rukh Khan masquerading their societal roles as stars. Khan although at times claiming to be as unreal as his roles (Chopra, 2007, p. 221-2), and at other times claiming to be the king of the Bollywood itself (“Shah Rukh Khan,” 2019), is not the star of the hour as the second decade comes to a close.

The newfound trends are changing rapidly in Bombay and its cinema. Social films that directly dealt with the domestic condition in Bombay never made it to the top of the box office. Films such as Traffic Signal, Chandni Bar, and Laaga Chunari Mein Daag tackled social issues but failed to grab large-scale national attention. It was with the beginning of underground success of the less popular anthology films such as Bombay Talkies and Lust Stories that stories that dealt directly with housing and Dharavi emerged. As of 2019, films like Kaala and Gully Boy (Akhtar, 2019) have begun to talk about the domestic condition of Bombay from a realist perspective. The complacency that was seen in popular films to social inequality at the turn of the century is waning and Indian cinema appears to trace its steps back to a period where it was a medium for social engagement and criticism.

Every protagonist that navigates urban space in order to resolve their respective conflicts, social metaphors or not, wafts through a variety of spaces within the urban landscape that all symbolise their own particular functions. The villain might symbolise corruption or internal battles. The streets may represent memory, childhood and nostalgia. And the home may represent security, conflict or reconciliation.

One can always observe what the cinema tries to say, but one can only criticise these cinematic objects once we observe what it is that cinema as a medium of communication is trying to say.

And slowly we see that the cinema and the city evolve together constantly, therapeutically emerging as a single vehicle for social introspection.

Although the study is not chronological, the story builds itself around a timebound vision of Bombay Cinema. Introducing the city with its cinema to a global academic audience requires a well-structured narration that can combine both the wide extent of housing typology Bombay

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offers and the innumerable aspects of the city’s domesticity. As the study skims over the various eras of Bollywood defined perhaps most aptly by the following diagram.

1950s Socials: the ‘Golden Era’ (Directors: Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy) ↓ [1960s: overlap with 1950s] ↓ 1970s ‘Angry Man’ era and Parallel Cinema movement peak (Social retribution action films; directors Shyam Benegal and Ritwik Ghatak) ↓ [1980s: overlap with 1970s. Dip in cinema-going due to rise of television] (Doordarshan channel launches successful Ramayana TV series) ↓ 1990s NRI and Family Movies (Diaspora-oriented productions; patriotic, traditionalist, family-oriented ‘multi-starrers’) ↓ [2000s: continuation of 1990s?]

Figure 3.1: A chart showing the chronological organisation of Bombay Cinema from the 1950s to the 2000s (Wright, 2017, p. 22) Numerous conclusions can be drawn within the domestic domain that helps shed light in a similar manner. The “Golden Era” of Bombay Cinema with films like Mother India defined the cinematic aesthetic for decades to come. While it was an age marked by experimentation within the stereotypical roles of women and men in storytelling, domesticity was not openly spoken about. Whether or not feminist roles were introduced were far from the important questions concerned with nation building at hand. This period was succeeded immediately both by sociopolitical unrest in the nation as well as a reflection of it in Bombay Cinema. The “Classic” period that saw the rise of the “angry man” and the homeless or the “poor man”. The home functioned as a space that reconciled various urban synergies along the course of the film. The home functioned as a space to contextualise, reconcile, or punctuate an urban story. When Deewaar’s Vijay goes back to his mother after defeating a goon who runs a corrupt factory business, she mirrors the internal battles that Vijay experiences; ones we are exempted from as the viewer as Vijay stares blankly into space as his mother scolds him for getting into undue trouble. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… the home, although flagrantly opposing in visual styles, plays a similar role. The Haveli denotes a different reality and wealth is overtly celebrated, but

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the hero’s struggle is similar. His urban journey corresponds to a different scale and his villain is perhaps the familial hierarchy itself. The hero’s father merely executes the hierarchy and the hero never despises him like the angry man despised the villain. The home however is the space that is meant to welcome transformation in characters’ personalities as well as keep up with the realist cinema aesthetic and ever-evolving plot. It measures and tracks progress in the hero’s journey. As the cinema industry continues to evolve, what is seen after the postmodern cinema from 1990-2010 is a return to an experimental view of the domestic space, used to reflect a more accurate situation of the various housing plights in Bombay.

3.2 Studying the Narrative 3.2.1 Revisiting the Video Essay The audio-visual product published along with this written manual is one that captures the highlights of the observational study and transcribes it onto video from the specific movies being referred to in each chapter. As the essay film walks us through the various topics of interest, what is observed are truncated portions of films that are overlapped by a verbal narrative that introduce a variety of certain viewpoints that are outlined within a predefined theoretical framework and project scope. The essay film itself shares the very format it is assessing. And just as Bombay films are punctuated with drama, dance, music and silence, so is the essay film.

Contending with an assortment of domestic parameters, housing typologies and film genres, the film essay organises the extracted archive clips in a manner that doesn’t communicate any single one of the organising structures, rather what is communicated is a single amalgamated is done so through a unique product that intertwines the three. Although not divided exhaustively into chapters, the film essay can be divided into sub-topics that are addressed or tagged in a recurring manner. However, the effectiveness of the film-essay as a medium lies in its ability to transmit the observed ideas and bring them to a conclusion through a wellbalanced audio-visual and verbal dialogue.

3.2.2 Looking for Balance Although the film essay is a medium that is composed of multiple media elements, the final audio-visual is in itself its own media, and this could require scrutiny from a similar perspective.

However, what one finds when continuing this exercise is that there is a weighted interplay between the various overlaid elements that defines the communicative potential of the essay film. Visually, the essay film is more consistent. There is seldom overlap between multiple

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videos let alone there be a specific necessity to demonstrate a comparison between multiple clips. However, within the aural arrangement, there is a more convoluted dynamic. The clips from cinema, while found to generally contain audio punctuated with dialogue and silence, often contain music. This needs to fare well with the common thread that ties together all the selected clips. While moments of silence appear to come from within the studied film, they are actually part of the essay film. As the gears work together, a variety of mechanisms appear to arise. Firstly, there is the reflexive function of silence that brings the viewer into the image on the screen. Then there is the ambient function of music that defines a particular emotion or a mixture thereof. And finally there is dialogue that either uses language to directly provoke thought, or indirectly.

After watching the essay film, the viewer is aware of its nature as a compilation video.

However, it was not attempted to conceal this characteristic of the video. The essay film functions just as any other complete storytelling means and the proportions of audio-visual to verbal narration were negotiated in order to arrive at a suitable balance.

3.3 Final Meditations Concluding the film essay, the film depicts a movie scene being watched by a public from Dharavi. The scene being watched is an action sequence that involves a preamble delivered by Anil Kapoor. It is a speech overflowing with anger and cathartic frustration. Perhaps this scene accurately positions Bombay cinema, housing in Bombay and the everyday struggles of the common people of the city into light. As one of the women wistfully watch a scene bursting with emotion, we see the extent of the crisis of modernity in the globalised city of Bombay; one that is riddled with fear, hunger and corruption. And as the public watch the story of their own lives told through furious style, what pretends to be an auspicious and historic event is easily burned down by fire. The common person is snapped out of a fantasy, and the laborious machinery of city life retakes its familiar course.

Along the already explored lines, there is still much research to be conducted in order to come to a conclusion of the precise nature of the ever-evolving relationship between home and cinema. Ethnographic studies that involve Bombay’s citizens and the film they interact with are key. Such studies have already been carried out (Rao, 2007; Massoumi, 2017) but they are lacking in their focus on the socio-economic weight that housing in Bombay warrants in sociological studies.

Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema intends to reveal how film study can work as a means of social development and introspection. What is attempted throughout the study is both a Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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comprehensive and open approach to urban study and in this case in particular, domesticity in the city of Bombay. The post-globalised city with its bustling dynamic and ever-growing technological capabilities will be one that either grows close or away from the society that inhabits it. The cinema industry, that has long been tied to the society as a social means of reflection, should continue to remain a social medium as it is made either by or for the very society that consumes the media in vast magnitudes. While the both evolve together gradually, what will be observed is either a symmetrical development, or developments that drift apart from one another.

In either case, the evolution of the relationship between cinema and city is of paramount academic value, providing the observer with a logic to scrutinise both the society, and the society’s reflection of itself through a medium that it produces. Unquestionably, what is most obvious from Bombay’s films is that an archetypical Bombay home doesn’t exist. The domestic space of the typical Bombay home instead constantly awaits the next appropriate script wherein it can be reflected as the outspoken yet ordinary space that its proports to be.

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List of Annexes Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Máster en Comunicación Arquitectónica

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3.1 Bibliography Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press.

Appadurai, A. (2000). Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai.

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Armstrong, N. (1987). Desire and domestic fiction: a political history of the novel. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bachelard, G., Jolas, M., & Stilgoe, J. R. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.es/books?id=CVklE1ouVYIC Bhaumik, K. (2001). The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913-1936. University of Oxford.

Bose, B. (2008). Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City: A Reading of Indian Cinema.

The Global South, 2(1), 35–58. https://doi.org/10.2979/GSO.2008.2.1.35 Caws, M. A. (1991). City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film.

Psychology Press.

Chakravarty, S. S. (1989). National identity and the realist aesthetic: Indian cinema of the fifties.

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11(3), 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208909361313 Chakravarty, S. S. (2011). National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987. University of Texas Press.

Ciecko, A. (2004). Into the Sc(re)enery: Bollywood Locations and Docu-diaspora. Asian Cinema, 15(2), 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1386/ac.15.2.5_1 Clarke, D. (Ed.). (1997). The Cinematic City (1 edition). London ; New York: Routledge.

Dovey, K. (1985). Home and Homelessness. In I. Altman & C. M. Werner (Eds.), Home Environments (pp. 33–64). Boston, MA: Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-48992266-3_2 Dudrah, R., & Desai, J. (2008). The Essential Bollywood. The Bollywood Reader, 1–17.

Dumont, L., & Sainsbury, M. (2010). Homo hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications (Complete rev. English ed., 8th impr). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dutta, M., Lhungdim, H., & Prashad, L. (2016). An Enquiry Into Migration and Homelessness - A Developmental Discourse: Evidence From Mumbai City (Working Papers No. id:10059). eSocialSciences. Retrieved from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id10059.html Dwivedi, R. M. S. (2001). Bombay : The Cities Within. Bombay: Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd. Heidegger, M. (2009). Poetry, language, thought (20. print). New York: Perennical Classics.

Hohmann, J. M. (2010). Visions of Social Transformation and the Invocation of Human Rights in Mumbai: The Struggle for the Right to Housing. Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, 13, 135.

Kapur, J., & Pendakur, M. (2007). The Strange Disappearance of Bombay from its Own Cinema: A Case of Imperialism or Globalization? Democratic Communiqué, 21(1), 43.

Kavoori, A. P., & Punathambekar, A. (2008). Global Bollywood. NYU Press.

Korosec-Serfaty, P. (1985). Experience and Use of the Dwelling. In I. Altman & C. M. Werner (Eds.), Home Environments (pp. 65–86). Boston, MA: Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2266-3_3 Kumar, A. (2011). Changing Landscape of Moral Registers and Urban Pathology in ‘Bombay’ Cinema: Decline of Biological Family and Birth of the Individual through Awara (1951), Deewar (1951), (1975) and Satya (1998). CINEJ Cinema Journal, 1, 116–125. https://doi.org/10.5195/CINEJ.2011.20 Leigh, N. G., & Kenny, J. (1996). The City of Cinema: Interpreting Urban Images on Film.

Journal of Planning Education and Research, 16(1), 51–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X9601600106 Massoumi, N. (2017). Domestic Ethnography, Diaspora and Memory in Baba 1989. In B. Harper & H. Price (Eds.), Domestic Imaginaries: Navigating the Home in Global Literary and Visual Cultures (pp. 169–189). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66490-3_9 Mazumdar, R. (2007). Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. U of Minnesota Press.

McFarlane, C. (2008). Postcolonial Bombay: decline of a cosmopolitanism city? Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26(3), 480–499. https://doi.org/10.1068/dcos6

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Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science: The reward and communication systems of science are considered. Science, 159(3810), 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.159.3810.56 Mishra, V. (2002). Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. Psychology Press.

Nair, R., & Raghavan, V. (2014). Living on the edge: Scoping Study of Homeless Population in M East Ward, Mumbai. Social Work, 5, 35–45.

Nandy, A. (1998). The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan.

Nandy, A. (2000). The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Nandy, A. (2007). An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Othe Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195683974.001.0001/a cprof-9780195683974 Nijman, J. (2009). A Study of Spaces in Mumbai Slums. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 101(1), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2009.00576.x Padora, S. (2016). In the Name of Housing: A Study of 11 Projects in Mumbai.

Parthasarathy, D. (2009). Social and environmental insecurities in Mumbai: towards a sociological perspective on vulnerability. South African Review of Sociology, 40(1), 109–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2009.10425103 Prasad, M. M. (2000). Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Oxford University Press.

Punathambekar, A. (2013). From Bombay to Bollywood: the making of a global media industry. New York: New York University Press.

Raj, S. J., & Sreekumar, R. (2017). System within the Suburb: Dharavi and Class Depiction in Bollywood. In D. Forrest, G. Harper, & J. Rayner (Eds.), Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs (pp. 131–147). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-13753175-9_9 Rajadhyaksha, A., & Willemen, P. (1999). Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Taylor & Francis Group.

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Rao, S. (2007). The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India. The Communication Review, 10(1), 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714420601168491 Raj, S. J., & Sreekumar, R. (2017). System within the Suburb: Dharavi and Class Depiction in Bollywood. In D. Forrest, G. Harper, & J. Rayner (Eds.), Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs (pp. 131–147). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-13753175-9_9 Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands: essays and criticism 1981 - 1991. London: Granta Books [u.a.].

Sawhney, R. (2012). The Virtual Reality of Indian Cinema. Interventions, 14(3), 395–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2012.704498 Sen, J. (1976). “The Unintended City.” Seminar, no. 200 (April).

Shlay, A. B., & Rossi, P. H. (1992). Social Science Research and Contemporary Studies of Homelessness. Annual Review of Sociology, 18(1), 129–160. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.18.080192.001021 Shiel, M., & Fitzmaurice, T. (2011). Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. John Wiley & Sons.

Siddhartha Basu, Sanjay Kak, & Pradip Krishen. (n.d.). Cinema and Society: A Search for Meaning in a New Genre. India International Centre Quarterly, 8(1,). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001936 Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216–242. https://doi.org/10.2307/25470707 Upstone, S. (2007). Domesticity in Magical-Realist Postcolonial Fiction Reversals of Representation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 28(1), 260–284. https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2007.0036 Werner, C. M., Altman, I., & Oxley, D. (1985). Temporal Aspects of Homes. In I. Altman & C. M. Werner (Eds.), Home Environments (pp. 1–32). Boston, MA: Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2266-3_1 Williams, R. (1983). Culture and Society, 1780-1950. Columbia University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.es/books?id=V3me7QWAZR0C

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Wright, N. S. (2017). Bollywood and Postmodernism: Popular Indian Cinema in the 21st Century (Reprint edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

3.2 Webpages 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects | Multimedia Library - United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (n.d.). Retrieved January 15, 2019, from https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/2018-revision-of-worldurbanization-prospects.html Bollywood revenues may cross Rs 19,300 cr by FY17. (2016, January 5). The Hindu. Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/Bollywood-revenues-may-crossRs-19300-cr-by-FY17/article13982597.ece Dharavi. (2019). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dharavi&oldid=878006546 Economic survey says not many people are taking up houses in Mumbai. (2018, January 29).

Retrieved January 15, 2019, from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indlgoods/svs/construction/economic-survey-says-not-many-people-are-taking-up-houses-inmumbai/articleshow/62694225.cms GDP growth (annual %) | Data. (2019). Retrieved January 15, 2019, from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=IN

Hermes, C. H., Christopher R. Weingarten,Jon Dolan,Elias Leight,Brittany Spanos,Suzy Exposito,Kory Grow,Sarah Grant,Simon Vozick-Levinson,Andy Greene,Will, Hoard, C., Weingarten, C. R., Dolan, J., Leight, E., Spanos, B., … Hermes, W. (2018, June 28). The 100 Greatest Songs of the Century – So Far. Retrieved January 19, 2019, from

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https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/the-100-greatest-songs-of-the-centuryso-far-666874/ Hutchinson, P. (2013, July 25). The birth of India’s film industry: how the movies came to Mumbai. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/25/birth-indias-film-industry-moviesmumbai Lewis, C. (2015, November 17). First ever GIS study shows 3,293 slum clusters in Mumbai Times of India. Retrieved January 15, 2019, from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/First-ever-GIS-study-shows-3293slum-clusters-in-Mumbai/articleshow/49810365.cms Konermann. (2010). Dharavi, Slum for Sale. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188984/ Sare Jahan se Accha. (2019). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sare_Jahan_se_Accha&oldid=878865370 Scroll.in. (n.d.). Why Mumbai Has Slums - YouTube. Retrieved January 15, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPZp_ICmfhE&t=405s Shah Rukh Khan. (2019). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shah_Rukh_Khan&oldid=877827147 Thompson, D. (2010, January 14). Kevin McCloud: Slumming It, Channel 4, review. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6990314/Kevin-McCloudSlumming-It-Channel-4-review.html

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Video+Interview: MIA, “Jimmy.” (n.d.). Retrieved January 19, 2019, from https://www.thefader.com/2007/08/07/video-interview-mia-jimmy

3.3 Film Database The following is a complete list of all films referenced for the study.

CID

1956

Zanjeer

1973

27 Down

1974

Deewaar

1975

Gaman

1978

Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai?

1980

Katha

1982

Ardh Satya

1983

Salaam Bombay!

1988

Chandni

1989

Parinda

1989

Ghayal

1990

Deewana

1992

Dharavi

1992

Hum Apke Hain Kaun

1994

Baasha

1995

Bombay

1995

Rangeela

1995

Dil To Pagal Hai

1997

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Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

1998

Satya

1998

Chandni Bar

2001

Dil Chahta Hai

2001

Khabi Khushi Khabi Gham

2001

Company

2002

Baghban

2003

Maqbool

2003

Munna Bhai

2003

Black Friday

2004

Dombivili Fast

2005

Mumbai Express

2005

Ek Chalis Ki Last Local

2007

Life in a Metro

2007

Shootout at Lokhandwala

2007

Traffic Signal

2007

Mumbai Meri Jaan

2008

Dhobi Ghat

2010

Drohi

2010

Once Upon a Time in Mumbai

2010

Shor in the City

2010

Agneepath

2012

BT - Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh

2013

BT - Star

2013

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BT - Sheila Ki Jawani

2013

BT - Murabba

2013

Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobara

2013

The Attack of 26/11

2013

The Lunchbox

2013

Bombay Velvet

2015

BT2 - Radhika

2018

BT2 - Maid

2018

BT3 - Manisha

2018

BT4 - Arranged

2018

Kaala

2018

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