In a scene in Saeed Mirza’s National Award winning film Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989), the protagonist Salim walks down the deserted lanes of his neighbourhood with his friends and partners-in-crime, Bira and Abdul, when the trio is roughly reprimanded by a cop for loitering. In the Bombay of the late 1980s, communal violence is escalating and a curfew has been imposed on the Muslim ghetto they call home. As they turn a corner, a troubled Abdul wonders aloud: “Kya akkha zindagi hum aiseich rahenga? Insaano ka maar khaaenga?” (Will we spend our lives like this? Getting pushed around and beaten up by everyone else?) Salim assures him that their time too will come: “Tu dekhna, apnabhi time aayenga”. Exactly three decades on, in Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy, another Muslim boy from Dharavi turns these words into a rousing rap anthem.
Revisiting Salim Langde on its 30th anniversary, and soon after Gully Boy, it is interesting to look beyond this shared prophetic catchphrase, and focus on what the two films reveal about each filmmaker’s politics — or lack thereof. Set in the aftermath of the disastrous closure of the Bombay textile mills, in a rapidly communalising city that saw the rise of the Shiv Sena,Salim’s story is an essential primer to understand the Mumbai that Gully Boy’s Murad is born into and feels so trapped within.
The bereft son
Salim is the second son of a man who loses his job when the mills close. Salim’s brother, a bright college student, abandons his studies to work in the mills, but dies in a factory accident. Though Salim never knew his brother, he idolises him. Beneath the tough street-smart exterior, he feels bereft. He has lost not only a sibling, but also what he symbolised — the possibility of a life of dignity. In an emotional outburst, Salim talks of wanting a life where his father’s unemployment wouldn’t have cost him his education and forced him into petty crime for survival. He desperately wishes for a life where his class and religious identity don’t create barriers to an honest living.
Still from Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro
The two films operate as ‘before’ and ‘after’ images, reflecting how life has changed for poor urban Muslims. Murad is in many ways the post-liberalisation legatee of Salim. In Gully Boy, market liberalisation has allowed Murad the relative privilege of having access to avenues that let him combine artistic expression with a degree of financial security.
If there is an echo of Salim’s plight in Gully Boy, it is reflected in one of the film’s most interesting characters, Moeen, Murad’s hustler friend. A mechanic by day, he steals cars and peddles drugs to make ends meet. In their last scene together, on either side of a jail cell, Moeen tells Murad to chase his dreams. In a poignant moment of vulnerability, and also easily the most socio-politically charged one, Moeen urges his friend to pursue his creative passion to escape a life of squalor.
Murad’s and by extension Gully Boy’s faith in the transformative power of self-actualisation is difficult to begrudge. It is as much a product of its times as is its belief in social media being an equaliser. If they were to ever meet, Salim would perhaps envy Murad for having the means to ensure his upward social mobility in a city that treated him like a second-class citizen.
Salim Langde is, however, a deeply political film, in all the ways that Gully Boy is not. Salim’s illiteracy doesn’t stop him from recognising his own alienation — like many of Mirza’s characters. Through their journeys, Mirza charts his frustration, anger and ultimately, perhaps, his own political disillusionment: he witnesses the aftermath of the trade union strikes — the hardening contours of community identity and its power to galvanise poor urban youth, which makes liberalisation a hollow promise, its potential benefits undercut by the rise of communal polarisation.
Class, not caste
Gully Boy, on the other hand, is told with a lot of empathy for its characters, but is politically evasive. For Akhtar, class prejudice is the only hurdle Murad faces in his path to success, operating exclusive of religious and caste identity. In recent interviews, Akhtar has said that she consciously chose not to dwell on Murad’s religious identity so that the film wouldn’t be slotted as a ‘Muslim’ film.
Still from Gully Boy.
From a commercial standpoint, this decision reveals how well the filmmaker knows her viewer demographic. But it simultaneously reflects how an audience’s biases and anxieties continue to dictate which stories get told and how they are told. This means that films like Salim Langde, which depict such characters with depth and insight, and also dare to analyse the prejudices of the society they inhabit, are practically non-existent in our times.
It is no surprise, then, that in the current cinematic landscape, Gully Boy’s unapologetic visual mainstreaming of minority identity has left a strong impression on the public imagination. It shows how low the storytelling bar has been set when simply depicting working-class Muslim characters as protagonists, whose actions register as subversive, becomes a laudable feat in itself. The problem is not that Muslims who look like Murad and Safeena do not exist, nor even that they have never appeared in mainstream films. The problem is that even if they do happen to be intermittently portrayed, they are almost never written as multi-dimensional, complex human beings who could be heroes of their own stories. They rarely amount to anything much more than the reductive and overwhelmingly negative perception of their religious identity. It is a struggle to remember the last time a Hindi film didn’t use the skull cap, the hijab, the masjid, namaz, and azaan as shorthand to foreshadow terrorism, suspicion and fear, or at best as kitschy background decoration for a Sufi song.
Thus Gully Boy, if nothing more, is an upbeat step in the right direction. Its strength lies in its subliminal framing of Muslimness as the everyday reality of ordinary people who are simply trying to get by. This is why, despite its consciously diluted politics, Gully Boy is still significant. It remains to be seen, however, if it is a drop in the ocean for Hindi cinema, or if its cultural impact will inspire more filmmakers to focus on marginalised identities and worlds.
The author is a Ph.D research scholar in modern history at Jawaharlal Nehru University.