Not so Mumbai: What often gets left out in city's on screen depictions

In many ways, Mumbai proves the natural homeground for stories of Modern Love. Fascination for Bombay comes from a desire for modern life, writes historian Gyan Prakash. It gave us the promise of living, earning and loving unencumbered by the conventions of traditional Indian life. But on-screen today, Mumbai’s colloquialisms has become wholly undetectable.

We see high urban myth-making in the short film Cutting Chai from the Mumbai spinoff of the Modern Love franchise. Low-angle shots frame the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where migrants arrive to build their life. A writer reminisces about her arrival from Delhi at this “grand station.” “Mumbai embraces everyone,” she says as she meditates on her own milestones as young girls at the ticket counter or a newlywed woman at the chai stall offers her a mirror.

On Twitter, several people have commented on how the show felt like “Live-action Humans of Bombay,” another cultural product ripped off from New York that presents vox pops of Mumbaikars with the flourish of silver linings. Others have brought up Richard Linklater as an obvious reference in the short I Love Thane, where the two main characters walk the streets and philosophies on life and love.

Latika’s story in Cutting Chai wasn’t the first starry-eyed narrative of Mumbai, the city of dreams, on our screens. The New Girl in the City is both the headline of the article and the character trope in Wake Up Sid’s Aisha. If the growing visibility of the emergent middle class immediately after economic liberalisation, induced us to forget about poverty in the urban cultural space, Bombay has now intensified as the symbol of our global aspiration. Aisha, Latika and Saiba from I Love Thane are only a shade removed from the new Bollywood personalities, who according to film critic Sohini Chattopadhyay are unrooted to place, community or any kind of identity except class. They have unmistakably cool jobs like Kaira in Dear Zindagi is a cinematographer Aditya in Rock On!! is a musician or none at all like the characters of Student of the Year.

In Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, the city is the stage of another grand love story with empty signifiers, a part of the stylish ether of Hindi film youth. They will beam you up to your college days, but the college in question is interchangeable with the same Gothic architecture. While we have too much Marine Drive on screen, the Asiatic library is ubiquitous and invisible. Never just a library – its concrete steps are transformed into a courthouse the way courthouses are supposed to look in Hollywood movies. ‘Bombay’, no stranger to revisionist forces, has also been restyled by Bollywood seen in the way that Bombay Velvet glamorises the 60s and Gangubai boxes up Kamathipura. Depictions of poorer classes spring from the same outsider impulse. Slumdog Millionaire and Gully Boy theorise Dharavi, of which urbanologists Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava say, “The urban legend of its squalor has taken root because few Mumbaikers have ever been there.” Asia’s biggest slum isn’t portrayed as an organically emergent order, where community comes before power, water and sanitation, but as hell to be escaped.

Still, Modern Love: Mumbai also contributes to a more holistic view of the city simply by virtue of being an anthology. A template of vignettes gives us the opportunity to explore different places like the Chinatown in Mazgaon and even it’s-not-mumbai-it’s Thane, the less-loved suburbs gets its own short precisely titled, “I Love Thane”.

When genuine insights break through the cool Western fantasia of the show, it feels electric. For example, Cutting Chai contains the tacit acknowledgement of the local trains as the most convenient mode of transport. There’s a nod to ‘jugaad’ (a way of life of frugal innovation) in Baai. The book Maximum City purported, “From the beginnings of the city, there was a Bombay culture, unique in India. Bombay is all about the transaction—dhandha. It was founded as a trading city, built at the entrance to the rest of the world, and everybody was welcome as long as they wanted to trade.” Unlike popular narratives about old women’s interactions with ‘militants’, Baai, who has been through the partition before, is not sentimental. The armed goons at her door do not retreat because they are confronted by a scolding grandma, who expected better from her potential assailants. They are paid to leave. In a scene that recalls Children of Men’s perspective shifts from central characters to the background, the ‘92-93 riots are seen through the windows of a roving school van.

In Raat Raani, a migrant from Kashmir notes the invisible roadblocks to accessing public space and individual freedoms. “Two-wheelers and pedestrians not allowed. Going to college? Not allowed. Going out at night? Not allowed. Falling in love? Not allowed. Marrying a man from a lower caste? Not allowed. And when he leaves you? Being happy is not allowed,” Lali grumbles.

Most significantly, the series also repeatedly pairs desires with anxieties. In this way, it goes some way in correcting the politics of forgetting that dogs the cinematic city of Bombay. Where usually Bollywood main characters reflect the anxiety of fitting into a neoliberal world, we have the Chinese-Indian Sui and the older and single socialite Dilbar concerned about letting go.

Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.

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