World Film Locations Mumbai

By Helio San Miguel

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-632-6

Contents

Maps/Scenes,
Scenes 1-8 1948 – 1966,
Scenes 9-16 1970 – 1978,
Scenes 17-24 1979 – 1989,
Scenes 25-32 1989 – 2000,
Scenes 33-39 2001 – 2008,
Scenes 40-46 2008 – 2010,
Essays,
Mumbai: City of the Imagination Helio San Miguel,
Bollywood: The Thousand Flavours of the Cinema of Mumbai Alberto Elena,
Victoria Terminus: Gateway of India’s Dreams Mayank Shekhar,
Counter-Bollywood: Realist Fables from the City of Dreams Nandini Ramnath,
Mumbai Noir: An Uncanny Present Ranjani Mazumdar,
Bombay, Post 6 December 1992: Space and Time of Communalism Lalitha Gopalan,
Bollywood Dynasties: Star Power and Lineage in Mumbai’s Film Aristocracy Devrath Sagar,
Backpages,
Resources,
Contributors,
Filmography,

CHAPTER 1

MUMBAI

City of the Imagination

MUMBAI, AN ‘OVER-PAINTED COURTESAN’ in the words of Satyajit Ray, ‘at once seductive and revolting’, is a fascinating, incommensurable and chaotic metropolis of astonishing social, religious and ethnic diversity, and heartbreaking extremes where immense wealth is just steps away from searing poverty. It’s home to notorious mafias, violent communal riots, and is a target of international terrorism. But Mumbai is also the financial heart of India, possesses an industrious and growing middle class, hidden urban beauty, a rich intellectual life, a vibrant art scene, and as the home of Bollywood, it’s India’s film capital. If there’s a city that can truly be called a city of the imagination, it is Mumbai. In fact, many cities, real and imaginary, inhabit Mumbai all at once. Cinema has both filmed them and created them, and they evoke multiple and contradictory images.

For western film-makers and spectators Mumbai frequently conjures up images that swing between the hopeless and the exotic. On one side, a representation of poverty, crime and alienation in the overpopulated megalopolis. Award-winning Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, 2008) dwells on this image, although infused by a Bollywood spirit, it incorporates a joyous ending. On the other side, films from Son of India (Jacques Feyder, 1931) to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011), that present Mumbai as a borderline orientalist fantasy, and are sometimes not even filmed there.

However, Mumbai is above all, Bollywood’s quintessential metropolis. Bollywood, the focus of Alberto Elena’s essay, is the Mumbai based mainstream Hindi film industry, oftentimes mistaken for the whole of India’s commercial cinema at the cost of other regional film industries. Bollywood produces only about one fifth of the around 1,000 films made yearly in India, but they arouse the imagination of billions of people in Asia, Africa, Russia, the Indian diaspora, and increasing numbers of western spectators. Bollywood’s Mumbai has been built both on its streets and in its numerous studios, from the legendary Bombay Talkies to contemporary Film City. Perhaps no other city has been so thoroughly filmed and recreated – and is so recognizable for its large and faithful audience. As Suketu Mehta remarks in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004, p. 350), ‘Through the movies, Indians have been living in Bombay all their lives, even those who have never actually been there.’

Cinematic Mumbai is the metaphor of an urban reality where all stories are possible and all dreams can be fulfilled. This Mumbai is a magnet for migrants from all over India lured by the excitement of the life they see in the movies. It’s the modern and slick metropolis where upper-class Mumbaikars, who feel equally at home in London or New York, live in beautifully designed apartments. But it’s also a city of temptation and peril that corrupts the honest villager searching for a better life. Mumbai symbolizes a mythical place of hope and disillusionment where the loftiest dreams sometimes clash with the harshest realities. CST station, Mumbai’s iconic landmark, is frequently the threshold between the imaginary city and the real one, as millions of villagers, workers, gangsters and tourists, enter ‘the city of dreams’. Mayank Shekhar composes an ode to Mumbai through this most important location, said to be India’s second most photographed site after the majestic Taj Mahal.

But Mumbai can’t be reduced to a few cinematic stereotypes, even if those represent the dominant discourse. Beyond them lies a more realistic representation, where the city becomes a character, the muse and the location. This Mumbai appears frequently in middle and parallel cinemas, as portrayed by such acclaimed directors as Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterjee, Mani Kaul, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, etc. However, it also features prominently in films made within the coordinates of commercial Hindi cinema, but that don’t comply with the telltale signs superficially identified with Bollywood. This is a Bollywood whose boundaries are being redrawn by cutting-edge film-makers – Ronni Screwvala, Ram Gopal Varma, Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bhardwaj, etc. – who are redefining it, changing our perception of it, and leading it into a second golden era. Their films might astonish spectators who equate Bollywood with song-and-dance escapist fictions. Nandini Ramnath’s illuminating essay guides us through these less travelled roads that she has aptly termed Counter-Bollywood, and Ranjani Mazumdar delves into the murky waters of Mumbai Noir, the successful genre that explores the city’s underworld and its gritty urban tales.

This realistic Mumbai doesn’t shy away from controversial topics and traumatic events. Political corruption, infamous police encounters, gangsters, brutal class inequalities, housing problems, floods, prostitution, and even the budding topic of gay issues – from Bomgay (Riyad Vinci Wadia, 1996) to I am (Onir, 2010) – are all on display. As are the plight of millions of footpath and slum dwellers, and the Great Bombay Textile Strike, an event that dramatically altered the social fabric of the city. Even the most catastrophic events, the violent communal riots and ruthless terrorist attacks of the last two decades, receive prominent treatment, even in Bollywood films. Lalitha Gopalan’s essay contextualizes the tragic December 1992 communal violence in a wider historical context and explores its pervasive presence in film and media. In addition, Mumbai’s social issues are also represented in its rich documentary tradition –from Anand Patwardhan to Madhusree Dutta and Paromita Vohra – while its growing presence in a globalized economy is addressed in films likeJohn & Jane (Ashim Ahluwalia, 2005), that deals with outsourced jobs, and Made in India (Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha, 2010) about Mumbai as a destination for inexpensive surrogate mothers.

Since Lumière’s films were first shown in India at the Watson Hotel on 7 July 1896, Mumbai has always played a fundamental role in the development of Indian cinema. In Mumbai film life impregnates all aspects of city life. Colourful images advertising films can be seen everywhere, film songs become super hits, and ‘filmi’ is a common adjective. Even gangsters finance films, get extortion money from filmmakers, and have actresses as mistresses. Mumbai is also the glamorous habitat of the Bollywood stars, whose status among their following dwarfs that of their western counterparts, and whose weight can be seen in the many dynasties that populate films and TV programs – the subject of Devrath Sagar’s essay. Lastly, the city is home to two important festivals – ‘Mumbai Film Festival’ and ‘Mumbai International Film Festival’.

When Salman Rushdie writes in Midnight’s Children (2006, p. 30) that ‘nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary’, he’s simply expressing the profound and symbiotic relationship between the city, its cinema and its people. A relationship this book aspires to illuminate.

CHAPTER 2

BOLLYWOOD

UPFRONT

The Thousand Flavours of the Cinema of Mumbai

‘IT’S A TERM ONLY foreigners who don’t know our films use,’ megastar Shah Rukh Khan told film critic and historian Derek Malcolm as late as 2002, referring to the already very common and widespread term ‘Bollywood’. Today, however, nothing can be further from reality. It’s true that the expression started being used in a tongue-in-cheek way in the 1970s as a word play between ‘Bombay’ (now Mumbai) and ‘Hollywood’, to refer to the commercial cinema in the Hindi language that emanates from the studios and production companies based in this city. But since then, ‘Bollywood’ not only has become a sort of brand name that is easily recognizable on a global scale, but also a real phenomenon that is earning increasing respect and even enjoying a growing academic legitimacy all over the world. Despite the original pejorative meaning, Bollywood emerges in the era of globalization as synonymous, according to Ravi Vasudevan, with a particular type of ‘high-profile, export-oriented Bombay film’ (‘The Meaning of ‘Bollywood” injmionline.org), one that for the first time manages to combine production values that match those of any foreign film industry with a genuinely Indian spirit – and frequently also suffused with nationalist pride – and which at the same time succeeds in overcoming some of the customary hurdles that the distribution of popular Hindi cinema always faced abroad. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has also argued persuasively about the need to consider Bollywood as a phenomenon that transcends its own traditional boundaries to transform itself into a wider entertainment industry in which theatrical releases, DVDs, online streaming, cable and satellite TV, music rights, ringtones, merchandising and product placement, go hand in hand with amazing fluidity and exceptional commercial power.

Highly formulaic, Bollywood cinema has not renounced its well-known fondness for mixing genres according to the centenary aesthetic theory of the rasa (emotional themes) codified in the Natya Shastra by Indian theorist Bharata Muni around 2,000 years ago, nor the seasoning of the plots with songs and dances, already a common feature in various forms of traditional theatre, like Nautanki, and also in the influential nineteenth century Parsi Theatre. But at the same time Bollywood has succeeded in creating in the eyes of millions of spectators all around the world (although not precisely in most western countries yet) an identitarian badge and some sort of modernity alternative to Hollywood, that many proudly cheer on as a sign of resistance against cultural homogenization imposed from the outside. Spectators from the most remote corners of the world – many times belonging to the Non-Resident Indian diaspora, but not always – continue to get excited about what is offered by popular Hindi cinema, now conveniently updated regarding the nature of their stories, visual style and type of music that is used, whereas critics and scholars of international repute find in those films an endless amount of imagination and vigour in constant and creative interrelationship with the influence received from Hollywood and other foreign cinemas. Of course things are not that simple, nor does the retrospective and anachronistic use of the term make it easy for a more nuanced analysis, but in any case, the brand ‘Bollywood’ is today seen as far from that Third World imitation of Hollywood that it was once considered.

And, of course, at the heart of Bollywood is the city of Mumbai. In the first place, because thousands and thousands of images of its films recall its powerful urban imagery, a specific iconography that so many films, from classics like Taxi Driver (Chetan Anand, 1954) to Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (Milan Luthria, 2010), conjure up as a synonym for ‘The City’, whose name also appears in the titles of many more films. Also because of the close association between Mumbai and the extraordinarily popular – and socially influential – star system of Indian cinema, whose famous actors and actresses, along with film-makers and producers, mostly reside in the affluent suburb of Bandra in northwest Mumbai, and more specifically in the residential neighbourhood of Pali Hill. But above all, because beyond etymologies and iconographies, Mumbai constitutes the backbone of Bollywood as this city is, initially in close rivalry with Kolkata (then Calcutta), the great cradle of the Indian film production and its most robust fortress.

The struggle between these two cities lasted for a while, and in fact, India’s first talkie, Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani, 1931), was produced in Mumbai by Imperial Movietone and it opened less than a month before Jamai Shashthi (Amar Chaudhury, 1931) made by Madan Theatres, its Bengali competitor in Kolkata. In 1931, at the time of the arrival of sound, Mumbai was producing almost 65 per cent of all the films made in the subcontinent, and there were some occasional forays into Farsi and Burmese languages. From then on, the scale will tip more and more to the side of Mumbai. Since around World War II all the great studios of popular Hindi cinema, starting with the mythical Bombay Talkies and Prabhat Film Company, were located in the city and neighbouring areas (Kolhapur and Pune in the second of the abovementioned studios).

The fact that the local language of the state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is the capital, is Marathi was not an obstacle for Mumbai to become the epicentre of film production in Hindi, and the supplier of what for a long time was called ‘all-India films’. Hindus, Muslims and Parsis, not to mention other religions, as well as a fair amount of foreigners, would since the beginning come to provide, in harmonious and fruitful collaboration, the essential backbone for the film production of the great studios of the city. It would also be there where the great commercial formulas, like the so-called masala movies, would be created, developed, tested, and even exported to the other commercial regional cinemas of India, and also where from time to time the industry would house figures as singular and creative as Guru Dutt. And it would be there again where the extremely popular star system on a national scale would take root, from Nargis, Waheeda Rehman, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar, to Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai, through the always incommensurable Amitabh Bachchan.

The history of a significant part of Indian cinema, past and present, can be told from Mumbai. The history and the reality of the city has found in cinema one of its richest mirrors.

AAG (1948)

LOCATION

Royal Opera House, Matthew Road, Opera House, Girgaum

ALONG WITH GURU DUTT, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, B. R. Chopra and the Anand brothers, Raj Kapoor dominated the Golden Era of Bombay Cinema in the 1950s. Aag (Fire) was his directorial debut, at the age of 23. It also signalled his encounter with Nargis, his muse over the coming years. They became one of the most enduring couples in Indian cinema, on and off screen, and their collaboration resulted in sixteen films. In Aag, Kewal, a driven youngster, chooses, after failing his college exams, to leave his studies and privileged family situation to chart his own destiny and pursue his dreams of doing theatre. In his quest he arrives in Bombay where he enters an abandoned opera house on whose stage he delivers a moving monologue. Unbeknownst to him the theatre owner is listening in the dark and touched by Kewal’s passion decides to support his play. In the auditions for the leading female role they meet Nimmi (Nargis), a young woman who is a victim of the Partition. Just a few months after India has achieved its independence, their story spoke directly to the country’s youth. The theatre where Kewal realizes his dreams is the Royal Opera House, the only surviving one in India. It was inaugurated by George V in 1911, later used in film premieres and concerts (famous playback singer Lata Mangeshkar debuted here) and finally closed down in 1993 after a fashion show. A slow restoration plan is underway to return it to its former glory. ->Helio San Miguel

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