The city in film: Reading Dhobi Ghat and Island City as cinematic representations of Mumbai | Intellect Skip to content
1981
  1. Home
  2. A-Z Publications
  3. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies
  4. Volume 10, Issue 2
  5. Article
Volume 10, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 2050-9790
  • E-ISSN: 2050-9804

Abstract

Urban spaces harbour the capacity to embody varied social relations that constantly interact to form lived experiences. As the society has gradually transformed from a collection of rural settlements to a largely metropolitan space, urban fiction as a literary genre set in city landscapes has become increasingly popular. In a century dominated by new media technologies, the changing contours of contemporary societies became widely visible in the images and interpretations available through cinema. Cinema as one of the predominant modes of cultural expressions has played a performative role in encapsulating the changing lifestyles, attitudes and landscapes. The city as a mosaic of complexity, diversity and contradictions has consequently become an inseparable part of the world’s largest film industry – Bollywood. The Indian megacity of Mumbai has thus become a site of ‘glocal’ interconnections and polyphonic voices. Not only has the city contributed to the production and dissemination of films, but its increased influence has also allowed it to feature as a ‘character’ in many films. This article seeks to evaluate select cinematic narratives to foreground the living realities of the megacity of Mumbai. While examining the representation of Mumbai in two films released post-2010 – and , the article intends to interpret the implicit and explicit meanings in the cinematic language of these films. It seeks to argue that cinematic representations of Mumbai help to characterize ways of perceiving the city as a complex, multi-layered urban text. Rather than visualizing the city as an empty space that simply holds the narrative together, the article aims to show how cities in films become characters themselves, engulfing those of flesh and bone.

© 2023 Intellect Ltd
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/jucs_00074_1
2024-01-24
2024-04-29
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Appadurai, Arjun (2000), ‘Spectral housing and urban cleansing: Notes on millennial Mumbai’, Public Culture, 12:3, pp. 627–51, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-3-627.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Barry, Peter (1995), Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Bose, Brinda (2008), ‘Modernity, globality, sexuality, and the city: A reading of Indian cinema’, The Global South, 2:1, pp. 35–58, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40339281. Accessed 20 May 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Coleman, Roy (2020), ‘Surveillance as an urban way of life’, in Z. Krajina and D. Stevenson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, New York: Routledge, pp. 194–203.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel (2018), India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid, New York: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar (2006), Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, New Delhi: Sage.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Gupta, Shubhra (2016), ‘Island City movie review: When you are alone and lonely in a big city’, The Indian Express, 2 September, https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/movie-review/island-city-movie-review-vinay-pathak-tannishtha-chatterjee-star-rating-3009287/. Accessed 13 August 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Gurr, Jens Martin (2021), Charting Literary Urban Studies, New York: Taylor & Francis.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Haggerty, Kevin and Ericson, Richard Victor (eds) (2007), The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Joshi, Shamani (2021), ‘India already had a toxic work culture: Then came the pandemic, India already had a toxic work culture: Then came the pandemic’, Vice, 21 May, https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78bwm/india-toxic-work-hustle-office-culture-bosses-pandemic. Accessed 6 February 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Lewis, Jon (2014), Essential Cinema: An Introduction to Film Analysis, Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Macionis, John and Parrillo, Vincent (2012), Cities and Urban Life, Hoboken, NJ: Pearson.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Mankekar, Purnima (2003), Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Mazumdar, Ranjani (2003), ‘The Bombay film poster’, India Seminar, May, https://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20ranjani%20mazumdar.htm. Accessed 13 May 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Mazumdar, Ranjani (2007), Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. McNamara, Kathleen (2014), The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, New York: Cambridge University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. McQuire, Scott (2011), ‘The digital home’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, London: Sage, pp. 181–202.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Oberoi, Ruchika (2016), Island City, India: Drishyam Films, https://www.epicon.in/movies/island-city. Accessed 10 May 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Parker, Simon (2015), Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City, London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Plester, Barbara (2016), The Complexity of Workplace Humour, New York: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Prakash, Gyan (2010), Mumbai Fables, Haryana: HarperCollins Publishers.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. PTI (2010), ‘Mumbai is the fifth character in my film, says Kiran’, India Today, 1 December, www.indiatoday.in/movies/bollywood/story/mumbai-is-the-fifth-character-in-my-film-says-kiran-86403-2010-11-30. Accessed 23 June 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Rao, Vyjayanthi (2007), ‘Proximate distances: The phenomenology of density in Mumbai’, Built Environment, 33:2, pp. 227–48, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23289578. Accessed 24 July 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Rao, Kiran (2011), Dhobi Ghat, India: UTV Motion Pictures, www.netflix.com/in/title/70144331. Accessed 7 May 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Rose, Steve (2013), ‘Anurag Kashyap: Bollywood is to blame for India’s inability to deal with reality’, The Guardian, 28 February, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/28/anurag-kashyap-gangs-of-wasseypur. Accessed 16 June 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. Roy, Ananya (2011), ‘Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35:2, pp. 223–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Saitta, Dean (2011), ‘Interdisciplinarity in urban studies’, Intercultural Urbanism, 2 July, http://www.interculturalurbanism.com/?p=151. Accessed 18 May 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. Salmela, Markku, Ameel, Lieven and Finch, Jason (eds) (2021), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Shaban, Abdul and Zinat Aboli (2021), ‘Socio-spatial segregation and exclusion in Mumbai’, in M. van Ham, H. Janssen, T. Tammaru and R. Ubarevičienė (eds), Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality, Cham: Springer International Publishing AG, pp. 153–70.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Shi, Long and Zhu, Qingwei (2018), ‘Urban space and representation in literary study’, Open Journal of Social Sciences, 6:9, pp. 223–29, https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2018.69015.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Shiel, Mark (2004), ‘Cinema and the city in history and theory’, in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–18.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar (1977), ‘The changing position of Indian women’, Man, 12:2, pp. 221–38, www.jstor.org/stable/2800796.
     [Google Scholar]
  33. Verma, Rahul (2011), ‘Beyond Bollywood: Indian cinema’s new cutting edge’, The Guardian, 23 June, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jun/23/india-independent-cinema. Accessed 27 April 2021.
     [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1386/jucs_00074_1
Loading
  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): city literature; cultural studies; heterogeneous spaces; Indian cinema; metaphors; spatiality; urbanism

Most Cited Most Cited RSS feed

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error