Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City By Ranjani Mazumdar, Permanent Black, Rs 595

The 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire, popularized the modernist trope of the city as a labyrinthine space of mystery, a cosmopolitan inferno, with the figure of the flâneur or dandy — at once an observer and an explorer — lost in a city of secrets and hidden depths. Ranjani Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City takes off from this conception of the Western city and situates the cinematic city in Bombay films within a metaphor of “urban delirium”. Bombay, the favoured metropolis of representation for most of Hindi cinema till the late Nineties, becomes a “terrain of urban experience”, with people from all over India coming here and collectively scripting a narrative of modernity. Bombay Cinema’s larger scope is to investigate this cultural amalgamation and its intersection with Hindi cinema, wherein, Mazumdar argues, cinema integrates knowledge — philosophical, political, and historical — to become “the most innovative archive of the city in India”.

Mazumdar takes certain key representational figures and conceits used in Hindi films and locates the city in Bombay cinema through an examination of them. There is the tapori, Bombay’s counterpart of the Parisian flâneur, whose Bambayya streetspeak uncovers a subculture of crime and claustrophobia in the city, and the “angry young man”, with his transition from the Robin Hood-figure of the Seventies (made famous by Amitabh Bachchan in films like Deewar and Coolie) to the psychotic anti-hero of the Nineties (Shahrukh Khan in Baazigar). The discourse on women’s relationship to the city is initially mediated through the figure of the Westernized ‘vamp’, but finally metamorphoses into the Nineties’ heroine, whose performative stance in song-and-dance sequences is, ironically, similar to that of the vamp of yesteryear. Bombay Cinema covers all this, locating the city in relation to these figures as “a complex cartography”, an “urban nightmare” of poverty and violence, and also a “phantasmagoria of Indian modernity”, where cinema becomes a sort of “window-shopping” experience of the Western world of commodity and consumption. Mazumdar also dwells on the stylistic changes that Hindi cinema has undergone with the emergence of a new global market, comprising the Indian diaspora that constitutes the largest distribution territory for the film industry today. The disappearance of Bombay from its own cinema and/or the recasting of its filmed image to incorporate a new, globalized flavour to a redefined, diasporic sentiment of nationalism should, however, have merited analysis in the book, as it is one of the faces of 21st century ‘Bollywood’.

Bombay Cinema is a heavily researched and valuable book that fulfils the scope of its announced intentions. The editing, though, is careless in parts — on page 32, the phrase “father and sister [dying/die] under tragic circumstances” is repeated in consecutive sentences, and on page 47, the poet Nissim Ezekiel’s name is misspelt. Occasionally, the author alludes to films that are outside of the mainstream, on the unfair assumption that the reader has seen them.

Undoubtedly, Mazumdar’s book will serve as a reference text for students of Hindi cinema, but for the average film aficionado, Bombay Cinema comes across as hard and academic, with no sensuous engagement with the cinematic city, which is fluid and has a magical life of its own.