Cinema City

But the pivotal characters played by cities in several landmark films of Hindi cinema’s Golden Era have walked around with fluid grace even decades after their creation, leaking into discourses around Hindi cinema, and the geography of actual cities.

These embodied cities have survived in collective imaginations, inspiring the aesthetic of several Hindi films over the course of the next few decades, not merely because they formed the fulcrum of filmic narratives, but also because they appeared as visually pivotal. Urban spaces confidently strode into posters and promotional material, occupying a place of importance in the identity of the film in which they appeared.

Selected film posters and photographic lobby stills in the collection of the Museum of Art and Photography afford glimpses at the ways in which several films of Indian cinema’s Golden Era visually personified cities in their promotional material.

While a city looms large as menacing and shadowy silhouette in a poster of Guru Dutt’s superbly melancholic Pyaasa (1957), another appears as a modern technological playground where all things are possible in a poster of the effervescently improbable science-fiction drama Mr X. in Bombay (1964).

Bimal Roy’s highly feted Do Bigha Zamin(1953) was inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, an immensely influential Italian drama that follows a man and his son as they search Rome for a stolen bicycle that was meant to ensure the starving family’s livelihood. Do Bigha Zamin, however, frames its narrative within a familiar rural-urban divide.

It depicts farmer Shambhu’s (Balraj Sahni) desperate dash to Calcutta- a last-ditch attempt to retain ownership over a small patch of farmland that his family has cultivated for several generations. The city is a stranger to him and his son, and as a rickshaw puller, he is required to make intimate contact with its unforgiving hardness. As his body negotiates with the unfamiliar topography of the urban landscape, its foreignness becomes a source of persistent mental and physical exhaustion.

As Boot Polish (1954) charts the journey of two poor slum-dwelling children Belu (Baby Naaz) and Bhola (Rattan) who have been told not to beg for money, it exposes the duality of the city. Bombay, the film attests, reveals itself differently to people of different classes and ages.

This is captured in the moment where Belu, who has been adopted by a rich childless couple, leads her foster parents to her erstwhile slum residence via an extremely strange route: she crawls below railings and leaps over piles of garbage because that is the only face of the city she has seen as a desperately poor child.

The streets of Boot Polish’s Bombay are also sites of grand imaginations of progress and development. As John Chacha (David) sings to nudge the street children onto a path of ethical growth, the city watches and makes spaces for their celebratory dance routines.

If, as cultural theorist Ashis Nandy claims, popular Hindi cinema indeed offers a “slum’s eye view of Indian politics”, then Boot Polish’s city offers up a fantastic meta moment: it frames the city, and by extension, popular Hindi cinema, as a patched-up and endearing creature that is comfortable commenting on its own inadequacy, and confident of a better future.

Several theorists note that in the decade after Indian independence, its cities became entangled in contradictory narratives. While Mahatma Gandhi repeatedly called for mechanisms that could make villages self-reliant, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, staunchly rooted for industrialization. Film theorist Ranjani Mazumdar has pointed out in Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City that these arguments are often wrongly cited as irreconcilable ends of a binary. The cities embodied in Raj Kapoor’s films reflect the meeting points in the two perspectives.

In Shree 420, for instance, Bombay is a den of iniquity, a space where moral and ethical codes do not hold any currency. However, the city also appears as a benevolent guide whose street economies still carry a nationalistic authenticity.

Raj is eventually seduced by the charms of the city in the guise of the femme fatale Maya (Nadira), and led into a life of petty crime. He accumulates wealth, begins to dress and speak differently, and has his eyes firmly set on a prosperous future. However, Raj’s certitude is shaken when the city street beckons him with the song Ramaiyya Vastavaya.The voice of the street thrusts him back in time and space, reminding him of the strand of his identity that he had once hoped to forget, or at least elide.

Shree 420 also dwells on the erotic and sensual pleasures of the night-time urban street, which plays matchmaker for the protagonists. Raj leads the morally upright school teacher Vidya (Nargis) to a bench that he calls ‘Footpath Palace Restaurant’, which is served by a street vendor peddling hot tea. The cityscape- curiously barren and gently accommodating- offers them space to declare their love for each other. It begins to pour with rain, and the couple share an umbrella while strolling down the city streets and singing of their new-found love.

The symbolically loaded moment, which eventually went on to become emblematic of Hindi cinema, marks the start of their shared future: the couple does not have much money, the world is materialistic, but the city streets will look after them.

On the other hand, Pyaasa underscores the materialistic underpinnings of the dark city streets’ eroticism, molding it in the role of a pimp for Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman). She croons the seductive melody Jaane Kya Tune Kahi, with the inky, cinematic lushness of the city as her aide, to solicit the attention of a stranger who seems respectable and wealthy.

He is only able to stand up to the city when he becomes willing to stand out. After a melodramatic confrontation with the residents who find his strangeness unpalatable, he is lured by a curiously pastoral scene. A woman (Nargis) is going about her morning rituals, which include watering the holy basil in the courtyard of a temple.

As dawn breaks over the horizon, the man is finally given a drink of water in a space that has been conceived as a distinctly rural oasis in an urban desert.

Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard remarks that just as Italian and Dutch cities appear to be reflections of classical paintings, American cities seem to have just stepped out from their cinema. “To grasp its secret,” he adds, “you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards towards the city.”

As this exhibition demonstrates, decoding this secret in Hindi cinema is possible by way of a different outward journey: from the posters of the film that once adorned cityscapes, to the screenscapes of the city.