On the streets and in the workshops - Salaam Bombay!, 25 years later

[Salaam Bombay! is being rereleased by PVR Director’s Rare on the 22nd, in a fine restored print. I strongly recommend watching it on the big screen. Did this piece for Tehelka]

“I believe I may have been put on this earth to tell stories of living between worlds,” writes Mira Nair in her introduction to the soon-to-be-published book The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film. It’s a theme that runs through her wide-ranging movie career, and it takes on a very large scale in her adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s novel; The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about nothing less than the clash of civilisations, about the East-West conflict that hangs over the planet. But the canvas was smaller, more intimate – and no less powerful for it – in Nair’s first feature film Salaam Bombay!, which is being released this week in a re-mastered print to mark its 25th anniversary.

That movie’s version of “between worlds” is summed up in a quiet scene where the 12-year-old protagonist Krishna/Chaipau and his older, more experienced junkie friend Chillum sit talking together in a graveyard. (Coming as it does in a frequently Dickensian film, the scene might make you imagine a more genial version of Magwitch sharing a peace-pipe with a more confused version of Pip.) Living in the big city, they yearn for the pastoral life, for the cool air of the “muluk” that they left behind. Chaipau has at least a theoretical chance of returning to that world – the film centres on his efforts to earn the 500 rupees that will allow him to do this – but for Chillum, we will soon see, it is already too late.

A quarter-century after it was made, there are many ways to take stock of Nair’s extraordinary film. There is, of course, the saphead position – having little to do with meaningful criticism – that goes roughly like this: any depiction of our poor is inherently demeaning, or amounts to exoticising poverty for a western audience***. Salaam Bombay! was, to an extent, insulated from such charges because it had the stamp of government approval, being co-produced by the NFDC. But watch it and there is no doubting the seriousness of its intentions and the quality of its execution. Two decades before The White Tiger won the Man Booker and Slumdog Millionnaire got its grubby hands on all those Oscars, Nair’s film depicted the lives of Bombay’s street children with a pragmatic refusal to be either maudlin or voyeuristic. After all, one of her reference points was Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, a film that, as Andre Bazin put it, “did not refer to moral categories” or sentimentalise the poor.

Just as remarkable is Salaam Bombay!’s nearly seamless mixing of two disparate cinematic modes: this is a fiction narrative with scripted characters, but it also has elements of the Cinema Vérité in which Nair was trained in the US, including lengthy held shots where the camera is doing little more than observing life unfolding at its own pace. It was shot - on an unprecedented scale - on Bombay’s streets, in real train stations and real brothels, and hidden cameras were used for some scenes. The adult roles were played by professional actors such as Anita Kanwar, Nana Patekar and Raghuvir Yadav (magnificent as the snivelling, giggling Chillum, driven to animal-like whines and bursts of impotent rage as addiction corrodes him), but working alongside them were a group of wonderful non-professional child performers, and there is no telling the difference. Workshops were conducted to siphon out the children’s preconceived ideas of what “movie acting” should be; in other words, to get these real-life street kids to play versions of themselves, Nair had to make them unlearn the larger-than-life mannerisms they knew from watching commercial Hindi cinema. (This is a telling comment on the relationship between a society and its popular culture, also reflected in scenes like the one where a boy sings "Hawa Hawaii" as he pees on the tracks, or in the raunchy use of the lyrics "Chal chal dhakha maar" from the title track of Haathi Mere Saathi.) The final film is a testament to the effectiveness of those workshops, as well as a reminder that assiduous preparation can pave the way for on-set improvisation and the illusion of spontaneity – something that would also be seen in Nair’s Monsoon Wedding years later.

Handled with less care, some of Salaam Bombay!’s characters could have been hollow symbols (consider “Solah Saal”, the 16-year-old virgin from Nepal whose “seal” is valued at Rs 10,000 and who becomes the mute, uncomprehending catalyst for the viewer's understanding of the people around her) but Nair’s direction and Sooni Taraporevala's writing achieve a synthesis between sympathy and detachment. Sandi Sissel's cinematography creates numerous elegant frames without over-prettifying. And then there is the way in which L Subramaniam's beautiful violin-led score - a masterstroke by Nair that might have seemed an eccentric or "Western" decision on paper - embellishes, as opposed to thickly underlines, the story's dramatic moments.

With the passage of time, we can see that Salaam Bombay! helped open doors for a newer, grittier brand of Bombay filmmaking, beginning with the 1990s work of Ram Gopal Varma. It also led to the creation of the Salaam Baalak Trust, which has provided financial and emotional support to thousands of street children over the years. And so it is fitting that Penguin India has reprinted Nair’s 1989 book about the film’s genesis and legacy, a singular account of “private madness”, as she called it then (and her new Foreword to which mulls the question "Can art change the world?"). But there is no substitute for watching the film itself, especially on the big screen and in the re-mastered print. This is “pure cinema” while also being quasi-documentary, and it is as fresh today as when it was made.
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*** At Nair's Spring Fever session on Sunday, a member of the audience asked her that tired question "Why are filmmakers so obsessed with India’s poverty?" The man expressed his views genially and mentioned his admiration for Nair's work, but I was amused when he said that Monsoon Wedding was the only high-profile international film he could think of that presented a "positive" picture of India to the West. Now I absolutely love that film, but it's odd to think that a depiction of an upper-class family spending obscene quantities of money on an ostentatious wedding can be construed as an unqualifiedly positive representation of modern India, while a portrayal of street-children's lives should be seen as something to frown at.