Beautiful Thing: Literary reportage and Bombay

Abstract

There are few contemporary cities as recognizable as Bombay/Mumbai. It is especially familiar to global and local audiences via the circulation of popular cinema, and has been the subject of much recent critical discussion in postcolonial studies. This article considers the portrayal of the city in Sonia Faleiro’s acclaimed non-fictional work Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (2010). This book, which documents the lives of the city’s bar dancers, both alludes to and yet ultimately critiques the more popular image of Bombay as a mediated and hyperreal city of easy cosmopolitanism. Faleiro deploys what Graham Huggan would term “strategic exoticism” in order to undermine the sensational and decidedly gendered portrayal of Bombay found in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004). Through the figure of Leela, the teenage bar dancer who acts as Faleiro’s guide, Beautiful Thing gives voice to the unspectacular and ordinary experiences of the city’s most vulnerable subjects.