In the Name of Mera Shahar

Abstract

This article reads the city of Mumbai as a locus of terrorist disasters and impending/imminent terrorist threats. It primarily draws upon readings of three Hindi films released in 2008— Mumbai Meri Jaan, A Wednesday and Aamir—to decode the narratives of anxiety, fear, retribution and unrest constructed around real or imagined or expected terrorist threats to the cityscape. The article will argue that these films construct such narratives on several levels: a narrative that posits the various elements of the physical urban landscape with possibilities of danger or vulnerability to terror strikes, thus creating a ‘disaster-scape’ accentuated by its constant surveillance by the state as well as vigilante figures; a narrative of shared anxiety and paranoia that characters from all the three films share; a narrative that justifies vigilante action in the face of continued inaction on the part of the law and order system; and a narrative that demands symbolic atonement from the perceived ‘aggressor’. These narratives, in the final analysis, collapse into an overarching narrative of shared anxiety and paranoia that crystallises an imagined cityscape, an ‘essential’ Mumbai, which camouflages the innumerable differences and conflicts that the urban landscape is witness to.