Owning the city

Abstract

This chapter examines representations of postcolonial Bombay in Milan Luthria’s recent Hindi film, Taxi 9 2 11: Nau Do Gyarah (2006, hereafter Taxi), exploring its engagement with the city’s social and spatial crises at the turn of the millennium. Bollywood has long projected Bombay as a Janus-faced space of desire and disappointment, emancipation and exploitation. In its opening sequence, Taxi offers a conventionally ambivalent representation of the city, celebrating its postcolonial modernity while gesturing towards uneven experiences of its capitalist economies. Over what might be described as a ‘standard’ montage sequence (Prasad, 2004, p. 68), which splices together iconic images of the city that have themselves been cited endlessly in Hindi cinema — imperial architecture, panoramas of skyscraper-studded skylines, crowded streets, overflowing trains, advertising billboards, throbbing nightclubs — song lyrics evoke Bombay’s projection as ‘swapaner nagari — a city of dreams’ (Gangar, 1995, p. 210). Describing Bombay as ‘A golden nest with no place to rest’, Taxi’s opening track, ‘Boombai Nagariya’ (‘Boombai, city of dreams’), traces the simultaneous possibilities and problems of Bombay’s reputation as ‘the quintessentially modern city of India, the country’s commercial display window’ (Mazumdar, 2007, p. 113). Locating urban experience as caught between the attractions of prosperity and the realities of poverty, the song’s lyrical ambivalence is interrupted by a more equivocal statement of urban exclusion.