ABSTRACT
Indian cities have, in the last two decades, witnessed major transformations. The rise of innovative architectural designs, new forms of infrastructure and the ubiquitous presence of technological gadgets have marked this moment as globalization. This transformation has created a dense visual and aural landscape in which the sound of the cell phone follows us everywhere along with new surfaces and objects that pervade the city. It is this juncture that has triggered a cinematic re-visiting of a pre-globalized retro Bombay, through urban ‘sets’ created by production designers that are either constructed in studios or generated via a transformation of real locations, to adapt to the time of the films. Production designers work with a material memory—magazines, films, photographs, memoirs, paintings, architectural manuals and music. In this world carved by production designers, we see competing visions of Bombay through an intricate weaving or a tangled web of memories associated with sites, events, objects and cinema. Can these retro images culled from the history of popular culture provide an account of Bombay’s past and present? As I will show, the pasts deployed by three Bombay films of the 21st century offer us three distinctly different urban landscapes. In Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007) we journey into the Bombay film world of the 1970s. In Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007) we view the city’s past from the point of view of one of its most powerful industrialists. In Milan Luthria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (2010), we move through the labyrinthine by-lanes of Bombay’s underworld history. To evaluate these journeys into the recent past, we need to first understand the political and material dimensions of retro.
