Bombay/Mumbai Waterfronts in the Hindi Film Deewaar [The Wall] (1975) 1

This paper analyzes the representation of Bombay’s waterfronts in the Hindi movie Deewaar [The Wall] (1975) in the context of India’s three foundational ideals—socialism, secularism, and modernist urbanism. The film depicts waterfronts as sites of historic globalization processes that have shaped the city’s urban culture. The waterfronts in the film—Marine Drive, Malabar Hill, and Versova Beach on the west; and the docks and Ballard Estate on the east—comprise spaces of globalization that represent a tension between globalization; and the three ideals of socialism, secularism, and modernist urbanism. The narrative ends with upholding the state’s economic ideology that was geared at deglobalization. The film celebrates the docks as a site of Bombay’s secular cosmopolitanism, but also depicts the docks as a symbol of the failure of the state’s promise to build an equitable society. In Deewaar, the glitzy waterfronts of Marine Drive and Nariman Point represent aspirational urban icons of planned urbanism, which nevertheless failed the modernist promise of an equitable society. Viewed through the lens of urban histories, Deewaar’s depiction of waterfronts as spaces of globalization in Bombay illuminates the contradictions of Nehruvian statecraft with respect to globalization to represent social mobility and cosmopolitanism in the city in the 1970s.