Salaam Bombay!: Representation or Simplification?
Mina Mohammadi, February 2020
For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a journalist,; the idea of democratizing information and telling stories of people who are underreported has always been something really important to me. I saw the way that people of my background, particularly Middle-Easterners and Muslims, were being reported and I believed I could do better. It was in high school when I wrote my first article for the student newspaper, about my time in Iran. I wrote about the stories of the oppression of minorities within the country, citing my own family and their experiences during the ’79 revolution as reference, and was extremely proud of the product. The overall result however, I was less pleased with. For months, I would be asked why Iranians hated the “Jews” and the “westerners”: my article was used as political fodder for xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiment. In retrospect, I realized one truth, unfortunate may I add. That it is part of the responsibility of an author to provide context on why things are the way they are: this is key to proper representation. Elsewise, readers often have to rely on their own skewed assumptions and political beliefs that influence what they choose to take out of the text.
This truth permeates my viewing of Mira Nair’s film, Salaam Bombay. Nair’s film follows a young orphaned boy named Krishna as he works to garner enough cash to get back to his family, creating community amongst others struggling with poverty and homelessness in urban India. Themes of assault, drug abuse and other common plights of penury are highlighted in the film. Nair, actively chooses real street kids and takes parts of their stories to depict South Asian poverty. While one can appreciate the groundbreaking nature of India being represented on the big screen and Nair’s attempt to give a fairly accurate depiction of the streets of Bombay, much of the film surrounds tired ideas of India being entrenched in poverty and sexism, often lacking critical historical and cultural contexts in the story. Nair knowingly allowed her film to be played for a western audience, with the awareness that certain stereotypes of Indians will be walked away with. Which leads one to ask: Does Nair’s film genuinely work to combat stereotypes like sexism and poverty and be a representative picture of street kids in India, or does it work to reassert these damaging notions?
Nair rarely provides context in the film. We do not know where we are in time, we do not know where in India we really are until Krishna takes a train to the city of Bombay, we know nothing about his family besides their monetary needs, we know that societal institutions are corrupt and the country is poor, but nowhere does Nair ever actually answer why India is in this state. While one may argue that Nair does this to emphasize this specific story of Krishna’s struggle, this lack of context simplifies the street kid’s story. One example that particularly sticks out when discussing this problem is the orphanage scene. Krishna is taken into custody by law enforcement in the scene prior and is placed in an orphanage. The drab, barely-there building along with the muted blue uniforms of the kids, work to depict the almost-prison like nature of the institution. In the scene, Krishna sits and starts conversation with another orphaned kid as they discuss their depressing status. The music behind them is sullen, as though their fate of poverty is sealed, and the audience recognizes this poverty as inherently part of the world Nair creates. But, never is there an explanation as to why the orphanage is the way it is and why so many of these kids find themselves there. The audience is just expected to understand that this poverty is intrinsic. Never are we positioned to question our role in why these institutions exist, even though they can be traced as a byproduct of western colonization and imperialism. We instead are gifted a film that sits on the fence between being an actual narrative movie and a documentary. Since the movie fails to develop characters, we as an audience end up watching poor people be poor. Whereas with a documentary, we watch people be poor but are provided context as to why this is, and it usually ends with some form of a call to action. Here, there is neither no context nor a call to action. Instead, we are reasserted stereotypes that India is impoverished in an almost matter of fact way: a simplified, one dimensional take.
Another part of the film that reasserts stereotypes is the lack of characterization of women. Without exception, there are only two types of women that exist in this movie, either a prostitute or a mother. While many women in poverty end up having to fulfill these roles and Nair works to depict this sad truth, there is an overall lack of characterization of these women. Sweet Sixteen, the virgin prostitute, who is an integral part of the film’s plot, works only to develop the male characters around her. In fact, Sweet Sixteen only has three lines in the entire film, including head nods. One example of this is when Krishna first offers her chai. The teary-eyed girl throws the glass cup to the ground at Krishna, clearly frustrated but verbalizes nothing. Instead of highlighting the girl’s sadness through camera attention on her, the perspective shifts to Krishna, who offers tea to her again. Rather than emphasizing the problematic nature of Sweet Sixteen’s fate, she is instead depicted as childlike and the scene ends up working to show Krishna’s generosity and maturity, as he will be in trouble for Sweet Sixteen’s seemingly immature action. Quite frankly, these choices may have been deliberate. The sole scene in which a female is the center of the action is with the American journalist that comes to interview Baba in his brothel. She is surrounded by men who want to rape her, due to her ‘exotic’ nature, and is painted as a victim for seeing the abuse of Chillum. The journalist becomes the main victim of the scene, as opposed to the abuse of Chillum, or the hundreds of women that Baba pimps out. This deliberate concentration on the white woman can be seen as an attempt on the part of Nair to win over a European audience and give them something to sympathize with. After all, we understand why the journalist is there, she has an occupation to fulfill and she is not tied down to the fateful nature of Indian poverty the way that Indian women are. She has enough of a backstory given to her so as an audience we feel for her and can recognize her victimhood. We cannot say the same for the Indian women in the film, because as viewers are supposed to recognize the predisposed nature of these women to fulfill roles of abuse.
There are few moments in the film that do call upon a western audience to question their role in what they are viewing. The most notable moment is with the Taj Mahal scene, in which the tourist pays 150 rupees to Chillum and Krishna for cocaine. The scene highlights the hesitancy of the tourist to being “ripped off’, even though he is so much more well off than the likes of Chillum and Krishna and can easily afford the higher price. In the end, Chillum still rips off the man, slightly less than he wanted, laughing away at his newfound cash that he will use to buy weed. This scene works to show the cyclical nature of addiction and western exploitation of indigionus people. While this scene was strong, this theme could have been continued throughout the film to illustrate the degradation of many Indian institutions, including the orphanage, by the hands of western exploitation. Nair could have also been more explicit in the problematic nature of this, as the scene could also be read as tourists being cheated/victims of Indian action, done in a way to win over a European audience so they can see themselves in the injustice.
Nair’s film can best be described as an attempt, an attempt to be representative. She does succeed in bringing the stories of Bombay’s street kids to a western market and depict the human rights atrocity that is deep poverty. At the same time, this film does not do enough. It does not make us feel for the characters in a meaningful way, as we don’t receive enough character development for many of the characters in the film, and we also receive no critical historical and cultural context to aid our understanding of what we are looking at. We instead, become our own versions of tourists in poverty, watching real stories of street kids for shock value rather than having any meaningful takeaway to which we analyze ourselves and our implication. While not every film has to do this, there is a dereliction to leave our integral understanding of India and its state. Especially being the first of its kind to highlight India and represent the country in western media, there is a massive responsibility that Nair chose to neglect. This negligence may have unfortunately set precedent for massive amounts of one dimensional stories that diminish the region that we are saturated with today.
