Film and Politics: Term Paper
Salaam Bombay!

Directed by Mira Nair in 1988, “Salaam Bombay!” is a fine piece of cinematic art that portrays the unfortunate reality of how life is for street children in Bombay, India. The film makes a brave jump from the typical, happy-go-lucky, capitalist representation of life on the streets, to a more convincing one. Following the daily struggles of children living on the streets of Bombay, this film sheds light on the socio-economic realities of their lives. In this paper, I will analyze “Salaam Bombay!” in terms of its ability to provide a near accurate depiction of urban poverty in India, and the lives of its street children.

“Salaam Bombay!” follows the story of a young boy, around the age of twelve, named Krishna. Shortly into the movie we find Krishna living on the streets of the largest city in India, Bombay, surrounded by drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, and other homeless children like him. Through a conversation Krishna has with a drug addict he befriends, we discover that Krishna was abandoned by his mother at an Apollo Circus where she tells him that he can only come back home once he raises five hundred rupees to pay his brother back for destroying his bicycle. Krishna, named Chaipau by those around him, starts working as a tea deliverer for a local teashop so he can earn enough money to go back home. As the film traces Krishna’s struggles to earn enough money and survive on the streets of Bombay, his story clashes with three other prominent ones: one is based around Chillum, the drug addict Krishna befriends on the street; second revolves around Manju, the five year old daughter of a prostitute named Rekha and a local drug dealer called Baba; and the third story deals with a young girl referred to as “Sola Saal” (Sweet Sixteen) who is forcefully sold to the brothel Krishna delivers tea to.

One of the most salient themes in this film is the desire to go “home” – symbolized by Krishna’s continuous efforts to raise enough money so his mother accepts him again. Krishna’s search to go “home” is present metaphorically as well as he yearns for a sense of belonging; some of which he finds with Chillum and the other street children. It is in the very last scene of the film where Krishna finds himself completely alone on a street without a single person in sight that he realizes the closest thing to home for him is now the street itself. As part of a study done by Meena Mathur in 2009, she finds that UNICEF (1988) states that “street children are those for whom the street more than their family has become their real home; a situation in which there is no protection, supervision and direction from responsible adults”. Even Rekha, the prostitute and single-mom, spends her time hoping to have a “family life” with Baba, and her daughter Manju. The mockery of big-budget Bollywood films that leave audiences detached with the dark realities of Bombay is another prominent theme in this film. According to Shahid Khan in his film review of “Salaam Bombay!” - the Bollywood film industry, based in the city of Bombay (Mumbai), is a dream factory that produces fantasies for its viewers, majority of whom are poor. The poor choose to watch these entertaining movies in attempt to temporarily forget about their difficult lives. Nair shows the influence of these movies on many of the characters in “Salaam Bombay!” through their constant parodying of Hindi songs such as those from hugely popular mainstream Bollywood films like “Mr. India”. Shahid Khan also points out in his review that at a time when films like “Mr. India” were popular in mainstream cinema, “Salaam Bombay!” with its realism and courageous display of issues affecting the majority of India’s population was something rare in a 1980’s Bollywood film. “Salaam Bombay!” takes the bubble Bollywood seems to dwell in and literally pees on it (one of the scenes shows a boy peeing while singing a popular Hindi song). In fact, in an article written by David Sterritt in 1988, Mira Nair explained that while training the real street children to act in “Salaam Bombay!” they had to introduce the idea of un-teaching them their notions of acting, which were completely fed to them by Indian cinema – an overblown, dramatic style. Another, very prominent, and consistent theme in this film was the loss of innocence; which in some retrospect was related to almost every character in this film. Children on the street are forced into becoming completely self-reliant at an unnatural age; Krishna, for example, has no one to depend on or run to when he needs help; he must feed himself, make his own money, and survive with whatever means he gets. Due to his friendship with Chillum, and association with other street children, Krishna also experiments with drugs and alcohol, which a boy at his age shouldn’t be doing. According to a study done by Meena Mathur on the socialization of street children in India (2009), she discovered through interviewing approximately 200 street children (specifically in an interview with Mushtaq Alam, aged 14) that even though children may not admit it, but each and every one is particularly addicted to some substance or the other. In part of the same study (2009), Tanu, a 13-year-old-run-away girl who lived at the railway station with other street boys said, “I could sense that it is an unsafe world for a girl and I would fall prey to abuse of all kinds, I decided to role-play as a boy; dress, walk and talk like them. Slowly I picked up habits like using abusive language, eating tobacco and sometimes smoking and inhaling whitener.” The reality of the association and consequences of substance abuse is represented through Chillum, who left his family at an age even younger than Krishna’s and quickly fell into the underworld of drugs. Chillum’s addiction ultimately results in an untimely death after he loses his job as a dealer for Baba, and is unable to afford the drugs he desperately needs. One cannot move away from discussing the theme of premature loss of innocence without mentioning Manju, a five-year-old bubbly little girl born to a prostitute, and drug dealer. It is very prominent in the film that Manju yearns for love, time, and affection – like most children her age – but is too often exposed to her mother “entertaining” customers, and neglected by her drug/women obsessed father who she desperately wants to play with. After taking to the street, and finding comfort with the other street children, including Krishna, Manju is eventually put into an orphanage with other underprivileged children. There, Manju’s personality makes a complete shift, and she changes from being a happy, dancing, and talkative little girl, to being completely quiet and distressed.

Watching “Salaam Bombay!” is like watching a documentary; everything about the film, including its characters, story, and locations feels so genuinely raw, aiding the entire film in flowing naturally from start to end. In fact, Roger Ebert, a popular American film critic said in 1988, “director Mira Nair has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama”. Despite having watched a film like “Slumdog Millionaire” which also attempted to portray urban poverty in India, Nair’s efforts in ensuring that the real throb of the street world came across on screen evoked emotions in me that “Slumdog Millionaire” couldn’t even touch. My heart ached for the young children as they walked back from working as waiters at a wedding barefoot; I could practically feel the wet and coarse rocks beneath my own feet at that moment. “Slumdog Millionaire” on the other hand, through its rags-to-riches tale made me (and most moviegoers) make an unrealistic assumption that most street children can count on their luck like Jamal Malik, become millionaire’s, and ditch the evil slums for good. After watching the two films, it becomes evident that “Slumdog Millionaire” is Hollywood entertainment at its finest, designed solely to make money. It is far fetched, and created in a way to make the audience “feel good” – so that they watch it again, and again. Mitu Sengupta (2010) very powerfully contends that “Slumdog Millionaire” depicts the ‘slums’ of Bombay (Mumbai) as feral wasteland, a place where there is nothing but evil and deterioration that is lacking order, compassion, and productivity. Even though living on the streets of Bombay is without doubt brutal, “Salaam Bombay!” evokes a silent feeling of hope. The characters we come across in this film appear to share a community - whether it’s Krishna’s relationship with Chillum, his association with the other street children, his love for Sola Saal (“Sweet Sixteen”), or his bond with Rekha and her daughter Manju – each character is out to look after one another at some point in the movie. While “Slumdog Millionaire” addresses issues related to poverty, it concurrently promotes the ‘development’ or ‘westernization’ of the slums so they too can be used to make a profit. Contrary to that, “Salaam Bombay!” approaches issues of poverty from the outlook of someone who is more closely related to the lives of third world dwellers that only have these slums and streets to rely on for habituation. When Krishna gets picked up by the police and locked away in a detention center (a horrid combination of an orphanage and prison) with other troubled children, the audience is somehow convinced that the street life, however hard, is preferable to what happens to people once they are identified by the law and placed in institutions (Ebert, 1988). Being used to the typical fairy tale ending that most films deceive our perception of reality with, “Salaam Bombay!” ends at very stagnant note with Krishna, who gets separated from Rekha in a crowd after saving her from an unwanted life with Baba, ending up on a dreary street alone, crying. A film like “Salaam Bombay!” makes me want to help children, but unfortunately the movie provides little answers as to what should be done to help them. Shortly after “Salaam Bombay!” released in 1988, Mira Nair used the proceeds from the film to establish an organization called the ‘Salaam Balak Trust’ to rehabilitate the children who acted in the film (Sterritt, 1988). Unlike in “Slumdog Millionaire” where little is known of what happened to the real street children used as actors in the film after its release and success, Nair really wanted to understand and help these children in realizing their own self-worth and dignity; she wanted to help them create the opportunities they wanted for themselves (Sterritt, 1988). The desires and dreams of street children are just like ours; the difference being their underprivileged lives and struggles to survive each day before they even come close to achieving aspirations. Also, it doesn’t help when capitalists make attempts at undermining the value of what slums and streets provide to its dwellers, or threaten to ‘develop’ these areas.

To conclude my paper, I believe that during a time when commercialized cinema was (and at times, still is) the only source of knowledge, and an over glamorized depiction of the outside world, “Salaam Bombay!” selflessly provided the audience with an honest picture of the lives of street children in India. To me, Mira Nair has captured a story of survival and spirit. Every street child comes with this unique energy, and flamboyance to keep going and dealing with each day as it comes. Even Krishna, despite everything that happens to him, never loses hope. Every time he ends up back at the bottom, with no money or guidance, he starts all over again – capturing the real inspiration these children are. The streets, apart from their cruelty, provide these children with a place to live, a place where they have some sort of identity within a community, and more importantly a place they can call “home”.

Works Cited

Ebert, R. (1988). Salaam Bombay! Movie Review & Film Summary (1988). Retrieved March 10, 2015, from http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/salaam-bombay-1988

Khan, S. (1988). Film Review - Salaam Bombay! Retrieved March 14, 2015, from http://planetbollywood.com/Film/SalaamBombay!/

Mathur, M. (2009). Socialisation of Street Children in India. Psychology and Developing Societies, 21(2), 299-325. doi:10.1177/097133360902100207

Sengupta, M. (2010). A Million Dollar Exit from the Anarchic Slum-world: Slumdog Millionaire's hollow idioms of social justice. Third World Quarterly, 31(4), 599-616. doi:10.1080/01436591003701117

Sterritt, D. (1988). MIRA NAIR. Interview with Indian director whose new film stars street children from Bombay. Retrieved March 10, 2015, from http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1012/lfl07.html