Elroy Pinto
Independent Filmmaker, researcher and writer.
10.21659/9788197513022.04Abstract
Kali Salwaar (2001) is Fareeda Mehta’s directorial debut and is based on a short story by revolutionary writer Sadat Hasan Manto. The film follows the life of a couple of migrants from the North, Sultana, a sex worker, and her partner, Khudabaksh, a pimp and dilettante with photography. Sultana navigates the streets of Bombay with the help of several stereotypical characters, including sex workers, bhai, grifters, and auto-mechanics. Similarly, their spaces are portrayed as vibrant sites of politics, power, and commerce that operate within working-class localities. In the film, structural elements of cinema- gesture, lensing, sound, music, dialogue, lighting, colour, and movement- form distinct sequences crafted to reveal an ‘inner drama’ that transcends the narrative. By centring the experiences of the migrant labourer and sex worker, the film’s form constructs the spatial relations of the city with its inhabitants into an ever-changing labyrinth. The essay begins by historically locating the role of Muharrum in the life of the working classes of Bombay. Drawing on the work on epic cinema by Alex Koutsouraki, I ask, what does infusing the everyday lives of the working class with modernist epic structures do for our understanding of urban life? Utilising neuroscience studies conducted by Vittorio Gallese & Michelle Guerra on movement in cinema and Bregt Lameris’s study on colour, I argue that Mehta tweaks these structural elements of cinema and increases the possibilities of urban spaces. Finally, I analyse the cinematic processes by which Fareeda Mehta transforms the spaces realised in Manto’s Bombay stories into the visual language of cinema.
Keywords: Epic cinema, Indian cinema, Fareeda Mehta, Sadat Hasan Manto, Kali Salwaar.
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Urban Imaginaries and Indian Cities in Literature
Table of Contents
Urban Imaginaries and Indian Cities in Literature: An Introduction
Dr. Neethu P Antony and Dr. Arpana Venu
Olivia Joseph
Multilingual Metropolis: The Politics of Language and Belonging in Guwahati Through Sheelabhadra’s Fiction
Sangeeta Bhagawati
Spatial (re)orientations and Epic structures of the urban in Fareeda Mehta’s Kali Salwaar
Elroy Pinto
Between Tramline and Traffic Jam: Mapping Indian City through Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar and Anurag Basu’s Life in a…Metro
Trisha Sengupta & Dr. Sanghamitra Baladhikari
Reimagining Kolkata: Subaltern Narratives and the Colonial Urban Dystopia in Kallol Magazine’s Literature
Nandini Gayen
Walking, Writing and Resisting the City: Spatial Tactics and Postcolonial Reimaginings in Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches
Parvin Sultana
Mimesis, Montage and Mapping: A Spatial Analysis of Gangtok City Scapes in the Select Works of Satyajit Ray and Prajwal Parajuly
Dr. Sudakshina Bhattacharya, Dr. Sulagna Mohanty, and Dr. Ankusha Bandyopadhyay
