7 Islands And A Metro
To the seven goddesses who reign over Bom Bahia / Bombay / Mumbai.
The multilingual Bombay, the Bombay of closed mills, of popular culture, sprawling slums and real estate onslaughts, the metropolis of numerous ghettos, the El Dorado. A tale of the city through a tapestry of fiction, cinema verite, art objects, found footage, sound installation and literary texts.
The narrative is structured around imaginary debates between Ismat Chugtai and Sadat Hasan Manto over the art of chronicling these multi-layered overlapping cities. Shot mainly during the monsoon the film portrays some extremely beautiful yet ruthlessly violent features of Bombay which, generally, are not part of the popular narratives.
Filmmaker Madhusree Dutta's "Seven Islands and a Metro" focuses on the invisible citizens who keep the city's wheels running.
Are you aware that the first Japanese to ply their trade in this port city were 200 prostitutes? In the Christian cemetery, a burial service is lullaby to a vagabond asleep on a nearby grave. Overnight, a European graveyard is transformed into living quarters by a migrant Tamil community. Marbles stolen from Jewish graves are part of temples across the road. Little feet fly in and out through the window, from an unseen swing, behind a hereditary watchman of the Chinese cemetery.
These singular images are from Madhusree Dutta's "Seven Islands and a Metro", a documentary on Mumbai. Nothing can stop life at full tilt in this city, not even death. The surreal cutting into the real is no stylistic device, but truth staring at you from the city's history and geography.
The seven goddesses of Bom Bahia (Bombay) have watched Arab traders, Portuguese conquerors, British colonizers, the rise and fall of the mills, the growth of heavy industry, mafia strangleholds, Bollywood pageants, political struggles, racial holocausts, and the seas swelled to cover the land.
Hordes swarm to the El Dorado, ending up on pavements, slums, underworld, mujra houses, bars, factories, construction sites. Few amass wealth. Fewer return home. The goddesses appointed the seas and hills to ensure that none took anything out of their terrain.
Dutta found her thread in motifs of arrival and departure. A graduate of the National School of Drama, hadn't she herself come to Bombay to fulfill dreams? Writers Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai as fictionised narrators took care of links and layerings.
Manto left for Lahore but wrote about Bombay. Chugtai died in Bombay but never wrote about it. Its constant shifts were superficial for her epics, but just right for Manto's short spins. Did Manto really leave? Did Chugtai really live here? The filmmaker wondered if a metropolitan epic had necessarily to be fragmented... Didn't Bombay choose not to be Venice, creating one metro out of seven isles?
Manto (Harish Khanna) is the night bird, while Chugtai (Vibha Chibber) claims the day in the segments - Check Naka, Construction Site, Pillion Riders, Chronology, Left Luggage, Reclamation and Faith. Their dialogues are Dutta's tribute to Bombay filmdom, a reminder that Urdu culture is getting erased in this multilingual metro.
Images are simply surreal. A man walks on the highway, his wares hanging from both ends of the pole on his shoulder: the waif who survives in anonymity. The film is also about any globalised megalopolis, where gigantic cement mixers rumble in like military tanks. Fringe dwellers are Dutta's concern. The camera probes a slum to find Hema Malini's stuntwoman in "Sholay". "Show your face and you're paid Rs.1,000, don't show and you get Rs.2,000," she smiles grimly.
The nocturnal coffeewala, with his own tragic romance of cross-caste love, can vanish without a trace. Such invisible citizens keep