Gangland Bombay Detailed Notes

Suketu Mehta's Maximum City

Suketu Mehta's Maximum City presents an array of characters (film personalities, bar girls, gangsters, rioters) to depict the psychological world that defines Bombay's culture. The book portrays a landscape of greed, fear, violence, and riots, capturing the sensibility and everyday stories of the city. It was the first major nonfiction attempt to explore aspects of city life often ignored by serious scholarship. The book's power comes from its sensationalism, immediacy, and vivid depiction of the city as a visual palimpsest of dreams and nightmares, drawing on cinematic language to understand complex urban forces. Mehta uses an essayistic approach to uncover the city's darker side.

Bombay Underworld

One notable section focuses on the Bombay underworld, offering a lens through which to read the city, mirroring the cinematic representation of this world in recent gangster films. These films provide a counternarrative to the designed city by exploring the mythology of the underworld, depicting the city's decline and journey through urban chaos, expressing catastrophe, despair, and crisis.

Gangster Films

Bombay's underworld has produced famous gangsters, sometimes portrayed as heroic outlaws in films. Current gangster films address the underworld's accelerated activity since the mid-1980s, vividly capturing its linguistic, cultural, and performative styles. This is due to:

1. Gang life being classic thriller and noir material.

2. The solidified connection between the underworld and the film industry over the last 15-20 years.

Suketu Mehta notes a symbiosis between the underworld and the movies, where filmmakers draw inspiration from gangsters' lives, and gangsters model themselves on-screen characters. This mutual influence extends to film financing, although secrecy obscures the full extent of the underworld's involvement. Events since the 1990s, such as police raids and arrests, have exposed these connections.

Key Films Exploring Bombay

Three films stand out for their gritty and psychological explorations of Bombay, presenting protagonists as denizens of the underworld:

• Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989): An early response to the gangland experience.

• Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998) and Company (2002): Films presenting a distinct shift in the gangster's journey.

These films explore the city through emotional and spatial registers, offering insights into its hidden recesses.
Parinda explores space and the uncanny through a fascination with death, struggling with the idea of a better future. Satya shifts from earlier crime narratives by presenting protagonists without a past, unfolding within a flow of random events and producing the idea of the residual city. Company locates crime within an international syndicate, portraying a networked city and a culture of technological surveillance. All three films depict Bombay as marked by violence, terror, claustrophobia, and the uncanny, transforming it into a gangland haunted by death, darkness, and ruin.

Gangster Film Topography

The gangster film, as a subgenre of crime films, is significant in the urban context because it offers an alternative topography, community, and urban consciousness. Fran Mason sees the gangster as a central figure in 20th-century culture, embodying tensions related to tradition, modernity, urban space politics, and the individual's struggle in the modern world.

The street is the primary site of narrative action, symbolizing freedom and liberation from restricted urban spaces. Gang control of the street evokes power and expresses masculinity through traversing treacherous city areas. Gangster films also involve transgressing spatial boundaries and social hierarchies.
The underworld is a space of fascination, offering outsiders access to a world felt and seen at street level but not fully understood. The visible aspects of gangster films, such as guns, cars, action, and city spaces, capture the seduction of the underworld, while the genre reveals deeper contradictions of urban life.

Contradictions of Urban Life

Jack Shaodian suggests the gangster genre reveals societal nature and the individuals it creates by focusing on outcasts who oppose the legitimate social order. The genre provides a perspective on society through worlds and figures outside it. While the distinction between gangster and society was clear in the 1930s, it has become more complex with cultural evolution.
The core elements of the gangster genre include an urban backdrop, criminality within a male community, performative masculinity, impossible romance, family crisis, and everyday fear. Visual codes of gangster films are easily recognized due to their international circulation. As cities grapple with crime, the gangster genre creates urban legends and myths, often located in global cities with illicit financial transactions.

Underworld Operations

Organized crime in Bombay, involving smuggling, prostitution, extortion, land grabbing, contract killing, and corporate crime, emerged in the 1960s. Bombay, with its commercial enterprises and film industry, became a center for underworld operations. Initially focused on bootlegging, gangs expanded into gold smuggling, gambling, extortion, drug peddling, and contract killing. In the 1980s, the underworld intensified with Dawood Ibrahim, whose extortion racket affected people from hawkers to movie stars. Dawood's flight to Dubai in the mid-1980s, following a police crackdown, did not stop his operations in Bombay.

Dawood Ibrahim

Under Dawood, the underworld's connections to the film industry grew through financial networks and extortion. The underworld became a major threat after the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts. Dawood, suspected of orchestrating the blasts in retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Mosque and subsequent anti-Muslim violence, became an international terrorist due to suspected links with the Gulf and Pakistan.

Access to the underworld's culture is primarily through cinema, with themes of masculinity, brotherhood, identity, and aspiration played out through excessive performances. The mise-en-scène and narrative provide clues linking social space with cinematic space, expressing crisis through urban disintegration. Gangster films unleash excess related to Bombay's social topography, reflecting anxiety, confusion, despair, and fear from the 1980s and 1990s.

Spatial Crisis in Bombay

The spatial crisis in Bombay has been intensifying due to criminal activity. The rise in crime is linked to the decline of Bombay's textile mills, which once employed nearly two-thirds of the city's industrial workers. A strike lasting 18 months (1982–83) accelerated this decline. The textile strike resulted in despair for many workers, with journalistic accounts suggesting adventurism and self-interest among union leaders. The strike marked a shift from a manufacturing city to a global service economy, with retrenched workers struggling for survival.

The factory sites and residential areas of workers became spaces of local time, global imaginaries, and spatial claustrophobia. Thomas Blom Hansen's exploration of Central Bombay reveals how working-class despair became visible in the neighborhood's topography, with crime, prostitution, and gang wars prevalent. Illegal construction, hawkers, and pavement dwellers increased congestion, leading to spatial disenchantment.
Migration to the Gulf in the late 1970s created competition for jobs and bribery to secure travel, contributing to an unstable situation. The Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, active since the 1970s, exploited unemployed youth, industrial workers, and petty gangsters. Initially regionalist (Marathi), the Sena became a Hindu organization in the mid-1980s, promoting brotherhood and street action while engaging in extortion.

Bomb Blasts

The 1993 bomb blasts highlighted the myth of cosmopolitanism in Bombay. Polarization between Hindus and Muslims, gang wars, and urban decay followed the riots. Muslim communities adopted internal purification and plebeian assertion through small business and strongmen tactics. Local street dadas in Muslim neighborhoods provided role models and access to consumer goods from cable television, reflecting a landscape of consumption amidst the ruins of modernity. The rise of gangsters needed to be understood in this spatial backdrop, in which Dawood Ibrahim grew up, becoming seen as a mystical hero. Dada culture in the Muslim Mohalla, similar to that of the Shiv Sena, emphasized male honor, action, and violence.

The events after the textile strike led to a self-destructive nihilism among unemployed workers facing shrinking living space and accelerated work time. Overcrowding in chawls destroyed privacy and fostered fear. The post-strike city revealed the banality of everyday life, where the past lost its connection to the present and random events shaped urban identities. When this banality reached a breaking point, criminality and gang activity emerged within a complex spatial map.

The Underworld as a Community

The Bombay underworld is seen as a new community of men referred to as Bhai (brother). Assassination fees are called $Supari$, and the gang language is Bambayya. Despite both Muslim and Hindu members, gangs are popularly perceived as predominantly Muslim due to Dawood Ibrahim's prominence and connections. Dawood's suspected involvement in the 1993 bomb blasts linked the underworld to international terrorism, reinforcing the Muslim image.
After the 1993 blasts, urban mythology suggests a religious split between Chota Rajan (Hindu) and Dawood. Gangster films like Satya and Company cautiously reference gang activities, often alluding to Dawood Ibrahim's story. The film industry responds to Bombay's climate of disorder and crisis, with narratives portraying the loss of cosmopolitanism, urban decline, and overcrowding.

It is difficult to trace a single narrative explaining the contemporary crisis. Crisis is both an experience and a metaphor for the cityscape. The film industry renders crisis through narratives of despair, negotiating a strategic realism where films allude to events without fully explaining them. Anurag Kashyap, the screenwriter of Satya, emphasizes the importance of urban space exploration in his scripts, mythologizing underworld events to create characters and depict city life. Inhabiting the experience of disorder is more important than analyzing its causes.

An Urban Legend

The Bombay underworld serves as an urban legend linking city parts to gang activity. Extortion of money from shopkeepers is a routine affair, marking gang territories. The cinematic reproduction of this mythology combines real events, contemporary sensibilities about Bombay's spatial crisis, and mythmaking. The film industry creates an experiential realm of disorder through an urban delirium about the underworld, drawing on informal knowledge, rumor, and journalistic discourse, becoming entrenched within this delirium like a dark shadow following commodity spectacle.
Passengers circulate everyday knowledge of crime, combining informally circulated news with hyperbolic reporting in the press. Reports on encounter killings and extortions have become regular news items. Commerce in the city reckons with the underworld through negotiated activity or monetary supply for safety. Stories of death threats circulate, contributing to an urban delirium of crime—a combination of print, sound, speech, and image.

Ram Gopal Varma

Director Ram Gopal Varma aimed to capture the texture of life within the gangster's world, exploring time between killings. Varma views Bombay as an outsider, seeing living conditions and claustrophobia as central to its identity. He wonders about people's strategies for acquiring private lives, intimacy, desires, and aspirations, viewing the gangster myth as emerging from this psychological urban world.

Gangster films are shot in real locations, such as alleys, hutments, and docks. Meeting places resemble abandoned factory sites or half-constructed buildings. Chase sequences navigate the city's public spaces. Low-key photography, reminiscent of film noir, enhances the spatial topography of dread, decay, and death, contrasting with the sanitized aesthetics of family films. Urban display is countered by dark shadows and fragmented shots, connecting with Benjamin's evocation of ruin.

Spatial Disenchantment\

The dark textures of the city enable a cinematic exploration of ruin and spatial disenchantment. The gangster genre navigates the city of spatial disenchantment by articulating despair through the gangland experience. Social space emerges through mood, mise-en-scène, characterization, and plot, offering a prism through which to grasp disenchantment.

Parinda - The Uncanny City

Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Parinda intricately plots the underworld's ability to destroy ordinary dreams. Karan, returning from America, finds his dreams shattered when underworld don Anna has his sweetheart Paro's brother killed. Kishen, working for Anna, fails to dissuade his brother Karan from seeking revenge. Karan gets involved with Anna and sets up the men who killed Prakash. Anna then proceeds to kill Karan and Para on their wedding night. Finally, Kishen kills Anna. The film uses urban terror, ritualistic fascination with death, and fragmented space of film noir.

Parinda uses limited location shots, fragmented through editing combining film-noir cynicism with Eisensteinian montage and Hitchcockian terror, to develop the image of the city as ruin through an articulation of the architectural uncanny. Anthony Vidler suggests the metropolitan uncanny is associated with spatial fear, articulating an unlivable modern condition. In film, the uncanny emerges within a tense space where the yearning for home and the fear of homelessness impinge on desire and freedom.

Memory, childhood, nostalgia, claustrophobia, and primitivism coexist to produce spatial anxiety. Parinda's Bombay is fragmented into dark spaces, with characters framed in light and shadow, showing a decrepit and Spartan city. The city's alleys, closed spaces, elevators, dark staircases, peeling walls, and streets are ubiquitous. Anna is the center, connecting to the police, underworld rivals, factories, and politicians through a social net and eccentricity.
\nParinda offers a combination of themes of excess, the bizarre, cruelty, madness, innocence, and a fascination with death, acquiring a ceremonial quality staged elaborately. The city’s darkness plays a central role narrating death. Anna’s mannerisms are peculiar, stemming from the burning of his wife and child. This creates Anna's power and complexity, embedding trauma in consciousness. Anna maintains a simmering exterior, a savage control, an ascetic persona, and intimacy with the everyday violence of the city. Terror in Parinda is linked to madness, revealing a sense of internal destruction that leads people to brutal deaths.

Invasion of Private Worlds

The inability to sustain a private world runs throughout Parinda. The film constantly interrupts personal space while utilizing disturbing sounds. The fear of internal destruction is enhanced when violence is always lurking outside. Childhood impressions and experiences connect to all the characters, including Anna, as orphaned children. Childhood is a state of homelessness as children are singing, dancing, and playing. These actions portray the city as the city of dreams. However, childhood images do not provide resolution, leaving these memories as a series of unfinished images.

Remembering Urban Spaces

In “A Berlin Chronicle,” Walter Benjamin suggests that urban reminiscences are usually discontinuous, unlike time mapping in classical autobiography. The relationship of specific locations to time, and the ways in which the city shapes memory, are critical. In Parinda, all the characters are caught in a battle with fate. Monuments are also seen as dangerous and negative. The monument hides the persistence of barbarism in the present as it presents a false history by eternalizing the past. In Parinda, the space of both the monument and counter-monument is shattered by violence.

Parinda uses the Gateway of India, Babulnath Temple, and a neighborhood fountain as spaces of terror. The Gateway is used a major backdrop to promote disarray and violence while also incorporating the death of innocents. Through rapid, back-and-forth structures, city films show visible violence through the shock of the urban. The fountain, like the Babulnath Temple, becomes a violent space. In conclusion, every character besides Paro assists in enacting violence through urban dismay.

Satya and the Residual City

Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya tells the story of Satya, who becomes part of the underworld. He retains little ethical stance, causing the city to show a residual place in the film. The city's wasteland and detritus saturate the mise-en-scène of the film, becoming the heart of the city. The remarkable feature of Satya is its play with space and bodies to craft an urban jungle where the