Salaam Bombay!: A View from the Streets

The making of Salaam Bombay! is a saga of its own, detailed beautifully in a book published in 1989 featuring Nair’s journal entries, correspondences, and notes. Nair recruited famed British Indian acting coach Barry John to conduct a weeks-long theater workshop with 130 street kids, who were each paid a day rate. Seventeen members of the group were eventually cast in the film, including the impish Shafiq Syed as Chaipau and the saucer-eyed Hansa Vithal as Manju. Adult roles were filled by actors who would go on to become Indian art-house darlings: Nana Patekar as Baba, Raghubir Yadav as Chillum, and Aneeta Kanwar as Rekha. Nair also discovered the great, hood-eyed Irrfan Khan, who appears in a tiny cameo as a letter writer and who would go on to international fame with his performances in The Namesake (2006) and Life of Pi (2012). She spent many nights raising money for scenes that were to be shot the next day. Bollywood producers scoffed at the prospect of a feature film without stars or song-and-dance numbers, while Western funders balked at a project whose dialogue would be entirely in Hindi.

The lore about how Salaam Bombay! was made, particularly Nair’s casting of street children, means that the movie is often discussed in terms of its authenticity—that up-close sense of reality that unsettled some of Nair’s critics. But “mere exposition” it is decidedly not. The thrill of the film—its feeling of irreducible complexity—lies in the friction between documentary and narrative. In cinema, authenticity is always a fiction, and here, Nair and company make evident the gorgeous craftsmanship involved in contriving naturalism. Sandi Sissel’s cinematography, for instance, is lush and immersive, distinguished by close-ups in which the background blurs in shallow focus, and by long shots where the screen seems fit to burst with people, colors, and the movement of characters weaving in and out of crowds and traffic. (“I love to fill the frame to the fullest with details,” Nair writes in one of her notes in the Salaam Bombay! book.)

The film balances a languorous rhythm with propulsive emotional dramas. Chillum struggles to beat his addiction. Chaipau, enamored with Solasaal, tries to escape with her. Baba seduces Solasaal and irks Rekha, who tries to raise Manju as best she can amid the debris of her lover’s broken promises. These narratives unfold as they would in life—all at once, each a distinct world of its own rather than a chapter in some larger story arc. In one scene that always sticks with me, Chaipau gives a pack of biscuits to Manju, who is supposed to pass them on to Solasaal but instead hides behind a door and eats them herself. (“Eat these biscuits like you were eating Solasaal, bite by bite” was Nair’s direction to Vithal.) The camera stays with her as she eats the biscuits one by one, her eyes darting furtively, the soundtrack hushed except for the muted din of the street and the sharp sound of her crunching. In this quiet, interstitial moment, Nair captures the entire drama of a little girl’s loneliness, desire, and envy.

Salaam Bombay! belongs to a long and august lineage of neorealist films that center street children, from Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) to Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1980). If neorealism is fundamentally a humanist mode, affirming our faith in a shared community that transcends all differences, then children are its defining emblem—symbols of an unsullied innocence. Within this cinematic tradition, they have both moral and formal power. They represent a psychological tabula rasa whose corruption allows us to see how social forces influence individual behavior. And because children are perceived as incapable of the calculation required by performance, they reinforce neorealism’s rejection of professional acting.

But the children in Salaam Bombay! are not innocent—or not entirely. They know both too little and too much. Chaipau doesn’t know the address of his family home, but he knows what a sex worker is and where to find “brown sugar” (a form of powdered heroin) when Chillum needs it. Manju delights in her mother’s bedtime stories, illustrated with shadow puppets, but she also peers in through the frosted glass window of Rekha’s door as she entertains clients. Many of the kids use curse words with abandon. All of these young characters call to mind art historian Anne Higonnet’s description of the “knowing child,” whose taboo awareness of the world’s sordid realities destabilizes the romantic myth of childhood innocence.

The most unsettling thing about Salaam Bombay! is our knowledge that, were the child actors to view themselves on-screen, they would be looking at their own tragedies, cruelties, and joys from the outside, through Nair’s lens—meaning they would understand, as we do, their oppression. In allowing the kids to share their lives with us, Salaam Bombay! gives us their view of the world, rather than imposing its own understanding of childhood on them. The film also shows us how the institutions that claim to restore these children’s innocence often undermine their lived realities. After a brush with the cops, Manju and Chaipau are sent away to the Chiller Room; when Rekha comes to retrieve her daughter, she is told that, as a prostitute, she is not fit to be a mother. Chaipau meets a kid who says that he has been incarcerated for five years for urinating in public; another has been there for so long that he has forgotten what he got locked up for.

In a letter to her production designer (and then-husband) Mitch Epstein, Nair quotes André Bazin’s essay on Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, another tale of street children: “These children are beautiful not because they do good or evil, but because they are children even in crime and even in death.” Despite the cruelties it depicts, Bazin argues, Los olvidados is a “film of love” that “evades nothing, concedes nothing, and dares to dissect reality with surgical obscenity.” Salaam Bombay! achieves the same level of candor. These children, beautiful by virtue of their youth, are the same individuals who will grow up to be the Babas, Rekhas, and madams of the world. The celebrated art-house actor Naseeruddin Shah, who turned down the role of Baba, reportedly had reservations because he didn’t find the character likable. But Nair invites us to do something more complex than like or dislike her characters. She calls upon us to look attentively at a reality that always exceeds our preconceptions.

That kind of attention, to paraphrase Simone Weil, presupposes love. It forces us to recognize that we share the world with these people, good and bad alike, and are thus implicated in their fates. In the film’s climax, a bravura sequence initiated by an act of vengeance and set during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, Chaipau is briefly swallowed by the crowds of Bombay as he tries to flee with Rekha. Nair and her crew filmed a real street procession, with hundreds of people singing and dancing in the wake of a truck carrying a large statue of Lord Ganesh toward the sea for its final immersion. At certain points, Nair films the street from high up, via a crane shot, and we lose Chaipau in the crowd. It’s a momentary reprieve to imagine him as just a speck within a sea of anonymous lives and stories. But the camera finally settles on a close-up of his face as he sits, in an alleyway beyond the throng, and cries in grim silence. His gaze is askance, refusing to meet ours. Soon, he will disappear from the screen with a cut to black. We, however, will not escape the film unscathed.