Readers Write In #830: Cinematic Amnesia – How Bollywood Forgot the Cities It Once Loved

By Pranav Jain

Pranav Jain is an incoming civil servant and also a columnist.

When Metro…In Dino hit the screens a few weeks back, there was a quiet sense of déjà vu. Its spiritual prequel Life in a…Metro had managed to capture something rare: the poetry of urban fatigue. Mumbai acted as a microcosm of archetypal urban India. It depicted unrequited love, thankless jobs, men torn between passion and duty, and mornings spent staring blankly into the distance between CST and Bandra.

This got me thinking about something different yet related – how urban India has been Bollywood’s most complicated and fractious lover. Hindi cinema’s engagement with city life has always felt like an avoidant romance, fiercely attracted, yet unable to articulate it properly.

From the 1950s to the late 1990s, the city served as both sin capital and salvation. Red-light districts in Pyaasa; Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, where the hero arrives idealistic but is left disillusioned like Chaplin’s tramp; Naveen Nischol’s existential crooning of “tum jo mil gaye ho” as a taxi driver in Hanste Zakham; Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young Vijay in Deewar, acting with righteous fury, as if the city itself had double-crossed him; Shyam Benegal deploying the Mahabharata in Kalyug, as a biting indictment of capitalism and urbanism; and Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani exposing the darkly comic absurdities of urban corruption in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. And always, always, there were slums. Ah, the slum, Bollywood’s most overused crutch. Slums were where the hero was born (Amar Akbar Anthony), where the villain ruled (Parinda), or where the Oscar was conceived (Slumdog Millionaire).

But for all its early flirtations with urban themes, Bollywood long preferred the city only as a symbol, a glittering Babylon where daughters strayed, sons smoked, wives forgot their mangalsutra, and where you could become anything if you put in enough chicanery, blood, sweat, and tears.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that a curious shift took place. Liberalisation and the IT boom had completely transformed Indian metros. Mumbai was bursting at the seams with an influx of migrants, and Delhi wore its contradictions louder than ever, privilege and precarity knotted into the same brutalist skyline. A new class of filmmakers, urban themselves and English-speaking, decided to turn the lens inward. There was also a new captive audience, one raised on both Shah Rukh Khan and Friends reruns. It was the era of what might be called the Café Coffee Day renaissance in Hindi cinema.

Dil Chahta Hai gave us South Bombay mornings, its dialogues dripping in English, Hindi, and friendship angst. Jhankaar Beats scored the soundtrack for millennial romance and re-introduced RD Burman to an entire generation. Nagesh Kukunoor captured alienation evocatively in Hyderabad Blues. Rocket Singh immersed us in the sterile cubicles of Gurugram’s offices. Khosla Ka Ghosla wove class satire while giving a peek into Delhi’s middle-class culture.

These films were not about cities. They were cities incarnate. Ethereal, fragmented, lonely, self-absorbed, aspirational, and quietly desperate. This era, roughly between 2000 and 2011, was not the high watermark or golden in the nostalgic sense. It was golden because it felt like finally, the movies had decided to live where their audiences did. And then, something changed once again.

2011 and 2012 were watershed moments, not for urban India, but for its cinematic disappearance. In 2011, Aanand L Rai introduced a new small-town aesthetic with Tanu weds Manu – fun, comic, relatable and intimately grounded. And in 2012, through Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap dragged Bollywood away from the glass towers of metros into the delectable dustbowls of Dhanbad. Hindi cinema followed both, as if on cue.

Suddenly, the hinterland was chic. Masaan, Bareilly Ki Barfi, Raanjhanaa, Sonchiriya, and more ruled the cinematic airwaves. It is not that these heartland films were not compelling; they brought with them a different and very entertaining vocabulary of realism. After all, who can forget Rajkumar Rao playing the well-meaning friend in Bareilly Ki Barfi or Swanand Kirkire giving voice to Dushyant Kumar’s “tu kisi rail si guzarti hai, main kisi pul sa thartharata hoon” in Masaan. My only lament is that urban India did not merely downsize but simply vanished.

There were three reasons for this. First, after the 2000s’ urban optimism came the hangover – the ‘Great Indian Middle-Class Disillusionment’. Delhi became notorious for the Nirbhaya case and Mumbai earned a bad rep for becoming unaffordable. The city was no longer aspirational. Second, urban India became visually boring. One can only see the same apartments and the same cubicles so many times. Hindi cinema, ever allergic to visual monotony, found richer textures in small towns and badlands. Third, with rising per capita incomes, Bollywood found an untapped potential in a new audience of cinemagoers, particularly in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities.

There were exceptions, however. The Lunchbox was poetry in motion set against the backdrop of an on-the-move Mumbai. Titli found surprising intimacy in the choking lanes of Delhi. Piku turned bathroom talk into a meditation on roots and filial fatigue, with Delhi and Kolkata arguing quietly in the background. Talaash was a masterclass in the urban-noir genre. But these films felt like outliers, not a wave.

Even today, the recent resurgence of ‘city films’ feels too artificial and curated. Bollywood, as it is wont to do, has flattened urban India into aesthetics. Representation of urban youth has been reduced to gritty start-ups, heartbreak on Tinder, Old Monk nostalgia, and therapist scenes written by people who have clearly never been to therapy. Where are the real stories? The story of a student juggling part-time jobs to pay for a co-living space. The story of the young professional who just wants to survive another Monday like Arvind Desai in his Ajeeb Dastaan. The story of a couple who grapple with the mechanics of modern day urban love, not performatively, but within real constraints.

And this is the deeper failure of Bollywood. Not the lack of movies on urban India but the lack of accuracy. Bollywood, for all its problems, once knew how to capture that accuracy. Maybe it will again. Maybe the next great urban film is already being written somewhere. Until then we will have to wait at the platform, watching the same train of clichés pass by, hoping, just once, that it stops and gives us something real.