2026 Essays

Cinema and the City of Images: An Intermedial, Pharai Tale

Mukherjee, Debashree

A cinematic city at its core, Bombay has been lauded and lamented in innumerable films. However, in this essay I point to a much longer history of representation that cuts across multiple media genres from the 1820s onwards. While the canon of classic Bombay city films is well established, this essay goes beyond Bollywood to set up a dialogue between canvas and paper-based works on one hand, and feminist independent films on the other. I follow the tropes of midnight, money, myth, monsoon, and draw out iconic Bombay figures like the mazdoor, the poet, the sex worker, and the Koli. Kali Salwar (2002), Cosmopolis (2004), 7 Islands and a Metro (2006) and All We Imagine as Light (2024) are paired with works exhibited at DAG’s Bombay Framed 2026 exhibition, by Robert Grindlay, Anupam Sud, MS Joshi, and Chittaprosad. My argument is largely in my method - pharai - a digressive method that is inspired by Sa’adat Hasan Manto.