Mumbai has endured in public imagination through the gentle mythmaking of its own cinema, its shoreline, crowds and anonymity endlessly rehearsed.
In the past two decades, filmmakers have shifted from spectacle to scrutiny, tracing the city’s tensions, ruptures and uncertain bargains.
This article surveys the distance between Mumbai’s inherited myths and its lived truths.
Mumbai has long existed in public imagination through the soft distortions of its own cinema. Its coastline, restless crowds and quiet promise of anonymity have been rehearsed too often. In the ‘city of dreams’, as it is fondly called, the promise of upward mobility that once defined its cinematic imagination now coexists with images of stalled queues, flooded underpasses, collapsing bridges and trains carrying more bodies than they’re designed to hold. Yet, a romanticised reading of Mumbai in films often overlooks how a city can exceed its function as a setting. The city has repeatedly emerged as an active presence that shapes emotional climates and moral tensions. It absorbs desire, produces alienation and registers the private negotiations of those who arrive with hope and remain with compromise.
Over the last two decades, filmmakers have stopped treating the city as a static backdrop and begun to register its anxieties, fractures and unstable promises. This shift coincides with Mumbai’s own transformation into an infrastructural paradox: a financial capital that cannot sustain its own workers, a city of cinematic dreams that struggles to ensure the physical survival of those who sustain its mythology. Hindi cinema has returned to this relationship with persistent fascination, treating the city as both witness and participant.
Earlier films such as Page 3 (2005), CityLights (2014) and Dhobi Ghat (2010) staged Mumbai through binaries of success and failure, often through an outsider who either conquered or was crushed by the city. Contemporary cinema, however, reveals a more diffuse transformation. In Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), Mumbai appears as a city capable of accommodating labour, but unable to accommodate emotional continuity. The city reorganises intimacy, emotional time and self-worth, producing a psychological climate that shapes how young people imagine their futures and endure their present. This impulse also finds expression in Bejoy Nambiar’s Tu Yaa Main (2026), where a single city produces sharply unequal emotional realities. Adarsh Gourav’s Aala Flowpara, a rapper from Nalasopara, draws his voice from material instability shaped by water scarcity, spatial compression and systemic neglect. His art emerges from survival. In contrast, Shanaya Kapoor’s Miss Vanity moves through inherited wealth, yet remains emotionally unmoored. Social media becomes their site of articulation, allowing both to construct identities the physical city cannot accommodate. Mumbai operates here as an emotional infrastructure, giving form to both absence and self-invention.
Understanding Mumbai as a character becomes necessary because the city now actively produces the narrative conditions within which its stories emerge. It determines not only what can be told but also the material and psychological environment in which storytelling becomes possible. Pressurised writers’ rooms, prohibitive rents, deteriorating infrastructure, overburdened transport and persistent language tensions are not peripheral realities. They structure authorship itself. They decide who can afford to remain in the city long enough to write, who is forced to leave and whose perspective acquires legitimacy within its cultural economy. Mumbai no longer exists merely as a metaphor. It operates as an active narrative force, shaping both the emotional interiority of its storytellers and the structural limits within which their stories can be imagined and realised.
An Archive Of The Younger Generation’s Aspirations
Mumbai has long been mythologised as India’s economic engine. Contemporary cinema increasingly depicts it as an indifferent employer. In Gully Boy (2019), Murad Sheikh’s aspiration unfolds within cramped housing, informal labour and fragile economic stability. His artistic voice emerges alongside structural constraints rather than because of the city’s support. Aspiration becomes an act of resistance against material limitation. Mumbai assumes a catalytic function in Wake Up Sid (2009), wherein Sid Mehra’s movement from his father’s insulated Malabar Hills home to Aisha Banerjee’s modest Bandra apartment marks a shift in his relationship to time. The city introduces repetition, discipline and self-sufficiency. Adulthood emerges through routine and Mumbai becomes an instructor, teaching temporal responsibility through ordinary survival.
This temporal layering acquires greater density in Dhobi Ghat (2010), where Mumbai exists as an archive of separately suspended lives deeply interconnected through the city’s pulse. Arun’s isolation in his sea-facing apartment, Yasmin Noor’s fragile video diaries and Munna Shaikh’s precarious existence as a dhobi and aspiring actor unfold within unequal temporal realities. Their trajectories rarely intersect, yet remain structurally connected. Similarly, Life in a… Metro (2007) presents Mumbai as a repository of deferred desire, where emotional compromise emerges from economic necessity. The city preserves these unrealised futures within its material and emotional infrastructure.
A Witness to History and Crime
Urban historian Gyan Prakash described Mumbai as a palimpsest—a surface where earlier histories remain faintly visible. Cinema has repeatedly engaged with this accumulation. Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet (2015) reconstructs a speculative post-Independence city shaped by ambition, capital and institutional complicity. Inequality appears not accidental but architecturally produced.
In Satya (1998), which is partially inspired by real events, the city absorbs anonymous migrants into its criminal economy, dissolving individual identity within systemic violence. Ambition survives, but individual authority disappears. Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010) too, situates crime within the city’s historical continuity. Sultan Mirza and Shoaib Khan rise and fall, yet Mumbai remains structurally unchanged. Their individual trajectories become temporary disturbances within a larger permanence.
Similarly, the 1993 bomb blasts, too, persist in its institutions and memory. Black Friday (2004) extends this historical consciousness by presenting Mumbai as a witness to trauma. Closure remains impossible because the city continues to carry their afterlife.
A Surface of Performed Belonging
In contemporary cinema, belonging in Mumbai rarely appears as a given. It must be rehearsed into existence. Individuals perform composure in public even when privately uncertain. Belonging becomes an act sustained through repetition. Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016) locates this condition within leisure. Arjun Anand (Barun Sobti) and his friends gather every Sunday to play football, not out of indulgence but necessity. Public space becomes accessible only through persistent occupation. Their friendship compensates for what the city withholds, creating a temporary geography of belonging that must be continually renewed.
A quieter articulation appears in The Lunchbox (2013), where Ila (Nimrat Kaur) and Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) develop intimacy through handwritten letters carried across the dabbawala network. Their emotional connection unfolds without sustained physical proximity. Saajan exists as a bureaucratic survivor whose routines have outlived his emotional attachments. Ila remains confined within domestic invisibility. Their correspondence creates an interior space that the physical city cannot provide.
A Gendered Terrain of Negotiated Safety
Cinema has increasingly confronted Mumbai’s gendered geography. The city’s reputation as safer for women often reflects privilege rather than structural reality. In Talaash (2012), nocturnal streets and red-light districts reveal how visibility produces vulnerability. Rosie (Kareena Kapoor Khan), a sex worker, exists suspended in an unresolved in-between—unable to find balance in life or death. She finds quiet refuge in police officer Suri (Aamir Khan), who is himself searching for inner peace after losing his child and drifting away from his marriage. Their bond becomes entwined with the investigation of a murdered film star, yet Rosie’s death remains invisible for most of the narrative, mirroring how her life, too, passed through the city without recognition.
In Sir (2018), Ratna (Tillotama Shome) navigates Mumbai through constant spatial negotiation. Her employer Ashwin experiences the city as opportunity, while she experiences it as constraint. Her mobility remains structured by class and gender hierarchies. The urban space reflects power rather than neutrality.
This structural precarity appears again in All We Imagine as Light (2024). Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), Malayali nurses working in a municipal hospital, inhabit hostels, buses and clinical interiors marked by impermanence. The hostel offers shelter without belonging. Anu’s relationship must remain hidden. Prabha’s estranged marriage reflects migration’s emotional cost. Mumbai accommodates their labour while withholding stability.
A Machine of Intimacy and Distance
Long projected as the city of love, Mumbai often produces intimacy alongside distance. In The Lunchbox, Ila and Saajan’s relationship emerges through infrastructural error. The dabbawala system, designed for efficiency, inadvertently produces emotional connection. Their intimacy survives within absence. In Sir, Ratna and Ashwin share physical proximity but remain separated by structural hierarchy. Emotional closeness emerges through acts of care that exceed contractual obligation. Their relationship exists within a city that enables proximity while prohibiting recognition. In All We Imagine as Light, loneliness emerges as a structural condition of migrant life. Anu and her boyfriend search for spaces that allow privacy, often finding none. Public spaces become substitutes for private dignity. The city permits presence but rarely intimacy.
Wake Up Sid presents intimacy as inseparable from self-formation. Sid and Aisha’s relationship develops alongside their evolving independence. Emotional stability becomes possible only after economic and personal stability emerge. OK Kanmani (2015) locates intimacy within rental agreements and transit systems. Aadi (Dulquer Salmaan) and Tara’s (Nithya Menen) live-in relationship becomes possible because the city does not demand permanence. Their anonymity sustains their autonomy. Similarly, Love Per Square Foot (2018) portrays romance within the housing crisis. Sanjay Chaturvedi (Vicky Kaushal) and Karina D’Souza (Angira Dhar) enter a marriage of convenience to access property ownership. Housing becomes the condition through which intimacy acquires legitimacy.
Perhaps Mumbai’s most unsettling cinematic role lies in its indifference to individual mortality. Death integrates seamlessly into its rhythm. Hospitals, crematoriums and bureaucratic procedures operate with mechanical continuity. Despite its failures, Mumbai continues to function as a myth. Young people continue to arrive seeking creative futures. Cinema sustains this belief while acknowledging its fragility. This persistence distinguishes Mumbai from other cities whose cinematic identities remain tied to governance or technology. Mumbai remains tied to imagination.
The romantic Marine Drive continues to circulate on screen while daily life unfolds through infrastructural fatigue and emotional depletion. At the same time, cinema has grown increasingly attentive to the instability between these registers. It observes how the lived city and the imagined city fail to align and how individuals must negotiate both simultaneously. Mumbai emerges here as archive, performance, gendered terrain and myth, revealing how the city operates as both lived reality and imagined promise.
The question is no longer whether Mumbai functions as a character. It is whether this character retains any investment in those who continue to seek themselves within it. Yet, filmmakers continue to return to Mumbai. The city remains unfinished. Its contradictions remain unresolved. Its emotional and material instability continues to produce stories that demand articulation. Cinema returns not because Mumbai provides answers, but because it continues to generate questions
