‘Bullets over Bombay’ review: A game changer in Bollywood

How Satya heralded a new era in the Mumbai gangster cinema genre

When Satya was released in 1998, it stunned audiences with a never before seen portrayal of the life of a Mumbai gangster. It became a crucial milestone heralding a new era of Mumbai gangster cinema.

Two decades after Satya’s release, Uday Bhatia, a film critic and journalist, has written Bullets over Bombay examining the making of the film, its place in Hindi cinema history and its remarkable influence on the filmmaking culture in Bollywood.

Multiple views

Bhatia approaches the book from multiple viewpoints: First, as a journalist by interviewing the cast and crew to piece together the story of the making of the film; and then deftly wears the scholarly critic’s hat to analyse the film in the context of Hindi cinema helping us draw a line from Kismet (1943) to Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) and offers his compelling theories on Satya’s influence on the gangster genre and city cinema; and lastly, he foregrounds his subjective self from time to time to crystallise the viewer’s experience of Satya and the writer’s experience of making this book. The result is an engaging narrative packed with many layers of invaluable information.

Bhatia’s conversations with the film crew reveal what he aptly calls a “charged and chaotic unit” with varying accounts harking back to a lesser organised but dynamic time in Bollywood. The many artistic accidents which led this motley crew of upstarts helmed by Ram Gopal Varma to create memorable sequences make for great trivia. The influence of real life gangster killings (Gulshan Kumar, Maya Dolas) on some scenes and the insights of people with mafia connections informing the research tempt us to read the film as a visual record of the bloody times. 

“Satya is what you get when you boil Mumbai down: a combustible mixture of loud, fast, emotive, enterprising and desperate,” writes Bhatia evocatively in the chapter ‘Bombay on Film’ in which he traces the depiction of Mumbai on screen throughout the history of Hindi cinema. The result is an exciting ride through 1950s Bombay in early Navketan films, through the middle class city of the 1970s cinema, the authentic but decaying city in the 1980s parallel cinema, culminating in the grimy and realistic underbelly as portrayed in the likes of Salaam Bombay and Satya.

Bhatia’s study of the Hindi gangster film analyses the characterisation of the urban criminal from the early portrayal as a pickpocket to the transformation to a camp, a psychopath and a suave businessman, and puts forward his theory of how Satya alters this by humanising the gangster. In doing this, he reminds us of significant moments from several iconic Hindi crime cinema of yore and also few from forgotten but important milestones such as Hathyar (1989), Angaar (1992) and Gardish (1993). Bhatia also draws many unlikely connections such as that between the Govinda Aala Re song sequence in Bluff Master (1963) to the killing of Bhau scene in Satya, and the wild eyes of Dilip Dhawan in Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai (1980) to that of Bheeku Mhatre in Satya.

The chapters on the city and the gangster genre are invaluable additions to scholarship on Indian cinema as, in addition to primary research, Bhatia also builds on works of scholars such as Ranjani Mazumdar, Lalitha Gopalan, M.K. Raghavendra etc. Densely packed in just 240 pages, Bhatia’s prose is precise and free-flowing but can be challenging at times as the writer switches from an interesting trivia to serious genre analysis to Hollywood reference — all in the space of a paragraph. 

Bullets over Bombay; Uday Bhatia, HarperCollins, ₹399. 

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based independent writer, researcher and filmmaker.