In the recommendations to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry for revamping norms for film certification, the committee under Chairman Shyam Benegal has proposed a sub-category for certification called A+C (Adult with Caution). This categorisation, we assume, would work for films with themes that our emerging ‘State-mandated’ morality cannot easily handle. A+C implies, correctly, that all Indians are not equal; that some need handholding, while others need to be entirely kept away from the corrupting influences of liberalism. This mirrors the ‘Parental Guidance Required’ version of cinema that cannot be processed by underdeveloped minds, but subverts it at the same time, because it is precisely such cinema that ‘ sanskari ’ parents would not wish to touch with a barge-pole.
Benegal, while speaking to TheIndian Express , even suggested, “An A+C movie can be shown in red-light districts or other non-residential areas.” Was this was a throwaway remark, or are there far-reaching consequences embedded in this advice? Did the eminent film-maker envisage the creation of the ‘Smokers’ Corner’ version of cinema screens at a sufficiently safe distance from the grand-washed, where these upholders of the country’s morality reside?
To create such theatres, pockets of the city would have to develop an ecosystem where such public dissemination could be tolerated. This brings out several interesting possibilities. Could this be a way of rejuvenating our ‘inner-city’ areas and places of urban blight, bogged down by decades of neglect and semi-official ostracism?
Consider this: Grant Road, Kamathipura and Falkland Road, other than being the nudge-nudge wink-wink areas of every growing Mumbaikar’s imagination were also, at one time, roads that housed a line of single-screen cinema houses. What a way to revive them, then, by making them bespoke picture palaces that only the most open-minded in the city would want to visit. Imagine the buzz around these dense inner-city neighbourhoods, to which the city beyond would clamour to see films like Udta Punjab , unexpurgated. Or indeed, the best of avant-garde or indie cinema: Hindi, regional, international. No need to worry about hard-core pornography being shown on the large screen. That age has passed. Everybody has a smartphone.
Imagine now, the streets outside these cinema houses, filled with the best minds of the city, openly discussing and critiquing cinema and the arts, and of course, the political miasma that allowed spaces like this to happen. Conceive of the surroundings, changing with this newfound customer base: decrepit Iranis upgrading to new-age Theobromas; pocket art galleries emerging (one of which displays Mary Ellen Mark’s proscribed photos of life in Falkland Road) for those turned away by ‘House full’ boards; a paradise for Ola and Uber riders; a street-life vibrant, even in the dead reaches of a Mumbai night. We need more Kala Ghodas, and Falkland Road is as good a place as any to transform into Mumbai’s next art district.
Art, in any case, for the current dispensation is, more or less, ‘Adult with Caution’.
It is a prospect far better than the currently inevitable: that sex-workers be shunted out and the merchants of redevelopment move in with bulldozers to create tabula rasa for vegetarian, gated communities. The messiness of the city we grew up in and love would be sustained and enriched by the gestation of these new zones of free-thinking patrons, happy to be there, to put money where their mouth is.
The infusion of liberal culture into an urban context has been known to pick up a failing city. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, revived a post-industrial city in decline, making it one of Europe’s most visited places. Even Shyam Benegal, in his 1983 film Mandi alluded to this, showing how the relocation of a community of sex-workers transforms a dormant peri-urban locality. This is the kind of radical urbanism Mumbai needs.
Think about it. In future, sociologists would write dissertations on how one man, Pahlaj Nihalani, was the engine for urban revival. We would remember him with awe, like a latter day Hausmann or Robert Moses.
Mustansir Dalvi is an architect and an academic, teaching in Mumbai. He keeps one eye critically cast on Mumbai in its current post-planning avatar and another on its rapidly transforming urban culture
