Out of all the South Asian cities, none capture the imagination quite like Mumbai does. From the waters of Juhu Beach to the architecture of Andheri, the Bombay skyline overlooks Indian cinema with an unrivaled gaze. In this sea of Bombay-based media, Payal Kapadia’s bittersweet tale of three migrant women and their lives in the city could have been lost as just another “Mumbai film.” However, “All We Imagine As Light” takes a revolutionary perspective on the city of dreams, transforming Bombay’s high grandeur into a location for the struggling everyman — or, in Kapadia’s case, the struggling everywoman.
Bombay has long held the status of “great equalizer” — a city where caste, gender and class disappear. “All We Imagine As Light” breaks this narrative down, only to reinvent Bombay’s dream-like splendor through the eyes of mundanity. This new narrative emerges thanks to Kapadia’s focus on the forgotten lower-class migrant workers from Tier 2 and Tier 3 villages, underserved communities in India, who have built the city. Specifically, Kapadia highlights the overlooked labor of Indian women who toil in both the workplace and the home while the patriarchy constrains their autonomy. There is nothing unique, groundbreaking or romantic about their stories, but Kapadia showcases their extraordinary resilience, determination and sisterhood in the face of constant struggle.
The movie’s multidimensional characters and the stunning exposition of their stories epitomize this thesis. The film’s restrained cinematography and absence of a soundscape allow Kapadia to hone in on the lives of the three primary characters: Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a jaded nurse whose husband abandoned her for Germany soon after arranged marriage; Anu (Divya Prabha), Prabha’s bold and fiery roommate in the throes of a love affair with a Muslim man; and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam), an old widow being threatened with eviction from her childhood home. Each is at a crossroads many Indian women reckon with: to conform with or to rebel against society’s expectations.
In a country dictated by arranged marriage and delineated by caste, religion, race and gender, love is a rarity and a rebellion. By highlighting the raw and painful need for companionship and refusing to shy away from the anti-pastoral, the film delivers an introspection on what it means to be human. Love is not the only dissent the characters embody; “All We Imagine As Light” deconstructs Bombay as the city of class-caste mobility. Parvathy commiserates her plight, stating: “They think building their towers taller and taller means they can replace God.” In this case, “they” are the upper-class Bombay elites, the success stories the media loves to tout. Our characters, on the other hand, are the “other.” The film is rife with these depictions of worker protest in Parvathy’s story, cutting a figure of unmitigated empowerment even if she does end up leaving for her village.
The “outsider” and themes of belonging and identity are the focal points of the movie as Kapadia uses dialogue to show that language and ethnicity become demarcations of who ‘belongs’ within the society. Amid the linear storytelling, the film has long melancholic exposures of Bombay, overlaid with documentary-style voiceovers of Bombay’s immigrants. Featuring a variety of languages, from Tamil to Bhojpuri, the voices detail their lives with unflinching vulnerability, including reasons as to why they left their homes to their experience working in Mumbai.
This is a familiar story for many Indians; someone states, “everyone in the village has at least one person in Mumbai.” All of them are haunted by a feeling that they will be forced to leave. This impermanence and imposter syndrome common to immigrants carries into every storyline in the film: from Dr. Manoj, an immigrant doctor who leaves Bombay because he never learned how to “speak its language” (referring to both Hindi and the intangible feeling of making a place home), to Parvathy who “does not exist without papers” because migrant life in Bombay is precarious to Prabha and Anu who eventually leave the city with Parvathy.
The voices also create the new tapestry of Bombay that makes the film remarkable and singular among its kind, revealing an unspoken code of the city: Even if you live in gutters, you’re allowed to feel no anger. Mumbai becomes a breathing creature, and Kapadia’s film is both its love letter and indictment — at points, the city is said to not even be real, as it serves more as an allegory or character in and of itself.
The lighting design also helps to represent the migrants’ isolation and the reality of living in abject poverty amongst high-rises. Light is a symbol of power in the film, as Parvathy’s lights are turned off by her building’s owners. It is a sparsity, as most of the cinematography is dim, gritty and dirty yet blanketed by a hazy, dream-like quality. The migrants are figuratively and literally always hidden. When they are illuminated, the lighting is harsh and unforgiving, exposing their faults. The darkness becomes their language, a living entity in the same way Bombay is. It allows both the characters and the viewer to dream, to believe in the illusion of the city. When we do wake up, Kapadia is there to remind us that the unseen and the ordinary are beautiful because they are all we imagine as light.
