On Manjeet Singh’s Mumbai Cha Raja (aka Mumbai’s King)
by Soham Gadre
A lot has changed over the past decade for me, from age 19 to 29, and I can easily say it has been the most eventful ten years of my life thus far, for better and for worse. Cinema always falls into the former category. Regardless of the onslaught of industry monopolization and sidelining of independent films towards streaming services, where nothing is permanent and everything is fleeting, I have discovered more great films than ever before. Asian cinema has become a particular revelation for me during this decade, as I saw my first Korean film (Oldboy, Park Chan-wook, 2003), my first Filipino film (Norte, The End of History, Lav Diaz, 2013), my first Thai film (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010), my first Kazakh film (Revenge/Mest, Yermek Shinarbayev, 1989), and many more from each country thereafter. I discovered the writings of many film critics, chiefly those of Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has had the biggest influence on the way I now view the culture and industry of cinema, with his revealing of vehement biases of the American film distribution system against independent and foreign voices of cinema, an unrelenting theme in his work.
Through these pieces of education, I considered it more of an obligation than ever to seek out the unheard, unheralded, and overall ignored films of the world. I only began being published and paid for pieces in the fall of last year and thus far most of my pieces have been geared toward the cinema of my country of birth, India. I have felt obligated to write about Indian cinema whenever given the opportunity, especially, and I stress this, the cinema outside of Bollywood, because of the lack of discussion surrounding it, even among the most ardently knowledgeable and well-versed critics, academics, and filmmakers.
This brings me to the single best Indian film I’ve seen this last decade, a movie I have grown to love more and more every day since watching it and a movie that has not only been overlooked by Western cinephiles but also most Indian ones. The reason is that Manjeet Singh’s phenomenal Mumbai Cha Raja (aka Mumbai’s King) never received theatrical distribution in India. Made in 2012 on a shoestring budget and featuring non-actors, it wasn’t until Netflix picked it up that it was even available to a wider audience outside the lesser-known film festival circuit. The irony here is that the film ended up on the largest and most-subscribed, readily available streaming channel on Earth and it still has barely gotten a sentence of discourse in my current residence of America, or my home country of India. I guess this essay then, is my attempt to change that.
The central character in the film, Rahul, is a disaffected teenager in a slum neighborhood of the city. He has an abusive alcoholic father and an aloof and depressed mother, and his only source of joy is the little space he has in which to yell, jump, and play—in the hazy streets of the only city he knows. Siddharth Kay’s cinematography depicts a crowded, cramped metropolis of more than 12 million people (four million more than New York City, in half the area). The film’s set-up may seem a cliché but, like all talented filmmakers, Manjeet Singh brings forth new ideas from worn-out tropes. The opening shot of Rahul walking on a shanty roof to his favorite hideout may at first elicit a superficial connection to the running sequence in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), but it has more in common metaphorically and thematically with the roof-jumping in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) or the children throwing various objects off of the roof at the end of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933) because, like those kids, Rahul is acting in a mode of playful defiance, of rising above the surroundings he was born into and into a free state.
Many Indian films in the past decade have become more aware of and perceptive to the detailed inner workings of communities, both rural and urban. What sets Mumbai Cha Raja apart from the others, however, is Singh’s understanding of both the physical and social limitations of Mumbai. It is a diverse city, with improving infrastructure, but it is one that is still segregated by class and religion. Rahul is a Hindu and his best friend Salman is a Muslim, and the two of them must navigate their religious differences and the social pressures inherent in them that permeate the city. A poignant scene following an aarti (prayer ritual) at a Hindu temple during Ganesh Chaturti, a significant Hindu religious holiday celebrating Lord Ganesha, shows Rahul going to Salman’s home to eat mutton, which is forbidden on said holiday. Yet later that night, he leaves Salman’s home to go pray to a statue of Ganesha on his own, perhaps from a sense of guilt.
Like Spike Lee’s Bronx, Djibril Diop Mambety’s Dakar, and Johnnie To’s Hong Kong, Mumbai is depicted as a complex and intricate character in and of itself. Unlike more mainstream films, which are concerned with telling a story and thus could be located anywhere, leaving the living, breathing life of Mumbai relegated to unimaginative B-roll footage of street vendors making food or rickshaw drivers yelling at each other, Singh takes you down the alleys, into the homes, and into the minds of the city’s generational residents. He finds his inspiration from some of the great Mumbai films of the past like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988) and Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi (1992). He makes it clear that the city’s character comes from the people directly and their surroundings indirectly. While Singh is focused on the structure and plotting of the city, the camerawork by Siddharth Kay, done with great elan, is constantly attuned to how Rahul reacts to these surroundings. This reaction is what defines life in Mumbai, and makes the film more humanistic and empathetic to its subjects, signifying the difference between how Indian filmmakers depict the poverty of their nation and the patronizing tone of that of most Western filmmakers (which is rooted in the idea that the humans are secondary to the squalor).
The authenticity of an Indian filmmaker, a Mumbai filmmaker, like Manjeet Singh, telling a story of his country and his city, is invaluable in a landscape of Hollywood movies like Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Hotel Mumbai, and others crowding the conversation in the West and acting as the spokespeople of what India is and who its people are. Mumbai Cha Raja is streaming on Netflix. It’s readily available for millions of human beings with an account, and it should serve as an example of the masterpieces of cinema we choose to ignore even when they, by sheer luck, manage to overcome the biases of distribution because it’s not easy for us to recognize our own.
Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is an Indian-American writer based in Washington D.C. who also works in the environmental non-profit sector. He has had various musings on film published in Film Inquiry, Hyperallergic, Popula, Vague Visages, Bustle, and others. All of his writing and filmmaking work can be found at his website www.extrasensoryfilm.com