THIS article is not about the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in Delhi. It uses the games as an entry point to interrogate the deep concern of politicians and bureaucrats with urban surfaces – a concern equally echoed in the middle class belief that the games would finally elevate Delhi to the same infrastructural and aesthetic level of other ‘world-class’ cities. Streets were cleaned up and repaired; construction work of all sorts promised a new city with an efficient public transport and sport facilities; the prospect of a huge number of foreigners attending the Games boosted the energy of the tourism and hospitality industry. The monuments of Delhi – the kind of urban surfaces this article focuses on – were presented as the symbols of a city full of history and socio-religious diversity in huge advertisement hoardings at bus stops and other locations.

Yet the millions of rupees involved made many susceptible to and part of the corruption that the 2010 Commonwealth Games would be infamous for. Furthermore, lack of proper supervision resulted in unstable structures which claimed the lives of many construction workers. The Games displaced many people from their original neighbourhoods. Construction workers did not get paid by corrupt contractors. There was indeed a makeover happening in the city, but one in which the authorities tried to hide the poor from the view of the ‘imagined’ visitor to Delhi. One solution which generated a lot of debate was the installation of the huge advertisement hoardings announcing the event with images of the city’s emblematic monuments hiding the slums from view. The monuments too turned into aseptic surfaces which, in their celebratory sanitized mood, hid precisely what might have been, symbols of the complex cultural landscape of the city.

Regarding the perception authorities have about the possibilities of their own city, Bharati Chaturvedi writes: ‘What will foreigners think?’ ask horrified municipal officials repeatedly in closed door meetings, when referring to potholes, uneven signage and dirt. No one considers what the locals, whose city it is think of all this every day of their lives.’¹ The different articles that give shape to Chaturvedi’s book, Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity, emphasize the absence of the poor in the minds of the decision-makers. For instance, Somnath Batabyal writes that a ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ has substituted the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ as mainstream political discourse has made the middle class the emblematic citizen of a new, liberal India. Workers and rural villagers are no longer being thought of; they after all were the subjects the socialist ideologies of the past had in mind.

 

Amita Baviskar writes of how Delhi’s public infrastructure, including the Metro, has been built ‘on the backs of the poor’ and that citizenship is a right available only to those who have property. Baviskar connects bourgeois environmentalism with the upper class’ use of media and courts to achieve their desired city. Lalit Batra connects the demolition of slums to a discourse prevalent amongst officials and citizens – that the poor are ‘unscrupulous elements’ stealing resources from hapless ‘honest citizens’. In a different kind of intervention, Ravi Sundaram situates civic liberalism as a ‘strategy adopted by globalizing elites who want to ‘reclaim urban discourse from political representation.’² Sundaram argues that upper and middle class activists and journalists appeal for a more environment friendly space in which images of international cities defined as ‘world-class’ are regularly mobilized.

Looking at the way cinema articulates this problematic helps us to locate the specific dynamics dealing directly with questions of representation and marginalization. Cinema has invariably played a pivotal role in the creation of city images. It is difficult to think about New York, Los Angeles, Paris or Hong Kong without its cinematic doppelgangers. In South Asia, Mumbai is as much a city as it is a cinematic one. The recent interest of filmmakers in the city of Delhi is surely based on many grounds such as producers looking for new territories, filmmakers bringing out childhood and teenage memories.

But it is not a mere coincidence that films on Delhi have multiplied in the last years when the capital of emerging India is forcing itself to compete with other ‘international’ cities. Delhi’s quest for a metropolitan ethos, when the memories of the historical city have faded and the Nehruvian urbanity is already a matter of the past, is pointing towards a renewal which pays close attention to the discourses around the lure of global cities. In the cinematic creation of ‘globalized’ contemporary Delhi, the cinematic city, at times presented as the real city, has not yet found equilibrium between its past, its present and its projection towards the future.

 

In the process of balancing out economic, social and cultural forces of a very different nature and resolve the psychological conflicts of an heterogenic urban landscape – slums, illegal constructions, institutional buildings, improvised colonies, 5-star hotels, all standing next to each other – many of the Hindi cinema stories set in Delhi seek refuge in the new aseptic so-called globalized spaces – lavish restaurants, malls, programmed trips – through processes of sanitization/compartmentalization and under the scrutiny of an ever-growing touristic gaze on urban space.

This process is not specific only to the representation of Delhi in cinema but a quality of Bombay cinema in general. Yet, if we look at the monumental landscape of the city, we can see that there might be a relation between the contemporary exclusion of certain communities from the cinematic representation, especially the Muslim community and the poor of the city, and the way a sort of political and media civic liberalism attempts to make the city of Delhi an international reference. For this I will discuss the use of the Delhi monument landscape of the city in two contemporary Hindi films Love Aaj Kal (Imtiaz Ali, 2009) and Fanaa (Kunal Kohli, 2006).

 

Looking at the family films of the early years of liberalization, Ranjani Mazumdar notices how the characters retire to a designed interior with no trace of the street or the real city which looks uncontrollable and filthy to them. She calls this transformation of interior space ‘panoramic interior’.³ Here I would like to expand this idea to the realm of public and semi-public spaces, for the practice of aestheticization/sanitization of space that some post-liberalization Hindi films carry out does not stop in the interiors. It also makes use of the monumental history of the city, turning public spaces into a sort of private space, even, as it is the case of the Qutub Minar in Love Aaj Kal, when this improvised interior turns into an international site of consumerism and commodity celebration. In this process, the complex spatial dynamics of the city undergoes a representational reduction to the detriment of the representation of the surrounding areas and its cultural and social specificity. The new shiny surfaces rewrite the socio-cultural urban landscape creating a sort of exclusive interior and pushing into the background pre-globalization modus vivendi.

 

Love Aaj Kal deals with the relationship between two lovers, Jai (Saif Ali Khan) and Meera, who live in London. After a while they decide to break up since Jai has to go to San Francisco and Meera leaves for Delhi to work as a restoration artist of heritage sites. When Jai visits Delhi, Meera tells him of her plans to marry Vikram, her boss. Jai accepts this coolly. Immediately after the marriage, Meera feels that she has made a mistake. Jai finally gets his dream job in San Francisco but after his initial euphoria admits that he misses Meera. He returns to Delhi where he finds out that Meera has divorced Vikram. They eventually come back together.

Another love story runs parallel to Jai and Meera’s romance. Veer Singh (Rishi Kapoor), a middle-aged Sikh who has settled down in London, narrates his love story to Jai. The former talks about how he fell in love with Harleen Kaur while in Delhi, how he followed her to Calcutta, how she came back to Delhi to get engaged to another man and how Veer finally eloped with her. This story comes in the form of a flashback to the past.

The city of open spaces where residential and commercial areas were connected with the old monuments is relegated to the past, to Veer’s old love story, while the Delhi of the present is primarily one belonging to the upper-middle class. The film works through parallel tracks to show Jai either in London or in San Francisco involved in activities that look quite similar to those carried out by Meera and occupying spaces that look quite similar to those inhabited by Meera. Delhi in this narrative turns into a place of modern classrooms (the building of the Alliance Française) where art restoration workshops are being held. This is combined with images of stylish restaurants, exclusive discos and malls. Meera’s apartment is a designed interior. The entrance to the apartment looks almost like the porch of a hotel. The parties are lavish and global, with Latin-American beats and champagne. The lure of international tourism takes over the city.

 

The monuments of the city appear alive but decrepit in Veer’s story but disappear from the common man’s horizon in contemporary Delhi. The lavish party at the Qutub Minar and the final reunion of the lovers in the Purana Qila are two sequences that testify to this changed engagement with monuments. With the Qutub Minar in the background, Meera informs Jai that Vikram has proposed to her. The scene reminds us of hundreds of moments in Hindi cinema in which the lovers, with the green background of the monuments area, face a moment of deep crisis like that of Pinky (Neetu Singh) questioning her middle class life in Delhi and postponing her romance with Vicky (Rishi Kapoor) for the sake of her quest for her real mother in Kabhie Kabhie (Yash Chopra, 1976). But in the latter film, that space still contains the allusion to an unresolved past which needs, however, to be faced outside the city.

This is not the case in Love Aaj Kal where Meera’s profession in the field of art restoration does not point to a connection with the past. Veer’s story shows romantic scenes in old monuments as well. Yet, restoration here is not an exercise in reviving the past and exposing its problematic history. Rather, restoration points to a violent gesture of appropriation by the upper classes. This is a kind of civic liberalism – a situation where a particular class attempts to ‘save’ certain sites from the people by turning them into museums. Saving the monuments does not point in any case to saving the culture behind it.

The monument is many things here, an idyllic space of cinematic realization of romance, an excuse for the realization of the artistic drives of the youth, a set, a stage, a landscape with enough exotic appeal for the celebration of lavish parties, and an excuse to justify the intervention on the urban surface without resorting to the problematic slums and informal settlements. The monument is not a symbol of the historical and cultural complexity of the city and in no case, a real public space.

 

It is the language of sanitization in the shape of tourism that sets the story of Fanaa in motion. It does it with the awareness that terrorism produces the reverse of the tourist face of the city which tries to internationalize urban experiences. Dil Se (Mani Ratnam, 1998) is the most representative example of the interaction between images of the nation/city, monumental architecture and terrorism in the ’90s. But, although the film uses the monuments in the background as a means to foreground the absence of the ‘Islamicate’ in mainstream cinema and to denounce how ‘Islamicate’ space is either ‘in the underbelly of urban society’ like the labyrinthine Old Delhi or ‘relegated to the background of affluent urban life’ like the ruins, its scope remains national.⁴

One year later, Sarfarosh (John Matthew Matthan, 1999) linked different sites such as Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, Bombay, Chandrapur and Delhi following the route of the illegal arms trade from the Pakistan/Indian border to the Bombay underworld to a tribal leader near Chandrapur who massacres the civil occupants of a bus to assert his power in the region. The Assistant Commissioner of Police, Ajay Singh Rathod (Aamir Khan), takes charge of the investigation. His past in Delhi has two implications for the development of the story. On one side, his brother was murdered and father left almost paralyzed by some terrorists before he could testify against them in court. This episode, which places Delhi as the centre of legality, marks Ajay’s future as he decides to become a police officer. Besides, Delhi’s college life creates a background for the beginning of a rather insipid love story which will continue in Bombay.

 

In recent years Delhi has become part of a more complicated network in the films on terrorism. In Black Friday (Anurag Kashyap, 2004) or the most recent Kurban (Rensil D’Silva, 2009), Delhi is a point in a network of sites navigated by terrorists. In the former, Old Delhi becomes the provisional hideout of one of the perpetrators of the 1993 Bombay blasts. The fact that an envoy of the gangster, Tiger Memon, comes to his help shows the scale of Bombay’s organized crime and international terrorism in the capital city.

In Kurban, Delhi is just a place of transit for Avantika (Kareena Kapoor), an academician who has returned to Delhi from the USA after her father had a cardiac arrest and of course for Eshaan (Saif Ali Khan) pretending to be an open-minded expert on Islam who seduces Avantika. The couple gets married and migrates to America. Later, we get to know that Eshaan has used Avantika to get a visa for the States to join his terrorist cell whose background goes back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fanaa (Kunal Kohli, 2006) gives Delhi an important role in the plot and enters the city with a global component. The role of technology and international networks is emphasized.

 

What is interesting and unique in Fanaa is how the ‘safe’ spaces of tourism are made unstable by the figure of the terrorist. The film, though constrained by the conventions of genre – as a matter of fact, of many genres, romance, spy film, action film, and so on – shows a significant awareness of the convergence of the language of tourism and the construction of the official city image for consumption. The first part of the film follows a group of Kashmiri girls as they visit the monuments of Delhi. This enables the development of the romance between the tour guide, Rehan Khan (Aamir Khan) and Zooni Ali Beg (Kajol), a blind Kashmiri girl. As they visit Qutub Minar, Lodhi Garden or Humayun’s Tomb, Urdu culture is mobilized through poetry and songs to create the space for the love story. Rehan knows how to conjugate the verbs of Urdu poetry and knows that tourist sites are projected as sanitized spaces, safe areas of pure visual beauty. He is also familiar with the idioms of popular cinema through the lure of the same Urdu poetry.⁵

Khan uses both, those idioms and the safety of the tourist sites to hide his other self. When Zooni and the audience are finally seduced by Khan’s charm, his true identity as a terrorist is revealed. Tourism, romance and terrorism come together in Rehan’s character. ‘Women are like cities for me. I spend some time in them. I get to know it, get immersed in it and then move to another city,’ he says to Zooni. Rehan’s global mobility and sophistication connect with the idea of ‘new terrorism’.⁶ We see him in spaces of transit such as airports, invariably accompanied by music which reminds us of the classical James Bond score. In her speech, the government investigator defines terrorism as a global form which the film establishes through a focus on connection between terrorism and modern technology.

 

What is more revealing is that Delhi is now placed as a target of global terrorism: ‘In the last few years over 15,000 people have been killed in Mumbai, Oklahoma City, New York, Bali, Madrid and London. And losses have run into millions. But if they use this bomb, five million people can die. An entire city can be destroyed. The city can also be our capital, New Delhi. We must stop this bomb, whatever it takes.’

By making Aamir Khan’s character a global high-tech terrorist, the film loses touch with the ground, with local tragedies and realities. The city of Delhi is projected towards the global arena by an act of terrorism which is believed to have international appeal. The international appeal of tourist sites of the city is darkened by the same internationalization as terrorism enters the spaces of neo-liberal Delhi. What better way to establish Delhi as a global city than by making it a victim of the same destiny as its western counterparts? Delhi is not New York, as it appears the movie means to foreground, but it is closer to New York when it comes to international terrorism. Fanaa thrives on the idea that monuments are just a wrong sign to look for the dangers of contemporary urban life. Tragedies are, according to the film, of a global nature.

In his ‘The Right to the City’, David Harvey recalls the way Haussmann used the language of the law to remove slums in 19th century Paris. Harvey’s approach to the transformations taking place in various cities of the world can be deployed to understand contemporary events in Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai or New York where ‘the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever’.⁷ The analysis of certain films helps us to approach the complexity of this appropriation. It is here where not only the language of law but also the language of tourism is played out with exuberance to make the city a field of intervention of particular classes over the will and lack of resources of the less privileged.

It is not that all films using Delhi are so concerned with polishing the surface of the city, but that can be the content of a different article. Here one has attempted to reflect on some of the ways cinema discloses a desire for an aseptic urban space, as the city of Delhi, perhaps as a metaphor for the whole country, thrives for international recognition. It does so by stripping urban surfaces, historical monuments included, off their inherent complexity and unforeseen appeal and of the city’s many actors who do not belong to the ‘globalized’ middle and upper classes.

 

Footnotes:

1. Bharati Chaturvedi (ed.), Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity. Penguin/Viking, New Delhi, 2010.

2. Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. Routledge, London and New York, 2010.

3. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007.

4. Ananya Jaharana Kabir, ‘Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining: Minority Subjectivities in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se’, South Asian Popular Culture 1(2), 2003, pp. 141-159.

5. Mukul Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, in Zoya Hassan (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State. Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1994, pp. 244-257.

6. Anthony Giddens, Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2006.

7. David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review 53, September-October 2008.

 

References:

John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Sage, London, 1990.

Rana Dasgupta, Capital. Fourth Estate, New Delhi, 2014.

Ranjana Sengupta, Delhi Metropolitan: the Making of an Unlikely City. Penguin Books, Delhi, 2007.

Romi Khosla (ed.), The Idea of Delhi. Marg Publications on behalf of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, 2005.

Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage, London, 1992.