Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in our theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here.
By Shruti Hussain
We lock eyes with a stream of children, of women and men, peering straight at the camera standing in various urban Indian settings; in a square of the planned city of Chandigarh, against hutments that foreground skyscrapers, in informal settlements with limited amenities. Their gazes are quizzical; sometimes smiling as if questioning, “why is the camera here, what does it want to know?” At times one feels compelled to return the bemusement, at other times one feels stared down. The project of modernity championed by the postcolonial Indian state floundered way before reaching the finish line. Those eyes seem shortchanged by ideas of modern citizenry that never materialized the way in which they were intended.
These images are from Nostalgia for the Future (2016), a film that reminisces and unravels notions of modernity that were a projected as a desirable utopia by the state in the post-independence to pre-liberalism (1947 to late 1980s) period of India’s history. The filmmakers, Architect and Educator Rohan Shivkumar and Cinematographer Avijit Mukul Kishore, have portrayed a nuanced understanding of the story of Indian modernism. The national project, once the country gained independence from British rule in 1947, was to face the sun of modernism in every walk of life. State sponsored films under the Films Division of India (FD), established in 1948, focused on emancipatory themes with an intention to transform the subaltern, unruly populace into an orderly public. The city was the epitome of a desirable modernity in post-independent times. This is evident in the themes that the FD films dished out and these short films were duly played in cinema halls before the commercial film took over the senses of the ardent filmgoers. FD films were later broadcast over state television, and their collective memory has existed alongside the films of Bollywood. Where Nostalgia for the Future stops at home as a machine and tool to build the nation, another FD film, City on the Water (1975), takes the story forward, showing how this machine was spluttering. The city on the water is Bombay (now renamed Mumbai), the home of Bollywood, but also home to the homeless and India’s financial capital. Here, just 30 years after independence, the images of modernity of the FD and Bollywood were fading. How film captures the putting together and coming apart of the idea of modernity is explored here.
Search for Shelter, A Home, Low Cost Houses, Better Homes, Housing for the People–these were the titles of the FD films made in the early post-independence era. A heavy leaning on socialism, controlled development, and the state as a benefactor were the markers of this era, in all aspects of citizens’ lives. Emphasis on science and technology was seen as the means to tie together a fractured nation replete with an array of religions, castes, and classes. The country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru looked at cities to be its engines of growth. He saw architecture and cinema as subsets of science and technology that could drive the country ahead. Nostalgia for the Future was produced by FD, and at the same time it also questioned the state’s projections of an ideal home that would house the body of the ideal citizen, in turn creating an ideal society ensconced within the perfect city. “It’s interesting to think about the state as an important kind of body that commissioned cinema or film and hence they did not have to cater to the whims of the market. Since we were really interested in the way that the state itself imagined modernity, having Films Division in the project was absolutely apt. It is an interesting organization because it has had a history of not just straightforward propaganda films but also of fairly radical experimental work that happened in the late 60s and early 70s,” explains Shivkumar.[1]
It’s the house, a seemingly innocuous space, and its many manifestations that we see in the film, that raises a quiet storm in the minds of the viewer in Nostalgia for the Future. The architecture of the house shapes the citizen who inhabits it, and different forms of the house express identities that alter with time and with the beliefs of the socialist elite. Out of the five houses and corresponding bodies seen in the film the Luxshmi Vilas is the first. It’s a palace of the Indian prince Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III built prior to Independence. Here, with the fusion of European elements in an Indian setting, the house is a prosthetic, a costume of modernity that one puts on to become something else. The film then shows the house of B R Ambedkar, a political leader who rose from lowest caste of Dalits to become the first Law minister of the country. Ambedkar, clothes himself in western attire, denying an affiliation with the caste he was born into. His clothing and his house in an upper-class Hindu neighborhood in Bombay speaks of a costume that transcends rudimentary beliefs to achieve the modern dream of an egalitarian nation.
The film then moves to the city of Chandigarh, designed by Swiss-French Master Architect and Planner Le Corbusier at the invitation of the Indian state under the stewardship of Nehru. Here the citizen becomes naked, as if stripped of the prejudices of the past, as Chandigarh was independent India’s utopian experiment in brutalism and exposed concrete. Here in the city that was designed on open lands with no precursor, the imagination of the new Indian citizen came to the fore, encouraged to imagine that such a city was for the truly emancipated body of the future. The idea of a body shorn of all societal markers is explicit in Corbusier’s Shodhan Villa, a house for the elite Shodhan family in Ahmedabad, a prosperous city which had been a cradle for Indian modern architecture.
The narrative shifts to M K Gandhi’s ideas of ascetic living where the body is imagined by the leader of the Indian non-violence, civil disobedience, and Independence movement as sinful and thus not to be trusted. The camera pans over the plan of Gandhi’s house called the Sabarmati Ashram, which is just a verandah with rooms beyond, and minimal furnishing. The spirit transcends the body to attain some kind of higher goal, while the body of the modern citizen is discarded. This segment of the film deftly juxtaposes the rural-centric approach of Gandhi towards development as he believed India lived in her villages, with Nehru’s focus on infrastructure that he saw as temples of modern Indian and cities to be its engines of growth.
Towards the end of the film, the Gandhian spirit evaporates to leave behind a residue of the machinic body that inhabits the molds of the houses being created by the Delhi Development Authority to accommodate refugees after the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. With images of the early housing projects designed according to the proverbial ‘types,’ we see the citizen as machine to propel the nation building project. Nation building and its tools were propelled by the elite, who made the subaltern a project but maintained the distance.
Exploring the intricacies of this issue, the film has intelligently woven Bollywood cinema clips into the images shot by the filmmakers. Films that depicted the protagonist as an industrious hero who upholds moral values, appears progressive in western attire and in general is an asset to society started being made in the 1950s and 1960s. Clips from three films featuring three of the popular actors of the black and white film era appear in the film, playing the following urban characters: lawyer deputized on a project in the rural hinterlands, a village bumpkin grappling with the big city life, and a foreign-educated bourgeoisie architect trying to win a girl’s heart. The hugely popular Hindi film industry also pushed forward the narrative of a desired modernism in the stories and the manner in which they were projected. The acts of building a better nation embedded in such mainstream films have been intertwined in Nostalgia for the Future. Here architecture and cinema overlap to present the imagined future for India.
However, as the film draws to a close, the stares of the people into the camera intensify. The question looms– if this was the imagined future, why are we not living it now? Where did the ideals falter? This is the nostalgia for the future that never happened, hence the paradoxical title. The film mulls over the current concerns of crumbling, overburdened cities, migration, housing, jobs; all the issues associated with the problems of urbanism. There are no answers, just raised questions on whether modernism completely eluded us or if we are somewhere in its vicinity.
Nostalgia for the Future is shot on 16mm film that lends it a certain grainy texture and color, making contemporary day images appear nostalgic, as if they were dated home videos from the 1990s. A deliberate artistic ploy by the makers, the texture and color treatment of the various clips help to collage these ideas of time across the film. Even the narration deliberately mimics the patronizing, all-knowing, advising “voice of god,” a regular feature of the early FD documentaries. In the film, this voice speaks in Hindi, starting on a firm oratory note and eventually faltering and questioning the processes of modernity and the citizen’s place in the narrative.
While we move from the body to the house and nation building ideals, showing houses built before the 1970s, the other FD produced film in consideration, City on the Water, written and directed by India’s eminent MIT-educated architect Charles Correa, tells the story of Bombay. It follows the problem-and-solution approach, telling us in a straightforward commentary how the city is overburdened with people traveling to the business district every day, exacerbated by the housing crisis. Made in 1975, we are presented with images of railway stations, roads, and pavements teeming with mostly male office goers. Bombay is for the rich, the film says, using the cinematic device of focusing on a subject and then zooming out to offer the context of a cricket pitch in a tony part of Bombay or a vagabond sprawled in the middle of a traffic island with cars whirring around him.
The film builds up the need for an alternate city of New Bombay, a sponge that would absorb the excessive commerce, industry and thus the people and their homes from the old Bombay. It does so by taking the viewer into the decrepit slums, into the single rooms where entire families live, their common toilets, struggles for collecting water, bedding on the pavement. “Do we really have to treat people this way?” the female narrator asks as we see women cooking on wood fires in unsanitary conditions, people setting up homes in abandoned concrete pipes sections and railway platforms. The female narrator is projected as the worried citizen, troubled by the squalor and the urban blight of slums. She is perturbed by the streams of faceless humanity that pour into the business district of South Bombay. She could as well be the elite, who wish for sparkling cities without the grime of the poor and the unsightly issues of housing, transport, and livelihood. The male narrator here is the “voice of god” that speaks in an affirmative tone and offers confident answers to the problems of modernity that have not yet been resolved.
In one scene, we see the camera hover over a shantytown of worker huts at a construction site and then pan up to reveal the new high-rises that the workers have been building to house a new middle class of Mumbai. The sound in the background is of a plane taking off–only the well-heeled can afford homes in the city. All around, the city is breaking down due to the sheer weight of numbers. Numbers of the relentless humanity pouring into the city and the numbers of hopes they bring.
Animation is used to illustrate the problems of the North to South movement of people, increasing land prices, and how New Bombay will offer a buffer by absorbing jobs and the extent of the land acquired by the government. This would be the largest planned city anywhere in the world. We see pristine hills and coastal lands, mangroves, and creeks. “This will be the home of two million people, where even the poorest of the poor must have a space and place to live,” the male voiceover tells the viewer.
The rest of the film goes on to document the new developments in the new city–suburban housing being constructed, government offices, industrial belts, and road networks. A telling image is neatly terraced homes that are close to a transport hub and places of work, in sharp contrast to an earlier image of dilapidated housing near the cotton mills in the heart of Bombay. The people were urged to believe in the new dream of this satellite city, believe in a utopia of uncontested land and resources, idyllic and satisfied living, a Bombay of promenades and gentle sea breeze.
“I often think of what the city was and what it could become, the finest of things,” prompting the viewer to accept the idea of New Bombay with tenderness and nostalgia for the Bombay of the past. City on the Water’s director, Charles Correa, was a constituent of the elite who were building the nation in the post colonial years. Correa was highly regarded for his sensitive designs that placed the structure not just on the site but within the larger context of the city. He was on the team of designers and planners that put forth the idea of New Bombay and subsequently worked on the city’s planning. It is noteworthy that an architect would use state-sponsored media in the form of a documentary film to propagate the idea of a new city. This is a remarkable instance of the active participation of architects in the nation building project and thinking of architecture as a discourse-making instrument.
Housing the masses has remained a formidable challenge for the state. In the films discussed here, the body of the citizens is ultimately consumed by the project of nation building and modernity. From 1947 to 1975, nation building ideals exist only for the educated elite, whereas the burgeoning subaltern battle for homes. While the state had its heart and intentions in the right place, the execution and perhaps the citizen as an embodiment of the ideal, modern nation could not align completely with those ideals. The state as a socialist caretaker of the people and their needs in the years post-independence receded as neoliberalism caught up with India. Capital and commerce began to hold sway and land became a commodity. State efforts to create affordable housing in cities dried up, with the private sector took up the task of building, admittedly for those who could afford to pay.
Lastly, what we might have left now in the city of the Global South could be called a Pirate Modernity, the title and subject of media scholar Ravi Sundaram’s book published in 2010. With postcolonial models of the city in disarray in the global South, resulting in an urban crisis, Sundaram says that the poorer urban populations have took to practicing a pirated form of modernity, an illicit form of urban globalization when they could not afford legitimate modernity of nation building.
Shivkumar offers a plausible point in the discussion of modernity. He says, “There is this confusion of modernity with progress and development. These three terms are actually very different terms. And oftentimes, what happens is that we conflate all of them together into one. If you’re talking about to be modern, we really are looking at making a world where everyone is free, equal, and there’s justice for all, right? That’s what a modern Indian, what a modern state is meant to be. Progress is us moving towards that space, right? And development is seen as the instrument through which we get there.”[2]
The two films, Nostalgia for the Future and City on the Water, through their varied narratives and styles, start a story of the citizen-home-city-nation progression against the backdrop of a desired modern and continue it, but there is no end, no definitive answer, when seen from our standpoint of the present. Modernity would come to mean living in the city but somehow with the same prejudices of the past. The country started with a certain set of urban issues that kept accelerating and modernity bloomed only in certain pockets of the postcolonial city of the Global South, leaving the rest to gaze at modernity from a distance or find makeshift versions of it.
The perplexed female voice sums up the apprehensions of the elite and the middle classes when she asks towards the end in City on the Water–“Do you think we’ll make it? Do you think we’ll be able to turn Bombay again into a place we can live in and work in and enjoy being in?”
We are still finding an answer to that question.
Shruti Hussain is an Architect, Journalist and Researcher based in India. She has a penchant for historical narratives that shape modern politics and geographies and resulting cultures of built spaces, media and heritage. She has explored her interests by doing Fellowships – Nieuwe Instituut- Rotterdam, Wikipedia Open Knowledge, Canadian Centre for Architecture; Research Projects – Archiving and Digitization of Materiality of Indian Cinema & EU funded CHIEF Project; Journalism – Failed Architecture, BBC South Asia, Sakal Times and Editorship – CQRA Podcasts and Blogs & Quality Edge magazine. She relishes listening to people from various walks of life, world cinema and reading nonfiction and travel.
Featured image (at top): Still from Nostalgia for the Future – Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Courtesy of the NFDC.
[1] As told by Architect and Educator Rohan Shivkumar who is one of the filmmakers of ‘Nostalgia for the Future’ in an interview with the Author.
[2] As told by Architect and Educator Rohan Shivkumar who is one of the filmmakers of ‘Nostalgia for the Future’ in an interview with the Author.
