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Assembling Cinematic Bombay
Minimalist Mappings
Speaker
A city is known by the tales of its inhabitants. And few cities have been captured on screen with as much intimacy and complexity as Bombay.
In this evocative lecture, film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar explores the layered portrait of the city as seen in films like Ritesh Batra’s Lunch Box (2013) and Photograph (2019), Milind Dhaimade’s Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016), Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat (2010), and Rohena Gera’s Sir (2018).
Through quiet details, fading memories, and the rhythm of everyday life, these films map a metropolis that is both deeply personal and constantly changing. With her deep insight into cinema, technology, and urban life, Mazumdar traces how filmmakers evoke the city’s past and present while imagining its future.
The event concludes with a Q&A, offering space for reflection and conversation.
This lecture is a part of Azim Premji University’s Public Lecture Series.
Presented by:
Speaker
Ranjani Mazumdar
Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Arts and Aesthetics. Her publications focus on popular cinema, techno-urbanism, and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007), co-editor of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema (2022), and guest editor of two special issues of Bioscope on cinema and techno-materiality (2013) and a dossier on Pathaan (2023). Her current research interests include intermedial encounters, contemporary nonfiction media aesthetics, globalization and film culture, and the intersection of technology, travel, design, and colour in 1960s Bombay cinema.
