Mumbai has been both a language and a metaphor for a city that trumps the struggles of itinerant immigrants and dreary dreamers with the promise of a better life. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light neither romanticises the poetics of the city, nor the pathos of the proletariat. Instead, it upends the trope in an unhurried assurance. The cramped living, weary women, the choking proximity of people in Mumbai trains, the anarchy of the monsoons are all present. But they are like the optional footnotes in an afternoon novella – you can read them (or not) and move on.
What is striking about All We Imagine as Light is the luminous quality of kinship among the three women living in the margins of a city where it is easy to be invisible and annonymous. In fact, one of the characters laments the unreal reality of the city “[where] one can vanish into thin air.” The women are separated by age, language and circumstances.
Prabha (played brilliantly by Kani Kusruti) a senior nurse at a private hospital in Mumbai and shares both home and office with a younger, Anu (Divya Prabha). Then there is the hospital cook, Parvarty (Chhaya Kadam), a feisty middle-aged widow who refuses to bend backwards and respond to eviction threats of local goons and builders.
Kani Kusruti and Chhaya Kadam in a scene from All We Imagine As Light. Photo: Screen grab of video from Youtube/BFI
Kapadia deftly uses contrasts as a bulwark against the homogenisation of struggles in the city, where immigrant and commuter lives often appear indistinguishable. Prabha’s quiet brooding eyes longing for a connection with her estranged husband stands in sharp contrast to Anu’s restless quest for an intimate moment with her boyfriend.
There is something deeply poignant about Prabha’s quiet desperation as she wraps her arms around the electric rice cooker from her husband to Anu’s playfulness with the stethoscope as she runs it on artificial organs displayed at the hospital. Later, as the women travel to the coastal town of Parvarty, the constant clammour of the city melts into an uneasy lightness of the blue skies and the sea. The contradictions seem mundane and exceptional at once.
Also read: ‘All We Imagine As Light’ Is a Sentient Ode to – and a Lament for – the Spirit of Mumbai
In many ways, it is a rare Indian film that attends to female friendship where quotidian joys elude the consumerist pleasures that are often associated with celebration of same-sex friendships in Hindi cinema (think about The Crew or Veere Di Wedding). In Kapadia’s women, friendship serves as a moral, social and an instrumental resource. They are partners in modest forms of social resistance – Prabha accompanying Parvarty to meet a lawyer and a working class union meeting; or the diffident acknowledgement of the older women of Anu’s inter-religious romance and intimacy. They are partners in rest and leisure – a rarity in the lives of working class women.
In one scene, Parvarty walks into the ocean in a sari and squeals in joy as the waves crash against her. In another, they sit quietly and sip on their sodas at a seaside shack. And in yet another, they drink from a seemingly expired bottle of alcohol and break into an old Bollywood number. These moments of kinship offer a vehicle to express sociality beyond the individual.
A scene from the film ‘All We Imagine As Light’. Photo: Screen grab of video from Youtube/BFI
Unwittingly, this form of “social” friendship offers a feminist critique of private and individuated notions of companionship in late modernity. One of the most prominent commentators of the changing nature of personal relationships, sociologist Anthony Giddens (author of The Transformation of Intimacy, 1992) contends how detraditionalisation (the decline of the family) has ushered a process in which individuals reflexively craft “narratives of the self,” as social life becomes more uncertain and fragmented.
While this personalised form of friendship might hold normative purchase in the West, feminists and contemporary single-studies scholars have shown how lives are lived beyond the heteronormative coupledom; where durable, non-familial bonds are forged among (unpartnered) women thereby opening up an affirmative space for intimate disclosures. In this framing, elective communities of non-kin friends offer a different interpretation of selfhood, one that is rooted not in carving personalised biographies but on nurturance, care and mutuality.
For Kapadia’s women, this sense of shared solidarity in their respective futures of love, livelihood and longing is portrayed in unambiguous clarity. And so is the moral ambivalence that these voluntary communities entail. Prabha’s initial disapproval of Anu’s inter-religious romance or Parvarty’s astute observation about Prabha’s absent husband are demonstrative of how these relations are marked with indeterminacy and ambivalence.
Kani Kusruti and others involved in ‘All That We Imagine As Light’ on the Cannes red carpet. Photo: X/@Festival_Cannes
All that said, Kapadia is not reticent in exploring the lives of her women both in their fullness and fragility. The final scene portrays this sentiment in the most breathtaking way. The sterile murmurs of the clinic dissolve into the warmth of a seaside night filled with longing, ennui, and familiarity. As the women chat by a palm-lined shack under the dark, star-speckled sky, you can almost feel the quiet, luminous bond they share – a light that lingers in the darkness.
Tannistha Samanta is an associate professor of Sociology at FLAME University, Pune, India. Her work lies at the intersection of family sociology and aging studies.
