Christophe Jaffrelot 
All We Imagine as Light, written and directed by Payal Kapadia, is the first film from India to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.
It immediately brings to mind the masterpieces of Satyajit Ray, another Indian filmmaker to have been celebrated at Cannes, for Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) in 1956. Like Ray in that first film in the Apu Trilogy, Kapadia provides viewers with close-ups that are intensely beautiful and strikingly expressive, even when their subjects remain impassive and enigmatic.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
These two filmmakers excel in the art of deliciously slow, even static, shots, which never appear overly long but instead draw the viewer into the intimate worlds of men and (especially) women, as we will see. Nor does this virtuosity slide into mere aestheticism, for behind the heady poetry of her cinematographic style, Kapadia’s work is in fact just as political as that of Ray. Indeed, the young director first became known in the early 2020s for a militant documentary on the caste system – winner of the Golden Eye at Cannes in 2021, and when she was still a film student Kapadia participated in protests against the Modi government’s nomination of a fellow Hindu nationalist at the head of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), and saw her scholarship revoked in response to her opposition.
The smoke and mirrors of Mumbai
All We Imagine as Light is political in a different way. The film focuses on ordinary everyday victims, first and foremost those who came to Mumbai in search of an Eldorado and who are losing hope. These are the migrants whose anonymous voices – they do not appear on screen – mark the opening moments of the film. They no longer live in the illusion created by the smoke and mirrors of the city, and it is that contrast between dreams and reality that is expressed in the title of the film.
Why does Mumbai disappoint those who left their villages in hope of a better life?
First, because it is difficult to find housing, or indeed any shelter, there. The cost of accommodation per meter square has increased so much that the factories that filled the city centre up until the 1980s have been transformed into skyscrapers. Here, luxury apartments are sold to what Indians call the “middle-class,” but who are in fact, an elite. One of the advertising posters in the film unreservedly boasts of this housing, reserved for a “privileged” few. In Mumbai, property speculation has deadly consequences.
Parvati, one of the film’s heroines, is the widow of a worker in the now-abandoned factories, and the target of a property developer who has managed to force her to leave her home and return to her village. She tried to join forces with other victims of the same injustice (along the lines of great revolutionaries like Jyotirao Phule and Bhagat Singh whose portraits appear in the film) but in vain. Since the Bombay Textile Worker’s strike was broken in the early 1980s, the city has fallen into hands of business interests and their political allies. This is no longer a time for class struggle, but for religion. Kapadia shows this Hindu nationalist version of the “opium of the masses”, documentary-style, by filming the Ganesha Chaturthi processions, where participants dance and sing.
A screengrab from ‘All We Imagine as Light’.
When they have nowhere to return to, Mumbai’s poor must pile into the overcrowded slums, which are pushed as far away from the city centre as possible. The members of the lower middle class are also relegated to buildings on the outskirts, which forces them to commute by train from the outlying suburbs. The length of these commuter journeys increases as the city spreads, along the two trainlines stretching north and south, and which structure both the time (minutes are counted in the number of stations) and the imaginary of Mumbaikars. These trains, which the viewers take several times with the films’ heroines, are a symbol of urban violence. Hundreds of people die every year on the tracks, whether from falling from open doors, or from electrocution. But this daily commute also provides respite for workers – drowsy with sleep on the way out, exhausted by the day on the way home – and particularly for women who have the benefit of the “Ladies Compartment”.
Three women
As well as being a film about a major city, All We Imagine as Light, is a film about women, about the women who are victims of the city, of men, and of social norms. The two main characters, Prabha, the eldest, and Anu, the youngest, illustrate two forms of oppression that Indian women face today – and have long faced. They both come from Kerala, work together in a hospital, and share the same apartment, but are otherwise unlike each other. The eldest, Prabha, is a woman of duty. She values strength; as a nurse she rebukes the novice midwives who are repulsed by the smell of placenta. Although she takes no nonsense, she is extraordinarily sensitive, and even expressive in her largely unsmiling reserve. Her husband has left to work in Germany, and she has had no news of him for a year. One day he sends her a rice-cooker, with no note, and she projects all her unfulfilled desires onto this anonymous object. A doctor at the hospital courts her delicately, giving her a poem that she reads once night has fallen and the city is asleep. Yet she does not take the hand he offers. She is married and thus devoted to one man alone, in accordance with Hindu tradition.
Anu, by contrast, rejects this tradition. She is graceful, laughs easily, and spends more than she earns – leading to debts she owes to Prabha – and says she will refuse all the suitors her parents propose, according to that same tradition of arranged marriage. Worse, she is secretly involved in a romantic relationship – which Prabha knows and disapproves of – with, worse still, a young Muslim man. Although today a young couple can be more open than before about their relationship when they are both from the same community, a romance between a Hindu and a Muslim puts both parties in extreme danger. Indeed, Hindu nationalists have declared war on what they call “love jihad”, a term referring to the idea that young Muslim men are good at seducing Hindu girls, converting them to Islam and thus swelling the ranks of the Muslim community with their children. When discovered, mixed couples like this are hunted down and the men beaten, even lynched. Anu’s young lover Shiaz hides in terror at the idea of being found in her presence.
A screengrab from ‘All We Imagine as Light’.
Where can these two live their love safely? Not in Mumbai, which is somewhat of a paradox, given this city was long reputed for its cosmopolitanism, and for providing an anonymity that made it an ideal site for forbidden encounters. In the film, when the two women help Parvarti to return to her original fishing village, Anu invites Shiaz to follow them secretly – and this is where they are finally able to fulfil their love. The city no longer provides the same security as the mangrove trees. It no longer conceals forbidden love, not only because of the intense promiscuity resulting from skyrocketing population density, but also because spying and informing on others has become a national sport.
Also read: ‘All We Imagine as Light’: A Tribute to Love, Longing and Friendship
While the standard Bollywood dream is in Hindi, All We Imagine as Light speaks the language of migrants – Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi – and reveals an unvarnished reality which borders on tragic. Anu still believes she can rebel, but for Prabha this struggle is in vain: no one can escape their destiny. Yet there is no place for sadness here, gravitas and grace (in the quasi-mystical sense) are what dominate. Kapadia’s women are exceptionally dignified, intensely human, and show unwavering solidarity. They also share delectable moments of freedom, like Anu and Parvati’s slightly tipsy impromptu dancing, under the half-amused, half-disapproving gaze of Prabha, on the beach, far from the city that is the melting pot for all woes.
Above all, this is the moment that it seems Prabha might shift towards a new destiny. When the sea washes a man’s body up onto the beach, she is the one who resuscitates him, by performing CPR, before the disconcerted villagers. The man, whom she then washes, has lost his memory and the villagers believe Prabha is his wife. She tries to set the record straight and then uses this misunderstanding to tell this play-husband (who joins in the pretence for a few phrases) that she does not ever want to see her husband again. This break-up opens up her heart, and she encourages Anu to call Shiaz – who is hiding in the forest – to join them openly.
A new hope is born from this rejection of social norms by the woman who had previously resigned herself to their constraints. Prabha shows the way to all those who are smothered by the condition Indian women are subject to. This is one of the reasons why only a few cinemas are screening this film in India, the director has offered to organise screenings from city to city to those who request it. And All We Imagine as Light would undoubtedly not have escaped censorship if it had not won the Grand Prix at Cannes, for which the festival should be duly thanked, along with the French co-producer of the film, Petit Chaos.
This article first appeared on the website of the Sciences Po South Asia Programme and has been republished with permission.
Christophe Jaffrelot is research director at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Professor of Politics and Sociology at King’s College London and Non-Resident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His publications include Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, and Gujarat under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India, Hurst, 2024, both of which are published in India by Westland.