The re-release of Mira Nair’s unflinching 1988 story of street children, prostitutes and drug dealers shows it has lost none of its power
Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! from 1988 was developed through journalistic research into the street children of Mumbai with her screenwriting partner Sooni Taraporevala; now it is re-released and what strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality. This is a movie that withholds the resolution for which the audience might find itself longing, showing only how street children cannot imagine their own future as street adults, seeing only imprisonment or death. I found myself contrasting Garth Davis’s recent film Lion from 2017, about the true story of a street kid who fell asleep on a train and finds himself transported thousands of miles away to Kolkata without any means of getting back or explaining to the uncaring officialdom what has happened. That movie was able to offer us a happy ending. Salaam Bombay! can’t and won’t.
The beginning is not so very different. Krishna, later to be nicknamed Chaipau (played by non-professional Shafiq Syed) has been working in a circus to pay off a family debt; when the cruel owner sends him to buy three cans of food, poor Krishna returns to finds the circus gone: just a bare patch of land where the big tent was. It’s a stunningly bleak image which, in its way, governs Chaipau’s worldview for the rest of the film. With what little money he has, he buys a train ticket to Bombay (Mumbai), where his three cans are of course immediately stolen.