The False Promises of Indian Community

Romy Rajan considers Payal Kapadia’s new film “All We Imagine as Light.”

By Romy RajanFebruary 14, 2025

• Film

NARRATED LARGELY BY two migrant Malayali nurses living in Mumbai, India, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024) also weaves in the voices of migrants speaking Tamil, Gujarati, and Bengali. The film gestures to a lingua franca that might unite this otherwise polyglot community. Its protagonist is a source of hope for others, and her name, Prabha, means “light” in Malayalam, her native tongue. The word has Sanskrit roots and is therefore at least conceivably intelligible to many of the film’s communities. But Kapadia’s use of the word is also bitterly ironic. Prabha struggles with melancholy and indecision. And, in truth, this film is no celebration of Mumbai’s multilingualism. It is rather an exposition of what celebrations of multilingualism frequently conceal: a brutally cutthroat society whose social mobility is more illusion than reality.

The story of hopeful migrants from rural India arriving in Mumbai only to be disillusioned by the squalor and struggle that awaits them is not new and is at least as old as Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (“Mr. 420”), released in 1955. Since then, films like 1980’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (“What Makes Albert Pinto Angry?”), 1988’s Salaam Bombay!, and 1998’s Satya have explored the vortex of corruption, poverty, and fundamentalism that the city’s residents, Mumbaikars, find themselves in. Such cinema has existed parallel to the glamorization of Mumbai within the public imagination, mostly for its position as the seat of “Bollywood,” the Hindi film industry that largely churns out escapist fare. The city in this binary becomes either a space where dreams are realized or the site of their demise. For Kapadia, the city is both. Her protagonists navigate a city that belittles them through its sheer immensity but also offers them kinds of freedom unavailable in the hinterland. All We Imagine as Light examines the contradictions that make Mumbai a fascinating city, and it does so in a much less sensationalist way than another popular depiction of the city, Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

All We Imagine as Light follows three women, two nurses and a cook, all of whom work at a hospital in Mumbai. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the older of the two nurses, is married to a man working in Germany, from whom she hasn’t heard in a long time. She lives with her younger colleague, Anu (Divya Prabha), who is a Hindu and is in a relationship with a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and whose colleagues are scandalized by her relationship. Both women are from Kerala (the demonym is Malayali, after the local language, Malayalam), a southern Indian state known for its disproportionate contribution to the diasporic population—57 percent of nurses from the state work in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Middle East. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital, is a widow who faces eviction from her apartment, which stands on land that is to be turned into a luxury apartment complex. The three women are all migrants, though in different ways. Parvaty is Marathi, but she is as alienated as the other two. To be a part of the Mumbai working class, Kapadia suggests, is to be rootless and displaced.

Kapadia’s narrative unfolds mostly in a hospital and tracks the people who work there, primarily the nurses. The hospital is a space where an entire community of Malayali nurses form what amounts to a distinct subculture. They speak among themselves in Malayalam (one wishes the subtitles would make this clear), make plans to watch the latest Malayalam movie, and follow a conservative sexual code that renders Anu the subject of gossip merely because she begins dating, a “violation” that Shiaz’s religious identity makes worse. The confusion that a new and dynamic city engenders elicits very divergent responses—in some, it causes them to hold on to home and its comforting (yet illusory) stabilities, whereas for others, the same fixities seem limiting.

Kapadia’s representation of Mumbai does not package experiences like these with legible conceptual labels—this is not a film about Indian women finding themselves, for example. The film also consciously shuns the need to translate itself, at the expense of being illegible to its Western viewers. The translation, if any, happens between the speakers of different Indian languages and dialects who congregate in Mumbai, with Hindi often functioning as an imperfect and inconvenient lingua franca. These experiences, along with the corrupt machinations of real estate barons who displace Parvaty, form a rich tapestry of life in Mumbai, albeit one that gets lost in Bollywood-inspired celebrations of the city. Such nuances, in both the differentiation of communities and the ways in which Mumbai has been perceived, would be readily apparent to a viewer familiar with the Indian sociopolitical landscape but, more often than not, remain unavailable to mainstream Western audiences.

India has seen its levels of inequality rise since the liberalization of its economy in 1991. The percentage of wealth held by its top one percent is higher now than it has been at any time since 1922 (a period that includes the colonial era). Kapadia’s debut, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), a partly fictional documentary, deals with India’s neoliberalization following the victory of the right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While the film was ostensibly about the backlash to the appointment of a BJP functionary to the top administrative post at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), it was equally about the state’s withdrawal from education and a general retrenchment of its role through a rollback of subsidized education offered to gifted students. The documentary criticized the media’s role in characterizing FTII students as leeches on taxpayer funds, at a time when tax cuts were enriching corporate coffers and the number of billionaires in the nation was booming.

All We Imagine as Light exposes this state of affairs. Its Mumbai offers meager avenues for advancement, as most find themselves lucky to be able to rent a small apartment with flimsy legal agreements that allow for easy eviction. The film shows some limited avenues for political action against land-grabbers—meetings where protesters gather, shout a few slogans, and retreat without accomplishing much. This leaves Parvaty and Prabha to undertake a sorry performative protest as they throw a single stone at a billboard advertising swanky new apartments, giggle at their own audacity, and quickly scamper away. Ultimately, Parvaty is forced to return to her village, after having spent decades in Mumbai. The young are driven to Mumbai, whereas the old and no longer useful return in defeat.

These abiding problems have been the domain of art house films like Sandhya Suri’s recent Santosh (2024), Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes (2022), and P. S. Vinothraj’s Pebbles (2021). But unsurprisingly, many of these (to Western audiences, obscure) films are foreign co-productions with independent Indian companies. India remains a nation in which press and artistic freedoms are severely limited, and the discussion of social issues can often be labeled anti-national. An association with a French or British production company has often offered a useful way of circumventing censorship. This does, however, come at the cost of a perceived lowering of “Indianness.” Meanwhile, blockbuster aspirants like RRR (2022), Baahubali (2015), Kalki 2898 AD (2024), and the KGF series (2018– ) invoke economic precarity only for a male hero to single-handedly solve it and reveal himself to be the “chosen one” in the process. It is perhaps not a coincidence that India’s highest leader is a right-wing populist who has claimed his right to rule as divinely ordained and gone so far as to claim a somewhat immaculate conception for himself.

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The critical reception of All We Imagine as Light has largely overlooked the film’s setting in Mumbai and the deep connections between its characters and the current political and economic condition of the city and the nation it is a part of. Reviews since its breakthrough at Cannes have called it “lyrical,” “dreamlike,” a “lonesome romance,” and even “modernist.” These praises wrench the film from Mumbai as its context; The New York Times even calls it “transcendently familiar,” whatever that means. This is a curious fate to befall one of the few films to chronicle the lives of Malayali nurses, who are present in virtually every urban Indian hospital.

The criticism thus far yanks the film from its rich context, the better to make it recognizable as world cinema—and able to compete on the international festival circuit. Even as Peter Bradshaw, in his review for The Guardian, describes the film’s depiction of religious differences and the incursions of property developers, he cannot refrain from seeing the characters as affected by a “mood of romantic and emotional insecurity” that is ultimately resolvable “away from the city, with all its rational, commercial worries.” Nicholas Barber, writing for the BBC, feels the film is “universal and emotional enough to hypnotise anyone who has been alone in a city.” While he mentions in passing that the film is “specific in its detailing of life as a woman in today's Mumbai,” he is quick to remind his readers that “this Indian-French co-production also has the feel of an American or European indie comedy drama.” The desire to approach the film through the city (rather than Mumbai as a specific city) seems to characterize multiple critical responses. Manohla Dargis’s review for The New York Times directs our attention to the film’s “characteristic modernist concern with the attractions and the drawbacks of cities, with their frenetic swarms and cacophonous din, their liberating and soul-crushing anonymity.”

And, in truth, All We Imagine as Light might fool you into thinking it the offspring of “atmospheric” filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, whose middle and late films inspired a style that emphasizes a film’s immediate experience rather than its external referents. But it is much more useful to watch All We Imagine as Light with Italian neorealism in mind. The lineage is not particularly complicated—the school of filmmaking associated with Kapadia’s alma mater, the FTII, has long been synonymous with documentary realism. We see the influence of earlier directors like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, the latter of whom taught at the FTII, and a later generation of filmmakers, such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Kaul, and Saeed Akhtar Mirza, in Kapadia’s emphasis on the everyday struggles of her protagonists, the seemingly insurmountable nature of the little problems they encounter, and the crushing poverty they suffer.

If All We Imagine as Light appears to focus on mood and atmosphere, then, it does so from a deliberate pace—the film jumps from one event to the other, but the events themselves are narrated slowly. The camera often plods along with Anu and Shiaz in slow motion, subjecting the young couple to a disinterested gaze in high angle shots; it lingers over Prabha as she gazes nowhere in particular (Kusruti excels at embodying Prabha’s helpless anguish). Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad)—and, to a lesser extent, Anu—writes poetry that is slow and sensuous, yearning for a sense of community that is sorely lacking in the city.

It is not a coincidence that sexual desire in the film is communicated in poetic language, the everyday communicative language of the city seemingly inadequate in making this need known. As Theodor Adorno points out, the self-absorption of the lyric can only be set against a society that has rendered collectivity nearly impossible. The film invites its viewers to refuse the pace of the city and see how the characters negotiate the difficult choices the city makes available to its residents. The lead characters’ move away from the city at the end does not signal the desirability of a different rural temporality but the need for a vision of the city that slows it down.

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All We Imagine as Light reminds one of a film like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!, which unflinchingly examines an unglamorous life in Mumbai. While not as grim (or committed to a neorealist aesthetic), Kapadia’s film is cut from the same cloth. Nursing in Kerala (where Anu and Prabha are from) is often held up as an occupation that would allow its practitioners to migrate to the promised lands of Europe, the United States, and other legibly Western spaces. Most, however, end up working low-paying jobs in other parts of India, hoping to make the jump, living in a state of arrested flight. Salman Rushdie (arguably our greatest chronicler of Mumbai/Bombay) claims that this is the essence of the migrant condition, a state of exile attended by a persistent yearning for an ever-receding image of a home. It is appropriate that the scenes Anu shares with Shiaz are often accompanied by the song “The Homeless Wanderer,” composed by the Ethiopian musician and nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whom the film acknowledges at the beginning. These concerns and associations also separate Kapadia’s film from Nair’s, whose characters are drawn from slums, their homelessness often literal, and who are often forced to make a living through illegal means.

The deracinating praise that has been heaped upon this film flies in the face of Kapadia’s decidedly unmagical and earthy treatment of its subjects and the mundane hardships that dominate their lives. In the scene that introduces Anu, we find her sullen, bogged down by the numerous patients at the hospital, one of whom is a poor, young woman who is pregnant with her third child and asks for help avoiding pregnancies. The woman seems exasperated with her mounting number of children, possibly the effect of her limited sexual autonomy in a nation where marital rape is still not recognized as a crime. Anu is affected by her plight and, after looking around to see if she is being watched, slips her patient a bottle of birth control pills free of charge. This is an instance of solidarity in which the director highlights the everyday kindnesses that sustain the precarious lives of those at the city’s economic margins.

Such moments within the film feel representative of a generalized insecurity and the provisional nature of the characters’ everyday lives. The healthcare system forces patients to rely on similar acts of kindness. People like Parvaty lose rights to their homes when real estate companies take an interest in the land on which they are built, taking advantage of their insufficient knowledge of the law. Anu and Shiaz have to bribe security guards not to disturb them while they make out in parking lots. It is only by ignoring such moments that the film appears “transcendently familiar.” The strength of the film lies in its unflinching depiction of the contradictions of life in Mumbai that cannot be solved merely by leaving it, because the city is as much a space of freedom as it is of constraints. While it is certainly possible to see in these specific experiences the effects of economic austerity and governmental apathy, reducing All We Imagine as Light’s connections to a shared humanity, to modernist urban experiences, or to its likeness to Western film is clearly not amenable to excavating such a common humanity.

The Indian response to the film has been equally perplexing. Newspapers and the general public have accepted the film and celebrated it, and its theatrical release received more publicity than most independent productions. This has been overshadowed, however, by the Film Federation of India’s decision to pick another to represent the country in the Academy Awards: 2023’s Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies). That film was produced jointly by two major studios, one owned by a Bollywood actor and the other by a billionaire industrialist who is rumored to be close to the current political regime.

The terms in which this snub was explained were telling. The FFI president argued that the “jury [that decided on the selection] said that they were watching a European film taking place in India, not an Indian film taking place in India.” He further claimed that the film lacked “Indian-ness,” adding, one knows not for what reason, that “Indian women are a strange mixture of submission and dominance.” Western critics and an Indian jury comprised of 13 male members seem to agree, casting doubt on All We Imagine as Light as a genuine Indian cultural artifact.

It’s not wrong to see a European lineage in the film’s lyricism. But that lyricism is not born of a desire to mimic the West, or to extricate beauty from urban poverty. This film does not seek transcendence. But one does hope that All We Imagine as Light will be able, in the long run, to transcend the critical terms assigned to it and be accepted as a film that evolved from local as much as, if not more than, global cinematic conditions and traditions.