When Anu, a young Hindu nurse, slips into a blue burqa to meet her Muslim lover Shiaz in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), it is not the consequence of religious conversion but a form of tactical camouflage. The act offers a striking commentary on Mumbai, a city long celebrated for its liberalism and cosmopolitanism, where the search for intimacy must still contend with socio-religious cleavages. ‘You know my neighbourhood, right? If anybody sees you like this, we’re screwed,’ Shiaz tells her.
Indian cinema rarely imagines a society free of tensions. From caste and migration to religion and class, its most moving stories explore how people seek connection across social boundaries that remain stubbornly difficult to overcome. Their significance lies not in the promise of harmony but in a persistent return to a question that is deeply contemporary and urgent: how does one continue to share a world with those whose histories, loyalties and futures appear increasingly at odds with one’s own?
In any conventional cinematic narrative, Anu’s transformation from a young Hindu Malayali woman from Kerala into a burqa clad undistinguishable woman might be read as a romantic move – a poetic, star-crossed masquerade to outsmart a conservative neighbourhood. In reality, it is a defensive use of space within an apparently multicultural metropolis. The burqa becomes a temporary refuge from the social gaze, allowing Anu to move through Mumbai’s crowded and interconnected urban landscape without drawing attention to a relationship that must be pursued discretely. Intimacy here cannot be a natural state of human connection. It can only follow from a complex, exhausting logistical maneuver that must be performed in the shadows of a pluralist society. This striking image of strategic survival challenges the comfortable, classical liberal ideals of the ‘global village’ that characterize mainstream discourse today.
For much of the twentieth century, urbanization, mass education, citizenship and economic development were expected to promote social integration. The city occupied a privileged place within this imagination. By drawing together individuals from different religious, linguistic and social backgrounds, urban life appeared capable of generating forms of belonging that transcended inherited antagonisms. For decades, the blockbusters of 1990s and 2000s Bollywood actively propagated a celebratory, borderless globalism. The iconic, diasporic nostalgia of Shah Rukh Khan films projected an illusion of an expansive world where traditional identities, capital and modern desires could be reconciled over catchy musical numbers. In this illusory universe, difference was merely a colorful backdrop, and conflict was an obstacle destined to melt away before the force of love and universal family values.
However, the twenty-first century has questioned many of these assumptions. Greater closeness has not necessarily produced greater commonality. Today, that celebratory myth is threatened by a problematic globalism. Contemporary independent and parallel cinema has ceased trying to curate an illusion of a harmonious, unified nation. Instead, it is attentive to the splinters which, left unattended, can eventually pull a society apart. Many of these films reflect a world where the ordinary people must devise ways of working around the prejudices and assumptions encountered in everyday life.
Few cities embody the promise of coexistence more strongly than Mumbai. Built through successive waves of migration and marked by a staggering diversity of languages, religions and communities, it came to embody an urban culture in which people from across the country coexisted with remarkable ease. However, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light highlights the obstacles that emerge amongst people from disparate social horizons even when they live side by side. The film follows three women whose lives intersect in one of the hospitals of the metropolis. One of them is Anu, a young Hindu nurse originally from Kerala, part of the large Malayali community that has long supplied labour to the city’s hospitals and service sector. Like many young migrants, she finds herself suspended between family loyalties and the possibilities opened by urban life. Away from her family but not entirely free from their influence, she must deal with the pressures of work, friendship and desire in a city that is simultaneously liberating and constraining.
The story unfolds within trains, hospitals, apartment blocks and crowded streets that continually bring strangers into contact. Nonetheless, these encounters do not dissolve inherited boundaries. The city gathers people together without necessarily providing a common horizon through which they understand one another.
Anu’s flat mate Prabha is also her supervisor in the hospital. Within its fluorescent corridors, patients and care workers from different regions, religions or social backgrounds temporarily enter the same institutional space. Professional roles impose a degree of equality. Uniforms flatten visible distinctions. The routines of care create fleeting forms of complicity among individuals whose lives may rarely cross outside the hospital.
The two women also share an apartment but understand obligations, social behaviour and freedom in markedly different ways. Prabha struggles to accept Anu’s determination to pursue a relationship whose difficulties seem obvious to her, just as Anu cannot understand why Prabha remains emotionally bound to a husband who has long since disappeared from her daily life. When Anu remarks that she could never marry a stranger, Prabha’s response is telling: ‘sometimes people close to us become strangers as well’. Neither woman rejects the other’s outlook outright, nor fully understands the moral world through which those choices acquire meaning. Their exchanges reveal a subtler difficulty of understanding lives organized around opposed emotional and moral horizons.
The gap visible in the women’s conversations spills over outside their apartment into a social world structured by religion, family and communal obligations. When Shiaz enters the picture, Anu approaches their relationship as a matter of personal choice and desire. But Shiaz is more attuned to the social realities surrounding it. ‘If I used a Hindu name, would your father send it to you?’, he asks, when Anu is scrolling through the photographs of prospective husbands her family has sent her.
Before stepping out into the city to meet him, Anu dons a blue burqa. The gesture is almost casual, performed without dramatic emphasis. Yet it forms part of a carefully negotiated plan. Earlier, when Shiaz asks whether she owns a burqa, Anu responds with surprise: ‘Why should I have a burqa?’ His answer is immediate: without it, ‘there’s no plan’. The garment is not presented as an expression of religious conviction but as a practical condition for the intimate encounter they are trying to arrange. With his relatives at a wedding, Shiaz has found a rare opportunity for them to spend time together away from the prying eyes of a crowd. For the plan to work, however, Anu must pass through the neighbourhood without attracting attention. The burqa functions as a response to the forms of informal surveillance surrounding the relationship.
In another exchange, a colleague urges Prabha to ‘keep an eye’ on Anu because she is seeing a Muslim man and everyone is gossiping about her. When Prabha dismisses the matter as none of her concern, the colleague replies: ‘But she’s your roommate. You should keep an eye on her.’ The conversation reveals how social disapproval circulates through ordinary social ties rather than formal prohibitions. It is precisely this informal scrutiny that is closest to Goffman’s observation that social life often depends upon the management of appearances.
In Kapadia’s Mumbai, however, such adjustments are not simply a matter of moving between social settings. They become a condition for intimacy itself. Anu and Shiaz do not confront segregation in its classical form in the metropolis. Instead, the film exposes the persistence of social boundaries within spaces of everyday encounter. Proximity, as Arjun Appadurai has suggested, can generate anxiety as readily as familiarity. Those who live closest to one another are not always those who understand one another best.
The burqa therefore functions as more than a practical disguise. It points to a world in which intimacy depends upon improvization. Anu and Shiaz are not separated by walls, laws or distance. Yet the possibility of being together still requires concealment, maneuver and careful timing. The film’s concern is less with exclusion than with the shrinking space available for individual choice.
A fragile common world
Kapadia’s film explores the conditions that make a common world possible through the story of an impossible love affair. Beneath the romance lies a wider concern with the terms on which people live together. Writing in the aftermath of profound political ruptures, Hannah Arendt approached this problem through the idea of a world held in common. The world, she suggested, resembles a table around which people gather: it relates those seated around it while simultaneously maintaining the distance that separates them. Political life depends on this dual function. Such a world requires institutions and practices capable of maintaining a reality that remains intelligible to people who do not necessarily share the same origins, beliefs, memories or practices.
Post-independence filmmakers repeatedly returned to the problem of how individuals divided by class, caste, religion or region might nevertheless inhabit a common social and political world. Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) exposed the social violence of economic transformation, while Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal delved into the fractures concealed beneath developmental optimism. Still, these divisions did not always lead filmmakers towards pessimism. Popular cinema frequently imagined romance, kinship and national belonging as frameworks capable of containing social conflict. Films such as Bobby (1973) or Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) amongst many others, acknowledged class and social divisions but ultimately folded them into a larger emotional or familial order.
More recent films inherit the same concern with cohabitation but without a confidence in reconciliation. Their attention turns instead to the quieter processes through which a shared world begins to fray. Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) and Fandry (2013) probe lives shaped by precarity, mistrust, unequal power relations and competing forms of belonging. Their protagonists are rarely activists or ideological figures. More often, they are simply workers, migrants, neighbours or family members attempting to make their way in worlds whose social coordinates appear increasingly mysterious.
Arun Karthick’s Nasir (2020) shifts the angle from the plane of intimacy to the isolation of the individual in contemporary urban society. If All We Imagine as Light explores the difficulties of sustaining a relationship across religious communities even in a city like Mumbai, Nasir asks a more unsettling question: what happens when people continue to inhabit the same streets, workplaces and institutions but no longer interpret them through a common frame of reference?
The film follows a middle-aged salesman through the routines of everyday life. In a cramped Muslim neighbourhood of Coimbatore, an industrial city in western Tamil Nadu, Nasir’s world revolves around his wife, Taj, his disabled nephew, Iqbal, and his ailing mother. This domestic world contrasts sharply with the predominantly Hindu commercial district where he works. In the background, barely disturbing these routines at first, growing Hindu nationalist mobilization slowly reshapes the atmosphere of the city.
At first glance, the garment shop where he works appears entirely ordinary. Hindu and Muslim co-workers joke with one another and assist customers throughout the day. A decorative triptych displaying symbols of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity gestures towards an ideal of everyday pluralism. However, small signs gradually complicate this image. The film lays bare the social distance underlying these routine exchanges. Outside, truckloads of people shouting slogans such as ‘One nation, one religion’ move through the streets. Inside, the employees exchange banter, serve customers and work side by side, without moving beyond these functional relationships. A conversation about local restaurants ends with the shop owner explaining that he only eats at home. The possibility of sharing a meal never arises.
Nasir himself moves through this environment quietly, disapproving of the crude stories being narrated but keeping to himself. He folds saris, discusses fashion and colours with customers, and participates in the small routines of working life. The shop continues to function, and the ordinary courtesies of everyday exchanges remain largely intact. Slowly, the film invites viewers to notice the growing distance between these familiar rhythms and the political atmosphere gathering around them.
One brief scene interrupts the ordinariness of the working day. Asked by his colleagues to recite a poem, Nasir speaks lines written for his wife. ‘What else is life if not loneliness and silence?’, he asks. For a brief moment, the distinctions increasingly organizing the social world recede into the background. The poem speaks of love, longing, vulnerability and companionship – experiences capable of resonating across the boundaries that otherwise structure their relations. The scene offers a fleeting glimpse of the common ground that is increasingly overshadowed by the city’s political climate. In this respect, Nasir recalls Simmel’s figure of the stranger: someone who belongs to a community, participates in its routines and institutions, yet remains vulnerable to being perceived as irreducibly different.
Throughout the day, calls to prayer, devotional songs, political speeches and fragments of nationalist rhetoric drift through the background, gradually altering the atmosphere in which Nasir moves. Hannah Arendt observed that institutions rarely disappear overnight, rather, the meanings attached to them slowly shift.
This process is captured in a scene at the garment shop. Naisr overhears a telephone conversation: ‘We shouldn’t just leave these fellows alone … only if there is fear will they remain submissive.’ But he remains silent. The day proceeds uninterrupted. Business carries on as usual: saris are unfolded and folded, customers are greeted, and their whims accepted with weary patience. The significance of the scene lies precisely in this absence of rupture. Hostility has entered the ordinary rhythms of the workplace without disrupting them. The film’s concern is therefore not spectacular violence but the quieter processes through which a shared world gradually loses its coherence.
Both Kapadia and Karthick are ultimately less concerned with coexistence than with the room available to individuals to act, desire, love, imagine and relate to one another. At stake are the conditions of human agency in mixed societies. Their deepest concern lies with the possibilities available to ordinary people seeking to shape the course of their own lives.
A transnational condition
The tensions visible in Mumbai or Coimbatore extend far beyond India. Across cities shaped by migration, diversity and everyday proximity, the problem is no longer how complex societies accommodate plurality. It is what happens when the practices that once rendered social life intelligible lose their authority and give way to conflictual narratives, and fears.
A similar concern runs through Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, which examines a parallel predicament decades before contemporary debates about polarization. Moving between Calcutta, Dhaka and London, the novel follows characters whose lives remain entangled across borders while their understandings of history increasingly diverge. The narrators’ grandmother, Tha’mma’s bewilderment when she discovers that the border separating India and East Pakistan is invisible from the sky exposes a central strain running through the novel: political realities capable of reorganizing millions of lives often lack any obvious material form.
Like the boundaries separating Anu and Shiaz or gradually isolating Nasir, their force lies less in physical barriers than in the meanings people attach to them. These fault lines cannot be explained by social differences alone. Human societies have always contained competing loyalties and memories. The issue is less their existence than the frameworks through which they are interpreted. Work, family and friendship remain the primary concerns of most people, yet these experiences acquire significance through wider stories about history, belonging and collective futures. Estrangement emerges when those stories cease to overlap.
This structural drift is not an isolated South Asian anomaly but a striking feature of a broader contemporary condition. Similar dynamics can be observed elsewhere. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the municipal buildings, schools and transport networks of ethnically mixed cities such as Mostar still organize everyday life much as before. Residents continue to cross the same bridges and benefit together from urban infrastructure. Yet public commemorations, school curricula and political discourse often reproduce competing narratives of historical justice and nationhood. A comparable dynamic persists in Northern Ireland. Decades after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 integrated schools and neighbourhoods, today, their murals, ceremonies or commemorative practices propose rival understandings of the past. At stake is the reconstruction of neighbourliness across communities and institutions of civic life. People may live in the same street, city or political community while remaining attached to different worlds of meaning.
The significance of these examples lies in the density of connections that increasingly link people across lines of religion, language, class and origin. Migration, urbanization and globalization have woven together lives shaped by different national or family histories, political memories and moral assumptions. Offices, schools and housing complexes become meeting points for people who, in earlier generations, might have remained far more socially distant.
In this sense, the films make a distinctive intervention. They shift attention away from leaders, movements and institutions towards the more modest domain of personal conduct. Michael Ignatieff has argued that complex societies in today’s global age depend upon ordinary virtues such as tolerance, trust and compromise. The films discussed here approach everyday life from a different angle. Their concern lies less with moral virtues than with the possibilities individuals can exploit or practices they can improvize or invent to shape the course of their own lives. Anu chooses to persist in a relationship despite the obstacles surrounding it. Even if her actions remain limited and often improvized, without always producing results, yet they represent an attempt to shape the course of her own life. Nasir occupies a more constrained position. He neither challenges the hostility around him nor actively participates in it. His resistance takes a quieter form: his attachment to poetry, affection and the ordinary routines of care that continue to affirm a humanity increasingly denied by those around him. The contrast matters because it reveals different ways of inhabiting the same historical moment. Neither character controls the larger forces surrounding them, yet neither is entirely reducible to them.
The same observation applies beyond the world of the films. School curricula, commemorative practices and political rhetoric may be established from above, yet their effects depend upon how people receive, reproduce or modify them in everyday life. Social worlds are shaped as much by these innumerable micro-decisions as by formal political settlements. As the protagonists of the films discussed above demonstrate, their worlds are shaped less by dramatic confrontations than by a succession of small decisions: a colleague who agrees to support a younger roommate or a coworker, a young woman who conceals herself in order to meet her partner, a shop owner who is intent on keeping his social distance intact, a salesman who chooses silence over confrontation. These gestures appear inconsequential in isolation. Nonetheless, they establish the terms on which people relate to one another, grasp the possibilities available to them, and sometimes even change the course of their lives. Large political transformations become tangible through such ordinary conduct.
How does one continue to share a world with those whose histories, loyalties and desires appear increasingly at odds with one’s own? The answer, if there is one, lies in the ordinary spaces where people continue to encounter one another: apartment blocks, hospitals, workplaces and streets. The burqa worn by Anu, the poem recited by Nasir, suggest that worlds rarely unravel in a single dramatic moment. They are nurtured, or abandoned, through the everyday ways people make room for those next door.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
