From Grime To Glory

The updated version of Bollywood’s ‘son of the soil’ trope, Gully Boy’s troubled roots don’t stop him from shooting towards the sky

- Rehana Munir

Gaad do, beej hoon main ped ban hi jaunga (Bury me, but like any seed I’ll grow into a tree) – from the song Asli Hip Hop

Hip-hop is not organic to Mumbai. Born in the Bronx in the 1970s, it started out as the music of the disaffected black youth of a nation where race determined one’s prospects in life. Zoya Akhtar’s 2019 film, Gully Boy, inspired by real-life rappers Divine and Naezy, takes one of America’s iconic music genres and recasts it in a distinctly local setting, Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums. The result: hip-hop feels organic to Mumbai.

Bollywood has a long history of trying to mirror social realities and drive positive change. Urban squalor and inhuman living conditions form the theme or backdrop of countless films. From Raj Kapoor’s tramp to Guru Dutt’s poet, bastis and chawls troubled the conscience of the 1950s idealists, resulting in some of our most memorable films, from Awaara (1956) to Pyaasa (1957). The 1980s introduced audiences to hardened heroes in bastis, played by actors like Jackie Shroff and Anil Kapoor. Masala films of the goonda variety with romance-action drama-comedy thrown into an indiscriminate mix.

The parallel cinema movement and its offshoots spawned another kind of hero in a chawl, exemplified by Naseeruddin Shah and Farouque Shaikh in Katha. The 1990s brought Rangeela’s Munna, yet another masala manifestation of life in Mumbai’s mean streets, entertaining yet limited by the film’s worldview. The 2000s to 2010s were largely oriented towards urban affluence. The past decade, however, has seen the rise of the small-town hero, with the trio of Ayushmann Khurrana, Rajkummar Rao and Vicky Kaushal infusing an earthiness and vibrancy into proceedings.