The urge to throw a stone

In Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light, the symbolic protest of two working-class women echoes a rich and radical tradition in Indian cinema

Prabha, a nurse, and Parvaty, a cook, pick up stones from the street and throw them at the billboard. The missiles find their mark, the billboard comes loose. It is an advertisement for a property developer, with the tagline: “Class is a privilege.” Both of them laugh, loudly. But the very next moment, a security guard raises an alarm, and both women run from the site. This short scene occurs around the halfway mark of ‘All We Imagine As Light’. Written and directed by Payal Kapadia, the film released in India in November last year. It is still running in cinemas across the country and dropped on streaming platform Disney Hotstar on 3 January.

 

 

But it was already widely celebrated since winning the Grand Prix at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. Much webspace and newsprint have rightly been devoted to the film, decoding its various aspects, such as its lyrical depiction of Mumbai in the rains, the lives of working women, female friendships, and technical aspects such as Ranabir Das’s cinematography. The decision of the Film Federation of India (FFI) to not select it as India’s official entry for the 97th Academy Awards sparked controversy, especially since the FFI’s choice, ‘Laapataa Ladies’ (2023), failed to clinch a nomination. One aspect of Kapadia’s film, however, has hardly received any attention: its subtext of radical politics. 

 

‘All We Imagine As Light’ tells the story of two nurses from Kerala who work in Mumbai and share a cramped flat. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the older of the two, is married, but her husband works at a factory in Germany. He has not called her for more than a year. When a doctor at the hospital makes a romantic overture towards her, she rebuffs him. Her younger roommate, Anu (Divya Prabha), is in love with a man, Shiaz (Hridu Haroon). However, Shiaz being Muslim makes it difficult for them to plan a future. Anu’s parents are already looking for a suitable Hindu man to get her married. In the overcrowded, congested city, the young lovers find it incredibly difficult to be intimate.

 

The film opens with documentary footage of working-class people in different parts of Mumbai. There are no easily recognizable urban signposts, such as the Gateway of India, the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, or Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Instead, we see labourers loading trucks, hawkers selling their wares. It is accompanied by voiceovers of interviews with migrant workers, millions of whom populate the streets and buildings of the metropolis. Journalist and film critic Sohini Chattopadhyay compares Kapadia’s use of the voices of working-class men and women to a similar narrative strategy adopted by Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen in his films from the 1970s, such as ‘Calcutta 71’.

 

Panning over the cityscape, drenched in its famous rains, the camera suddenly picks out Prabha. She is on a train, holding on to an iron rod near the door of the compartment, possibly returning home after her duty hours. She is one of the hundreds and thousands of nurses from Kerala who work in the city. 

 

Sociologist Sreelekha Nair in her book, ‘Moving with the Times: Gender, Status and Migration of Nurses in India’ (2012), suggests that the proliferation of women from Kerala working as nurses in various parts of India — and the world — is a result of the state’s agrarian crisis. While exploring the status of nurses as migrant workers, she asserts that they are not victims of their situations; on the contrary, they have adapted successfully to the times. 

 

The camera picking out Prabha from the crowd, in a lingering slow motion, reverses the stereotyping and invisiblisation of Malayali nurses. She emerges as an individual with hopes, dreams, desires, and aspirations.

 

At the hospital where Prabha and Anu work, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a cook. She is also a migrant worker, but from a village in Maharashtra. She lives at a tenement, which she got when her husband lost his job at a textile mill. She has lived in this accommodation for more than two decades. But a property developer is now evicting her because she does not have any documentation to prove her residence. 

 

The references to ‘kagaz’ — legal documents — to prove one’s identity and right of residence, in the context of the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, and the protests against it that roiled the country in late 2019 and early 2020, are not lost on the audience. Similarly, the threat of displacement that hangs over Parvaty also refers to the controversy around the Adani Group’s plans to develop Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum in the heart of Mumbai. 

 

According to a Financial Times report, the development plan promises to provide free houses to residents of the slum who can prove residence before 1 January 2000. But this leaves around 700,000 people ineligible for on-site rehousing, and fears of displacement and loss of livelihood for many of them. “Dharavi, the largest of the city’s slums, packs up to 1,800 people into an acre,” writes British architect Deyan Sudjic in his 2016 book ‘The Language of Cities’. 

 

Parvaty and Prabha go from pillar to post to save her home. An influential lawyer tells her that she has no case, and the builder threatens her. When it becomes evident that she cannot win, Parvaty decides to return to her coastal village. On their last night in the city, they throw stones at the billboard. 

 

Watching the film at a nearly empty cinema in Bengaluru on Friday, I was immediately reminded of two other films, from half a century ago. The first film is ‘Interview’ (1971), directed by Mrinal Sen; the second one is ‘Ankur’ (1974), directed by Shyam Benegal. In the climactic scenes of both films, powerless, underclass characters express their anger against the all-pervasive injustice in their societies by throwing stones at symbols of power.

 

‘Interview’ is the first film in Sen’s Calcutta trilogy. Adapted from a story by Sen’s frequent collaborator, the novelist Ashish Burman, ‘Interview’ follows the travails of a young man, Ranjit (Ranjit Mallick), over a single day. Ranjit is not unemployed: he has a job at a small press. But he has also managed to land an interview with an international firm through the recommendation of a friend of his dead father. This friend advises him to appear for the interview in a suit. However, Ranjit cannot pick up his suit from the laundry because of a workers’ strike. He borrows a suit from a friend but misplaces it on a bus because he is distracted by the commotion around a pickpocket. Ranjit is forced to appear for the interview in a dhoti and kurta. 

 

Thanks to his sartorial goof-up, Ranjit does not get the job. His father’s friend berates him for failing to follow his instructions. Late at night, as he roams the city streets, he is interrogated by an unseen person. Losing his temper, Ranjit explodes. His anger is directed towards a mannequin, wearing a suit, in the display window of a clothes showroom. Throwing a pebble, Ranjit breaks the window. Then, he proceeds to disrobe the mannequin. Through a rapid montage, his anger is merged with protests in Calcutta, Vietnam, and Biafra. 

 

“One way to see this colocation of images would be to see Ranjit as the personification of the anger of the everyman in Calcutta,” writes historian Rochona Majumdar in her book, ‘Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony’ (2021). For Majumdar, Sen’s trilogy, made with the backdrop of the violent, far-left Naxalite movement that roiled Calcutta (Kolkata) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is a “reading of twentieth-century Indian history that culminated in the tumultuous present”.  

 

Unlike ‘Interview’, ‘Ankur’ takes place in a village near Hyderabad. When Surya (Anant Nag), the son of the local zamindar, returns to his village after completing his education in the city, he is forced to marry the under-age Saru (Priya Tendulkar) and take up administrative duties. A Dalit couple, Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) and Kishtayya (Sadhu Meher), are hired to take care of Surya’s household. Kishtayya is disabled (he cannot speak or hear) and is also an alcoholic. Sending off Kishtayya on errands, Surya flirts with Lakshmi, but she does not reciprocate. When Kishtayya is caught stealing toddy, he has to leave the village. Lakshmi eventually succumbs to Surya’s overtures. 

 

Kishtayya returns to the village after a while, having cured himself of alcoholism and also made some money. Surya, however, feels that his former servant seeks revenge for Lakshmi’s infidelity. He ties up Kishtayya and whips him with a rope. The villagers gather; Lakshmi comes to the rescue of her husband. She curses Surya and returns home with Kishtayya. A little later, when everyone has left, a village boy throws a stone at Surya’s house, breaking one of its windows.

 

Historian Gyan Prakash in his book Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (2019) finds that the village in Benegal’s film is a contrast to the “nationalist representation… as a space of harmony and wholesome life”. Instead, it emerges as a playground of patriarchal feudalism. The village boy’s stone is a protest against this feudal structure. In Benegal’s next film ‘Nishant’, it grows into a “full-blown, collective and violent” rebellion against the social status quo. 

 

In the diegetic space of the film, it is symbolic of the national mood of discontent in the late 1960s and 1970s, leading to widespread protests by students, unemployed young people, and Opposition groups against rising inequality and corruption in the country.

 

‘Nishant’ released in 1975 — the year in which former prime minister Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, a 21-month period from 25 June 1975 to 21 March 1977, when the government suspended the Constitution, imprisoned political opponents, muzzled the press, and ruled by decree. This year, 2025, marks half a century of the Emergency. 

 

It is unlikely that there will be an angry Ranjit or village boy throwing stones at symbols of power now. But Prabha and Parvaty, completely powerless to affect the status quo, throwing stones at the billboard of the powerful builder is not without meaning. As their stones find their marks, Prabha and Parvaty break out in laughter. This laughter is not a momentary catharsis; instead, it is the first note of a song of rebellion. It is the laughter of the child who has seen the emperor without his clothes.

 

Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist