Of Hope and Hopelessness

The body appears as light in Payal Kapadia's film

- Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

PAYAL Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024) is a film not just about the travails of women migrant workers, but more specifically about their desiring bodies. If Prabha is waiting for the return of her husband who works in Germany, Anu is hiding her Muslim lover from the world. Both are Malayali nurses in Mumbai, and their Malayalam is to be read not merely as the story of a displaced tongue, but how that tongue displaces any singular claim of belonging to Mumbai.

Prabha and Anu’s Malayalam is not a language out of place, but a language searching for a place in the world. Language must echo the precarious economy of migrant lives. Prabha and Anu’s Malayalam places the question of language beyond the contours of cultural territory to register the presence of people whose dislocations desperately seek both comfort and recognition.

In the film, Prabha and Anu become the eyes and voices of Mumbai’s migrant-body. The body of a city is also reflected in bodies that inhabit its peripheries, its shacks, in the silence and desires of its migrants. In the process, Prabha and Anu also acquire new selves that navigate between their being who they are and what the city helps them become (or prevents them from becoming).