From Bombay to The Taj Story

I was a boy, alone in my room in Dhaka, watching a pirated VHS tape of Bombay.

I should explain what it meant that I was watching it at all. I had spent three years living in England with my family, which quietly rewired what I expected from stories, from music, from the whole business of sitting in the dark and letting someone else's imagination wash over you. I had watched English films. I had listened to music that didn't feel like it was assembled from borrowed parts. And when we moved back to Dhaka, I brought that awareness with me like a piece of luggage I couldn't put down.

Bollywood, seen from that new angle, was hard to take seriously. Not out of snobbery, and I want to be clear about that, but because I could now see the seams. The song that sounded like a Western pop hit from two years ago. The plot lifted wholesale from an American film that most people hadn't seen but some of us had. The emotions that arrived on cue, pressed into shape by a formula so familiar it had become invisible to people who hadn't stepped outside it. I had stepped outside it. I couldn't step back in.

And then Bombay happened.

You couldn't avoid the music. It arrived before the film did, the way rumours arrive before news. AR Rahman's score was everywhere in Dhaka that year, drifting from shops, playing in rickshaws, bleeding through walls from neighbouring flats. Humma Humma. Kehna Hi Kya. I would be channel surfing and the moment it came on I would stop and just listen, which for a restless teenager with a remote control was saying something. It didn't sound like the Bollywood I had written off. It didn't sound like an imitation of anything. It sounded like something that had come from inside, genuinely stubbornly itself, and yet like nothing I had heard before.

I had to know where it was from.

I bought the cassette on one of my regular visits to the music store, the same trip I remember that I picked up Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins. I saved my allowance for these visits, which usually stretched to two or four tapes a month, so every choice mattered. Spending one of those slots on a Bollywood soundtrack was not a casual decision. I took both tapes home and listened to the Bombay soundtrack on repeat for weeks before the film was even available to rent.

When it finally came out, I rented it from the local video store and watched it alone in my room, on a small television, the way you watch something you're not quite ready to admit has already got to you.

Manisha Koirala was extraordinary. I remember that clearly, that particular quality of stillness she brought to a role that could easily have been just a symbol. But I'll be honest: the love story itself left me cold. By then I had seen enough of Bollywood's romantic formula — the longing glances, the songs in fields, the families that must be overcome — to find it tedious rather than transporting. I hadn't rented this tape for a love story. I wanted something different. Something that felt like it was grappling with the real world.

And then the riots came. The burning, the chaos, the family being pulled apart in the smoke and the noise. But even here, something felt off. Not in the violence itself, but in how the Muslim characters were drawn inside it.

I had grown up loving Hindi films. Coolie. Deewar. Sholay. Films I had watched with my family where Muslim characters simply existed without the camera feeling any need to explain them. Amitabh Bachchan's closest friend in Deewar is a Muslim police officer. Nobody in the film remarks on it. Nobody needs to. In those films the world was just the world, crowded and composite and unselfconscious, and a Muslim character was as unremarkable and as human as anyone else on screen.

Bombay was the first time I was old enough to notice something was off. The first time the camera's attitude toward Muslim characters felt like an attitude rather than just a fact. Something about the way the film looked at its Muslim characters felt different from anything I remembered. Tilted, somehow. Like a picture hanging slightly crooked on a wall.

But I finished the tape with a feeling I couldn't name.

It wasn't offense. It wasn't anything as clear as that. It was quieter, a low hum underneath everything, the sense that I had watched something that was supposed to be about people like me, and had come away feeling faintly like an outsider to my own story. I was a Muslim boy in Bangladesh. The film was about Muslims and Hindus, about riots that had happened three years earlier and killed hundreds of real people. And somehow, watching it, I felt like a guest in a narrative that should have been mine to inhabit fully.

I returned the tape to the video store. I didn't talk about the film much. And I went back to not watching Bollywood. Properly this time. A film every few years, when something unavoidable came across my path. That distance never fully closed.

It hasn't closed now, and increasingly I'm not sure it can. The problem with living with someone who loves Bollywood, and with carrying a phone that watches what you watch, is that Bollywood is no longer something you choose. It finds you. It populates your recommendations, it plays in the next room, it arrives unrequested on your television on a Wednesday evening. The distance I constructed over thirty years — the careful, deliberate not-watching — has been quietly dismantled by the algorithm. I can't ignore it completely anymore. It has infiltrated the feed. And so I sit with it, this cinema that has always made me feel like a guest, now served to me by a machine that has decided, based on my wife's viewing history, that it knows what I want.

When you no longer need beauty to smuggle the argument in, it means the argument has already won enough ground to stand in the open.

What the Music Was Doing

My wife doesn't know most of this history. She loves Bollywood the way I loved it before England — freely, without audit, letting it wash over her. Some evenings I'll wander into the room where she's watching something and within five minutes I've said something I shouldn't. Named the Western song the number was lifted from, or identified the Hollywood film the plot came from. She finds it insufferable. I find it impossible to stop.

But there are exceptions. There are songs she plays that I can't talk over, because they were there before the critical part of my brain took up residence. Kehna Hi Kya is one of them. She played it once in the car, early in our relationship, just because she loved it, with no idea what it meant to me. And the moment it came on I was gone — back in that small room in Dhaka, a boy alone with a television, a cassette he had saved his allowance for, and a feeling he couldn't explain to anyone.

To understand why that song does that, you have to understand what AR Rahman was doing with Bombay.

Rahman had already changed Indian film music with Roja in 1992. But Bombay was where he became something larger than a composer. The soundtrack spread across South Asia months before the film released. Kehna Hi Kya — that soaring, aching melody, Hariharan's voice opening up like a door into something sacred — had already told you how to feel about this story before you knew what the story was.

Great film music doesn't just accompany images. It argues for them. It tells you which emotions are correct and when to have them. And when the riots come, when the city burns and the family is torn apart, Rahman's music is there too, making the horror achingly, unbearably beautiful. You don't interrogate a film while the music is pulling you under. You absorb it. You carry it home.

I didn't understand this at the time. I just felt it.

The Thing I Couldn't See Then

Perhaps I'm reading backwards from the present. That's worth saying plainly. I am a grown man living in Toronto, watching India's cultural landscape shift in ways that alarm me, and it is possible that I am pressing that alarm backwards onto a film that was simply imperfect — a well-meaning work with blind spots, made by a talented director who was trying to do something hard. I want to hold that possibility honestly.

But I don't think it fully explains what I felt in that room.

Bombay now feels to me like a film that was genuinely trying to be humane, and yet couldn't quite see past its own vantage point. It presents itself as a film about communal violence, a plea for peace. And on that level it works. Ratnam was depicting events barely three years old that most Indian cinema wouldn't touch. He put a Muslim woman at the centre of a mainstream love story.

But the Muslim characters are consistently less fully drawn. Shaila Bano is loving and luminous but largely passive — she exists to be loved, to be protected, to represent what violence destroys. The question of why the Babri Masjid was demolished, which political movement had spent years building toward that moment, is carefully kept offscreen. What's left is a tragedy without an origin. Violence that descended from nowhere, like weather.

The film was asking me to grieve without asking me to understand.

What it now feels like, looking back, is a story about Muslim suffering told primarily for a Hindu audience. Its emotional world assumed a viewer who needed to be reminded of their Muslim neighbours' humanity. I was not that viewer. I was the subject of the lesson. To be the figure whose pain is aesthetically arranged for another community's moral education is its own kind of erasure — subtle enough that a boy in Dhaka couldn't name it, persistent enough that it followed him out of the room.

Bombay made its intended audience feel liberal and large-hearted. It made me feel like a problem that had been handled with taste.

Where That Road Leads

I'm aware this is a strong reading of a thirty-year-old film. And I'm aware that what came after may be colouring how I see it now. But that is also part of the point.

I wasn't tracking Bollywood closely in the years after Bombay. It had receded back to the edge of my life where it had always lived after England — present but not central, something my parents watched, something that played in the background. The films that came after, the ones that continued what Bombay had started, I mostly encountered in fragments. A trailer autoplaying while I was looking for something else. A clip someone had shared. Enough to recognise the shape of it. Enough to know I didn't need more.

Sarfarosh, Mission Kashmir — I caught enough of both to feel the familiar tilt. The Muslim as outsider, as threat, as the problem the story must navigate around. By then the feeling had a name, even if I rarely used it out loud.

There was briefly a counter-current. Jodhaa Akbar in 2008 put a Mughal emperor at its centre and asked audiences to admire him, to understand his reign as a place of genuine pluralism. Watching even that trailer I remember something loosening slightly in my chest. So it was still possible. Someone still thought it was worth making.

That feeling didn't last.

I came across the Kashmir Files trailer the way I came across most things by then — scrolling, not looking for it, the algorithm deciding I should see it. I watched maybe ninety seconds before putting my phone down. It wasn't the anger that struck me most. It was how little it needed to hide. There was no Rahman. No attempt at beauty to lower your defenses first. Just the grievance, presented as revelation, confident it had an audience large enough not to require any disguise.

The Taj Story arrived differently. I was watching television and it came up as a recommended trailer, served to me by an algorithm that had been paying close attention to my wife's watch history. There was something almost comic about it — her love of Bollywood, which I tease her about, had reached across the recommendation engine and deposited this on our screen. Two minutes was enough. A courtroom drama built on a theory India's own Supreme Court once dismissed as a man with "a bee in his bonnet" — the Taj Mahal was Hindu, it was stolen, someone must finally say so. I remember glancing at her. She had already moved on, scrolling her phone, unbothered. It hadn't landed on her the way it landed on me.

What struck me, sitting there, was the distance between that trailer and the cassette I had saved my allowance for thirty years earlier. Bombay needed two hours and one of the greatest film scores ever made to produce that low hum of unease in a boy in Dhaka. The Taj Story managed the same feeling in two minutes of scrolling on a Tuesday afternoon in Toronto. When you no longer need beauty to smuggle the argument in, it means the argument has already won enough ground to stand in the open.

What Remains

Mani Ratnam is not a villain. He made films of genuine feeling and real ambition, and I don't think the tilt in Bombay came from cynicism. He was trying to make something humane. That matters. But it doesn't change what the work did, or what it feels like to have been on the receiving end of its compassion.

What I keep returning to is not the politics but the feeling. The feeling of watching a story that was nominally yours and sensing, without being able to say why, that you were somehow peripheral to it. That the camera's sympathy, though extended in your direction, was not quite for you. That you were being seen, but not quite recognised.

I grew up between places. Dhaka, England, and eventually Toronto. I have spent most of my life being legible to myself in ways that weren't always legible to the cultures around me. You learn to read the room. You learn to notice when a space is welcoming you or merely tolerating you, and the two can look identical from the outside.

Bombay was the first film that made me feel that way. Not excluded. Not attacked. Just — adjacent. A face in the background of someone else's story, included for texture.

Decades later my wife plays Kehna Hi Kya in the car and I'm back there in an instant. Not because the song brings back the film, but because it brings back the boy — the one who had saved his allowance for a cassette, who had let a melody past his defenses, who had sat alone in a room with something he felt but couldn't name, and quietly returned the tape and said nothing.

That boy is still trying to find the words. These, I think, are some of them.