As the city’s multiplexes have opened up to mainland influences and independent film-makers, some of the most trenchant clichés about urbanism have found expression in Bollywood’s 21st century portrayals of Mumbai. The dark underbelly pulsing beneath the glittering surface of the city, the artificiality behind the art, the terrible loneliness of the metropolis – all of these tell us what we fear; that our boom years have not protected us from the evils of urban overdevelopment. There are days in the life of this city, after all, during which we don’t have to open a newspaper to feel endangered; we simply have to step on a train.

It seems as though the industry now finds the once-mandatory celebration of ‘Bambai’ as India’s melting pot too trite for film. Tempting as it may be to trace the feeling to the rise of communalism in a city once famous for its origin-blindness, it probably has much more to do with the rapid gentrification of our living areas, compartmentalising classes and deepening differences. In a liberalised economy, as high-rises pile up around us, we tend to remember the perils, and forget the pleasures, of our shared civic life.

It is the public, open, festive Bombay that we celebrate in that mammoth classic of Hindi cinema, Amar Akbar Anthony. Manmohan Desai’s 1977 masterpiece still gets regular airtime on primetime television and weekend film festivals, for a number of reasons: it’s a ‘clean,’ ‘family’ film that kids love; it is a feat of star casting that still has the power to amaze and has never been achieved since; its performances and comic track are still vivid, slick and adorably hilarious. It is a proven fact that Indians of every stripe will sit through as many advertisements as it takes to see Amitabh Bachchan jump out of an Easter egg in the My name is Anthony Gonsalves song sequence, again and again. If the film hasn’t entered the pantheon of Bollywood’s absolute crowning glories, at the same level as a Sholay or a Mother India, it is perhaps because it is far too unselfconscious, far too ready to give in both to absurd soppiness and absurd jollity, and far too reliant on its preposterous magical-realist location – the Bombay of the 70s.

There is an almost Shakespearean felicity to city life in Amar Akbar Anthony. The woods of Borivali National Park become its Forest of Arden. (It helps that Mumbai is the only city in the world to have a forest plumb within city limits.) The park swallows up a family looking for shelter, and separates them from each other. The three children end up in motherless homes, with three foster fathers of three different faiths. They grow up to inhabit their own magical worlds in different parts of the city, but are always colliding with each other in improbable ways. Anthony’s wadi, an area that is part-fishing village, part-spaghetti Western set, is by turns incalculably distant from and right next door to Akbar’s Muslim neighbourhood. In Akbar’s world, rich conservatives are continually rubbing shoulders with young, impoverished mavericks. Qawwals and doctors envision romantic futures with each other. Eunuchs form a chorus for the hero as he lampoons his girlfriend’s dad as love’s enemy. Even prostitutes get some agency.

All through the film, the brothers run into each other, by turn strangers, antagonists, and friends, and fight, sing, dance and chatter at each other in a profusion of colour and chaos. The Christian breaks out spontaneously into a qawwali at the Muslim’s concert. The Muslim sings a bhajan to Sai Baba in a temple where his long-lost mother miraculously regains her sight. Even the strait-laced, law-enforcing Hindu cop shucks his inhibitions as the film hurtles towards its climax; he dons a fez cap, knickerbockers and concertina, and loses his measured, middle-class diction to break into the Bambaiya argot of the street.

Together, they fight crime.
All of this is generally understood to be too good to be true. There is no more pretence to realism in Amar Akbar Anthony than in the average Bollywood potboiler. But it isn’t just the pulpy by-product of an abstract idealism. The city of the film teems with dangerous coincidences. It is a mess. Dirt and unruliness abound in its frames. Its women are constantly at the mercy of cold-hearted families and villainous vendettas. Betrayal and petty thievery are running themes. But its biggest triumph is in its unabashed good humour. The narrative’s emotional crux is not the eventual reunion of a family long grown apart. What it brings home is the triumph of bonds formed randomly, not by way of blood and oaths, but friendship and faith. In the great loneliness of the throng, the film tells us, separated from our kith and kin and struggling to eke out a living, we can still sing each other’s songs and fight each other’s fights. We may lead segregated, separate lives, but on the street and in the square, we’re still part of a larger pattern.

It is a belief that is now backed up by the work of an increasing number of social scientists, as New York magazine reported in December 2008, in a cover story examining urban loneliness. In spite of their differences from the ideal of the intimate village community, large population centres actually synchronise large groups of people and instill better community virtues in them than small ones do. While strong connections – close family, best friends – proliferate less in cities, the plethora of ‘weak connections’ we form in our daily lives, with the number of people we meet and join forces with over the course of work, travel, meals and more, increases our potential to form those strong connections. In the film’s last sequence, as the boys’ imprisoned father greets his wife, he says to her, “Look at your good fortune – you’ve found not only your three sons, but three daughters-in-law as well.” (It’s a matter of further delight that the mother assents with a joy that few devout Hindus faced with the prospect of daughters-in-laws named Jenny and Salma – the sole Lakshmi happens to be a reformed confidence trickster – would otherwise exhibit).

In the bustle and relentless splintering and re-shaping of Mumbai's civic spaces, those on its streets – its ‘public’ – are always colliding in weak connections. Bombay is a city of commerce and inclusion, where alienation, quite literally, exists only in the imagination. Amar Akbar Anthony’s utter disregard of the divisive aspects of communal life in this space is, in many ways, also the solution to its problems. It builds a fluid, vibrant urban space held together by human links. The proliferation of action on its roads, beaches, places of worship and commercial spaces recalls Aristotle’s comment in the Nichomachean Ethics – friendships form the glue that binds a city together. The film holds up a mirror to the very best face of Mumbai, as a city that makes up in bonhomie and sentiment what it lacks in prestige, discipline and comfort. Chamak aana mangta, as the villain would say. Shakal dikhna mangta.
Make it shine; I want to see my face in it.

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