Dead in the streets: Watching ‘Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro' with Saeed Akhtar Mirza

The Hindu

23-04-2025

For a film that unfolds as a chronicle of a death foretold, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro opens in resplendent liveliness. A young, brash man struts down (or up?) a Mumbai street, seems to 'own the street', according to the film's director, Saeed Akhtar Mirza. 'My name is Salim Pasha, the public calls me Salim Langda,' announces Pavan Malhotra, then a young man of 30, in insolent voiceover. He walks with movie-star assurance, proudly massaging his wrist, dark birds gliding in the dawn sky. A BEST bus pulls up behind him, and Salim, ever the punk, makes way. He will die a dog's death by the film's end, but there's time.
The 1980s are popularly viewed as an era of unmitigated trash in Hindi film, yet out of the muck bloomed such incendiary works as Ardh Satya, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro. For Mirza, one of the boldest (and coolest) exponents of the Parallel Cinema movement, the film rounded out a loose quartet of films with playfully elongated titles: the previous entries were Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978), Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai (1980) and Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho (1984). All four films were set in Mumbai; each homed in on a protagonist representing a certain social class, and each distilled, in its own way, the moral, political and existential collapse of its time.
Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro was recently screened in Mumbai, as part of the Versova Homage Screenings (VHS) initiative. It was my first trip to a VHS screening; they've shown 21 films so far, small, curated gatherings at assorted venues, typically ending with a conversation with the filmmaker. Mirza, now 80 and residing in Goa, turned up for the screening, and was in conversation with Sudhir Mishra, who assisted the director on multiple films, including Salim Langde Pe...
Mirza shared a lovely origin story for his penultimate film. While shooting Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho in Do-Tanki, a lower-middle class Muslim neighbourhood in South Mumbai, his set was intercepted by a young hoodlum of 23; though Mirza, shooting on limited film stock and a paltry budget, was incensed by the interruption, he was duly advised by his local 'protector' not to react. The trespasser, he was later told, was a shooter for the D-gang. 'He owned the street, he owned the neighbourhood,' the director recalled observing.
Mirza described Salim Langde... as an 'essay' film mapping the anxieties and aspirations of a 'ghettoised mind'. The film, he emphasised, was made in a specific social and historical context: the textile mill strikes that disenfranchised Mumbai's working class, the 1984 Bhiwandi riots, the trouble in Kashmir and the buildup to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Salim, a low-level enforcer for a local 'seth', gets by thieving and extorting and hanging around street corners with his two buddies. He has a rascally laugh that Malhotra makes oddly endearing, and he professes a weary, street-toughened philosophy. 'Ek pai ki mistake nahi bardaast karti yeh duniya (this world is unforgiving),' he says, a coarse poetry in his agitated tones: Salim's language, per Mirza, is influenced by his Deccani roots.
The film's best scenes unfold inside Salim's home. With simple pans and tilts, cinematographer Virendra Saini evokes a world. Salim's father, we learn, lost his job in the mill strikes, and his elder brother, Javed, an electrician who worked at a factory, died in a mishap. His mother toils at the sewing machine, while his sister—so the family concludes—has come of marriageable age. Salim feels the weight and humiliation of his circumstances, though he is not, as yet, fully equipped to investigate its true origins. Like many of the director's heroes, his consciousness is raised by degrees, through conversations and late-night reflection. 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness,' wrote a certain German philosopher from the 19th century (quote that to Salim and he will likely reach for his rampuri.)
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Much like his late contemporary, Shyam Benegal, who passed away last year, Mirza's reputation as a 'serious' social thinker obscures his yen for humour. Even as bleak and pessimistic a work like Salim Langde Pe... packs a barrel of laughs, with zingers and quips as serrated as knives. 'This country has a long queue of patriots,' spits a character at one point. 'Don't add to the traffic jam.' There are also the countless cameos that make you pleasantly misty-eyed: Tom Alter as a sweet-natured hippie, singing 'Mera Joota Hai Japani' for street urchins in a slum, Neeraj Vora hawking digestive herbs with a long blowhorn, and, my favourite, Ajit Vachani as the venerated Rafiq bhai, a calm, cautious equanimity in his eyes.
After the screening, an audience member told Mirza, in a matter-of-fact way, 'thank you for reflecting our times.' Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro does that to you. The communal tensions that simmer throughout the film are now the bland order of things. The fringe is the mainstream. Mirza, as ever, was even-toned in his self-assessment. 'I'm not an oracle,' he said, adding a little later, 'but I had my ear pretty close to the ground.'