All We Imagine as Light (2024)

directed by Payal Kapadia

Faiz Elahi

The group chat is busy this evening. We’ve got texts coming from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates, where my friends and I grew up in UAE’s Indian diaspora. We’re roasting each other for my pretentious taste, one friend’s lack of it, and the ones whose tastes fall in between. Then the text, the seed that will sink deep and sprout much later pops on my screen:

J: What’s the point?

J: Your prejudiced ass won’t watch Hindi movies no matter how good they are 

Prejudiced?

I’ve watched less than ten Bollywood films since the beginning of high school almost fifteen years ago. I don’t watch India’s cricket matches. I don’t listen to Indian music. My Hindi has become rusty. I don’t have a single Indian friend in Montreal, where I’ve lived for three years. I don’t push my Ts, I hide my Rs, and I don’t end sentences with “only.” My extensive references have become world literature, foreign films, and songs in languages I don’t understand. My empathy is for everyone but my people. A strange push outward. An unacknowledged prejudice.

I’ve never been more disconnected to my “roots,” whatever those might be. But how do I even articulate what those are? Unlike Britain or America, the Middle East isn’t far enough for India to dwindle into an abstraction. I studied in an all-Indian school, ate Indian food, grew up around Indian people in a little microcosmic Indian bubble. It wasn’t until I reached university that I engaged with other cultures. I grew up as Indian as possible. Today, however, I don’t “feel” Indian enough.

This impostor syndrome only made itself known after I arrived in Canada to study for my master’s degree. It started during an introductory session, where I observed faces of all colors, including brown folks from the Indian subcontinent—born and raised. We all had to answer the question “Where do you learn/know from?” It’s an inclusivity exercise to account for how we attain knowledge and experiences in a world of rampant globalization. Saying I was from India when looking at my Indian classmate felt wrong. She’s Indian! She grew up in Rajasthan, studied in Delhi, and now she’s here. She gets to claim her Indianness, not me. I lack her experiential knowledge. Only 50% of my material references are Indian—MDH, Parle G, R.D Sharma. I’ve only ever been a visitor to India. Every time I purchase something in India, I need to convert the cost from Indian Rupees to Dirhams to comprehend how much I spent.

I’m a Non-Resident Indian (NRI). I don’t know what it’s like to live in India. Isn’t that what constitutes being “from” a place? Since that introductory session, when asked where I’m from, I say, “I was born in India, and I was raised in the United Arab Emirates.”

By my second year in Canada, I observed how those who looked like me often flocked to those who looked and sounded like themselves, finding comfort in creating pocket dimensions instead of assimilating with the population. I was critical of them, thinking myself superior. I couldn’t see an Indian immigrant as an immigrant. They began to look like outsiders who didn’t care to integrate. I was born in India, but I was raised in the UAE. I’m different. I’m not like them. My lens had become Western. I had become what Desi populations back in the sub-continent call a “coconut.” Brown on the outside, white on the inside.

When you’re a coconut, you don’t get to claim Indianness. On the other hand, it’s a pipe dream to expect the Middle East or the West or anyone else to claim you as one of them. I’ve become neither from here, nor from there.

My divergence from my Indianness began several years ago. I stopped watching Bollywood films. I jumped off that ship because I felt the quality of that film industry was falling. However, it’s easier to stay connected with your culture if you engage with its cultural production—films, music, cricket, etc. But I lost touch with all of it and my connection with the motherland waned. Concurrently, I engaged with other cultures and their cultural productions, particularly that of the West. My taste in film, literature, music, and culture changed. It grew more “sophisticated.” Less Indian. Over several years, I reached the mistaken conclusion that sophisticated art and Indian cultural production are mutually exclusive.

My pretentious self was very excited to hear that All We Imagine as Light, a film by an female Indian director, was nominated for the Palme D’Or and received the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Finally, an Indian film worthy of my attention. Perhaps because it was receiving validation from the West?

But what is an “Indian” film? India is the most diverse country in the world. It was a quality, I was taught as a kid, that every Indian should be proud of. The art, sport, language, food, and cultural practices change from one state to another. Every state has a different English accent. Each Indian state is like a different country. This is why India has the largest number of film industries of any country in the world. Indians don’t say a film is from India. Indians say it’s a Bollywood film, or a Telugu film, or a Marathi film, to designate its belonging to the film industry of a particular state. Saying a Marathi film is “Indian” is like saying a Spanish person is from Europe.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is a curious case for an Indian movie. The film has dialogue in the Indian languages of Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, and a little English. This is a Malayalam film, but not fully. It is co-produced with companies from France, India, Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Italy. It’s edited by Clément Pinteaux, a filmmaker from France. This isn’t a film fully produced by India and its state-specific industries. I wonder if it could be what it is if it were.

I cannot help but see myself in the film’s creation: I was born in the state of Telangana. My Indian friends are from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Kerala, and more. The Indianness is positioned more broadly. It doesn’t conform itself to the experiences of growing up in one state. I am not 100% from Telangana, and All We Imagine as Light is not 100% a Malayalam film. The identity is in flux.

It’s this flux that All We Imagine as Light opens with. Rather than opening with its leads, the film starts with a voiceover. Various voices speak about why they moved from their rural homes to the city of Mumbai. While this is a film about three women in Mumbai, it’s also about urbanization in India: the movement of rural populations to urban areas.

All We Imagine as Light is about three women who immigrated to Mumbai. They work at the same hospital. Prabha, who works as a senior nurse, is from the state of Kerala. Prabha’s husband is in Germany, and they have not spoken in at least a year. Prabha’s journey is about reconciling how the lack of her husband’s presence affects her—that she might have to let him go. Anu, who is younger than Prabha, is her roommate and works at the hospital. She’s in a secret relationship with Shiaz, and they’re both of different religions, complicating their future. Anu and Shiaz are also from Kerala. Parvathy is older than Prabha and works in the hospital. She’s being harassed into leaving her home because her husband is dead and did not leave her the papers for their home.

I have tertiary knowledge of Mumbai, formerly Bombay. My father tried building a life there years before I was born. I learnt about Mumbai in secondary school. I have several friends from Mumbai who have told me much about it. Mumbai is where Bollywood is. It’s where the richest and the poorest live. It’s pandemonium.

Because of my tertiary knowledge of Mumbai, I was surprised by how quiet Kapadia’s film is. In that quiet, I understood why it may have appealed to Western audiences so much. It’s specifically universal. But that specificity isn’t particularly new to me, or anyone from India or its diaspora. A friend who follows Indian cinema closer than I do thought it said nothing new. It’s overflowing with so much reality that it nearly fails at being mimetic.

Yet, in doing so, without ever offering to, All We Imagine as Light gave me something I didn’t realize I was searching for since my friend accused me in jest. As the film progressed, I unconsciously began to search for India(ns) in the film’s characters. Thus, they transformed before me.

Parvathy was the first to change. Even when she surrenders her fight for her tenement, because she doesn’t have any papers to prove her tenancy, because she is poor, because she wasn’t expected to know of such things, because her husband is dead, and thus her status as a woman is invalid, she still fights for her autonomy. She refuses to move in with her son and instead takes a job in her village. As she kept fighting for herself within the intersectional bounds of gender and class, she transformed into my grandmother, whose startling vigor for independence within the bounds of property, her health, and relationships with extended family is a story of its own.

Anu changed into my first flame when she asked Shiaz about their future; their relationship only progresses once they candidly discuss their prospects as a Hindu woman and Muslim man. Unlike Shiaz and Anu, my relationship didn’t progress. She and I parted ways after those discussions.

Prabha had already changed into several people by then. Prabha’s quiet longing and distance from her husband turned her into some of my in-law cousins, who married my brothers but don’t see them for several years because the men provide by working in other countries. Later, when a female coworker whispers about Anu’s relationship, Prabha rejects it, saying “That can’t be. She’s not like that.” Prabha then resembled my mother and my teachers in school—how they conduct themselves with such austerity regarding romantic love, lust, and longing. I saw my father in Dr. Manoj (who timidly attempts to court Prabha), who struggles to fit in in Mumbai. My father tried to make it in the city years before he married my mother. He hated it, and he left.

Like the narrative of this film, I’m a product of urbanization. My parents left their town for another country to seek opportunities. But they have spent half their lives viewing India through their memory-reduced lenses at a collage of news reports, the milestones crossed by family members, and their gossip. My parents’ India, divorced from the materiality that makes a place, has become a product of the people they know there.

Can’t a place be a people, not just its material conditions? Because that’s what my home in the UAE also is: my friends and family, not just its blistering July heat, Chai Karak, and smooth roads.

And so is Canada, which I’ve called home for the last three years. The country I jumped through so many hoops to be allowed to study in, where the immigration officer looks at me as no different than any of my compatriots. Where the delight felt by the politeness of my peers, neighbors, and officials has lately given way to the gnawing feeling that perhaps they think that there are too many of us. That despite my privileged status, my advanced education, my not-so-Indian accent, my nice Western clothes, and my “sophisticated” taste, us Indians are all the same this far from the motherland. Nothing but spicy food, Punjabi MC, and rampant overpopulation.

I watched All We Imagine as Light in a full Montreal theater, filled with people of every ethnicity. The entire theater applauded as the credits rolled. As I watched the red credits roll on the black backdrop, I sat with the realization that I had just seen the Indian from which I learnt. I saw all the Indians I ever knew. I saw me. I had been so focused on all the ways I wasn’t Indian. I had forgotten all the ways in which I was.

That outward push away from my Indianness has weakened. In the months since, the push has become a pull, its polarity switched, that prejudice turned to yearning. It became a desire to know Indian cinema, food, cricket, and people. I noticed the force I hadn’t felt in years, the same which I felt the last time my family and I were leaving my grandmother’s home in India for our home in UAE.

I look back, as we exit the bumpy driveway that shakes the image of them diminishing in the rear window. Standing there is my grandmother, joined by my uncles, aunts, and cousins, all waving non-stop. A physical sensation takes over me. My throat closes, my eyes burn, and my neck buzzes. I can’t help but wave back through the window, unsure if they can see. I feel a pull towards them. It is the pull of home.

Faiz Elahi is an Indian writer who earned his M.A in English from McGill University, Montreal. His work can be found in Film Obsessive and The Film Magazine. He can be found on Instagram @faiznailed8.