At Home in Filmistan

Filmistan Studios occupies five acres in Goregaon, India, which is technically an outer suburb of Mumbai, but denser than most New York City neighborhoods. If you take the train from the city proper and fight the foot traffic that crowds the bazaar area around the station, you’ll reach a pair of steel gates. Just on the other side are Filmistan’s soundstages, which have been in continuous operation since 1943. In the Golden Age of Hindi Film, up to the 1960s, the industry worked along lines similar to those of the old Hollywood studio system, with each production house fielding its own stable of talent. Unlike most of its former rivals, Filmistan has remained open for business as a production facility, and the grounds now accommodate eight stages and several outdoor shooting areas, including a Hindu temple, a jailhouse exterior, and a village. But Filmistan is more than a collection of sets. Behind the scenes, there are real people living there. I came to Filmistan as an anthropologist in training, with a research project that looked solid enough, on paper, to win a Fulbright grant. One thing about ethnography they don’t teach you in school, though, is how awkward it can be getting started. Reaching out to people to do research with—soliciting “informants”—can feel like approaching strangers for a date. Left to myself in Mumbai, with my sunglasses and clumsy Hindi, I was a fieldwork wallflower.

I came accompanied by a camera, which during my first few days in Filmistan made me even more self-conscious. My filmmaker friend Sadia was shooting some documentary footage there, and I pretended to be attached to her crew to share her access. Once through the gates, though, I tried to leave the others behind, heading to the part of the grounds where people were living in what appeared to be a movie set designed to look like a village. I sat around, toying with my voice recorder. The women did their chores and ignored me. If I hung out long enough, away from the camera, I thought, I might earn someone’s trust. As things turned out, when I was finally able to connect with the one resident who had shown an inclination to talk, it was thanks again to Sadia and her crew.

I’ll call him Vikas. He was in his early thirties at the time. He had a slender build—he’s put on a bit of weight since—and rather delicate features. Then, as now, his appearance could be rumpled. For a long time he owned only one pair of pants, and often went about in a shirt and a short lungi wrapped around his waist. But he wasn’t poor in self-regard. Once we hit it...