MUMBAI: Searching for the Private Realm

"Mumbai, then, is a complex, crowded, and intense city seemingly filled to the brim, and while the entire city seems to be the public realm due to this crowdedness, The Lunchbox explores the dabbawalla system as a Habermasian representation of the public realm that links people in intimate ways."

Mumbai appears to be similar to Berlin in a way—it’s a city in which the private realm is very much separated from the public, but for a very different reason. This reason is that Mumbai is just far too crowded to really accommodate “private space” like Berlin or Moscow might. It’s one of the most densely populated cities there is: with a population of 12.5 million people, it has a density of 20,694 people per km squared. 

Unlike Moscow, with its host of open space in the public realm, Mumbai is lacking much of this public space at all. According to “Redefining the Public Realm in Mumbai,” an article on Designwala:

Mumbai as a city is expanding with public spaces diminishing … Mumbai has a severe dearth of parks and playgrounds to cater for it’s rapidly increasing population. The quality of public realm in our cities is essential if we are to make our cities livable and working environments suitable … Development of private-public spaces in Mumbai so far has been restricted to multiplexes, atriums and malls that is not accessible by all and social development has been neglected by the government.

In a Habermasian sense, the public realm is complicated here: the city is just so crowded that while everything might be considered public space. The entire landscape is seemingly in flux, and an attempt for the private realm is met through unusual forms of mediation—not just cultural mediation as with Doblin in Berlin, although those certainly also exist in bringing Mumbai into the urban imaginary. 

One such way is the dabbawalla system as explored in The Lunchbox—”a delivery system that collects hot food in lunch boxes from the residences of workers in the late morning, delivers the lunches to the workplace, predominantly using bicycles and the railway trains, and returns the empty boxes to the worker's residence that afternoon,” according to its Wikipedia entry. 

The Lunchbox is just one small small slice of the private, intimate moments that occur through this system. Ila and Saajan meet and converse through notes in these lunchboxes through most of the film; the eventually fall for each other, and their private moments are interestingly mediated within the overwhelmingly crowded public sphere of the city. This dabbawalla system thus links the public with the private while also preserving its intimacy.

Here, we see one of many scene in which Saajan and Ila exchange words through handwritten notes—which, in a city overflowing, is a rare moment of intimacy. The dabbawalla system is thus the perfect example of how certain mediations can exist in a city where there is a “diminishing” amount of public space.  

Therefore, while it might seem difficult for the public realm to even exist in a city this overcrowded, there are some ways of breaking down the barriers and having the two coexist. This complicates the relationship between the public sphere and the private: ultimately, in searching for these intimate moments, those living in Mumbai can still find their private realm in the midst of what appears to be a city built entirely of the public realm.