Salaam Bombay! is a 1988 Indian Hindi-language drama film, directed, co-written and co-produced by Mira Nair. The screenwriter was Nair's creative collaborator Sooni Taraporevala. This was the first feature film directed by Nair. The film depicts the daily lives of children living in slums in Bombay (now Mumbai), India's largest city. It stars Shafiq Syed, Raghuvir Yadav, Anita Kanwar, Nana Patekar, Hansa Vithal and Chanda Sharma.
Nair's inspiration for the film came from the spirit of Bombay's street children and how they lived. Production began in early 1988, and the film was co-financed by the National Film Development Corporation of India. After being released worldwide on 6 October 1988, the film grossed an estimated at the overseas box office, against a production budget of only $450,000.
Nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 61st Academy Awards, the film was India's second film submission to be so nominated. After its initial release on 11 May 1988 at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, Salaam Bombay! achieved significant critical acclaim. It won the Caméra d'Or and Audience award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi, the National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Film and three awards at the Montreal World Film Festival. The film was on the list of "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" by The New York Times.
Plot
Before the start of the film, Krishna has set fire to his elder brother's motorbike as retaliation for being bullied by him. His angry mother has taken him to the nearby Apollo Circus and told him that he can only come home when he earns 500 rupees to pay for the damage. Krishna agrees and starts work for the circus.
The film begins as the circus is packing up to move on to its next site. His boss asks him to run an errand but when Krishna returns he finds that the circus has left. Alone, with nowhere to turn, and without the money to repay his mother, he travels to the nearest big city, Bombay. As soon as he arrives, he is robbed of his few possessions. He follows the thieves, befriends them, and ends up in the city's notorious red-light area of Falkland Road, near the Grant Road Railway Station.
One of the thieves, Chillum, a drug pusher and addict, helps Krishna to get a job at the Grant Road Tea Stall and becomes a mentor of sorts to him. Baba, a local drug dealer, employs addicts like Chillum. Baba's wife, Rekha, is a prostitute and they have a little daughter, Manju. Rekha is annoyed that she has to raise her daughter in such an environment. Baba had promised to start a new life elsewhere, but it is a promise that Baba cannot, or will not, fulfill.
Krishna gets a new name, "Chaipau", and learns to live with it. His goal is still to raise the money he needs to return home, but soon finds out that saving money in his new surroundings is next to impossible. To make matters worse, he has a crush on a young girl named Sola Saal, who has been recently sold to the brothel. He sets fire to her room and attempts to escape with her, but they are caught. The fire causes Krishna to get a severe beating, while Sola Saal, who is considered valuable since she is still a virgin, denies starting the fire and tearfully tries to resist her enslavement. The madame of the house asks Baba to "tame her," which Baba agrees to do.
Meanwhile, Krishna, as well as working at the tea stall, works odd jobs to save some money and help Chillum, who cannot survive without drugs, especially after being sacked by Baba after a disastrous interview with a foreign journalist. Eventually, one of these odd jobs costs Krishna his job at the tea stall. To get more money, Krishna and his pals rob an elderly Parsi man by breaking into his house in broad daylight. Krishna eventually finds out that the money he had saved eventually has been stolen by Chillum for drugs, which he had overdosed on fatally.