Documentary form and spectral citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

Despite its aesthetic experimentation, its intervention into urgent questions about citizenship and belonging in contemporary India, and its attention to the most iconic of Indian cities, Mumbai, Madhusree Dutta’s 2006 documentary film 7 Islands and a Metro – and Dutta’s work more broadly – has yet to receive the critical attention it demands. Addressing this gap, this article examines Dutta’s use of spectrality to structure her search for a documentary form that makes room for Mumbai’s marginalised subjects to narrate themselves into its representational histories and contemporary spaces. Key to Dutta’s approach is a visual dialogue between the city’s historical ghosts and its spectral citizens – those who exist in a state of dispossession and social invisibility in the present, such as women, migrant workers, casteized and Muslim subjects, and the urban poor. Through this spectral framework – a dialogue between the living and the dead, which is also an intertextual dialogue between the past and the present, the fictional and the actual – Dutta’s film probes the complexities of representation and self-representation, agency, and access to story-making processes and platforms. Dutta’s formal play foregrounds the multiple ways in which the city and citizenship are mediated, represented, and claimed, and the multiple ways in which spectral subjects are produced and displaced. Her aesthetic experimentation – particularly her use of spectrality and performative modes of representation – enables reflections on the ways in which spectral subjects seek to render themselves visible in the city and claim themselves as active agents and participants in the making of Mumbai.