The city of new Marathi cinema and urban negotiations with caste

With Marathi cinema’s new turn, the contested city has emerged as a key textual preoccupation. This contested site of the urban either becomes the grounds for the negotiation of a hybrid identity – straddling the traditional and the modern – or it functions as a source of dissatisfaction. This article looks at the construction of the cinematic city in three films: Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai, Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai 2 and Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai 3. The trilogy, through the genres of romance and the family film, mystifies the operations of caste in family-mediated marriages, thereby demonstrating how love and the domestic can become a site for urban modes of caste.