This article proposes that the film Slumdog Millionaire describes a key moment in the history of India, during the transformation during the 1990s of Bombay into Mumbai. In the film, the life trajectories of Jamal Malik, his Hindu love Latika and his older brother Salim play out against the alteration of the city from conditions of modernity to postmodernity.

Slumdog Millionaire constructs an urban narrative that spatializes and critiques this change and that is built on two tropes. First is the erasure of Bombay’s complex local histories to facilitate its reinvention as monocultural, neoliberal Mumbai, and others are increasing exclusion of the poor from public space.

The film narrates Bombay/Mumbai’s recent urban history as a class war. There is the key spatial registers of the city’s transformation are large-scale urban renewal projects, massive infrastructure redevelopment, class conflict, and increasing inaccessibility of public spaces to the poor.