This article proposes that the film Slumdog Millionaire depicts a key moment in the history of India — the transformation during the 1990s of Bombay into Mumbai. In the film, the life trajectories of Jamal Malik (its Muslim protagonist), his Hindu love Latika, and his older brother Salim play out against the metamorphosis of the city from conditions of modernity to postmodernity. Recent scholarship has suggested this transformation involves the erasure of Bombay’s former cosmopolitanism. The article argues that 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. This is expressed through the use of settings where the city’s former architectural palimpsest is being razed to create homogenized redevelopment areas. Second is the increasing exclusion of the poor from public space — a point the film makes through its selective use (and avoidance) of traditionally emblematic public spaces. Overall, the film narrates Bombay/Mumbai’s recent urban history as a class war between what Rahul Mehrotra has called the “kinetic” and the “static” cities. The article also builds on Nezar AlSayyad’s argument that cinematic representations frequently draw on urban discourses in narrative construction — and, conversely, that cinema may serve as a lens through which to examine the cultural foundations upon which these discourses are built. In this regard, Slumdog Millionaire refers to three urban/architectural spaces invested with specific ideological meaning: Dharavi, an organic settlement of vernacular architectures used to represent old Bombay; Lake Castle, an apartment building used to depict Bombay’s neoliberal transformation into Mumbai; and Victoria Terminus, the Gothic Revival train station which serves as a site of contestation between those who would preserve the city’s multiple histories and those who would overwrite them.