Playing the subaltern: Irrfan Khan as the migrant worker in ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’

By Umang Kumar
Khan allows the viewer to enter the unvarnished world of the migrant worker and struggle along with him each moment – buying biscuits at the kiosk; sipping chai; doing sit ups as his coffee is drained; taking his family to the mall, dressed in a fresh, untucked bush-shirt with a kerchief under the collar; trying to participate in the new India by indulging a whim for expensive perfumes, as if to reclaim something the city and the society owe him.