This chapter looks at Zoya Akhtar's Gully Boy (2019) to examine the relationship between Mumbai and its working-class communities and language, particularly poetry. The city plays a central role in the film as that which inspires, intrigues, gives and denies its people in a complicated relationship that demands to be examined. By using gully (street) rap to capture all these sides of Mumbai and reflect on the social and economic realities of its residents, Gully Boy represents the conflict between the city and its citizens.

This reflection is inspired by Murad (Ranveer Singh), the film's subaltern Muslim protagonist, who because of his position has a compelling outsiderinsider relationship to this consuming space. Murad traverses the city from slums to skyrises, encountering and living through the tension that Mumbai, at once a city of dreams and a city of deprivation and exclusion, holds. In Gully Boy, this tension is explored by drawing on two enduring Hindi film character types to fashion Murad as a shayar (poet) who also carries the baggage of the tapori (urban vagabond). In the form of rap lyrics and dialogue, language becomes a way for Murad to chronicle, occupy and claim various parts of the cinematic metropolis that at once claims and rejects him as this vagabond figure, becoming the poetic voice of the city's tensions.

I present this argument in four sections: in the first, I examine how the rise of Mumbai as the ‘global city’ and its relationship with its proletarian citizens play out through Murad's engagement with Mumbai. In the next section, I show how Murad navigates this urbanscape using gully rap, making him a descendant of the shayar figure. The third section draws a contrast between Murad and two previous incarnations of the urban shayar – Pyaasa's (Guru Dutt 1957) Vijay (Guru Dutt) and Namak Haraam's (Hrishikesh Mukherjee 1973) Alam (Raza Murad) – to discuss how Gully Boy departs from the politics of those films by adhering to a neoliberal order. In the final section, I interpret the shayar/tapori characterisation of Murad by examining his language and class location in the context of a need to emphasise the ‘local’, showing how language becomes a mode of subversion.