Poetic Transposition and Uneven Freedom: Space, Materiality, and Imagination in All We Imagine as Light

Abstract

Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light moves from an observational encounter with Mumbai toward more character-bound forms of desire, memory, and imagination. This article defines that movement as “poetic transposition”: a social fact is carried into a new sensory or imaginative register while the constraint that organizes it remains legible. The opening produces a polyphonic urban address through the non-coincidence of migrant voices and city images; it is not yet free indirect form in the Pasolinian sense. Ordinary things then differentiate the women's positions: a rice cooker materializes marital absence, a burqa tactically regulates visibility, and missing documents make Parvati institutionally illegible. At the coast, Prabha and Anu gain room for emotional and erotic movement, while Parvati's return combines dispossession with renewed familiarity, pleasure, and social agency. The fisherman sequence finally gives Prabha's absent husband a provisional body and constitutes the film's clearest instance of character-bound free indirect perception. In dialogue with recent work on recognition and friendship, the article argues that the film offers a poetics of uneven freedom. Care and imagination create real forms of release, but their benefits remain differentiated by housing security, mobility, and access to interiority.