Filmed on location in Dharavi, the 2018 Tamil film Kaala takes as its central theme the brew of corruption-ridden slum redevelopment, rightwing politics, and urban cleansing that defines contemporary Mumbai. True to history, landless Tamil migrants from the south of India did develop Dharavi out of swampland in the early 20th century and now form part of the labor backbone of the city. They therefore claim a right to the city. Like the real-life SRS, the redevelopment scheme portrayed in the film is slated to evict some slum residents to make way for luxury housing, while supposedly resettling eligible residents. In a notable scene, a non-governmental representative (Kaala’s long-lost Muslim love interest) can be seen helping to secure the slum dwellers’ consent for the redevelopment scheme amidst heated questions from the slum dwellers. While she starts out with faith in the scheme, ultimately she realizes—as a woman and non-Hindu herself—that the bigoted politician does not have the best interests of the slum dwellers in mind. Though the film does not explicitly call its characters “Dalit” or “Brahmin,” the symbolism is transparent. The dark-skinned slumlord, Kaala, played by south Indian actor Rajnikanth, wears black and embraces his blackness and Buddhism (a direct reference to BR Ambedkar’s turn to the egalitarianism of Buddhism against the casteism of Hinduism). The light-skinned upper-caste politician wears and surrounds himself with white, performs his Hindu piety, and refuses to drink water in Kaala’s house. Here is a struggle between a symbolic and racialized “black” versus “white,” where the “white’s” claim to purity is premised on denying the “black’s” humanity. Kaala’s plot dynamics reverse the classical ethical binaries: what is white is corrupt; what is black is heroic. And what is heroic can only be understood through a slum’s eye view: after all, Kaala is not universally “good.” A hustler and gangster to the core, he is introduced with all the fanfare and accoutrements of the modern-day crime lord, and he metes out brutal revenge with masculine bravado on anyone who threatens him, his territory, or his loyalists. The film ends with a spectral dollop of magic realism with a globalized hip-hop score: as the eviction begins despite his heroic efforts, Kaala, believed to have died in a fire started by the politician’s thugs, magically reappears as if given a second life. Or is it a mirage? Every slum dweller holds up a picture of Kaala’s head as the screen explodes, first with black, and then with the spectrum of colors. In what seems to be an on-screen reinterpretation of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Kaala rises from the ashes as the multi-headed Ravana, the dark-skinned demon-king from the south whom the upper castes want to rid the world of. Along with politicized reversals of classical Hindu mythology, the film’s fantastic plot is infused with feminism, anti-casteism, and anti-racism, producing an ethical affordance, that while rooted in a slum’s eye view, is also firmly pro-social justice.