Ranked #24 of 100
Salaam Bombay!
सलाम बॉम्बे! · 1988
A boy is abandoned in the city and joins the tea-runners, addicts and sex workers of Grant Road. Cast largely from the street.
- Director
- Mira Nair
- Year
- 1988
- Genre
- Drama
- Cast
- Shafiq Syed, Nana Patekar, Irrfan Khan
Why it's at number 24
Caméra d'Or at Cannes and an Oscar nomination. Nair filmed children as people, not symbols.
A boy is abandoned in the city and joins the tea-runners, addicts and sex workers of Grant Road. Cast largely from the street.
Salaam Bombay! sits in the 1980s alongside Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Umrao Jaan — a decade this canon treats as formative.
The Bollywood 100The essentials
- Directed by Mira Nair — also responsible for Monsoon Wedding.
- Released in 1988, in the 1980s — see everything else from that decade.
- Filed under Drama.
- Read more on Wikipedia, check the full crew on IMDb, or find a legal stream via JustWatch.
Film record Wikipedia — Salaam Bombay! (1988) · data last revised 9 August 2026 · title, year, director and cast are read from that article; this site keeps no independent print record and does not claim one
Editorial The ranking and the case made for each placement — not a measurement · last revised 9 August 2026 · signed by Amit Sharma · the scoring is published in full so the machinery can be argued with, not just the result
No box-office figure, rating or audience score is printed on this page, because none has been independently verified for this film. The dated, sourced money figures the site does stand behind are on the box office page.
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