One Church, Two Bombays: Amar Akbar Anthony, Mount Mary and the Strange Geography of My Own Life

On the Feast of Our Lady of the Mount, a look at how Manmohan Desai turned Mount Mary in Bandra and Don Bosco in Matunga into one cinematic church, and why that piece of Bombay movie geography has followed me all my life.

There are certain places in Bombay that transcend geography.

They are addresses, certainly, but they are also repositories. Of memory. Of community. Of faith. Of cinema. Of generations who may never have known one another but who have climbed the same steps, stood beneath the same arches and attached their own stories to the same piece of land.

For Bandra, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Mount is one such place.

And today, Sunday, September 13, 2026, is the Feast of Our Lady of the Mount.

The annual Novena has concluded, the Feast has arrived, and the familiar transformation of the Mount and its surrounding lanes has begun. The Feast falls this year on September 13, with Bandra moving into that familiar week of devotion, pilgrimage, commerce, sweets, candles, family ritual and neighbourhood theatre that has shaped September here for generations.

For somebody from Bandra, Feast is difficult to explain purely as a religious observance.

It is religious, of course. Deeply so.

But it is also neighbourhood memory. The candles. The wax figurines. The sweets. The crowds climbing towards the Basilica. Families making the same pilgrimage their parents made before them. People who have moved away returning because some rituals continue to exert their own gravitational pull.

Catholic Bandra is at its most visible during Feast week, but Mount Mary has never belonged exclusively to Catholics. Bombay, being Bombay, has always been more porous than that.

And perhaps that is why one of Hindi cinema’s great celebrations of religious plurality found its Christian geography here.

Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony.

Anthony’s church begins in Bandra

Released in 1977, Amar Akbar Anthony remains one of the grand monuments of Hindi popular cinema.

Three brothers are separated as children. One is raised Hindu, one Muslim, one Christian. They become Amar, Akbar and Anthony.

Their mother is Nirupa Roy.

Probability politely excuses itself from the room.

What remains is Manmohan Desai.

The film was never interested in realism in the narrow sense. Its universe is powered by coincidence, faith, melodrama, music and an almost Puranic willingness to make separated people orbit one another until destiny finally reveals the pattern.

And within this wonderfully impossible construction sits Amitabh Bachchan’s Anthony Gonsalves.

Anthony needed a church.

For the exterior, the filmmakers turned to Mount Mary in Bandra.

It was a clever choice because Mount Mary requires very little introduction.

The building does the exposition for you.

For generations of Bombay residents, the façade on the hill already carried meaning. Even audiences who did not know the ecclesiastical history of the Basilica understood its cultural vocabulary.

Catholic Bombay.

Bandra.

Pilgrimage.

Mother Mary.

Anthony’s world.

One establishing shot could accomplish what pages of dialogue could not.

Then Anthony walks inside.

And, cinematically at least, we cross the city.

Inside, we are somewhere else

The wonderful wrinkle in this story is that the interior associated with those church sequences was filmed separately.

Published accounts of Amar Akbar Anthony commonly identify Don Bosco with the interior material, with local Bombay memory placing that part of the cinematic church at Don Bosco in Matunga.

There are competing retrospective claims about some church footage from the film, so one should be careful about converting decades of location lore into unquestionable scripture.

But the Bombay tradition around the sequence is wonderfully persistent: outside, Mount Mary. Inside, Don Bosco.

And that is the version that fascinates me.

Because it means that Anthony can effectively stand in Bandra, cross a threshold and find himself in Matunga.

No taxi.

No Western Express Highway.

No traffic.

One cut.

Manmohan Desai solved Mumbai commuting decades before anyone else.

More importantly, he created a church that exists completely only in cinema.

Its exterior belongs to one part of Bombay. Its interior belongs to another. Editing performs the marriage.

Why would a filmmaker do that?

There does not appear to be a surviving declaration from Desai saying, “I chose Mount Mary for this reason and Don Bosco for that one.”

So anything beyond the documented locations becomes interpretation.

But the cinematic logic is easy to understand.

Mount Mary provides an extraordinary exterior identity.

Don Bosco provides a highly usable sacred interior.

The first tells the audience where Anthony belongs culturally. The second gives the camera the church world required for the scene.

Filmmakers do this constantly. Cinema has never been under any obligation to respect municipal boundaries.

A doorway in one city can lead into a room in another country.

A palace can have three different buildings playing its exterior, corridor and bedroom.

Bombay cinema was particularly gifted at this kind of geographical alchemy because the city itself offered such an astonishing concentration of architectural languages.

Gothic.

Art Deco.

Indo-Saracenic.

Portuguese Catholic.

Colonial institutional.

Modernist.

Industrial.

Village.

Metropolis.

All within the same filmmaking ecosystem.

Desai merely treated the city as an enormous backlot.

And, of course, Amar Akbar Anthony should have a composite church

There is something almost too perfect about it.

This is a film constructed around synthesis.

Three brothers.

Three religions.

Three cultural identities.

One family.

Amar does not cease being Amar when the truth is revealed. Akbar does not cease being Akbar. Anthony remains magnificently Anthony.

Their reunion does not erase the worlds that raised them.

Instead, the film makes those worlds coexist.

That is one reason Amar Akbar Anthony remains such a powerful artefact of a particular Indian popular imagination. Its pluralism is loud, sentimental, imperfect, theatrical and completely uninterested in subtlety.

It makes its argument with songs, miracles, comedy, blood and Amitabh Bachchan climbing out of an Easter egg.

There are probably more academically respectable ways of expressing national integration.

Few are as entertaining.

Even Anthony’s name carries another layer of Bombay film history. The character’s surname was famously taken from Anthony Gonsalves, the Goan composer, arranger and music teacher whose influence extended through the Hindi film music industry.

So Anthony is already an assemblage.

Goan name.

Bombay Catholic mannerisms.

Bandra church exterior.

Matunga church interior.

Hindi film superstardom.

India, compressed into one gloriously improbable man.

Then the story becomes strangely personal

Perhaps this is why I have always found this particular piece of film geography more affecting than an ordinary location-trivia anecdote.

There are five coincidences here that are almost embarrassingly neat.

The first is that my father’s name was Anthony.

The second is that I am from Bandra. I was born here, on 16th Road. Mount Mary was never an exotic Mumbai landmark encountered through a tourist guide. It belonged to the geography of home.

The third coincidence makes the circle tighter.

My father’s business was called Mount Mary Cycle Shop.

So before I ever thought seriously about films as cultural documents, before Alt Bollywood existed, even before I could have understood the peculiar geographical trick Manmohan Desai was performing, the words “Mount Mary” were already embedded in my family’s everyday vocabulary.

Then comes the fourth coincidence.

I went to Don Bosco in Matunga.

More than that, I lived on the campus for almost four years.

Think about the absurd symmetry of that for a moment.

The exterior of Anthony’s cinematic church belongs to the neighbourhood in which I was born and to the name of my father’s business.

The interior belongs to the campus on which I would later live for years.

And my father’s name was Anthony.

At some point coincidence begins to acquire the texture of narrative.

But there is another layer to this connection that reaches beyond geography.

My father’s own roots carried some Khoja Lohana ancestry, yet he was adopted and raised by an Anglo-Indian East Indian family. My mother, meanwhile, was born into a Hindu Brahmin family.

So even within my own family history, inherited identity and lived identity do not travel in perfectly straight lines.

Bloodline, adoption, religion, community and culture overlap.

They interrupt one another.

They reassemble.

And that makes Amar Akbar Anthony feel strangely familiar to me in another sense.

The film’s central conceit is that one family can contain multiple religious and cultural worlds without any one of them cancelling the others out.

In my own family, those layers happened through ancestry, adoption, conversion, upbringing and circumstance rather than melodramatic cinematic separation, but the underlying complexity is recognisable.

There is Hindu ancestry.

Khoja Lohana ancestry.

Anglo-Indian and East Indian family culture.

Catholic upbringing.

Bandra.

Bombay.

All of it occupying the same family story.

That, perhaps, is why the film’s famous religious triptych has always felt more interesting to me than a simple slogan about communal harmony.

Identity in India has rarely been neat enough for slogans.

Sometimes it is inherited.

Sometimes it is adopted.

Sometimes it is given to you.

Sometimes it is chosen.

Sometimes several of those things happen within the same generation.

And sometimes you inherit a family history that contains all of them.

Then there is the fifth coincidence.

I now run Alt Bollywood.

So here I am, decades after Amar Akbar Anthony was filmed, running a publication about Indian popular culture and writing about a fictional church assembled from two physical places that happen to map almost perfectly onto my own life.

Bandra outside.

Don Bosco inside.

Anthony at the centre.

A family history crossing religious and cultural boundaries behind it.

And now Alt Bollywood chronicling the whole thing.

Cinema has a peculiar habit of waiting for you in places you did not realise you were already travelling towards.

Bombay understood Anthony Gonsalves

There is another reason Anthony matters.

His Christianity is unmistakably Bombay Christianity.

It is stylised and frequently caricatured, certainly. Hindi cinema’s representation of Catholics has historically been an untidy mixture of affection, stereotype, fascination and comic invention.

But Anthony is bigger than the stereotype.

Bachchan makes him irresistible.

His speech patterns, clothes, theatricality, humour, religiosity and strange linguistic universe turn him into one of Hindi cinema’s indestructible characters.

And the decision to anchor that character visually at Mount Mary was significant.

The Basilica was already one of the great public symbols of Catholic Bombay.

Anthony emerges from a cinematic imagination in which Bandra, Goan musicians, parish culture, Anglo-Indian and East Indian influences, Catholic institutions, English-inflected Bombay speech and Hindi popular cinema continuously collided with one another.

This was never some marginal culture sitting outside Bombay modernity.

It helped build Bombay modernity.

Catholic musicians helped create the orchestral language of Hindi film music. Catholic schools educated generations of the city’s children. Bandra became one of the central residential and cultural districts of the Hindi film industry.

The supposedly “minority” culture was sitting inside the machinery of mainstream Indian popular culture all along.

Anthony Gonsalves merely made it visible.

Loudly.

Mount Mary and the great Bandra contradiction

The Mount itself embodies something similar.

It is simultaneously intensely local and astonishingly cosmopolitan.

It belongs to the parish and to the metropolis.

It is Marian Catholic devotion and Bandra street carnival.

It is candles and commerce.

Prayer and memory.

Old families and visitors who travel across Mumbai.

The sacred and the everyday live next door to one another here without requiring much explanation.

Perhaps that is the most Bandra thing about it.

Our Lady of the Mount can be approached through formal Catholic theology, through family tradition, through neighbourhood identity or simply through the accumulated memory of generations who have returned to the same hill every September.

Cities build their own rituals this way.

Eventually nobody alive remembers the first time.

They simply know to return.

Manmohan Desai’s Bombay was never supposed to be literal

Sometimes old Hindi films are judged according to a kind of realism they never promised.

That misses their intelligence.

Manmohan Desai was building mythology.

The infamous simultaneous blood-transfusion sequence in Amar Akbar Anthony is medically ridiculous and cinematically perfect because biology is not really the point of the scene.

The image is.

Three sons.

Three faiths.

One mother.

Blood returning to its source.

Desai understood something essential about popular storytelling: an image can be factually absurd and emotionally precise.

The composite church works in much the same way.

Mount Mary and Don Bosco become one building because, for the purposes of Anthony’s universe, they need to be one building.

Cinema joins them.

And once the edit has happened, millions of viewers carry around a place that does not quite exist anywhere except in their memories.

That may be one of cinema’s strangest powers.

It creates geography.

Happy Feast, Bandra

So today, on the Feast of Our Lady of the Mount, I find myself thinking about Anthony.

The fictional Anthony Gonsalves.

The real Anthony Gonsalves.

My father, Anthony.

His Khoja Lohana roots.

The Anglo-Indian East Indian family that adopted and raised him.

My mother’s Hindu Brahmin roots.

Mount Mary.

The cycle shop that carried her name.

16th Road.

Don Bosco, Matunga.

Four years of my life on that campus.

And Alt Bollywood.

What began as five coincidences starts to look less like a chain of trivia and more like a miniature map of Bombay itself.

Different faiths.

Different inheritances.

Different families.

Different neighbourhoods.

Different histories.

One life containing all of them.

Perhaps that is why old films endure.

We change around them.

Cities change around them.

People die. Businesses disappear. Schools become memories. Streets acquire new buildings. Neighbourhoods become more expensive and less recognisable. Generations arrive with no recollection of the Bombay that made these films.

But the film remains.

And sometimes, if you return to it many years later, you discover that it has quietly collected pieces of your own life.

For me, Amar Akbar Anthony now contains a church with Mount Mary on the outside and Don Bosco on the inside.

Somewhere between those two doors sits an Anthony.

Behind him sit several Indias.

And somewhere, improbably, sits a piece of me.

From all of us at Alt Bollywood, to Bandra’s Catholic community, to everyone making the pilgrimage up the Mount today, to Bandraites near and far, and to every Mumbaikar for whom this week carries a memory:

Happy Feast of Our Lady of the Mount.

Happy Feast, Bandra. 🌹