Possibly but she seems to still be lucid enough that she is the sole person running her operation. Rangan is also delusional, paranoid and narcissistic sociopath something you gather from just walking around the level. You don’t even have to go to the tower to pick up that info, you can hear about how he gifted a TV to the slums but only made it play his films.
Don’t go messing with me on the language of architecture man! I wrote to OG thesis on what the architecture of Mumbai says about the characters themselves. But if we want to really play this game then I can go right ahead and give you my OG thesis.
Rangan represents the Modern India, the India that is most commonly perceived by the West and is a microcosm of the treatment of India as a developing nation. Despite appearing to be a modern place it is actually filled with people that are either in a service industry, exploited workers and agents of foreign companies on top of being nowhere near finished much like the long road India has to truly developing.
The tower itself clashes with the rest of the slums because the modern architecture and size of the tower represents the wealth disparity of India. The modern architecture not only resembles American gentrified architecture but also the sort of influence American neo-liberalism has had on the top one percent of Indians. The clean architecture just hides the horrible system that works to keep it looking clean those people have it just as bad as the metal workers but slightly better than Shah’s launderers.
Vanya is the complete opposite in that she represents the historic exploitation of the Indian subcontinent. Not only does she act and dress like someone the British installed to power but she bases her operation out of a very British looking railway station. The British railways of India are not only one of the famous monuments to The Raj but they are also a rallying cry for racists and neo-colonists (“The Indians would never have developed a railway if it wasn’t for the Brits!”).
She hoards their resources to use for herself like a Rani and it is reflect everywhere with water, she has a private wash basin and a reflecting pool all for her use on top of her using the luxury sleeping cars for her use but the cargo cars for her guards. She sends every able bodied man, woman and even children to work for her until they collapse and die while she does nothing but take in the net profit of the businesses for herself while granting token gestures like puddles of water and scraps of food.
In other words she is no different than the British Empire’s treatment of the Indian and their treatment of the Indian subcontinent is n different than banditry like Shah engaged with or the dacoity she descended from. No better, different or saner than Rangan’s boastful exploitation of the worker.
The base is overgrown and disconnected from the mainline not because it means she has flown the coop but because she represents something from India’s past they excised for good reason and simply abandoned, left to gather creepers, weeds and crumble into the dirt like so many servants and slaves. It is a failed system and Shah’s true insanity is not her belief that she is a Rani but that it is a system that she can use to her gain.
There is no difference between colonialism and the world development system, they are both used to exploit natives in poorer nations under the hopes that they can gain some level of good for themselves. That is the true meaning of Mumbai as a level, that economically rich nations did exploit nations once as colonialism and twice as capitalism.
Another is pretending and pretensions and how we lose ourselves in what we think about ourselves. Rangan thinks he is a big Bollywood action star because he was a pirate. Rangan is a snivelling, boastful coward whose only skill and use for the pirates was as an accountant. His entire criminal enterprise consists of low risk yet highly exploitative enterprises and he talks about how much he screws around with people behind their backs. We only see him kill once and that is against a defenceless man. He takes that money and uses it to make films where he is the big hero that everyone loves or the fearsome pirate that everyone was scared of.
Shah defaulted to violent thuggery after she was abandoned by The Maelstrom after the raid. She began thinking she was a powerful woman cut from the same cloth as the old ruling class. What she is thought? She is a bandit, she is no better than the dacoity her parents were and she can’t stand how Rangan has some level of adoration among who she considers her property. She forgot that you can rule through fear as much as you can rule through love or both but the main thing is to be respected. She thinks she is respected becuase she is awesome but she isn’t because she is seen as no better than a thug.
Wazir Kale thinks he is some sort of brave fighter for a good cause, the liberation of the Global South from the free market enterprise that stunts their growth, he believes that this makes up for how he treated The Crows the first time around and how he can justify his piracy. However what he is thought is a pirate turned terrorist who is being used by a White guy to enact a revenge plot that just so happens to target people Kale despises.
I think I will end this on a quote because I have run out of ideas and quoting people is what you do when you have no ideas anymore but want to sound smart.
“If you ever want to see who a man truly is, all you have to do is seem who he pretends to be.” - Kurt Vonnegut
But we have deviated from my main point which is I think terrorists and people who commit slavery are worse than serial sexual harassers but not by much. All of the Mumbai targets are reprehensible and no matter how insane they appear they all have control over their actions which is the legal distinction between sane and insane when judging crimes.