Back to Bombay follows the deaf actress Deepa Shastri on a journey of discovery to India to visit the family she hardly knows.

As she travels to meet her relatives, visits deaf schools, finds new friends, and experiences the social lives of young deaf people there, she starts to form a powerful sense of the life she might have led if she had been brought up in India rather than England. Back to Bombay is a VEE-TV documentary special made for Channel 4.

Back to Bombay was produced as a one-off special for VEE-TV, the popular Channel 4 series made by a young deaf production team. It follows the journey of Deepa Shastri, a British/Indian actress and presenter, as she returns to India for the first time since leaving there as a baby. Deepa lived in Mumbai for several months as a baby, but when her parents discovered she was deaf they decided to move back to the UK, fearing she would be treated as an outcast in India.

This trip back to India in December 2004 was a chance for Deepa to meet and get to know her extended family and to find out more about the life she might have had if she’d stayed there. Before leaving, her excitement about the trip was mixed with nerves about what would happen when she got there. How would she be able to communicate? Would she be able to lip read her family with accents and pronounciation that was completely different to British speech? Would she be able to meet deaf people there? How would people in India view disability, and how would they react to her independence as a young woman? Deepa’s experience there was mixed from the outset.

Her initial worries about communication were pushed aside - as people use their hands and gesture so much as part of everyday speech in India, communication was often easier than it would be here in the UK. But she became aware that disability rights were almost non existent - disability is defined as ‘abnormal’. Sign language is still largely not recognised by official bodies – there are only 2 registered interpreters for an estimated 3m deaf people in India at present, and oralism is predominant in deaf schools across the country. Yet despite this, Deepa discovered an active and vibrant deaf community. She met many deaf people working to improve access and opportunites for deaf people (though there wasn’t time to include them all in the final film which had to fit the 25 minute VEE-TV timeslot.)

In the film, Deepa visits two deaf schools. The first uses only oral methods, and we see a class teacher relying heavily on repetition to teach deaf children to lip read and speak. Sign language was not allowed at this school, although the children used it when they weren’t being watched. For Deepa, visiting the school was a powerful experience. She was very aware she might have been a pupil at a school like this had she stayed in Bombay. As she says in the film, it would have been impossible for her to be who she is today if she had been taught in this way – without using sign language to fully understand, express and develop ideas. The school that Deepa visits in rural India is very different.

Here, the husband and wife team who run the school encourage the children to communicate in whichever way they feel most comfortable, but the problems they run up against are very different. In rural/tribal India, many people are not even aware that deafness exists, so the teachers here go on expeditions into the jungle and mountains to find deaf children, then have to persuade their families that they are deaf and explain what this means – that their child is just as able as other children but needs to be able to communicate in order to learn and develop.

Overall the trip left her with a strong sense of wanting to come back and work with deaf children towards pushing deaf rights and awareness in India. It also left her with a fuller sense of herself, having come to understand more about her background, her religion, and her own deafness.