Slumdogs & Millionaires
Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by Indian in India, Observations
I have watched Slumdog Millionaire, an Indian story directed by British director Danny Boyle three times now. Each time the theater was packed, and each time the film was met with a standing ovation (even at a film market where the room was packed with cynical film buyers).
For years I have nursed a resentment against Indian cinema, also known as Bollywood. Slumdog Millionaire is an English language film with more Hindi in it without sub titles than in a three hour Bollywood flick. Bollywood is a name given to rag-tag collection of song dance sequences with astonishing pelvic shoving and rotating movements by middle aged men and women. The songs are woven together without dialogue and story, by superstars who earn more than Bill Gates, into three hour obscenities.
Slumdog Millionaire is a profoundly moving experience. To Indians living outside India it is a film that brings great relief. We can now stop lying about India and its lightening progress and prosperity. The film has revealed the truth of Indian life as no other film or documentary has ever been able to do. The drama itself is fictional and at times flimsy, but the the frantic camera work set in real Mumbai slums, the direction, and the acting have an honesty about them unseen in Indian cinema or life. We no longer need to cling to a false image of India that is on a fictional ride to super-powerdom to feel proud as Indians. We no longer need to close our eyes and shut our minds to the unspeakable levels of poverty, crime and decay in our nation. It is equally a relief for those westerners who have pretended to buy the Indian yarn of great strides of progress so they do not step on the feelings of us Indians. Now that the truth is out in the open, it has set us free. We can genuinely feel good for what we are as Indians and what we have achieved as individuals and a civilization. But we must also truthfully and honestly embrace the naked reality of the deep malaise of the country and how irretrievably many millions of lives are being lost to poverty.
There is no undermining Indian achievement but the yarn has been spun too thin. India’s status as an economic entity and a global power hangs by this thin yarn and every so often deep troubles are exposed by many small failures. In Slumdog, the film based on a novel by Indian civil servant Vikas Swaroop, we finally have an image of India that we can embrace and thus stop pretending about the non-existence of this real India.
There are more Indians living in slums than the entire population of Holland. Indians as a prosperous class are only to be found outside India where their abilities are not constrained. There are also more Indians on world’s rich lists than any other developing country with such enormous poverty. We can now let go of all fake presentations on India’s golden age and admit that much of the wealth that we see in the country has been criminally obtained. Wealth obtained legitimately is criminalised by a corrupt system of such depth and proportions that it has no parallels in human history. The real opportunity and some prosperity has been created by individuals despite the state. Just like the heroes of this film, prosperity comes at a high price to Indians. It requires more than good intention and effort, it needs compromises and pain no one should endure.
The star of the film Jamal and his brother Salim are what Indians call serial entrepreneurs. They constantly invent professions and expertise to get by. They represent a billion people of India where enterprise is the only way to survive. They are all trying to break through or die trying the ring fence of corruption restricting every aspect of economic life. Only a rare few ever break. Most urban poor are like Jamal, the Slumdog, who acquires knowledge through crumbs of overheard conversations and has one in a ten million shot at wealth.
I have no way of knowing how it will be received in India. I hope that the film will be welcomed and that it will be a cause of celebration and introspection.
That introspection will not come from Indian cinema. Most Bollywood movies now have one genre – superstars play the ordinary dude playing the superstar who gets the babe in the bikini. The Indian cinema had a claim to dreams for many decades. Now it has moved into indefensible territories of make-believe that can only rear corruption in young minds and distract people from a reality they need to fix. But Indian cinema is not the cause of India’s problems. It is just one of the symptoms. The introspection provoked by this film must go beyond cinema.
The empirical and statistical arguments of India’s growth that have been presented to the western world need to be set aside. The global financial system has failed and no one gives a fuck about India’s growth rate generated by computer financial models. Even if they return, foreign handouts and speculative casino capital will not forge India’s future. It will be made at home if Indians are liberated from the crushing poverty, corruption and crime. What India needs is a recognition of the dire condition in which the Indians now are. Urban and rural poor in hundreds of millions are living far below subsistence. And if they are above it, there is no cause for trumpeting their movement across this imaginary line of poverty, because that is hardly an existence either.
The least we can do is acknowledge this truth. With that alone starts the process of saving lives and building them. Nations are made of people not statistics. We, the privileged Indians, must look in the eyes of slumdog Indians and find ways to rekindle hope that they can have a shot at millions too without selling their soul to the devil. Go see the film and spare a tear for India.
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