For hours last Monday morning, India stayed glued to television sets. No, it was not a minute-by-minute account of a Mumbai-like terrorist attack that held the nation of one billion spellbound. Nor was the whole country watching a cricket match, which can often keep it away from all other occupations.
The anxious millions were watching the multi-star Oscar awards ceremony at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Their patience was rewarded, and their prayers were answered. “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film about Mumbai and ordeals more familiar than terrorist strikes to the less-fortunate citizens of the country’s financial capital, made a spectacular sweep, winning eight awards, including two for iconic music composer A. R. Rahman.
The collective sigh of relief over the repeated honor for the film – which had earlier won the Golden Globe and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards – was more than audible over the media. But that did not avert a controversy on the message and meaning of the film and the awards.
Whether it is an Indian film or not is not the most important question to be raised. British director Danny Boyle made it, but it was made in India and with an Indian cast about an Indian subject. A more serious debate has raged over the way the film projects India to the outside world.
The saga of the slum kid, who wins a fortune in fairytale style in a television quiz program and wins back his love too in the bargain, has been described as a salute to Mumbai’s spirit and decried as a slap on India’s face as well. Both sides have adopted unconsciously ironical stances in the bitter exchanges on the subject.
People who have had no problem whatsoever with India’s strategic partnership with the George Bush administration, for example, have espied a deep and diabolical imperialist conspiracy in “Slumdog.” Conversely, sections of the media which endorsed the right-wing poll slogan of a “shining India” in the past have evinced the same enthusiasm about selling the film with the slum as its soul.
The contradictions are easy to crack. Behind the great importance both sides attach to the film is its impact on India’s place in globalization as they perceive it. Adversaries of “Slumdog” see it as an attempt at denigrating India and denying its status as an emerging “superpower” and all associated goodies, including multinational investments and military alliances of a matching kind. Media supporters of “Slumdog,” on the other hand, see the film and the Oscars as adding further glitter to its globalized image.
Bollywood (as the Bombay cinema industry is known) has produced other films based on the Mumbai slum and its children. The most unforgettable, perhaps, is “Boot Polish” (1954), about the city’s shoe shining boys. “Slumdog,” however, presents starker images of poverty and squalor. It does indulge in exaggerations, but few can deny the facts of deprivation and exploitation that the director is dealing with.
Trying to defend the film in terms acceptable even to its trenchant critics, Rahman has said that it is “all about the power of hope in life.” But there are hopes and hopes.
In the beautiful lines of a song in “Boot Polish,” an avuncular friend of child workers asks them: “Hum se na chhupao bachho humein bhi batao,/ Aane wali duniya kaise hogi samjhao. (Don’t hide it from me, kids; tell me, too, what the coming world will be like.)” And, in a rousing chorus, they reply: “Aane wali duniya mein sab ke sar pe taaj hoga, …./badlega zamanaa ye sitaron mein likha hai (In the coming world, every head will wear a crown, …./ The times will change, this is written in the stars.)”
Contrast these lines with the crucial ones of “Jai Ho,” the climactic song in “Slumdog Millionaire.” As translated evocatively by unnamed authors in a blog called Inkspillz, the lines say: “Iota by iota, I have lost my life, in faith,/ I’ve passed this night dancing on coals,/ I blew away the sleep that was in my eyes,/ I counted the stars till my finger burned, …./ Taste it, taste it, this night is honey,/ Taste it, and keep it,/ It’s the heart, the heart is the final limit…./ Come, come my Life, under the canopy,/ Come under the blue brocade sky!”
There is a difference between a hope for the children of Indian slums and the hope for some fortunate individuals of the fraternity. There is all the difference, of course, between revolutionary hope from social change and the rags-to-riches hope of a fairytale romance.
But isn’t there hope, too, that the latter can lead back to the kind of hope left behind? The Oscar winner can perhaps serve to prompt, in however small a way, revival of socio-political concern over the rights of the urban poor.
“Slumdog,” after all, has hit the screen at a time when pre-emptive wars and unchecked profiteering have revived ideas of presumed obsolescence in a “post-ideology” period. It is not only in developing countries that ghettos deserve a place in the globalization debate.
