It would be a travesty of the truth to say that with the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” the Indian movie industry has come of age. That happened long ago. Nonetheless, its success at the box office across the world and now at the Oscars is a watershed for it — and for India. It marks the internationalization of the industry and throws into relief India’s global status. For years, Hollywood and Bollywood catered to two different worlds. In this film those two different worlds have become one.
The movie’s success can be seen as a metaphor for that of India itself — both as an economy and as a partner on the international political stage, whether in the fight against terrorism, in peacekeeping in Africa or in fighting piracy in the Arabian Sea. That is why the film generated such antagonism in some quarters of India. There were demonstrations against it; in some towns, cinemas were even threatened with being burned down if they screened the movie. The opposition was purely political: Advocates of a warped correctness who cannot stomach anyone outside the country knowing about its darker side (the poverty and the crime) joining hands with a Hindu far-right that fears all things Western and is desperate to rebuild political support among the poor which it lost at the last election. That is the real reason it is trying to whip up resentment in the slums against the film.
The suggestion that the film is “poverty pornography,” that the suffering of Indian slum-dwellers was exploited to satisfy Western voyeurism, is opportunistic fantasy. The world knows that there is poverty in India. It also knows that there is great creativity, a thriving economy and that the country is a superpower in the making. Those who attack what is at heart an old-fashioned love story — a film about a poor boy who makes it against all odds and wins the girl he loves, just because it takes place against the backdrop of slums and poverty — should grow up. What do they want? Films about India that show only maharajas or successful businessmen from Mumbai and their happy middle-class friends?
A society that is afraid of anyone noticing its downside is politically immature — and India is not immature. The problem is with some of its politicians. All art is political. So says the far-left. It is highly questionable, although there is a great tradition, from Goya’s brutal images of the Napoleonic war to Picasso’s horrific anti-war painting “Guernica” or, more recently, Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But those who tried to politicize this film and stop it in its tracks have failed. Despite the saffron-rigged protests, the excitement across India at its success at the Oscars is proof of that. Even prisons in Tamil Nadu now echo to the sound of the “Jai Ho” one of its main numbers and for which an Oscar deservedly went to its composer A.R. Rahman.
That is, because in one sense, the film is firmly political. The cinema is one of the ways people expand their horizons (literature and travel are others). Most Europeans have never visited America; most Americans have never visited Europe; but they know and understand a great deal about each other through the cinema and TV. “Slumdog Millionaire” enables non-Indian audiences to identify with its characters and enter into a culture hitherto largely unknown, and do so with pleasure. That is another reason why it has generated such excitement in India.
