Slumdog Millionaire distorts Indian reality, conceals India's prosperity

By Aditya Pradhan

The story of Slumdog Millionaire encapsulates almost all the dirt and squalor that one could conjure up in the slums of Mumbai. Eyes being gouged out of young children who are introduced into beggary, children dipping into sewage tank (very similar to the scene in Steven Spielberg’s black & white classic Schindler’s List) and garrulous prostitutes in dingy rooms lining both sides of narrow lanes all make up for picture postcards of Mumbai slums.

There are two starkly differing opinions on Slumdog Millionaire, the recently released pot-boiler on Mumbai slums, that is all set to become the first Academy Award winner with Bollywood actors. When you watch the movie on the first day of release at a multiplex in Mumbai back-to-back with Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, you come out of the theatre feeling inured by all the debate surrounding Slumdog Millionaire. Changeling is by far the best movie to come out of Hollywood in the year past, and the best ever of Clint Eastwood. The period thriller is a true story of corruption, incompetence and high-handedness of Los Angeles police department in the 1920s. People in the Third World, rich and poor, would certainly identify with this movie, much more than Slumdog Millionaire. Angelina Jolie, as a victim of police subversion, lethargy and insouciance, plays her role with a conviction that is seldom seen in stars. Period movies have been Angelina Jolie’s best performance platform. Last time when she played her role as an adulterer in the Original Sin the world sat up to take notice.

But full marks should go to Clint Eastwood’s direction in Changeling. The narration of the story is simple and straight almost as if reading a book, shorn of much gimmicks that Hollywood is known for. His attempt at making audiences realise a mother’s angst, misery and pain after having been given a different child by the police in place of her son who has been kidnapped, comes as a clean winner.

When it comes to Slumdog Millionaire the debate is consumed by the right and wrong of it rather than the film’s excellence. To begin with, the direction and the story narration is as melodramatic as the breast-beating in Tamil movies of the 80s. Vikas Swarup’s novel adaptation could have been in all sense better put, as RK Narayan once said of his novel Guide which created history when its story was adapted in Dev Anand’s all-time greatest hit. Needless to say, Allah Rakha Rahman’s music is as bad as it gets. The music sounded as if he had to complete composing the score in one night. If Golden Globe judges had heard Rahman’s earlier works in movies like Indira, Kadhalan and many others they would have realised their mistake. The movie was done in a hurry, admit many of the technical team members of Slumdog Millionaire, and AR Rahman is known to deliver his tracks in his own sweet time. This time the pressure of churning out a quickie for a white production team took an obvious toll on the music director’s delivery.

The story of Slumdog Millionaire, on the other hand, encapsulates almost all the dirt and squalor that one could conjure up in the slums of Mumbai. Eyes being gouged out of young children who are introduced into beggary, children dipping into sewage tank (very similar to the scene in Steven Spielberg’s black & white classic Schindler’s List) and garrulous prostitutes in dingy rooms lining both sides of narrow lanes all make up for picture postcards of Mumbai slums. But portrayal of sex workers in Mumbai could have not been better than in Madhur Bandarkar’s Page 3. The fact remains the story, the direction as well as the portrayal of various characters in Slumdog Millionaire get extremely predictable or in Bollywood parlance, ‘filmy’. The movie only did not have the Hollywood hero’s trademark let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here retort to impress the western audience.

If the movie was couched in realistic terms so much so that Anil Kapoor as Amitabh Bachchan in Kaun Banega Crorepati sounded like the original star of the show, then Danny Boyle does not have any credible answer as to why Anil Kapoor was mocking at the contestant (a ‘lowly chaiwala’) almost to the point of indignation. Amitabh has every reason to be offended at his portrayal. Nor is the editing of the movie anything great to write home about. The whole build-up of hype around the movie reminds one of the new found appreciation of Miss World and Miss Universe organisers towards Indian beauty after our economy was liberalised to allow international cosmetic giants to sell their wares in India.

But Irfan Khan, whose role as a typical Mumbai police officer in the movie, has a point of view. According to Khan, the poverty shown in the movie is not unknown or fake that we should be so outraged. The real picture of poverty is so overwhelming in most parts of the city including the plush areas of south Mumbai. And as Mahesh Bhatt said, if we Indians are outraged by the abject poverty, the dirt and the squalor, we should be working towards eradicating poverty rather than protesting against the portrayal of that poverty in movies. But the question is not of portrayal of poverty, but having an agenda to ridicule and show a country in bad light. It is that agenda which the Slumdog Millionaire production team is accused of. Well, if a book like The World is Flat written by an American journalist can sing paeans to the Indian genius and put India amongst the technologically advanced nations then we should take films like Slumdog Millionaire made by an Irish as the flip side of it.