Honestly, I’m perplexed by the range of reactions that Slumdog has elicited. I liked the movie, had a great time while I was watching it, adored the sound track and cinematography and thought the plot and acting were clichéd. But a week later, I would have forgotten the film if not for all the other hoopla surrounding it.
The core of the controversy seems to be whether the film is exploitative. Who gets exploited (slumdwellers, old India, new India) changes depending on who is levelling the accusation, but each time the claim is that the movie is somehow poverty pr0n.
The main broadside against the film was lobbed by Amitabh who said:
“if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” [link]
He later backpedaled, saying that the words were not his own, and that he had put them up merely to start a debate.
Similar criticism came from former ambassador (and Sree‘s dad) T P Sreenivasan, who saw the movie as undermining new India:
Having read the novel and seen the film, I cannot say that it has done more good than harm to India. This is not a matter of my wanting to shove the reality under the carpet… the film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success.Torture is internationally banned and the director of the film knew that India had not joined the global consensus against torture….The torture scenes do not add much to the story, but denigrates India even more than the slums do… As though the depiction of squalor, crime and cruelty is not enough, the film challenges India’s success. [link]
And an anonymous friend of mine summed up his discomfort with the film by saying:
Anything having to do with the third world that masses of white people go into paroxysms over is guilty until proven innocent…
On the other side are writers like Nirpal Dhaliwal in London, who parry Big B’s thrusts arguing that his discomfort with the movie is revealing:
Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India’s “murky underbelly” as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world’s poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema. [link]
David Bordwell, whose extensive review is one of the best I’ve seen and who is actually fairly critical of the movie, responds to Bachchan by pointing out that the first world has also had to deal with depictions of its own poverty in film (and therefore that this is not a First vs. Third World issue):
Indian criticisms of the image of poverty in Slumdog remind me of reactions to Italian Neorealism from authorities concerned about Italy’s image abroad. The government undersecretary Giulio Andreotti claimed that films by Rossellini, De Sica, and others were “washing Italy’s dirty linen in public.”…Liberal American films of the Cold War period were sometimes castigated by members of Congress for playing into the hands of Soviet propagandists. It seems that there will always be people who consider films portraying social injustice to be too negative and failing to see the bright side of things, a side that can always be found if you look hard enough. [link]
It is bizarre to me that both detractors and supporters of the movie agree that the movie is realistic and disagree about whether this realism is shameful or productive. Sure, SDM was a “more realistic” portrayal of India than your average Bolly flick, but that’s like saying that it was a more realistic portrayal of India than Johnny Quest. To me, the film itself remained fantastical, escapist and Dickensian, more Oliver Twist than clever plot twist. I just can’t be bothered to get my chuddies in a knot over it. Show me a realistic portrayal of India, and then we’ll rumble.
Related: Sajaforum’s roundup, everything on Slumdog on UB, and of course, everything we’ve blogged on the topic
I think the best film should have edutainment. Seems to be it has entertainment, but no education.
M. Nam
100 · Ponniyin Selvan said
well that’s only because the bold hair professionals of india stood up in the nick of time against billu barber.
the title slumdog millionaire captures the contradiction between how his antagonists perceive him, and what he achieves despite (or as it turns out, because of) those odds.
Like the news item you quoted shows, a lot of emotions are attached to how you name a movie in India. At least in that aspect, it is not an Indian movie.
The true character of Yuddhisthira is revealed at the end of the Mahabharata. On the mountain peak, Indra, King of Gods, arrived to take Yudhisthira to heaven in his Golden Chariot. As Yudhisthira was about to step into the Chariot, the Deva told him to leave behind his companion dog, a creature not worthy of heaven to Indra. Yudhisthira stepped back, refusing to leave behind the creature who he had taken under his protection. Indra wondered at him – “You can leave your brothers behind, not arranging proper cremations for them…and you refuse to leave behind a stray dog!”
Yudhisthira replied, “Draupadi and my brothers have left me, not me [them].” And he refused to go to heaven without the dog. At that moment the dog changed into the God Dharma, his father, who was testing him…and Yudhisthira had passed with distinction. [link]
72 · MoorNam said
This is too funny. It is precisely the libertarian ideological obsession with unregulated free markets that got the world into the mess it is in today. The arch villains responsible for the calamity: Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm et al are heroes of the libertarian right not of the Keynesians who are now the knights in shining armor come to the rescue.
http://www.slate.com/id/2202489/
The End of Libertarianism The financial collapse proves that its ideology makes no sense.
101 · MoorNam said
Yes, utilitarian art is da bomb. Edutainment has to be one of the worst portmanteaus (no offense to ms. portmanteau).
alas, i am reft upon the horns of a serious dilemma? whom do i satisfy when i make a movie? utilitarian moornam or escapist melbourne desi?
103 · Ponniyin Selvan said
well, there are a lot of emotions attached to this movie too. should make it perfectly indian then (to the extent that the words “indian movie” mean something in the context of this production which was helmed by brits/irish folk, but had a lot of significant creative input from indians on a variety of fronts).
the indian movies bend to these silly protests (billu barber, sandiyar, and so on) only because their primary market is in india. of course, sdm’s primary market is not india, nor was there much public awareness of the movie before it got legs, so it did not have to contend with the opposition before the movie was released.
Enis,
Phew! finally someone who has the same opinion as me. First of all kudos for the Indians who won the Oscars! (although I personally think that oscar is an award by the West for the West).
I don’t think that SDM was a great film, and I was especially suprised when it bagged the award for the adapated screenplay, which I think is the sloppiest of the film.And really wonder how it’s being called a reality film; what it is, is a typical bollywood film with some really unasthetic poverty thrown in.
I’m not miffed with it for, allegedly, showing the dark underside of Mumbai, but for it being hailed as a most realistic film to ever happen!!! And I’m wondering whether it would have made to the Oscars, if the movie was entirely Indian.
I think we are saying the same things. Of course SDM’s primary market is not India. Not to be repetitive, this is what I quoted from counterpunch first.
Anurag’s post on the genesis of Dev D(last paragraph) which is dedicated to Boyle. [link]
Incidentally, Boyle directed two of my favorite (must-watch if you are a Colin Dexter and Inspector Morse fan) Inspector Morse episodes — Masonic Mysteries and Cherubim & Seraphim. The second one is about growing drug use among English youth and foreshadows Trainspotting.
I am happy that ARR and Resul won Oscars. Dont care for the film maker. Yes, the ones who defend the movie are Uncle Toms. Can one not be happy that your cousin got promoted to being CFO at Lehman and yet still curse bankers and financiers who destroy the economy ? One does not preclude the other.
dipanjan thank you – good learning point.
IBM is also an MNC but I daresay that many claim it is an American firm 😉 I think we shall disagree. Someone made a comment earlier about more DBDs than ABDs being defensive – true and I wonder why ? any analysis ?
What is it going to take for Indians in India to treat each other better, to pull yourselves out of poverty and filth? Why are you guys so cruel (communal riots, cruelty to children, abusive to women)? All the people with the poverty stats I think are right. No more excuses for Indians in India for the way your country is, for the way you treat the poor and others. Indians in America we work hard to be a model minority. Indians in India are a never ending source of embarrassment and shame with everything depicted in SM, to cow urine colas and other weird, and disgusting things. What is wrong with you guys in India? It is your fault India is the way it is – the filth, the cruelty, the poverty. No point in blaming former colonizers. That ended decades ago. And that won’t change a darn thing of India today. I am glad my parents left India. I am glad I am an American. I never want to live in India, ever. I am tired of Indians and India being a never ending source of weird, and symbol of poverty and failure. If 80% and more of your population is poor, then sorry your country is a failure. Indians in India have no one else to blame for all the horrible things depicted in SM other than themselves because they created such a society that the film shows.
114 · melbourne desi said
I recall an Indian director twice making movies about Queen Elizabeth. Did anyone call it an Indian movie?
Also, M Desi, regarding your other comment: “Parents will call their children monkeys but never dogs. It is amongst the worst insults in india – bah am disgusted. enough said.” I am remembering how many of us Indians rushed to defend an Indian cricketer accused of calling an Australian cricketer ‘monkey’. The clinching argument was that monkey is a term of endearment in India, not a gaali.
112 · melbourne desi said
i don’t know what “defend the movie” means. i had gone in to watch the movie expecting more due to the hype. i thought it was mediocre in many respects – primarily that it didn’t have any kind of depth, but had excellent camera and editing work which made it fun for the duration of the movie itself. so yes, i will defend the movie on that ground. rahman’s music was good (it is irrelevant that it was nowhere near his best work in other movies), i especially liked o saaya, so was happy it got recognized for the music. for direction and best movie, well, i haven’t seen the competition, so it’s hard for me to say. i can see why you might be upset at those who see the movie and suddenly think they are experts on daily life in india, but i don’t get the other anger at all.
so you are only comfortable in judging and imputing motives to those you know nothing about? 🙂
115 · Sameer said
well informed comments like yours.
M. Nam, If it’s edutainment you seek, Danny Boyle has a film, nay a woderful example of libertarianism in action for you.
moornam, very creative argument about how movies should show only india shining. but hush! you will let ’em dumb americans in on the great indian plot to lull them into a false sense of complacency as we merrily catch up to them. we still have ’em believing that chinese can fly kick after crouching tiger, hidden dragon.
Melbourne Desi,
Your comment is offensive on so many levels, so anyone that doesn’t agree with your enlightened opinion is an Uncle Tom?
74 · Malathi said
wow! that was really offensive.
many sensible economists – summers, delong, krugman among them, iirc, were predicting a coming recession based on the growing deficit and rising mortage default rates as early as 2006. it didn’t require a crystal ball to figure this out in 2007. of course, the gold standard nutsos have been predicting this for 50 years ever since friedman post ww-ii defined the fed’s fiscal policy thrust, so they are right every time there’s a recession. it’s like always choosing “b” on a multiple-choice test 🙂
yes we are in agreement. Was my previous comment confusing ? Monkey is a term of endearment – dog is an insult.
No more offensive than the delight of millions of western moviegoers at the movie. Just borrowing from the left playbook when making an argument 😉
never said that my cousin is not a cheat unlike other scoundrels on Wall Street but he is my cousin and hence happy.
Again – I have not seen the movie – so all my comments are based a) Australian behaviour when conversing about the movie its depiction of life in india. b) on what others have written online and c) name of the movie.
124 · melbourne desi said
so… arr is an uncle tom. good to know 🙂
yes, they clearly took personal joy at seeing miserable indians. i, of course, assume it is ok if indians are happy when watching miserable indians in a movie made by indians? pick any amitabh movie where he is a kid in the slums, his father is killed by rich people, his mother is paraded around town and humiliated.
the most vociferous opponents of any work of art usually fall into this category 🙂
the other anger is the anger that someone has looked at only perspective of life in India and showed that to the sum of all life. Very similar to Friedman who goes on and on about how wonderful India is as a nation and he talks only to the CEOs of India. It hurts coz someone who is an outsider made into a cariacature so that the whole white world can cluck in sympathy and hold their noses in disgust.
Touche
Khoofia said:
Really? Why? I had this vibrant comment of yours in my mental picture and I remembered that it had made me smile. I didn’t take any offense then.
So why should you?
You are reading a little too much into my belatedly-developing sense of ethnic awareness (not that you are expected to recognize this in a total stranger). But anyway, please, ease a little. You are bristling unnecessarily in a way that is puzzling to me.
“But I think this is the first time that I have seen a movie titled with a “slur name” and that too representing a hero. It’s kind of odd in India.”
laawaris. and now, kaminay.
128 · Malathi said
for various reasons it was actually quite hurtful to be told i maintain certain biases you accused me off. actually really quite painful. le singhada… but never mind. it’s all the internets. ve shouldnt be so serious. for all you know i’m a stooped over thatha who uses a horn on his ear and just drops in to flirt with the laolee lay-dees the right side of fifty [that means you port. hope the gout’s better].
Man Bites Slumdog
port – hope you didnt mind the little poke. i am well aware f your profile from your vday protest site. 🙂
*sorry for the sidetracks. i’m out.
“But I think this is the first time that I have seen a movie titled with a “slur name” and that too representing a hero. It’s kind of odd in India.” shri 420. awara. hindi movies commonly have the epithet, “gandi naali ki keede (an insect in a dirty sewer)*,” commonly used for the hero. why does no one object to such slurs in hindi movie? because that is how folks talk.
in this movie, the inspector uses “slumdog” to abuse jamal, and the title juxtaposes slumdog with the unlikely millionaire.
meanwhile, you know what i find offensive? that people use “my servant”/naukar or “my maid”/naukrani to describe domestic workers. we have become immune to degrading each other on a daily basis, but we yelp in pain when we hear the word ‘slumdog’ in a ‘foreign’ movie title.
*my personal favorite is “khooni darinde.”
dipanjan @ #111: thanks for the PFC links. it is a pain to format and link on chrome. other browsers are so much slower here. and reminding us that dharamraj was a dog for a little bit.
Photos from the kids visit to Disneyworld
yes. my skin creeps at that too. it is equivaent to “my slave”, and especially awful when the “servant” is an 8 year old. of course, the household justifies it by saying they’re offering sanctuary to a kid and giving him or her rudimentary education – or he’d be out there starving on the streets. i know. desh and motherland and all that blah – but i’m really happy here, thank you very much.
“hope you didnt mind the little poke” come now, venerable khoofster, word on the street that little is not the right adjective to describe le poke.
On the Servant thing:
It’s only in America that the word “servant” is thought of as “dirty.” It’s a euphemistic treadmill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#The_.22euphemism_treadmill.22), so just because in the US we prefer to call them “custodial engineers” or whatever doesn’t actually change the reality of what’s going on.
Man George Carlin would have had a field day with this idea. “These people have been bullshitted by the system into thinking that if you change the name of the condition you change the condition!”
I think everyone’s missing the major point that SDM was a studio project. Developed at Warners and Produced at FOX. Films are really high risk and expensive. It’s a big marketing push for the US-UK-India Co-Production Agreements, which allowed Reliance to invest in Dreamworks and Will Smith to invest in Bollywood. This is what can happen when a studio actually backs a project. When Indians invest in Hollywood in the middle of a recession, you get Rahman and Bharat Natyam at the Oscars. There is still money in India. Personally it was satisfying to see the man behind “monkey brains” go to India to save his studio last year. Dreamworks is also obligated now to slate several shows for production in India annually. And guess what? Indians want a piece of that pie. Otherwise they would not have invested in it. So all this talk of cultural appropriation is a little vague to me. Did “Kal Ho Naa Ho” appropriate American culture? Why was it shot in Hindi?
As someone who makes films, distributes films, and markets films — SDM is way more marketable overseas than “Traffic Signal” (2006, Hindi), “Tale of a Naughty Girl” (2003, Bengali), and other features coming out of India with similar “street life” subject matter. In fact, those films barely made a blip on the radar Domestically. For several reasons : 1-Pace of Editing and Storytelling, 2-Acting Performance Style, and 3-the cinematography that made ‘Trainspotting’ a cultural phenomenon in its time — a film with its own famous Toilet Scene.
I was actually expecting a Bollywood director to step up the adrenaline on the “Goonda” / “Rags to Riches” genre like this years ago. It’s scene by scene a reference to any classic Hindi film — “Bombay”, “Don”, “Qurbani”, “Mother India” (1959) and a screen version of “Maximum City”. Most of the story is Mumbai street lore. There’s really nothing so shocking that we haven’t seen or heard about before. Maybe the film was subjectively shot, and that’s why it hit a nerve with people. Indian directors & their audience have a completely different aesthetic and taste — and most of the up and coming directors are still on their first feature. Boyle is 50. Every year I watch every single film that comes out of South Asia and the diaspora, and it’s really hard to find something that is in fact edgy, soulful, and marketable to a cross-over audience. Bollywood has its own Worldwide audience with its own taste.
I’m glad that some of the world class desi production crew members are FINALLY getting props on the world stage. They never get credit for the sheer SCALE of production in India. Imagine trying to silence an entire Mumbai block for a take or do crowd control at the Taj Mahal? Imagine Actually being the Wardrobe Assistant who has to keep track of all the costume changes in a Bollywood film? Not to mention lighting, grip and electric, and stunning Indian cinematography. Never gets credit. Rahman should’ve gotten an Oscar years ago. For that reason I’m glad they are all finally getting their due, and it will only bring better work to the game. I agree with the comment someone made about a “global” film drawing on many influences. Let’s kick it up a notch.
“Man George Carlin would have had a field day with this idea. “These people have been bullshitted by the system into thinking that if you change the name of the condition you change the condition!”
oh brilliant interlocutor, does saying ‘slumdog’ in a movie title leave slum dwellers worse off? the point was about slumdog being offensive; i suggested that it was how i have heard people talk. and i noted that the typically indian usage of the ‘servant’ is far greater cause of concern because it implies subservience and inferiority rather than an exchange of money and service. the word ‘servant’ reflects an entire mentality toward domestic workers, that i for one, have not observed in the US or Europe or Australia (except perhaps in the sabhnani household). if we realized how that word encapsulates a deeply flawed mentality, perhaps we’d do something about not only the title, but also the substance. maybe you’re aware how unisex professional titles came to be preferred in official correspondence — that usage both reflected and initiated change in how working women were perceived and treated. carlin would tell you to go light a bonfire now 🙂 what else are you going to do with the strawman you just demolished?
In my grad school, I have seen my North Indian friends use behenchod / matharchod casually. I dont watch many Hindi movies, so am not aware of the titles with ‘slurs’. We need a dictionary of bad words used in all languages for comparative studies. I have not heard similar words used in Tamil as frequently. (son of a prostitute is the commonly used bad word in Tamil). Too bad that men drag in unrelated women to curse some other men.
No. Slumdog Millionaire was produced by Film 4, the British Production house. Fox Searchlight are their distributors in America. Warner Brothers were going to send it straight to DVD before Fox picked it up for distribution. It is a British funded and produced movie. It’s important to correct this mistake you made. Slumdog is NOT Hollywood, it is a British indie, technically speaking.
All those whiners in India complaining about the filmmakers treatment of the kids in India. Why aren’t they giving jobs to the kids. SDG paid those kids more than what a typical Bollywood production would have. Why aren’t Bollywood filmmakers trying to use those kids in their movies giving them some immediate income to live in better houses? I thought the solution SDG filmmakers came up with works two fold – their salaries were more than what they would have gotten if they worked in a local production for the same amount of work, and they got their education taken care of.
Having said that, I hope all those rich celebs can donate some money to the kids at those oscar parties. One party costs as much as what it takes for one of those families to live on for a year.
“In my grad school, I have seen my North Indian friends use behenchod / matharchod casually.”
me too — it is common. also ‘saala.’ but not the tamil abuse you mentioned. the epithet i mentioned i’ve seen in hindi movies which depict a protagonist who lives in poverty (eg the bachchan-rajnikanth-govinda starrer ‘hum’ might have it).
I’m curious then. How do they decide what is a ‘Foreign film’ and what is in the general category, when they decide all the awards? Aren’t British films considered ‘foreign’? Or can ‘Foreign films’ compete in the regular category also if they want to?
To be eligible in ‘foreign’ film category, a film has to be produced outside US AND the dialogue track has to be ‘predominantly’ non-English. British films are not “foreign” because of the language constraint. On the other hand, Letters from Iwo Jima did not qualify because it was an American production even though the language was Japanese.
Movies in foreign languages are technically eligible for all ‘general’ categories if they were released commercially in LA county during the year, ran for at least seven days, and had English subtitles. In practice, though, they are rarely considered. Till now, there have been only 8 nominations in the Best Picture category, and Slumdog is the first partly foreign language film to win Best Picture.
145 · dipanjan said
Thank you, Dipanjan!
Besides all controversies of caricaturing, justice, poverty porn etc. – People made money and got awards, unknown stars got media light and hype, some kids got to see America and Disney Land, slum kids got educational opportunity to improve their lives, Freida gets international exposure and lands a role in Woody Allen, Vikas Swarup’s obscure book gets attention, Bollywood/Mumbai/India and other issues are in the limelight besides outsourcing mania…what more of “profits” and “spinoffs” do you need…paisa wasul…what next ?
well said Shilpa ….
English language. Has to be in the English language. I think about one third of SM is in Hindi, and that is the absolute limit for it to still be eligible. Funding of the movie was contingent on it being in English, not only for commercial reasons, but to make it eligible for the awards. Danny Boyle had to fight to get even the scenes of the kids early life to be in Hindi. He fought hard for it.
Good point Pravin. But you know the answer as well as I do. Because India is full of flatulent, whining hypocrites.