[Assam] From Outlook India--More on SDM

[Chan Mahanta]

Slumdog Paradox


http://www.outlookindia.com/fullprint.asp?choice=1&fodname=20090205&fname=slumdog&sid=1

Indian criticism of the film reveals the chasm 
between the country's self-perception and 
projection and any reasonable measure of its 
achievements. The squalor of the slums depicted 
in Slumdog is closer to reality than an 
elaborately choreographed Bollywood dance 
sequence shot on location in Switzerland.

SADANAND DHUME
The unexpected international success of Slumdog 
Millionaire has pleased some Indians while 
provoking unusually strong protests from others. 
The critical and commercial success of the film, 
contrasted with sharp criticism and a lacklustre 
run in Indian theatres, captures the inherent 
contradictions of an increasingly globalised 
country. India basks in the glow of international 
recognition, but resents the critical scrutiny 
that global exposure brings.

Not since Sir Richard Attenborough's Gandhi has a 
film about India captured the world's imagination 
as strongly as Slumdog Millionaire, director 
Danny Boyle's gritty yet uplifting drama about a 
boy from the slums of Mumbai who makes good as a 
game-show contestant on the Indian version of  
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The low-budget 
production -- which cost $15 million to make, a 
pittance in Hollywood terms -- has garnered both 
commercial and critical success, grossing $96 
million worldwide as of February 1st, and picking 
up four Golden Globe awards and 10 Oscar 
nominations. In one among a raft of glowing 
reviews, Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern 
hailed Slumdog as "the world's first globalized 
masterpiece".
In India, however, the response to the film has 
been ambivalent. Commercially, it has failed to 
replicate its American success. Despite a wave of 
publicity and an ambitious nationwide rollout, 
Slumdog is showing in half-empty theatres. It 
trails the box-office receipts of an obscure 
Hindi horror movie released the same day. And 
though some Indian reviewers praised the film for 
everything from inspired casting to an improbable 
Bollywoodish storyline, it also attracted its 
share of brickbats. On his blog, Bollywood star 
Amitabh Bachchan struck a populist note: "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." The 
critic Meenakshi Shedde dismissed the film as "a 
laundry list of India's miseries." Interviewed in 
the Los Angeles Times, film professor Shyamal 
Sengupta called the film "a white man's imagined 
India."
In many ways, Slumdog Millionaire is a metaphor 
for India in the age of globalisation. The 
director, Danny Boyle, and screenwriter, Simon 
Beaufoy, are British. The male lead, Dev Patel, 
who plays the part of the quiz-show contestant 
Jamal, is a Gujarati whose family migrated to 
London from Nairobi. His love interest, Latika, 
is played by Freida Pinto, a Catholic girl from 
Mumbai, India's most cosmopolitan city. The novel 
upon which the film is loosely based, Q and A, 
was written by an Indian diplomat currently 
stationed in South Africa. The television game 
show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which 
supplies the film's narrative backbone, is 
another British creation. Adapted in more than 50 
countries, the show is recognizable to audiences 
from Beijing to Buenos Aires.
The film's success also underscores India's 
emergence on the world stage. Indeed, the 
superficial similarities with Ang Lee's Crouching 
Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the 2001 blockbuster set in 
Qing dynasty China, are striking. Both films draw 
on the talents of a widespread diaspora: Michelle 
Yeoh, Dev Patel. Like Crouching Tiger, Slumdog 
taps into Western curiosity about a country whose 
weight is increasingly felt in ordinary lives. 
Service workers in the West worry about being 
"Bangalored," or losing their jobs to less 
expensive competitors in India. Credit-card and 
consumer-appliance users routinely deal with 
customer-service professionals in Gurgaon or 
Hyderabad. In America, one no longer has to live 
in a big city to be familiar with yoga or chicken 
tikka masala.An Indian company, Tata Motors, owns 
the iconic automobile brands Jaguar and Land 
Rover. India-born professionals helm Pepsi and 
Citibank. Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri occupy 
a similarly exalted place in fiction. To sum up, 
it seems unlikely that a story set in the slums 
of Manila or Jakarta would find nearly as large 
an audience in Boston or Baton Rouge.
For India, one of the most autarkic and 
culturally inward-looking countries in Asia until 
the advent of economic reforms in 1991, the 
benefits of globalisation are easily apparent. In 
purchasing power parity terms, per capita income 
more than doubled from $1400 in 1991 to $3800 in 
2006. The ranks of the middle class, broadly 
defined, have swelled to more than 250 million 
people. More Indians buy cell phones each month 
than any other people.
The same story can be told on the corporate and 
macroeconomic level. Since liberalization, a 
dozen Indian firms -- spanning banking, 
pharmaceuticals, software and services -- have 
listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and three 
on the technology-heavy NASDAQ. The United 
Nations Conference on Trade and Development 
estimates that a record $36.7 billion of foreign 
direct investment flowed into India in 2008. 
Foreign-exchange reserves stand at a robust $250 
billion.
There are less tangible changes as well. For 
generations after independence from Britain in 
1947, more or less the only way for an Indian to 
make a mark on the world stage was to emigrate. 
A.R. Rahman, the Chennai-based composer of the 
Slumdog soundtrack, has not needed to change the 
colour of his passport to snag a Golden Globe or 
multiple Oscar nominations. In a broader sense, 
the same holds true for many of the scientists 
and engineers who work for General Electric or 
Microsoft in Bangalore, or for the employees of a 
clutch of ambitious homegrown pharmaceutical 
companies with global ambition. India may not 
quite be centre-stage -- its contribution to 
world trade remains a slender 1.5 percent -- but 
neither is it off-stage anymore. If an ambitious 
government target is met, the country's share of 
world trade will more than triple to 5 percent by 
2020.
Notwithstanding the giant strides made over the 
past 18 years, Indian criticism of Slumdog also 
reveals the chasm between the country's 
self-perception and projection and any reasonable 
measure of its achievements. India may boast 
homegrown programs in space exploration and 
nuclear power, but -- as a first time visitor to 
India immediately notices and as the film 
mercilessly reveals -- it also struggles to 
provide its people with electricity, sanitation 
and drinking water. About half of Indian women 
are illiterate, a higher percentage than in Laos, 
Cambodia or Myanmar. It is at number 122 -- 
between Nepal and Lesotho -- on the World Bank 
index that measures ease of doing business, and 
85 on the global corruption index maintained by 
the anti-graft NGO Transparency International. To 
put it bluntly, the squalor of the slums depicted 
in Slumdog is closer to reality than an 
elaborately choreographed Bollywood dance 
sequence shot on location in Switzerland.

To sum up, by jettisoning socialism and embracing 
globalisation India has become more prosperous 
than at any time in more than six decades of 
independence. But the effects of failed policies 
pursued between 1947 and 1991 cannot be erased 
overnight. As Slumdog reveals, India is doing 
better than ever only when benchmarked against 
its own dismal past. When compared to the West, 
or to East Asian countries that have truly 
transformed themselves - Japan, Taiwan and Korea 
- the gap between India's rhetoric and its 
reality remains jarring. Slumdog may wound 
national pride, but the answer is more openness 
not less.As long as chronic poverty remains a 
central fact of Indian life, the spotlight that 
globalisation brings will shine on India's 
software success as well as on its slums.

Sadanand Dhume is a Washington, DC, based writer 
and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels 
with a Radical Islamist. His next book will 
examine the impact of globalization on India. 
Rights: © 2009 Yale Center for the Study of 
Globalization. YaleGlobal Online