(Photo: Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press) A vendor in Allahabad, India, sells sweetmeats, while a man rests atop posters for “Slumdog Millionaire” and its Hindi version “Slumdog Crorepati.” “Slumdog Millionaire” is a hit across the world, but in India, protesters have taken to the streets to attack the film.
Some Indians find the word “slumdog” in the movie’s title to be insulting to slum-dwellers. More generally, the rags-to-riches romance has been called “poverty porn” for the way it casts a glowing light on a very poor section of Mumbai society and promotes “slum tourism.”
We asked several experts, with experience in India, to tell us what’s behind the protests.
- Chitra Divakaruni, author of “Palace of Illusions”
- Amresh Sinha, teaches film and media studies
- Sadia Shepard, author of “The Girl From Foreign”
Put the Word in Context
Chitra Divakaruni is the author, most recently, of “The Palace of Illusions” a novel. She is a board member of Pratham, a nonprofit literacy project for children living in slums in India.
There has been quite a hullabaloo in India (and among Indians living outside the country) over the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”: people accusing it of being poverty porn, or balking at the fact that Danny Boyle, who is British, has created a film about slum life that ignores India’s recent economic prosperity. One of the more outraged complaints has been that the title of the movie is derogatory to people living in the slums.
Slum dwellers, organized by activists like Tapeshwar Vishwakarma, have led protests with placards that read: “Don’t call us dogs” and “I am not a slumdog.” Mr. Vishwakarma claims that referring to people in the slums as dogs has violated their human rights. He even filed a lawsuit demanding that the title of the movie be changed.
One can understand where the unhappiness over the title comes from. In Indian culture, dog — “kutte” in Hindi — has been deemed a derogatory appellation for centuries. It is often used in the excessive rants of Bollywood villains.
Clearly, the term “slumdog” is not the director’s evaluation of the main character — or anyone in the slums.
But I have a feeling that the people protesting against the title either have not seen the movie, or have not understood the context in which the word was used. In the movie, the word “slumdog” is never used as a general description of the people of the slums.
It is used in a very specific setting: the angry police inspector, when he is violently interrogating the hero, Jamal, whom he suspects of cheating on the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” show, scoffs: “What can a slumdog possibly know?” At this point in the movie, the inspector is the antagonist — certainly not a character with whom we are expected to agree.
By the end of the movie, the inspector has changed his attitude toward Jamal completely. He believes him, sets him free and roots for him to win. Clearly, the term “slumdog” is not the director’s evaluation of Jamal — or anyone in the slums. If anything, by the end of this gritty yet upbeat movie, Jamal triumphs over his many enemies and turns out to be top dog!
A Cause for Hindu Extremists
Amresh Sinha teaches film and media studies at New York University, the City University of New York and the School of Visual Arts and is the co-editor of the forthcoming “Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film.”
Since India has joined the ranks of global powers, there has been a growing backlash in the country against all things Western, especially Western culture. Indeed, “Slumdog” is only the latest example of attacks on Western ideas or symbols of Western culture. After the scandalous smooch Richard Gere gave the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, Mr. Gere’s effigy was burned in many cities, events that were widely covered by the Indian media. A radical Hindu judge in Jaipur issued a warrant for Mr. Gere’s arrest on public obscenity charges.
Frightened by the spectacular pace of change in India, agents of intolerance — the xenophobic cultural renegades of Hindu militant nationalists and their leftist counterparts — have upped the ante by rallying the masses to their anti-Western cause. Although the protests might not add up to more than a tempest in a teapot stirred primarily to seek maximum publicity for individuals and organizations, they have certainly cashed in on the immense popularity of the film. If “Slumdog Millionaire” were a big flop, would there have been any protests in India?
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(Click to enlarge.) Demonstrating outside the Mumbai office of the Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor, who plays the game show host in “Slumdog Millionaire.” (Photo: Associated Press)By protesting the title of the film, the people from the slums and poor regions are expressing their discontent with a modernizing India in which their lives have not been bettered. A legitimate grievance, to be sure, but these controversies must not be seen as simply a protest against cultural insult. They are part of a greater effort by some of the most conservative, communal elements in India that came to their full bloom during the Bhartiya Janta Party’s rule (1998-2004).
People in Patna (my hometown), a city in eastern India, where a case has been filed in the High Court against the title, were so outraged by the word “dog” in the title that they ended up ransacking a local theater where the film opened. The Gujarat High Court has accepted a petition from Dastak (a nongovernment organization) to make the Central Board of Film Certification, the censor board of India, a respondent. In Goa, Janjagruti Samiti, a Hindu organization, has demanded a ban on the release of the film for depicting the Indian god Ram in a denigrating way. More cases have been filed against the film in cities like Mumbai, Ahmadebad, Nagpur.
I think these protests are pre-emptive measures to deflect and avert attempts to recall the communal violence in which Hindu fascists killed hundreds of Muslims in Mumbai in 1992 and 1993, an assault which is graphically depicted in the beginning of the film. These Hindu fascists were aided in their attacks by both Shiv Sena, a regional arch-right-wing Hindu party in the state of Maharashtra, and the B.J.P., which came to power in the next general election. Many other political groups have now joined the feeding frenzy around the controversy to promote their own political agendas in the coming election in India by whipping up anti-Western sentiments among the slum dwellers, who constitute a major voting bloc.
The sheer hypocrisy of this controversy lies in the fact that the outcries are about getting the votes of poor slum residents who deserted the B.J.P. and Shiv Sena en masse in the last elections for the more progressive, liberal and secular Congress Party. “Slumdog Millionaire” happens to be a cause célèbre for the right-wingers to consolidate their political stronghold among the poorest of the poor by claiming that the West looks down upon them, a strategy that sometimes works because of India’s long history of being subjected to British rule. To suggest, however, that “Slumdog Millionaire” is an insult to the slum residents of Dharavi in Mumbai is as disingenuous as the film’s premise: a rags-to-riches fable.
Squalor, Not Scenery
Sadia Shepard is a documentary filmmaker and the author of “The Girl From Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories and a Sense of Home.”
In India, dogs are rarely the beloved pets they are in the United States — instead they are widely considered to be unclean, inauspicious and, in some cases, unsafe. So it was unsurprising when the use of the word “dog” in the title of “Slumdog Millionaire” aroused controversy in India, sparking a flurry of media attention and providing a platform for the consternation of several slum activists, Bollywood actors and members of the international press.
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(Click to enlarge.) The Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India. (Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)These unlikely allies argue that the film portrays India, and residents of the Dharavi slum where it was shot, in a negative light. Alice Miles of The Times of London goes so far as to suggest that the film is an example of “poverty porn” — where the suffering of the Indian poor is served up as a perverse form of First World voyeurism.
The film’s screenwriter Simon Beaufoy claims he coined the word “slumdog” without meaning to offend; he has said in interviews that he merely “liked the word.” His use of the word “dog” was a problematic choice he made arbitrarily, and clearly without doing enough research. But the outcry is perhaps more indicative of deeper rifts in India’s tumultuous struggle to establish itself as a modern power.
In the film, the director Danny Boyle uses a grab bag of recognizable Indian symbols — the Taj Mahal, cricket, Amitabh Bachchan — with which to make his film accessible and entertaining to Westerners. The Dharavi slum as depicted in the film, indeed the very notion of poverty itself, is merely one of these tropes. Choosing to represent squalor as colorful scenery may be in questionable taste, but it’s hardly pornography.
More troubling than Mr. Boyle’s facile characterization of life in Asia’s largest slum is how the national argument over India’s representation in popular culture seeps into the urban solutions proposed for Dharavi, notably a new redevelopment plan which would demolish the slum and relocate some of its residents to a complex of towers. This may be seen as an effort to put India’s best foot forward, a sentiment that goes hand in hand with Bollywood’s glossy view of reality. But the plan has little bearing on how Dharavi actually works; a complex structure of linked marketplaces, small factories and informal businesses. If the uproar over the film’s title can be channeled toward improving conditions in Indian slums — informed by the real-life needs of its residents — then “Slumdog Millionaire,” clichéd or not, will have been a success worth lauding.
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