Slumdog Millionaire: A Perspective

The last thing I wanted to do on a cold, rainy, windy night was to venture out for a late-night movie experience. But a Brazilian friend's rather last minute invitation to watch the critically acclaimed movie "Slumdog Millionaire" was too compelling. As we rushed over to Emeryville for the last show of the night, I kept telling myself to keep an open mind. I'd been given too much feedback: from friends who decried the raw violence, others who loved the rags-to-riches narrative, still others who thought it was just "okay" (my parents, in India, belonged to this last group). My friend's somewhat to-hell-with-caution driving and the fact that the car's headlights didn't work only mildly distracted me from my reservations about watching the film, and what I would take out of it.  

We got there just in time, and, soon after we had settled in separate spots in the conspicuously empty hall-he likes to sit by the aisle, and I like to sit in the center (this point is only important insofar as this movie is quite violent, and watching it while feeling marooned in an empty hall is quite something)-the movie began.  

[Spoiler alert!] The movie itself felt more familiar than I had expected it to be, given that it is a British production. The early sequences of police brutality are very common in Indian films, and reported frequently in the media, and while I cringed inwardly several times, there was no element of shock in my reaction. The beloved game of cricket rang another familiar note, though it was contextualized with brutal violence: policemen trying to beat up slum kids, an abusive ganglord forcing his mistress to submission. People dangerously perched on top of (moving) trains to avoid paying the fare struck another familiar note. And little kids who have been kidnapped and forcibly blinded or amputated so they can collect more money while begging-that story is painfully common. What surprised me most was how familiar the slums felt. While I grew up in a campus in the rather privileged and closed-in setting of South Delhi (India), slums circled the campus like little satellite villages; they are a familiar, an "integrated" part of the Indian landscape, though I didn't realize until yesterday just how much I consider them a part of my imagining of India, just how much the slums are in some way home. During my trip to New Delhi last month, I had occasion to visit several times the school that the orphans I am working with attend, and it's bang in the middle of a nearby slum. The scenes from Slumdog paralleled everything I saw there: the open drains, the stench of which almost make it through the screen; the piles of discarded plastic and garbage everywhere; the human and animal excreta you have to watch for every step you take; the tremendous foot traffic through the narrow lanes; the loud devotional and filmy music blaring from old tape-run stereos and radios; and the spirit, the indomitable spirit of the people who live in conditions that are too horrific to describe, and impossible to capture in words or moving images. And yet millions of people make their lives there.  

On a slightly different note, the language shifts in the movie were a little jarring. I find it impossible not to read subtitles if they are provided, and so even through Mumbai Hindi I understood (the language of the first third of the film), I found myself reading the English translations. The transition from Hindi to English is unexplained in the film, and what results is what one critic, Mukul Kesavan, called "a hybrid so odd." He further went on to say, ""the transition from child actors who in real life are slum children to young actors who are, just as clearly, middle-class anglophones is so abrupt and inexplicable that it subverts the "realism" of the brilliantly shot squalor in which their lives play out." This interferes, as he goes on to say, with the suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying the film's narrative. I totally agree.  

There's much talk about whether this movie is "Indian" in sentiment and feel. That's too big a question for me to tackle here. What I walked away with was overpowering homesickness. Was it the narrative? The Indian people? The Hindi? Not so much. It was strangely the moving images of the slumscape that took me home.