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 lackluster run in Indian
theaters, captures the inherent contradictions of an increasingly
globalized 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 eight Oscars.
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 theaters. 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 globalization. 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 Vikas
Swarup, 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 globalization are easily apparent. In purchasing
power parity terms, per capita income more than doubled from
$1,400 in 1991 to $3,800 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 center-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 globalization
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 globalization brings will shine on
India’s software success as well as on its slums.
Reprinted
with permission from YaleGlobal Online
www.yaleglobal.yale.edu
(c) 2008 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. For an
interview of Sadanand Dhume click
HERE.
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