Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
311
Reading Slumdog Millionaire
across Cultures
Rebecca Stephens Duncan
Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract
This essay examines the film Slumdog Millionaire and its reception as an
intercultural encounter focused on romance and class conflict. While the
Eastern and diasporic critical response registered outrage at the global
exposure of India’s slums, an emerging critical discourse on Indian popular
cinema adds cultural context and nuance to discussions of the film. Western
viewers and critics, in contrast, are culturally prepared to approach the
film as a generic hybrid or a postmodern romance. Innovative under
both paradigms, Slumdog invites new consideration of the archetypical
romantic quest in twenty-first century cinematography. Ultimately, the clear
division between Eastern and Western responses challenges the notion of
the global or transnational response to a regional or national narrative.
Keywords
Slumdog Millionaire, Indian popular cinema, romantic quest, Northrop
Frye, postmodern romance, Dharavi, India, hybrid film, Bollywood
In terms of its production, the Academy Award-winning film Slumdog
Millionaire1 reflects a certain globalization of film-making, an attempt to
break down cultural boundaries and re-signify generic conventions. Set
in Mumbai in the booming 1990s, it was based upon the widely translated
novel Q&A by Indian author Vikram Swarup, produced by a consortium
of Western studios, directed by Britain’s Danny Boyle and marketed
with great fanfare to both Eastern and Western audiences. In terms of its
locale and narrative, the film seems also to cross a number of aesthetic
and cultural boundaries, as it reveals – in full-tilt sensuality – the Dharavi
slum and the dynamic city of Mumbai to the world. Yet responses to the
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Vol 46(2): 311–326. DOI: 10.1177/0021989411404994
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Journal of Commonwealth Literature
film, reflected in reviews, commentary and even lawsuits and political
protests, in some ways uphold certain cultural boundaries, particularly
those regarding the genre of the romance film and class-based access to
the privileges and benefits offered by a globalized economy.
This response may raise questions about the possibility of a truly global
narrative or a transnational response to a regional or national narrative.
To reach a context in which such questions may be raised, I begin more
modestly by examining the film and its reception as an intercultural
encounter focused on romance and class conflict. Most broadly stated, my
argument suggests that Eastern audiences (consumers of the Bollywood
tradition) come prepared to value and accept aspects of the film that are
disdained by Western audiences (consumers of the Hollywood tradition)
and vice-versa. With the aim of initiating a critical conversation, I then
respond to this chiasmus of reception with a reading of the film as a
postmodern romantic quest.
Through a combination of box office success, motion picture awards,
critical reception and the socio-political discourse that it spawned, Slumdog
has belied the conclusion of one critic that it “makes for a better viewing
experience than a reflective one”.2 The film dramatizes the story of three
poor children who escape a brutal orphanage and find ways to survive
and thrive in globalized Mumbai on one side of the law or another, each
ultimately reaching a fitting form of redemption. Jamal acts strategically to
land a spot on the popular television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
and his brother Salim seeks his fortune at the right hand of a crime boss.
Their friend Latika slides between her roles as the crime boss’s kept
woman and the object of Jamal’s love. For having produced such a range
of responses and coverage, the film merits particular critical attention
as an aesthetic and cultural artifact. Such an approach, incorporating
cultural and literary theory and a growing body of research on Indian
popular cinema and its viewers, acknowledges innovations in genre that
characterize contemporary commercial film and the blending of high and
low culture that has renewed and enlivened discourse in the Humanities
in recent years. For additional context, I also look at the adaptation of
Swarup’s novel to film as well as some relevant Eastern and Western
literary/cultural paradigms. Although it is impossible to detail the exact
demographics of this film’s viewership in each culture, it is reasonable
to conclude that the reviewers in mainstream media addressed literate
viewers, online reviewers reached a yet broader set of prospective and
actual viewers, and that audiences around the world included all socioeconomic classes that could afford the price of admission. This last profile
may exclude many of the slum inhabitants whose lives were featured in
the film, yet as Swarup’s novel and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
313
suggest, India’s poor admire popular cinema and will sacrifice much for
a chance to enjoy it.
Film reviewers can establish a certain disposition toward a film by
assigning it a category or subgenre that acknowledges the audiences’
viewing repertoire. Faced with the unfamiliar locale of Mumbai and its
slums, Western critics highlighted a compelling yet disturbing exotic beauty
in their categorization of Slumdog. One reviewer summoned the “ghetto
picaresque” portrayed in the Brazilian slums in the 2002 film, City of God.3
A New York Times reviewer found a sort of “armchair tourism” in the film’s
travel episodes, particularly Jamal and Salim’s stint as vendors/thieves on
trains and at the Taj Mahal.4 This tendency to create new classifications
echoes Ira Jaffe’s notion of hybrid genres in film, explored in her book
Hollywood Hybrids. Following trends toward hybridization in modernist
painting, sculpture and music, Hollywood film, in Jaffe’s view, began in
the late twentieth century to blend genres to reflect “life’s distinctive
complexity and indeterminacy”.5
While alluding to the otherness of the film’s setting, Western critics
have done little to engage with the cultural significance of their rather
euphemistic generic labels; instead they demur to aesthetics with
descriptions of the film’s visual impact. Dargis of The New York Times
writes of a “vast, vibrant, sun-soaked, jampacked ghetto, a kaleidoscopic
city of flimsy shacks and struggling humanity”. 6 Rolling Stone’s Peter
Travers describes “an explosion of color and light with the darkness ever
ready to invade”.7 Somewhat more traditional yet no less euphemistic
are the London Telegraph’s and The Washington Times’ mentions of the
film’s Dickensian elements. Bunch calls the setting an “alien landscape”
and assures filmgoers that although Jamal’s “[fight] against history and
his own culture’s expectations” may sound “heavy […] don’t worry;
Mr. Boyle’s picture has a great sense of humor and knows just when to
ratchet down the level of intensity”.8
The film’s focus on the Dharavi slum and its residents, seen by some
critics as exotic or picturesque for Western viewers, provoked a much
more politically and culturally engaged range of responses from India
and its diasporic populations. A few film industry insiders and a number
of Indian reviewers recognized Boyle’s cinematic achievement, while a
much broader discourse range of artists, journalists, scholars, activists and
slum-dwellers questioned the realism of the film’s depiction of Dharavi and
its inhabitants, the fairness of exposing India’s poverty to the world via a
Hollywood-style film, and the plausibility of a rags-to-riches story enacted
under these socio-economic circumstances. These respondents located it
in a very different set of descriptive subgenres, including “poverty porn”,
“slum chic” and the “poverty tour”.
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Few would question that slums like Dharavi exist, that deliberately
maimed children from such places beg on the city streets, and that great
numbers of people there live far below their human potential. Vrindi Nabar
writes that “Many of us who live in Mumbai hold no brief for its negatives
of greed, inequitable distribution of wealth and unplanned development.
We battle these as best we can and hope for change.” 9 Yet journalists
and scholars alike offered nuance, and hence a richer sense of realism,
to discussions of the slum setting. Mitu Sengupta, writing for the Hindu
journal Frontline, deplores the “raw, chaotic tribalism” foregrounded in
the slum scenes and notes that
Dharavi teems with dynamism, creativity and entrepreneurship, in industries
such as garment manufacturing, embroidery, pottery, leather, plastics and
food processing. It is estimated that the annual turnover from Dharavi’s
small businesses is between $50 and $100 million. Dharavi’s lanes are lined
with cellphone retailers and cybercafés . . . and the slum’s residents exhibit
a remarkably high absorption of new technologies. 10
Sengupta also notes the strong cooperative societies and grass-roots
associations that “tackle difficult issues such as child abuse and violence
against women”.11 Such advocacy was apparent in the social protests
organized by activists in several slum neighborhoods and in a lawsuit filed
against Slumdog’s composer A.R. Rahman and actor Anil Kapoor alleging
that the film violated the human rights of slum dwellers. 12 Mumbaikars,
some interviewed by international news sources, challenged the fairness
of being labelled as dogs; one group vowed to protest until the film’s title
was changed.
Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood actor idolized by the young Jamal,
questions the fairness of standards that reward an outsider’s vision of India
while ignoring what he considers the superior work of native film-makers.13
Bachchan is not alone in being moved to anger. A South Asia correspondent
for the Seoul Times writes of the film’s “demeaning portrayal of India.
Poverty is celebrated, destitution, squalor, beggar mafia and prostitution
stare at us from the frames – magnified to distortion, glorified silly and
used as tools of titillation to please the smug white world. 14 He concludes
that “only India can do [the Bollywood genre] right”. 15
From these condemnations it is a short step to critiquing the plausibility
of the rags-to-riches genre itself. Sengupta wonders why Jamal’s success
must rely on destiny “in the form of an imported quiz show”, a narrative
choice that she argues dehumanizes the country’s poor and allows for little
agency on their part.16 Sudip Mazumdar of Newsweek reminds readers that
“Most people in the slums never achieve a fairy-tale ending.” 17 Further
doubts about plausibility arise in discussion of the switch from subtitled
Hindi to British English, with no accounting for how Jamal and various
Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
315
other characters acquire their polished accents.18 Poised between two
cultures, Salman Rushdie condemns both the film and Swarup’s novel
for their poor deployment of fantasy, a judgement that inversely indicts
their plausibility as well.19
Questions of plausibility also arise in Western responses. The emphasis
of this criticism falls upon the narrative structure, which pairs each quiz
show question with an experience in Jamal’s life. Rolling Stone’s Peter
Travers grants that “the concept bends coincidence to the breaking point”20
and The Washington Times’ Bunch notes the “astronomical” number of
coincidences needed to make the story work. 21 Yet plot credibility is
minor compared to the poverty issues, and it can be overcome for some by
acknowledging Boyle’s restless, surreal, curious, flashy, darkly humorous
and/or shape-shifting style, developed in the treatment of drug addicts in
Trainspotting and zombies in 28 Days Later and continued in Slumdog.
Although critics and academics intently focused on Slumdog’s treatment
of urban poverty find little merit in the film at all, others forgive a measure
of implausibility in the service of romance. Nikhat Kazmi writes that the
cinematography “serenades Mumbai with unbridled passion”,22 and Nabar
offers this generally romanticized view of the city:
Mumbai’s other, better soul – one that has resisted unimaginable calamities
both natural and man-made, refused to allow its cosmopolitan essence to be
destroyed, and shows itself determined to remain unique. A city in which
sensitivity coexists with despair, commitment with indifference, activism
with inaction, and humanism with the inhumane. 23
Family romance remains a staple of the popular film tradition in India, and
a number of Indian and diasporic reviewers have categorized the film as a
“Cinderella story”, a “fairy tale”, or a simple love story. Western reviewers
echoed similar subgenres as well, and NPR’s Bob Mondello notes that
Jamal remains “always intent – even when he’s appearing on TV – on
finding and rescuing the love of his life, who forever seems to be just out
of reach”.24 Beyond this observation, there is very little acknowledgement
among reviewers that all of the film’s other plots subordinate themselves to
Jamal’s romantic quest to locate and rescue Latika from her confinement
in the gangster Javed’s brothel. Both traditions admit romance in certain
forms, yet I suggest that the particular packaging of romance in Slumdog
forces each audience beyond its horizon of expectations.
Whereas cinema in India was for many years sharply divided into high
(or art) film and the popular genres, referred to somewhat derisively as
Bollywood, scholars have recently explored the cultural and aesthetic
dimensions of the latter, now referring to this tradition as Indian (or Hindi)
popular cinema. These critical endeavours have begun to characterize various
subgenres of popular film, including the family romance, in ways that can
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Journal of Commonwealth Literature
establish a plausible Indian response to the romantic elements of Slumdog.
Tracing the romance plot to ancient Sanskrit drama, Raghavendra writes
that these tradition- and family-centred episodic stories move through a
series of obstacles toward a pre-determined ending, generally a socially
acceptable marriage. For Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Sanskrit drama
continues to inspire the music-and-dance spectacles in which popular film
plots are embedded.25 The traditional family and its rituals are central,
and melodramatic conflicts between the morality of good and evil are
staged between stereotypical, rather than psychologically individuated,
characters.26 Rachel Dwyer calls melodrama “the underlying mode of
Hindi cinema” and emphasizes “the suffering of the powerless good […]
often at the hands of a villain who is known to the family”. 27 She adds
that “There are situations which can be resolved only through convenient
deaths, chance meetings and implausible happy endings.” 28
Although recent films have put pressure on traditional moral standards
with stories of pre-marital sex or co-habitation, and inter-caste romances
have received a degree of fantastic treatment over the years, Gokulsing and
Dissanayake assert that in terms of cultural norms and social structures,
popular film continues to affirm the rather conservative moral universe. 29
In interviews with dozens of Indian and diasporic Indian youth about
Indian films, Banaji confirms the persistence of such traditional values as
duty and sacrifice for family stability; young filmgoers seemed hopeful for
a love marriage while admitting they would accept an arranged match. It
was not uncommon for male and female respondents to endorse not only
a woman’s chastity before marriage but also the transfer of her affections
from the man she loves to her parents’ choice for a husband. The critical
and commercial success of the “clean” family romance film Hum Aapke
Hain Koun (1995) attests to the fact that “the joint family is, if not a fact
of traditional Indian society, at least a deeply held traditional value that
continues to provide the underlying principles of household-building
strategies in South Asia…”.30
Slumdog may not be the first to challenge these norms, but its particular
“masala” breaks new ground for Indian audiences. While foregrounding
poverty and a slum-based gangster life, the film remixes fragments of
Indian popular cinema in ways that can be unsettling. The three orphaned
children comprise a new and disturbing family configuration; Salim asserts
himself as their patriarch, yet he hands Latika over to Javed, the crime boss,
and forcefully sends Jamal away to fend for himself. Only intermittently
does Salim embrace his younger brother. When he does so, he recommends
that Jamal forget about Latika, and on behalf of his employer he subverts
Latika’s attempts to escape. For Latika the traditional sacredness of a
woman’s honour and purity are compromised when she becomes the
property of Javed. Even Jamal’s repeated assertion that his quest is
Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
317
destined or “written” seems an affront to popular cinema’s Sanskrit roots;
the bootstrapping quality of Jamal’s rise from street urchin to millionaire
suggests more agency than a predetermined plot line can withstand. The
explicit kiss between Jamal and Latika likewise challenges a taboo against
public displays of affection in film. Danny Boyle notes that “I think it’s
sort of like nudity here” and considers Freida Pinto “very gracious” for
agreeing to do the scene.31
In a 1998 study of politics and Indian popular cinema, Ashis Nandy
suggests that popular films create a bond along a spectrum of socio-economic
classes, from the poorest slum-dwellers to the haute bourgeoisie, noting
that even the upper middle class is too new and too small to feel securely
distinguished from the poor who continue to arrive from rural areas. Popular
films provide a fantasized future for the poor while idealizing the rural
past for the bourgeoisie.32 Jamal’s rapid “class-jumping,” particularly his
meteoric rise to bourgeois status via the quiz show, has the potential to
disturb the gradual process of urbanization and upward mobility Nandy
describes and therefore may produce anxiety among the recently gentrified.
The film’s melodrama, on the other hand, fits Dwyer’s and Gokulsing
and Dissanayake’s descriptions of Indian popular cinema. Maman, owner
of the begging “school”, and Javed the gangster are flat and stereotypical
bad guys, and Maman in particular enacts the role of the familiar villain
noted by Dwyer. Likewise, there is little psychological realism in the fact
that Jamal shapes his young adult life as a quest to recover a woman
he met randomly as a child and knew very briefly. Nandy accounts for
these elements by noting that in order to attract and unite India’s vast
middle classes, “the popular film ideally has to have everything – from the
classical to the folk, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the terribly
modern to the incorrigibly traditional, from the plots within plots that
never get resolved to the cameo roles and stereotypical characters that
never get developed”.33 Film clips of action-hero Amitabh Bachchan supply
the requisite “cameo”, while situating the story and the characters in the
popular film culture itself.
Also familiar to the Indian popular film audience is the song-anddance routine, which usually features elaborate costumes and settings
and expresses a degree of intimacy, sexuality and vulgarity not generally
attempted elsewhere in the script. Scholars of popular cinema continue to
wrestle philosophically with these routines, which “detract a terrible toll
from the aesthetic value of Hindi films”.34 Gokulsing and Dissanayake
also suggest that in romance films song-and-dance interludes enable a
safe mediation between traditional, parental standards and the individual
romantic impulses of the young protagonists. Regarding his choice to
include the final song-and-dance routine in Slumdog, Danny Boyle has said,
“Well you can’t live there and work there for about eight months without
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dancing. It’d be like filming a movie about America and not featuring
a motor car.”35 Singing and dancing were apparently pervasive on the
set during filming, and Boyle notes that his team tried unsuccessfully to
incorporate a dance number into the story. Risking the perception that
for Western audiences “the songs are the real deal-breakers” and the
first Bollywood element to be jettisoned in a crossover film, 36 Boyle uses
the closing routine to hail his Eastern viewers and confirm them as an
important audience for the film.
Characterizing a general response by Western audiences, those familiar
with the Hollywood tradition, is made more difficult by the paucity
of recent critical inquiry into romance on the screen and in literature.
Granted, Hollywood continues to turn out superficial romantic comedies,
many featuring female actresses in contemporary yet stereotypical roles.
Slumdog’s commercial success and its ongoing presence on YouTube
and Facebook suggest that it appeals to the audience for such films. Yet
productions with higher aesthetic and cultural aspirations – a classification
I extend to Slumdog – seem to approach the romance genre with caution
and subtlety. Strategies for success with such endeavours include generic
hybridization, irony, the broaching of new taboos and historical/geographical
distance. For the most part the focus of these films has also shifted from
the hero to the heroine, and romantic quests often fall into the subgenre
of the “chick flick”.
While newly configured families no longer trouble most Western
viewers and a kiss on screen is hardly scandalous, other Indian cinematic
conventions can be more troubling for critics and viewers. For instance,
reviewers are especially harsh on films that indulge in the sorts of melodrama
and superficiality expected and accepted by Eastern audiences. Titanic,
a disaster/romance hybrid, drew rotten tomatoes for its shallow dialogue
between the lovers. Jerry Maguire, in contrast, earned high marks for a
successful fusion of romance with the tale of an introspective “different
drummer” hero amidst the high stakes competition of sports business,
and superb acting is credited for pulling off the love story. Brokeback
Mountain explored the taboo of homosexuality and the romantic quest,
and The Piano dramatized infidelity and passion in the “exotic” muddy
regions of rural New Zealand. Ira Jaffe posits a hybrid genre called the
teen romance and cites the experimental Blue Velvet as an example. And
finally, I suggest that a combination of narrative irony, historical distance
and strong heroines contributes to the successful recent treatment of
Jane Austen’s novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Within
the context of this viewing repertoire, Slumdog succeeds by remixing familiar
genres, introducing an exotic new setting, and, most significantly, pacing
and fragmenting the story-lines in ways that disguise the melodramatic
and the superficial and simply turn the attention elsewhere.
Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
319
Like any inter-cultural encounter, Slumdog leaves its mark on the
participants in ways that cannot be ignored or erased. I have suggested
that the film places new pressures on the traditions of Indian popular
cinema, particularly those involving the role of social class in the family
romance genre. For Western scholars and viewers, I propose that the
film offers an opportunity to rethink the romantic quest paradigm in a
postmodern and transnational context. To explore this possibility, I turn
to literary contexts of the quest myth and argue that Jamal’s character
carries the traits of the romantic hero from a critically stalled modernist
state into the realm of the postmodern.
Northrop Frye has called romance “the structural core of all fiction”.
He has traced its genealogy through centuries of literature and folktales
to its origin in the Bible and determined that romance expresses “man’s
vision of his own life as a quest”.37 Central to this quest is a capable yet
innocent hero who undertakes a series of adventures in pursuit of a worthy
goal. Concurrent with Frye’s twentieth-century scholarship, however, runs
a concern among some of his peers that modernist culture has stymied
this hero and imperiled his quest. Ihab Hassan describes some of these
cultural conditions, including the fear of technologies that enable vast
destruction and the existential response to nihilism “in a context in which
no action is meaningful”.38 Further, the modernist hero finds himself
trapped in an historical position when “Eden is far behind, the millennium
not appreciably near…. And the pattern of human actions in time yields
no recognizable meaning.”39 Hassan writes that the modernist hero often
displays a radical, “peculiarly aware” innocence that conflicts with the
ever-diminishing pull of his “Edenic consciousness”. 40
As a desperately poor orphan, Slumdog’s Jamal responds to similar
conditions but from a very different vantage point as he pursues a romantic
quest for the love of his childhood friend Latika. Concerned with basic
survival, he experiences none of the existential angst of his well-fed
counterparts in modernist literature of the Western tradition: Hemingway’s
Nick Adams, Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, or Sherwood Anderson’s George
Willard. Technology in these postmodern times seems less threatening and
more enabling than its “potentially destructive” modernist counterpart. It
infuses the lives of even the poorest Mumbaikars, as they gather en masse
outside electronics shops to watch their hero compete on the game show.
Cellphones provide momentum, opportunity and suspense, and Jamal’s
ticket out of the slums is a servile job in an outsourced telecommunications
call centre. Historical awareness also fuels a new sort of agency, although
this is seen more clearly in the ambitious character of Salim, whom I
address more fully below.
An essential part of the character of the romantic hero, innocence
captures and preserves an Edenic, “before the fall” moral and intellectual
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state against which to measure his transformation and the success of his
quest. This innocence, particularly as we look back on it from a postmodern
perspective, seems also to assert cultural stability, and that can explain
why the unsettling cultural milieu of modernism posed a threat to the
questing hero and to romance as “the structural core of all fiction”.
Applied to Slumdog, the Western notion of Eden might be replaced by
the boys’ carefree childhood in the slums. Until the random attack on
Muslims in which their mother is killed, the boys play soccer on airport
runways, skip school, and live in a poor but vibrant community. Even at
Maman’s school, Jamal remains vulnerably smitten with his Bollywood
hero Amitabh Bachchan and then with Latika, with whom he confides
his dreams of wealth and fame. His fantasy of becoming an actor nearly
costs him his sight at Maman’s school when his excellent singing puts
him in line to become a blind beggar. Through the course of the story,
Jamal reworks this innocence into a quality more secure and benign, yet
“radical” in a strategic sense as well.
The adaptation of Swarup’s novel shows an effort to position Jamal
as ethically and aesthetically eligible to enjoy the state of innocence
he seeks. Ram Mohammed Thomas, the narrator-protagonist of Q&A,
combines qualities of the film’s Jamal and Salim. The Salim of the novel is
a Bollywood-smitten friend of Ram and a minor character. Ram finds his
friend’s dreaminess alarming and dangerous, yet he indulges the boy with
brotherly affection.41 As a hero, Ram shoots a train robber and assaults
a neighbour in order to protect women and avenge violence committed
upon them. His primary quest, the game show appearance, is similarly an
act of revenge on behalf of two additional female characters. The requisite
accounting and forgiving do occur in the novel, yet the screenplay takes
far less risk with the ethical spectrum of the hero’s behaviour and attitude.
By delegating the violence to a newly-created hero, screenwriter Beaufoy
removes any traces of guilt that might taint the ideal state of innocence
that Jamal seeks.
The division of Ram’s character into Jamal and Salim also echoes the
narrative tension between romance and realism that Frye, Hassan and
Steven Cohan have observed in their twentieth-century assessments of the
romantic quest. Cohan suggests that nineteenth-century literary realism,
associated with experience, drives a narrative forward, while romance,
associated with innocence, provides a backward movement, a “competing
imaginative energy” 42 that seeks to recover an Edenic or ideal state of mind.
Cohan argues that modernist writers, especially Virginia Woolf and D.H.
Lawrence, respond to the realism of the nineteenth century by exposing
and foregrounding these narrative tensions in their novels. Likewise, Jamal
and Salim direct the story with opposing paradigms grounded in realism
and romance. From the moment he sells Jamal’s autographed photo of
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Bachchan, the realist Salim displays ambition, confidence and an ability
to read and manipulate circumstances. As the boys run from Maman and
his men, Salim is clearly shown grasping and then letting go of Latika’s
hand as she tries to board the train. Quick to seize an opportunity, Salim
devises numerous schemes for selling merchandise and stealing food, and
once back in Mumbai he murders Maman and attaches himself to the
slum gangster Javed. In all of these roles he acts strategically to enhance
his material position and to gain stature, in a typically realistic rags-toriches plot line.
Jamal, on the other hand, interrupts Salim’s progression with a backwardlooking quest to recover Latika and position himself as a romantic hero.
Although he convinces Salim to return to Mumbai, Salim asks angrily why
they had to “return to this shit-hole”, which incidentally entails honest
work in a restaurant. The boys’ treatment of Latika further reflects this
forward-backward tension. Jamal admires her as an innocent girl, while
Salim recognizes and capitalizes on her emerging sexuality. The boys’ later
meeting on the concrete frame of a new skyscraper confirms their opposing
trajectories. Salim gushes with excitement about the city’s growth and,
historically aware, declares himself to be “at the centre of the centre” of
this development. Jamal, in contrasts, attacks Salim for having left him
(and for taking Latika), as an avenging hero might. When he asks about
Latika, Salim tries to put the past behind them, saying, “Still? You’re still
asking about her? She’s gone. She’s long gone.”
This backward motion becomes visually literal once Jamal has won his
record-breaking twenty million rupees and met up with Latika at the train
station. An earlier attempt to meet there resulted in her capture by Salim
and punishment in the form of facial disfigurement. At this point the film
literally unreels itself, moving backwards through – as if undoing – the
earlier encounter. Latika, whose life with Javed raises questions about
her sexual purity, appears at the station veiled in yellow, a celebratory
colour in India. This veiling, seemingly without irony or social awareness,
places Latika in the conservative, middle-class tradition of courtship
that Jamal’s success has earned them as it replaces her sexual past with a
second chance at innocence.
On the threshold of postmodernism, mid-century romantic heroes
persevere against absurdity and what Hassan calls “the terrible and the
ludicrous” by developing a sense of “ironic humility”.43 The heroes of Saul
Bellow’s fiction serve as examples of this stage. One can argue that harsh
realities press down upon Jamal as well, yet the story as a whole is shaped
not by the logic of realism but rather by the fluidity and fortuitousness
of romance. The film enacts a kind of romance that Neil Ten Kortenaar
identifies in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as “the genre of wish fulfillment”,
as desire produces, rather than confronts, the ludicrous.44 In declining
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an ironic stance in favour of this sort of romantic desire, Jamal enters a
familiar discourse on possible responses to the even more fragmented
and often ludicrous postmodern culture. His desire often takes the form
of nostalgia, which Linda Hutcheon contextualizes in useful ways.
For Hutcheon, postmodern nostalgia is a longing prompted by a
dissatisfaction with the present. A nostalgic subject may indulge this urge
by summoning the past, but not as it actually existed. Rather, the nostalgic
impulse selects and reorganizes memory into an alternate, ideal state.
Postmodern irony, an offspring of disillusionment that Hutcheon traces
to modernist narrative practices and finds ubiquitous today, rejects the
possibility of recreating or even imagining such a version of the past, mostly
because it never existed in the first place.45Yet, because both nostalgia
and irony are perceptions and responses to, rather than attributes of, an
artifact or event, they can be layered and framed in ways that present
both options simultaneously, as they are in Slumdog. In a postmodern
story or film, the characters may configure the two differently from how
the viewer does, providing an experience unlike that of, say, a Jane Austen
novel, in which the ironic narrative voice enjoys a certain privilege over
the perceptions of the characters and in this manner colludes with the
reader. The historical moment of the story, one of rapid economic growth
in Mumbai, provides an exhilarating sense of opportunity that extends to
agency in constructing identity. The different identities pursued by Jamal
and Salim, described above in terms of realism and romance, can also be
characterized by irony and nostalgia.
Jamal seizes various opportunities to formulate himself through
postmodern nostalgia. I have mentioned his very brief idealized and innocent
past involving his film hero Bachchan and a short dreamy encounter with
Latika in the slum and at Maman’s school. With no apparent sense of irony,
Jamal grows into adulthood longing to inhabit the world these memories
have inspired. Hence the backwards movement toward Latika, even as
Salim pulls him forward and further away. An especially powerful tug of
nostalgia and desire occurs when he happens upon an outdoor staging
of Orpheus and Eurydice; a woman in the audience explains Orpheus’
quest into the underworld for Eurydice, and in the next scene the boys are
abruptly bound for Mumbai. The irony in the subjectivity Jamal constructs
is reserved for the film viewer, who can hardly imagine such a romantic
desire emerging from these conditions. Even weighed against Jamal’s
rosy perspective, the viewer’s irony may extend to the political stance
that Bollywood exploits the poor of India with such impractical notions.
Also ironic – to the viewer at least – is a secondary and highly coincidental
rearrangement of Jamal’s past by the game show questions. He is able to
extend his exposure on the show – he tells Latika, “I went on the show
because I knew you’d be watching” – by mining the hellish details of his
Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
323
past. In the process he must confront the pain involved in recalling his
early experiences, pain that has coexisted with his youthful romantic
impulses. Recalling a question associated with the riots that killed his
mother, he says, “I wake up every morning wishing I didn’t know the
answer to that question.”
As he gains confidence, Jamal begins to assert his ignorance more
boldly. He smilingly tells Prem, the show’s host, he has no idea who scored
the most first class centuries in cricket. The flashback juxtaposed with
this question involves an encounter with Latika at the gangster Javed’s
home when Jamal experiences his first adult interaction with his beloved
and learns that she watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And so his
puzzling burst of euphoria may be read as nostalgia in action or perhaps
a sign that his present-day (perhaps destined?) romance is building
positive momentum amid its many obstacles. Answering the “lifeline” call
during the final question, Latika colludes in this ideal ignorance; when
asked the name of the third musketeer, she says, “I don’t know. I never
knew.” Ultimately the irony inherent in Jamal’s risky strategy gives way
to a triumph, not only of nostalgia but also of innocence; Jamal succeeds
in redeeming a cache of painful knowledge for the innocent bliss of not
knowing the various impediments to his romantic quest. And when the
actress playing the young Latika appears during the credits in a spanking
clean version of the ragged yellow dress she wore as a slum- dweller, it is
clear that Hutcheon’s revisionist nostalgia has prevailed.
The film’s most sophisticated commentary on this tension occurs when
the police inspector interrogates the selective nature of Jamal’s knowledge.
Noting that even his five-year-old daughter knows an answer for which
Jamal appealed to the audience for help, the inspector affirms his suspicion
that Jamal has cheated. Jamal recontextualizes the disputed knowledge
along the lines of class and privilege; he challenges the inspector to name
the price of bhelpuri in a street stall as well as the person who recently
stole a constable’s bicycle. The inspector is surprised at these questions,
and Jamal observes that “Everyone in Juhu knows that. Even five-yearolds.” With the dynamics of knowledge recast in terms of privilege, the
inspector softens his demeanour and offers Jamal a plea bargain.
Salim’s compelling character further complicates the quest motif as
well as the tension between irony and desire. Salim embraces Islam in
ways that may disturb the Western post-911 viewer; he prays on his rug
and then with no sense of irony packs his gun for a day of violent work.
Yet in the context of the romantic quest, he serves in the role identified
by Joseph Campbell as a helper or guide;46 at his own peril he ultimately
seeks Latika’s forgiveness and equips her with a car and a phone so she
can meet up with Jamal. Having rid the slums of two gangsters, he sacrifices
himself in a bathtub full of tainted cash at the very moment that Jamal
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Journal of Commonwealth Literature
is dancing among his honestly earned rupees on the game show set. A
second viewing of the film reveals – and offers narrative privilege to – a
glimpse of Salim’s death scene during the opening credits. Anticipating
more authoritative readings of his character than I can provide here, I
suggest that Salim’s story induces a new blend of irony and desire by
daring viewers, both Eastern and Western, to find a context in which his
choices make sense.
Similarly, Latika’s character calls for a cross-cultural reading that draws
upon expected roles of the romantic heroine in each aesthetic tradition.
She is not given the degree of agency demanded by Western viewers in
recent romantic films, and her role merges that of the courtesan with that
of the innocent, submissive daughter/wife familiar to Eastern audiences.
She may, in fact, be an awkward attempt at compromise, as she shifts from
the feisty child who lampoons Salim’s singing and places chili peppers on
his genitals to a passive, bitter victim and then finally to Jamal’s romantic
heroine.
Ultimately the struggles and interactions of these “three musketeers”
illustrate an effort to revive the romantic quest in a postmodern, crosscultural narrative. The critical and popular responses to the film by Eastern
and Western viewers suggest the risks inherent in such an undertaking
while urging a continued interpretive dialogue that supports transcultural,
and if such a thing exists, global innovation in literature and film.
NOTES
1 Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle, Celador Films Ltd. and Channel 4
Television Corporation Motion Picture Artwork and Photography, Twentieth
Century Fox Film Corporation, 2008. Subsequent references are to this production
and Slumdog Millionaire: The Shooting Script, New York: Newmarket, 2008.
2 Manohla Dargis, “Orphan’s Lifeline out of Hell Could Be a Game Show in
Mumbai”, The New York Times, 12 November 2008.
3 Doug Saunders, “This Oscar-Bound Urban Fantasy Comes with a Twist”, The
Globe and Mail, 14 February 2009.
4 Dargis, “Orphan’s Lifeline”.
5 Ira Jaffe, Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films, Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p.24.
6 Dargis, “Orphan’s Lifeline”.
7 Peter Travers, rev. of Slumdog Millionaire, Rolling Stone, 13 November 2008,
RollingStone.com/ Accessed 8 March 2010.
8 Sonny Bunch, “‘Slumdog: A Prize Worth Savoring’”, The Washington Times, 12
November 2008.
9 Vrindi Nabar, “Slumdog Millionaire Bizarrely Plausible?”, www.dnaindia.com,
10 January 2009. Accessed 9 March 2010.
10 Mitu Sungupta, “Slumdog Millionaire’s Dehumanizing View of India’s Poor”,
Counterpunch, 20-22 February 2009. Counterpunch.org/ Accessed 10 March 2010.
Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures
325
11 ibid.
12 ibid.
13 “Bollywood Star Criticizes Slumdog,” BBC News, 15 January 2009, http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7829985.stm/
14 Guataman Bhaskaran, “Slumdog Millionaire: A Warped Picture of India”, The
Seoul Times, 6 December 2010, http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.
php?idx=7889/
15 ibid.
16 Sungupta, “Slumdog Millionaire’s Dehumanizing View of India’s Poor”.
17 Sudip Mazumdar, “Mans Bites Slumdog”, Newsweek, February 21, 2009, http://
updateslive.blogspot.com/2009/02/sudip-mazumdar-man-bites-slumdog.html
18 Mukul Kesavan, “Lost in Translation: Slumdog Millionaire Uses Hindi
as Authenticating Décor”, The Telegraph, 5 February 2009, http://www.
telegraphindia.com/1090205/jsp/opinion/story_10485740.jsp
19 Salman Rushdie, “A Fine Pickle”, The Guardian, 28 February 2009, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/salman-rushdie-novels-film-adaptations
20 Travers, rev. of Slumdog Millionaire.
21 Bunch, “‘Slumdog: A Prize Worth Savoring’”.
22 Nikhat Kazmi, rev. of Slumdog Millionaire, TNN, 22 January 2009.
23 Nabar, “Slumdog Millionaire Bizarrely Plausible?”.
24 Bob Mondello, “Slumdog Millionaire: Mumbai Jackpot”, NPR.org, November 12,
2008.
25 M.K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian
Popular Cinema, New Delhi: OUP, 2008, p.98.
26 ibid., p.99.
27 Rachel Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sex and Romance
in Modern India, London: Cassell, 2000, p.108.
28 ibid.
29 Moti K. Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative
of Cultural Change, Stoke on Trent: Trentham, 2004, pp.28-31.
30 Shakuntala Banaji, Reading “Bollywood”: The Young Adult Audience and Hindi
Films, New York: Palgrave, 2006, p.178.
31 Erik Davis, “Interview: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Director Danny Boyle”,
Cinematical.com/, 12 November 2008.
32 Ashis Nandy, “Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics”, The
Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema,
ed. Nandy. New Delhi: OUP, 1998, pp.6-7.
33 ibid.
33 ibid.
34 Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema, p.148.
35 Davis, “Interview: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Director Danny Boyle.”
36 Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema, p.148.
37 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976, p.15.
38 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel,
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961, pp.51-7.
39 ibid., pp.14-20.
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Journal of Commonwealth Literature
40 ibid., pp.51-7.
41 Vikrum Swarup, Q&A, New York: Scribner, 2005, p.21.
42 Steven Cohan, Violation and Repair in the English Novel: The Paradigm of
Experience from Richardson to Woolf, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986, p.172.
43 Hassan, Radical Innocence, pp.329-30.
44 Neil Ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004, p.194.
45 Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”, University of Toronto
English Library, 19 January 1998, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/
hutchinp.html/
46 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949; Cleveland, OH:
Meridian, 1956, p.69ff.