Tuesday, January 27, 2009
It is so Bollywoodish after all: Slumdog Millionaire, British rearing of an Indian heart
One point of contention which seems to drive critics and commentators berserk at the present moment is how Indian is Slumdog Millionaire. Based on Swarup’s novel Q & A, Slumdog is not really India seen through the British eye as one critic chose to analyze it in a recent television talk show. It is India as India is. It is purely Bollywoodish, and could have been made by an Anurag Kashyap, a Dibakar Banerjee, an Ashutosh Gowarikar, an Abhishek Kapoor, a Madhur Bhandarkar, or a Ram Gopal Varma in his more sensible days! It’s difficult to make out the difference.
Slumdog is at one level a postmodern bildungsroman; at another level it’s a docu-fiction on Mumbai slum life and its infamous underbelly (one is unavoidably reminded of Salaam Bombay, Dharavi and Traffic Signal); but it’s above all a love story, a true Bollywood love story. Interestingly, the narrative is built on a number of familiar tropes, tropes Indians are so well-acquainted with that they fail to realise that the maker is British.
Jamal Malik participates in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire not to win money, but to win back his lost childhood sweetheart Latika. The answer to every single question asked on the show is coincidentally related to some incident or the other of Jamal’s life. The narrative moves seamlessly between the past and the present, taking us through spine-chilling slices of Jamal’s life whereby we experience the brutality of the Bombay riots of 1992-1993, the awfully wicked beggarmasters of the city, as well as some light-hearted moments of Jamal’s meeting with Latika on a rainy night and his incredible obsession with Mr. Bachchan! As the story progresses, the film employs one familiar trope after the other: the good brother versus the bad brother with a big heart (recall Dewaar), the same brothers estranged in childhood to be reunited again (recall Amar Akbar Anthony, Yaadon Ki Baraat, etc), childhood lovers separated by a stroke of bad luck (recall Parinda), discovery of the lost lover in a brothel (recall Ram Lakhan, where Anil Kapoor taken captive by the villains returns to find his childhood beloved Madhuri Dixit dancing to the tunes of ‘Bekadar, bekhabar, bewafa, balmaa’, and many other films), taking revenge on the vicious villain (several 1970s Hindi films have sufficiently invulnerable heroes returning to avenge the wrongs done to them in their childhood, when they were helpless and powerless), two brothers falling for the same girl (There’s no need to provide an example of an older Hindi film here; there are far too many, and exhaustively so), and so on and so forth. However, unlike the 70s Hindi films, Slumdog does not see the world in black and white. It problematizes the constructs of goodness and badness, and leaves several loose ends, not ensuring a really happy ending. Apparently, the film ends happily, but it does not have a proper closure.
The last few moments of the film deserve special attention. The last question asked is: “Who is the third musketeer in Alexander Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers?” Ironically, Jamal was introduced to the names of the two musketeers in school, but he did not know the name of the third one. He is left with one lifeline: Phone-a-friend. Jamal dials his brother’s number, the only number he has. But it is Latika who had run away from her captor who picks up the phone. Jamal’s mission is fulfilled. He had come on the show so that Latika saw him. He does not care anymore whether he wins or loses. He casually selects A, and hits on the correct the answer. Pages can be written on this one moment of the film.
It’s difficult to explain rationally how Jamal hits on the right answer! Like several romantic Hindi films, the director places the heart above the head. The power of real love is such it can help surmount the most redoubtable problems. We have seen this happening in myriad Hindi films; in fact, an Indian audience has time and again revelled in the victory of the heart over the head, and knows that in a love story Reason is secondary to Emotion. Indian popular culture, celebrating the nation and ideas of Indian nationalism, since the days of the struggle for freedom, has always given more importance to emotions than reasons. This was in consonance with the nationalist idea of using the weapon of emotion against the overwhelming importance given to reason by the western Enlightenment project. This was a method of resistance to cultural colonization. A re-invoking of the same trope in Slumdog is very significant, for in the era of globalization, when the drive to homogenize the world is soaring, every nation is anxious to construct its own ‘difference’ from the others. Here again, celebration of romantic love as capable of making possible the impossible is highly remarkable. In this sense Slumdog is truly Indian. Wishing a very happy ending to Slumdog at the Oscars this year…!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)