Although the hit feature film Slumdog Millionaire, set in India’s commercial capital has swept Hollywood’s annual Oscar awards bagging prizes for best picture, musical score and sound recording, not a few within the intelligentsia — your editor included — have experienced a peculiar reluctance to view it. By all accounts Slumdog is a gut-wrenching depiction of life in urban India’s proliferating slums, which middle class India seems to be celebrating instead of penitently mourning in sackcloth and ashes.
Moreover an inconvenient truth which seems to have been ignored is that Slumdog is hardly an Indian creation. The producer, director and screenplay writer are all Brits who seem to delight in proving right the Churchillian prophecy, that an independent India ruled by Indians would result in freebooters and rascals lording it over the common people. With an estimated shortage of 25 million homes and the average Indian household making do with a mere 100 sq.ft of built-up housing, post-independence India’s development effort has been a disaster. Yet instead of apologising for the shameful conditions in which the overwhelming majority of the population lives, the great Indian middle class is revelling in the poverty porn on lavish display in Slumdog.
But perhaps the most galling aspect of the naïve euphoria with which this searing indictment of India’s national development effort has been greeted, is that the country’s rapacious politicians have jumped on the success bandwagon of this hit movie. Although it’s indisputable that cockeyed legislation such as the Bombay Rent Act and Urban Ceiling Act, enacted by the Congress party, is majorly responsible for the horrible slums in which half of Mumbai’s citizens eke out miserable lives, a Congress spokesperson sporting a wolverine grin on national television claimed some of the credit for the global success of Slumdog. Half a century of Congress rule, he said, has “created a culture of achievement” in India’s spreading slums.
O tempore, O mores!