The sordid side of India
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 03 Mar, 2009
THE British-Indian film Slumdog Millionaire has become a phenomenon in the United States, Britain and other western countries. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won eight of them, including the highly coveted title of the best motion picture of the year.
Not only was the movie a sensation, its three child actors, all plucked from a Mumbai slum inhabited mostly by Muslims were also applauded.
The three kids were flown from Mumbai to Hollywood and attended the award ceremony. The film’s director, an Englishman, said the movie is really a love story — the story of two children who, after going their separate and at times ugly ways, find each other and presumably live happily ever after. The movie ends with a dance and song number — the song also won an Oscar — celebrating the triumph of love over evil.
The Indian reaction to the movie’s triumph was at best mixed. While Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, said that it was a matter of pride for his country that its art and artists had received global recognition, many Indian commentators were less enthralled. Priyadarshan Nair, an Indian filmmaker, wrote in an article published in India Today, that the movie was a poor copy of those made in Bollywood. Besides, it mocked India. He wrote. “India is not Somalia. We are one of the foremost nuclear powers in the world; our satellites are roaming the world. Our police commissioners’ offices don’t look like shacks and there are no blind children begging in the streets of Mumbai.”
There are, of course, blind and crippled children begging not only in the streets of Mumbai but in all major cities of South Asia. To deny their existence is to deny help from reaching them. The political slogan, ‘Shining India’, did not help the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2004 elections. ‘Incredible India’, the slogan with which India began to draw the attention of the world to its economic and political triumphs, must not be allowed to brush under the carpet the lives lived by hundreds of millions of people who have not been touched by the country’s impressive economic performance of the last couple of decades.
There is a tendency among many Indians to become highly nationalistic when what they perceive as the ugly side of their country becomes news. That is unfortunate since there are many areas where India is not doing well and one of them is the quality of services it delivers to the urban poor. That, in part, was the story of Slumdog. The poor in India feel differently about the film. “A lotus from the swamps” is how a proud father of a child actor in the film describes his son’s achievement.
But there was more to the movie and the story it told. It is not really a love story involving two kids from one of the more notorious slums of Mumbai, who ultimately escape poverty and much else to become rich and famous. What appealed to western audiences was the display of audacity on the part of some kids from the slums, with which they are able to mould their future. The three children in the story don’t opt for fame and wealth based on virtue; one of them becomes a leader of a gang that makes its money by exploiting kids from the slums.
This is not only the story of urban India
but of the entire developing world where the heartless exploitation of the poor by the rich is common and beyond the reach of the state. Not only is the state often a bystander in this form of economic exploitation, it is often complicit in what goes in. The police in particular provide little protection to the vulnerable. It often comes out in support of those who exploit. This happens in the slums of Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka, Sao Paulo and Lagos — in fact, in all the megacities of the developing world.
It is interesting that those who financed the film, produced and distributed it and who consequently made a good profit for themselves are anxious not to be seen as having exploited the slums, those who live in them and the slum children who are desperate to find some way of escape. They have declared that a part of their profit will be used to help the children who acted in the film. Their school will be improved and once they have graduated from it they will be provided financial assistance to attend institutions of higher learning.
The story of filth and squalor — at one point Jamal, the film’s young protagonist wades through raw sewage to get the autograph of a movie star who has arrived in his helicopter — is the story of millions of children who suffer from the extraordinary environment in which they live. Almost 90 per cent of the two billion projected increase in world population will take place in the developing world by 2050. Of this one-half will live in towns and cities.
About 50 large cities of the developing world will gain an additional 250 million people, 90 per cent of them will find accommodation in the slums of the cities and jobs in the already crowded informal sectors. The probability that one of them will become a millionaire is minuscule. Even the chance of surviving to adulthood and old age is small.
Slumdog is also a vivid portrayal of the environmental degradation that surrounds the people who live in these settlements. Economists have now begun to argue that providing clean drinking water and basic sanitation is an important way for bringing some development to these areas. This is the reason why the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the heads of state in 2000 emphasised not only education but also the supply of quality drinking water and the provision of sanitation to the poor. By focusing on this aspect of life for millions of slum dwellers in India — and by extension in all developing countries — the filmmakers have done a great service.
One likely consequence of public awareness that will definitely result from the success of the film is to attract the West’s civil society to pay some attention to the conditions in the slums of the developing world. Experience has shown that when governments fail non-government organisations step in. This happens in both developed and developing countries. The failure of western governments to increase assistance to poor nations — something they have promised over and over again — has prompted organisations such as the well-endowed Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to step in with assistance.
Likewise NGOs such as Pakistan’s Edhi Foundation come to the assistance of people in distress when the state fails to reach them. By increasing the world’s awareness of the conditions in which millions of people live, Slumdog did not mock India. It has served the world’s poor well.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/...+side+of+india