In a dilapidated tin shack next to one of Mumbai's busiest train lines, 30
street children have agreed to see a film of which they have never heard,
but which claims to depict their world: Slumdog Millionaire. The younger
ones, aged 6 and 7, sit cross- legged on the concrete floor of the day
shelter near Chowpatty beach in the south of the city. Barefoot in their
filthy vests and shorts, they pick their noses, hold their mouths wide open
and goggle at the television screen. The older boys - the eldest is 17 -
clap their hands and laugh uproariously during the comic scenes.
Everyone falls into hysterics when the young hero of the film, Jamal Malik,
plunges into a pit of human sewage on his way to collect the autograph of
his hero, the veteran Bollywood heart-throb Amitabh Bachchan. There is a
collective gasp when the film's villainous Fagin character, a man who
enslaves street children to beg for him, drugs one child with chloroform to
have a henchman burn out his eyes with boiling oil.
Once the final credits have rolled, I ask who has enjoyed the film. Thirty
hands shoot up immediately. Danny Boyle's movie, the most talked-about
British film in years, may have won a powerful cohort of enemies in India
and overseas, but among these real-life “slumdogs” the director has become a
hero. “The film is true to life,” says Rupesh, who claims to be 17 but looks
several years younger. With his shirt rakishly unbuttoned almost to the
navel and his hair carefully coiffed, he is the self-appointed leader of the
group. It was Rupesh who dealt out rather brutal clips around the ear when
the younger children initially refused to settle down. And he was in charge
of turning up the volume - to near deafening levels - as Mumbai commuter
trains screamed past just yards away.
“We like it better than the usual Bollywood movies,” he says. “It gives an
accurate picture of the world, of our kind of life.” Rupesh is well placed
to comment. At the age of 9 he ran away from a broken home in the city of
Nagpur in central India. Then he did what hundreds of thousands of errant
children in this country do every year: he got on a train. Living on his
wits and a few rupees stolen from home, he travelled as far as the city of
Jaipur in the north before heading south again to Mumbai, India's “maximum
city”, the nation's most cosmopolitan and charismatic metropolis, for
centuries a magnet for the disenfranchised.
Rupesh's real-life train journey mirrored that of Jamal and Salim, the
brothers depicted in Slumdog, who travel from Mumbai to the northern city of
Agra, site of the Taj Mahal, by rail and back again. Rupesh says that the
film captures the spirit of his world faithfully, although he takes issue
with a few technical details, especially the scenes that show the brothers
riding on top of India's “outstation” trains - those that travel between
cities. “These trains go far too fast to ride like that. I know. I tried the
same thing,” he says with something of a swagger. “Local trains in Mumbai,
yes, you can travel on top of those, but going on top of the outstation
trains - that's certain death.”
Rupesh now lives on Chowpatty beach, a stretch of sand that runaway children
from across the sub-continent somehow hear about as a place where it is
possible to scratch out a living. He helps to run a rickety Ferris wheel on
the shores of the Arabian sea and sleeps under a scrap of tarpaulin on “the
dirty side of the beach” - away from the gaze of Mumbai's middle classes,
who swarm to Chowpatty on weekend evenings to take the (rather polluted) sea
air, socialise and guzzle fried snacks.
His is not a job for the faint-hearted: he is employed to leap on to the rusty
steel Ferris wheel at its apex, which is about 25ft from the ground. He then
swings down, grasping the ride's frame and using his weight to send it
spinning. Seeing Rupesh work is terrifying. It is a wonder that he hasn't
been maimed by the heavy wheel as it spins furiously, laden with
queasy-looking passengers.
The job is as precarious financially as physically: Rupesh earns about 100
rupees (£1.40) on a good day, but after the terrorist attacks on the city in
November he went for almost two weeks without a wage after south Mumbai
became a ghost town.
“It's difficult but somehow we survive,” he says, with an air of resignation.
“It's not as if we have a lot of choice.”
The children's other main reservation about the film's accuracy concerns its
depiction of the gangmaster who rounds up children to set them begging and
mutilates them to make a bigger profit. “It doesn't happen like that,” says
Pipi, who claims to be 14. “Most of the beggars stay with their families.
Their mothers and fathers are in charge.” The children say that nobody in
their neighbourhood has been mutilated deliberately like the fictional
youngster who is blinded in Slumdog - but they believe that such atrocities
do happen elsewhere in Mumbai.
Among Chowpatty's child beggars, the physical scars are more subtle but no
less invidious than those depicted in the film: the small babies who are
carried alongside busy roads by young girl beggars - a practice alluded to
in Slumdog - quickly develop acute respiratory problems and most are
malnourished. Ailments such as scabies, tuberculosis and rickets are common.
Health workers who deal with street families regularly see babies whose
skulls have not formed properly because of calcium deficiencies.
Other true-to-life scenes in Slumdog that the real youngsters pick out include
those depicting small children working as rag-pickers on a rubbish dump, and
the film's portrayal of a violent sectarian riot. “We've seen these things,”
says Jeetu, 16. “They happen as you see in the film.” They approve of the
way in which Jamal and his brother are shown working together to survive.
“We have to look after each other,” says Ashfaq, 13. “Nobody else does.”
Virtually everyone in the audience has been chased - and beaten - by the
police, the scenario that forms the backdrop to the film's opening credits.
Asked if they find the film insulting, the children reply with a bemused “no”
- it shows real things, they reiterate: poverty, prostitution, murder,
theft, blackmail, religious violence, the exploitation of the weak. Its
“heart” is entirely authentic, they say, and it's good for outsiders to see
how they exist. This endorsement appears to undermine the criticism that
Slumdog has attracted in India and in the West. India's English-language
media has, for the most part, embraced the film and celebrated its
successes, but there have been high-profile backlashes against its depiction
of India's urban poor. Last month, Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood star,
took a swipe at the portrayal of the country as a “Third World, dirty,
underbelly developing nation” - a characterisation that he said had caused
“pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots”. In the UK, newspaper
columnists have branded the film voyeuristic “poverty porn”.
The discomfort surrounding what was billed as a feel-good movie increased when
the parents of the two child actors who play Jamal and Salim as infants
complained that their sons were paid a pittance, suggesting that they were
somehow duped by the film-makers. The allegation was denied by Boyle, who
has paid for the children to go to school and says that they will receive a
significant lump sum when they are old enough to spend it wisely. Deluged by
the world media, the families have gone into hiding.
Meanwhile, in the northern state of Bihar, one of India's poorest regions, a
slum-dweller has taken the Indian stars of the film to court, alleging that
Slumdog 's graphic portrayal of Mumbai's shanty towns has offended millions
of his peers. Tateshwar Vishwakarma, a social activist, later organised a
protest that resulted in a mob ransacking a cinema showing the film in
Patna, the capital of Bihar.
His biggest complaint: the use of the term “slumdog”. “Referring to people
living in slums as dogs is a violation of human rights,” he alleged. There
have also been a few rather thinly attended demonstrations in Mumbai's slums.
Cynics will note that firebrand activists, most of them championing dubious
causes, regularly attack cinemas in India to garner cheap publicity. But it
could be argued that Slumdog's controversial title does not fit the film.
When Jamal and Malik are first seen living in the slums, their lives are
fairly settled. They have a mother who loves them and they go to school (it
is only when their mother is killed in a riot that things fall apart).
Millions of real slum children live similar lives: more than half Mumbai's
population of about 18 million reside in the city's shanty towns. Not all
are impoverished. Many - especially in the long-established “registered
slums” - have homes that they consider comfortable, with running water,
electricity and satellite TV, and work in white-collar jobs.
Moreover, in Mumbai it is doubtful that the word “slum” carries the pejorative
connotation assigned to it by some characters in the film. It is a policeman
who calls Jamal a “slumdog”. But lots of policemen live in slums themselves.
It is estimated that one man in five of working age who lives in Dharavi -
Mumbai's mega-slum - is on the force.
One of the most eloquent defences of Slumdog was given by Irrfan Khan, the
actor who plays the chief cop who interrogates Jamal in the film. Boyle and
Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter who coined the term “slumdog”, did not
create the story, he observed; they worked from an Indian source. The
original story, Q&A, was written by Vikas Swarup, a first-time novelist
who has a day job as an Indian diplomat. “It's not as if [Boyle and Beaufoy]
took a story that was set in the Taj [Mumbai's finest five-star hotel] and
transferred it to the slums to make India look bad,” Khan said. “India is a
poor country. It's time we faced up to this”.
Arguably, what Beaufoy did was to anchor the film more firmly in the real
Mumbai. In Swarup's novel the hero is called Ram Mohammad Thomas, a name
that is part Hindu, part Muslim and part Christian, which makes the
protagonist a kind of abstract Indian Everyman. By contrast, in the film he
is definitely a Muslim who is orphaned by a baying Hindu mob in a riot that
recollects those that erupted in late 1992 and early 1993 in Mumbai, in
which some 900 people died.
The film-makers' decision to make Swarup's story more feasible may explain the
dominant reaction to Slumdog on India's streets: indifference. A telling
indicator of the Indian public's muted appetite for the film is that you
cannot buy pirated copies of the Hindi-dubbed version on India's streets.
The Hindi-language version was specially produced to appeal to the country's
mass market, but the bootleggers - some of the savviest operators in the
film industry - say that there is no demand for it. It seems that India's
cinema-besotted population cannot bear too much reality, and are certainly
not willing to pay to see it when they are confronted with it on the streets
every day.
“When I go to the cinema, I expect to be entertained,” says Kishor Joshi, a
former member of India's Central Board of Film Certification. “From what
I've heard, Slumdog Millionaire is quite depressing - not the sort of thing
I want to go to an auditorium for.” Media pundits agree: “The desi
[smalltown India] cinephile still likes his films with the regular mix of
high-decibel action, emotion, romance and revenge,” The Times of India said
last week in an article that detailed Slumdog's mediocre performance at the
local box office.
According to analysts, the film grossed about 90 million rupees (£1.3 million)
in its first week in India. It may have achieved the third-best opening by a
“Hollywood” release in the country, after SpiderMan 3 and Casino Royale, but
this was eclipsed by the 210million rupees reportedly taken by Raaz TMC, a
run-of-the-mill Bollywood horror flick released at about the same time.
Moreover, the 40 per cent of the 350 prints of Slumdog released in the
English-language version - which would have appealed to India's elite, a
tiny sliver of the population - accounted for 70 per cent of the film's
revenues.
According to our real street reviewers, it's the Indian public that is missing
out. “This is a film that is close to my heart,” says Rupesh - a sentiment
shared by his peers.
“It shows that somebody from the streets can achieve anything; that we can
fight oppression,” Jeetu adds. “When it wins awards, the victory is ours,
too.”
