By Anand Giridharadas
February 26, 2009
MUMBAI: If India's well-to-do ran the world, the film that dominated the Academy Awards this week might simply have been called "Millionaire."
That aspect of the movie - about hope - the well-to-do liked. It was the other aspect, distilled in the word "Slumdog," that was so deflating.
The boom era now fading left two longings among India's globalized rich. The first is a desire for recognition by the West, through magazine covers and Booker Prizes and Grammys. The second is a desire to show the world the most sanitized representation of India, not the stereotypical India mired in poverty and degradation, but an India as pristine as the elite's own posh homes.
Sometimes international recognition and sanitization come in the same work, as in films like "Bride and Prejudice" and "Outsourced." But on other occasions, what might be called the Slumdog Bargain has imposed itself: world acclaim came at the cost of celebrating a vision of India that the elite didn't really want to see.
Until the triumphs of Oscar night won their grudging nods to its success, many affluent Indians were irked by "Slumdog Millionaire." They complained at cocktail parties, in the press and on television: There they go again, those Westerners, making this out to be a land of poverty or something! They found their voice in Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's best-loved star, who ranted against "Slumdog" in a blog post that fast ricocheted through urban India.
"If SM projects India as Third World dirty under-belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots," he wrote, "let it be known that a murky under-belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations."
Supportive comments poured into the site from the elite pool of Indians with Internet access.
"They should realize that SM is not an Indian movie, but a means to sell out India to the world in order to make money," one user wrote. "The West enjoys trashing India as a land of smelly beggars and a land of corruption," said another.
The recognition-sanitization dilemma had struck a few months earlier, as well, when Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, "The White Tiger." He was praised in the local newspapers as yet another dazzling Indian novelist. But the book is not exactly a travel brochure. As he surveys India's class divides, he refers to millions of his compatriots as "half-baked," filled with "half-cooked ideas" by dismal schools. He writes of the degraded serving classes as "crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their 30s or 40s or 50s but still 'boys."'
Likewise, Arundhati Roy brought the nation great pride when she won the Booker in 1997 for "The God of Small Things." That is, until the newly affluent classes began to read her nonfiction writing and discovered her criticism of their heedless consumption and their blindness to the plight of the poor.
"There's a kind of insanity in the air and all of it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies," she told The Guardian newspaper in 2007. "The Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism."
Of course, the lifetime-achievement award in this category goes to V.S. Naipaul, a native of Trinidad who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. At the time, his Indian heritage was duly celebrated. Never mind his actual words about India: its "human futility," its "diseased society," its "intellectual depletion," its "evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body."
The comfortable classes dismiss these ways of seeing India as exploitative, as taking a slice of reality and marketing it to the outside world as the whole. But the truth may be instead that the comfortable are ever less aware of what reality in this country really involves.
Newspapers, magazines and television stations have all but removed poverty from prominence. They give more space to mergers than corruption, to Slumdog than slums. It becomes possible as a New Indian to imagine that India's poverty is some jealous Westerner's invention and to fear that one's own rising status is threatened by it.
That seems to be ultimate anxiety of the well-to-do: not the fact of poverty itself, but what poverty says about them. Poverty complicates the respect they are given on business trips abroad; poverty taints their Harvard degrees.
It is telling that, in my four years of writing about India, no poor person has ever asked me not to write about poverty. Countless rich people have.
I once received an e-mail response to an article of mine from an Indian-born, MIT-trained economist who has lived in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia.
"I was deeply pained and disappointed to catch a phrase, 'in this overwhelmingly destitute nation'," he said, in language that betrayed the personal, rather than political, nature of his complaint. "Why? Was it your phrase or did the editors insert it? What is the need to reinforce a stereotype of the West?"
But economic development is not Photoshop. There is a difference between making poverty history and making the mention of poverty history. Perhaps this is not part of the economics curriculum at MIT, but the World Bank says that 80 percent of Indians live on less than $2 daily.
The same self-regard was visible in Bachchan's musings. Unlike his counterpart Sean Penn, a heterosexual man who used his spotlight on Oscar night to call for the rights of those less included than he, Bachchan, like my economist interlocutor, seemed most concerned with his own psychic well-being. His words suggested a yearning to feel good about India that was more urgent to him than the change he might have achieved by saying other things: that half of Mumbai's people still live in slums; that half of India's children are still underfed; and that, whatever your taste in movies, something must be done.
Bachchan has done more than most for the poor, including battling polio. But his words on this occasion were about neediness more than the needy, and about Bachchan himself more than the gaunt millions who finance his career. And some visitors to his blog, dissenting from the rest, suggested that he reacquaint himself with reality by taking a short walk.
"If you think that SM movie did not show india as a developed country - you may have to step outside your opulent bungalow and have a look at how most people in india live - they live in villages and slums ignored by the government, celebrities and 'bollywood' filmmakers," a user called "Patriotic indian" wrote.
"Patriotism," the comment continued, "is not about living in an imaginary world but facing the real problems of India and doing something about it."