Art & Entertainment

All It Boyles Down To

Is Slumdog a success because it has been made by a Westerner? Haven't we been here before?

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All It Boyles Down To
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Boyle has taken the Bollywood form—its melodrama, lack of logic, predictability, stereotypes, cliches and song-'n-dance—and served it to the West with dollops of 'realism'. 'Indian' films made by Western filmmakers have followed an evolutionary pattern of their own—first it was the maharajas and the gurus, then the colonial touch of Merchant-Ivory, followed soon enough by exotic, 'Incredible India'. The trend du jour is India's underbelly, the India not quite shining. Which is fair enough, you certainly can't wash the overwhelming poverty out of the Indian landscape. Except: Boyle's realism just skims the surface; issues of poverty, child exploitation, images of brutality and violence are forgotten as quickly as they play out on the screen. The only question that remains is: will the boy get the girl, and how? It's a panoramic, bird's eye view of every single Indian problem—communal riots (if it were not for Ram and Allah I would still have a mother, says Jamal), child trade, the begging industry, prostitution. And in the midst of it, you have a bunch of spunky kids triumphing against every odd, a feelgood formula that a Karan Johar would never have managed to concoct. "This is a cheerfully undemanding and unreflective film with a vision of India that, if not touristy exactly, is certainly an outsider's view; it depends for its full enjoyment on not being taken too seriously," writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, perhaps the only temperate voice in a sea of hagiographies.

Boyle, it seems, is truly obsessed with shit. Remember Trainspotting, where he had Ewan McGregor searching for drugs in a pile of shit? Slumdog has a little boy wading through human excreta to get the autograph of Amitabh Bachchan (an incident that doesn't figure in Swaroop's novel). But there is a vital difference here. In Trainspotting , the scene might have been a brilliant encapsulation of the descent to low life. In Slumdog, a film that otherwise finds Boyle at his least edgy and most romantic, it just seems a token filth-and-grime scene—uncalled for, gratuitous, nauseating and pointless. Surely the boy's tenacity could have found a better illustration, and surely fan fervour in India has other ways of manifesting itself. As for the scourge of manual scavenging, who wants to get really real?

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A Slumdog still

Yet, this is not a grouse about how the West sees us. It's how we ourselves are responding to the film—as though no Indian filmmaker has ever cast his or her eye on slums, or dealt with real, uncomfortable issues. Have we forgotten Dharavi and Chakra? Parinda, Satya, Black Friday and Company captured the city's underbelly just as well, if not better. If Slumdog is gritty, the recent Tamil film Subramaniapuram, about unemployment and unrest amongst the youth in the '80s, is grittier. But would the world accept this little gem from a newcomer called Sasikumar? Would they get engaged with a warm and quirky film like Khosla Ka Ghosla, on a retired old man's struggles to reclaim his plot of land? Will they ever figure out the hullabaloo over catching a wild bull in a delightful Marathi film like Valu? Or the kinetic energy and thrill of a Johnny Gaddar? Would Slumdog itself have got as much approval, even from us, had it been directed by some Sriram Raghavan, Dibakar Banerjee or Shimit Amin?

Even as an entertainer, Slumdog can't do a Bollywood, though Boyle plunders maniacally from it. His storytelling is not half as madly entertaining as our masala films are. The template of two brothers going divergent ways goes back to Deewar, but lacks its zing, or the powerful dynamics of the class struggle. Nor does it better the guided tour of the Taj and the hoodwinking of tourists that Bunty aur Babli did with the hilarious "sale of Taj". And while Slumdog has made A.R. Rahman the first Indian to win a Golden Globe, the last item number, Jai ho, is badly choreographed, more like an aerobics video, and has not an ounce of the energy and exuberance of a Chhaiyyan chhaiyyan or a Kajrare.

It's perfectly okay to look for approval from the West. After all, who doesn't like more commerce and a bigger market? But to suddenly discover ourselves after Boyle has, well that's an incredible stretch.

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