If you’ve been paying attention to the Oscar buzz this month, you may have heard of a British-directed drama about a “Slumdog” orphan from Mumbai accused of cheating on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Although the movie, “Slumdog Millionaire,” already has critics, movie-goers and others in a fuss, I believe it is also affecting the Indian film industry known as “Bollywood.”
As a native of India myself, I am a lover of what most people call “Bollywood movies.” Typical Bollywood films are loaded with colorful musical numbers, charming and daring heroes, beautiful damsels, mean and wicked villains, fight scenes, happy endings and mostly three-hour long running times. These are the movies my friends and I have grown accustomed to watching back home.
In India, I found that theaters are mostly filled by “slum-dwellers” or middle-class people. The elite-class generally do not take the risk of buying tickets in huge crowds or watching movies in a theater with middle or lower classes. I noticed that in some Indian cities, low-income people still spend their daily wages to watch movies instead of buying food. I really consider people from slums as success stones for Bollywood in India. Slum people were the subject of movies acted by Raj Kapoor or Amitabh Bachchan, but were never shown in a realistic sense.
This is why I am delighted by the success of “Slumdog;” it is one of the few movies that applies the typical Bollywood formula — a song, a love story and a villain — while showing the ground reality of India. After nearly a century, some British director has finally come into India and made a film with the type of gravel and originality that many of us have been craving to see in Indian film for years. And, it took a team of Western filmmakers to make it happen. While some of the talents involved in the film (directors, actors, et cetera) are British, the spirit that delights me about the Indian movies is still there.
Above all, I think the movie will show Bollywood directors and producers that you can make movies about “slum folk” and still gain an audience. In an industry that distributes a thousand movies a year, almost all of them show India as an unrealistic glamorous world of middle and lower class people.
I am not saying this to backlash my own home; I love India and some of its movies, but it’s a fact that our lower castes are underrepresented in the Bollywood industry. Let’s face it, some of the images in “Slumdog,” — prostitutes, beggars, riots, scenes of torture — are not the types that Indians want to expose. Even though my nation now boasts some of the world’s richest people, I still hear so much about poverty and terrorism.
Many Indians hesitate to embrace “Slumdog” because of its portrayal of poverty and corruption in India. They say it lacks the fantasy, hope and gloss that Bollywood fans are accustomed to, and instead focuses on the harsh realities most Indians seek to ignore while watching the movie.
There have been many movies made about the “underbelly” of Western societies. In fact, the rest of the world has been making gritty films for years, like last year’s Oscar favorite, “No Country for Old Men.” It’s just that India has been addicted to its decades-old formula and hasn’t noticed.
“Slumdog” rates among the best films of the year. After watching the film, I walked out of the theater with a greater satisfaction than with most recent Indian films, thankful that someone had finally come along and modernized Bollywood, and not with nude women booty-shaking to club beats; this was modernization in a deeper sense, one that took the art of Indian filmmaking to a higher level.
All the essential Bollywood elements are there in full tact and thrown in for good measure. Yet British director Danny Boyle takes this basic formula and transforms it into a moving depiction of the hardships faced by these often ignored people in India, with the sort of realism that truly brings a fictional story to life. And even in these hardships, there was ample beauty to be found — the brilliant colors of the Mumbai landfills, the sacred bonds of brotherhood, the sensuality of a young dancer, the undying pursuit of the hopeless romantic for his only love. All this is woven into an engaging, tight-knit story. This marks the beginning of a new era in Bollywood, and many more Oscars to come.
— Kaushik Shandilya is a guest columnist and graduate student majoring in engineering.
