A Story of the Underdog

I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire - the drama, co-directed by Danny Boyle (director of Trainspotting) and Loveleen Tandon, is a fantastic, edge-of-your seat, globalesque phantasmagoria with a humanist message. The film cleverly employs the frame of a game show to narrate a tale of slum-life in Mumbai. Truly, the story of an underdog.

The hero of the film is Jamal Malik, an assistant from a call center (a.k.a. chai-wallah) who has become a contestant on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" which, in India, is "Kaun Banega Krorpati?" The show's sleazy host, brilliantly played by Anil Kapoor, enjoys reminding the audience that the contestant is "only a chai-wallah". Jamal is only a question away from the prize of 20 million rupees, a never before accomplished feat, when the program reaches its end, to be continued to the next day. That evening, the game-show host turns Jamal over to the police: he is arrested on grounds of cheating, and briefly tortured also -- the assumption being that a street kid turned chai-wallah could not possibly know so much. Jamal must prove his innocence to the police inspector (played by Irfan Khan) in an interrogation that becomes an opportunity to narrate his life story.

He does so by revealing how he knew the answer to each question. Each answer is a story, and reveals one part of his life: growing up with his brother in the slums, losing his mother to riots, his childhood love who is kidnapped by thugs running an 'orphanage' and placed in a brothel, his encounters with gangsters, travel and work as tour-guide and much more. In this, it holds no punches: if the film makes for stressful viewing, it is because the device of the game show is brilliantly inflected with the real dangers and fears of growing up poor, orphaned, and without protection from the tyrannies of poverty.

At the heart of Slumdog Millionaire is the complex story of class. It both subtlely and at times overtly, criticizes the state while also focusing on the injustices the poor experience due to the strains of global capitalism. (Jamal is caught between the authority of the state and the authority of the entertainment media.) Many scenes are shot from the eye-level of the people living between the train-tracks, a wonderful cinematographic move that captures Mumbai from the very bottom rungs: people, places flash through the crevices of the moving train. There is also the invocation of Amitabh Bachan from his more 'proletarian' days in the 1970s. The film ultimately depicts the resilience of those living in conditions where obstacles appear at every turn. Much credit on this point must go the music, which re-mixes, at points, the third-world concerns of M.I.A. songs with the sounds of music composer A.R. Rahman. This is the story of coming out of the shit box and onto the soapbox -- so, ultimately, it is a revamping of the rags to riches story. Hope is bonded to social and class mobility. It captures the present moment--between Obama's election and the recent attacks in Mumbai ---with an uncanny precision.

This is one of the few contemporary films in which the characters' Muslim identities are not the main angle of the film. One does not come away thinking that Javed and Salim were particularly Muslim--rather their Muslimness is simply another facet to their complex underdog identities. They are poor, orphaned, and belong to a minority community. The scene of the riots, and one presumes that these are the attacks that coincided with the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, is one of the earliest segments of the film. Slumdog Millionaire must be commended for breaking the mould of stereotypes commonly held about Muslims--this is particularly poignant in the fact that Salim, Jamal's brother--who is at one point, very briefly, shown praying-- is a highly complex character. Salim's transition into the criminal underworld is mediated through circumstances of personal relationships and re-encounters with dangerous enemies from the orphanage. Yet, there is the nuanced sense of minority expression, of how to deal with always being on the periphery: at one point, Salim, now the right-hand man of the underworld don, Javed, looks over the slum he grew up in, in astonishment. He says, "I am at the center, I am at the center of the center."

The Salim-Javed gangster alliance alludes to an interesting cultural reference also: Salim-Javed were also a pair of song-writers who wrote the lyrics to several films of the 1970s and 80s including, Zanjeer, shots of which appear throughout. The minority then exists in the links between the underworld and the world of entertainment.

Lastly, despite all these specificities, the fact that it tells a parallel story of the new India captured by a generation defined from the early 90s to the present, its appeal is that it remains a universal story. The story bears affinity with growing up as orphaned, poor, and in a slum/ghetto in many parts of the world, from favellas in Brazil or the inner city of Chicago--subject to the violence of every day life of sheer poverty.

Saudi Women Debates

Debates about women in Saudi society have appeared over the past year. First, there is this one, in which a cleric and woman's rights activist argue about marriage, male guardianship, and the shari'iah. It is particularly interesting in questioning by the activist of the shari'iah being used as the sole source of authority:



Then there is this one with author Zaynab Hifni, author of Women at the Equator, a collection of short stories. There is not yet an English translation. Note how the interviewer immediately refutes her quotation of a widely accepted hadith about 'Aisha:



There is also this, a newscaster rejecting the shura council's decision on a ban from women appearing on Saudi media:

Xenophilia

Amitav Ghosh writes about his travels and days as an anthropologist in a village of Egypt, Lataifa. He writes of film songs, cows, and the non-aligned movement in his "Confessions of a Xenophile" of which some snippets are below. Also, his hour-long interview regarding his newest book, Sea of Poppies, here.

If I am to think of what drew me to Egypt in 1980, it was, at bottom, the very impulse that I have been describing here – a kind of xenophilia, a desire to reclaim the globe in my own fashion, a wish to eavesdrop on an ancient civilizational conversation. Admittedly, this impulse could have taken me to many other places, but the opportunity presented itself at a time when I was just becoming aware of the ties that had once linked Yemen and China, Indonesia and East Africa – and most significantly for me, India and the Middle East. As one of the centres of the world, Egypt has always had a special attraction for travelers and it seemed natural that this was where I would come.

We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War. It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased. Even in the 19th century, the high noon of Empire, people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, sought each other out, wrote letters to each other, and stayed in each other’s homes while traveling. Lately, a great number of memoirs and autobiographies have been published that attest to the depth and strength of these ties. It was no accident therefore that Mahatma Gandhi chose to stop in Egypt, in order to see Sa’ad Zaghloul before proceeding to the Round Table Conference in London. This was integral to the ethos of the time. Similarly, it is no accident that capitals like New Delhi, Abuja and Tunis have many roads that are named after leaders from other continents. Sometimes these names are unpronounceable to local tongues and then they cause annoyance or laughter, and invite dismissal as empty gestures. But the fact that such gestures are not without value becomes apparent when we reflect that we would search in vain for roads that are named in this fashion in such supposedly global cities as London, New York and Berlin. These gestures, in other words, may be imbued with both pomposity and pathos, but they are not empty: they represent a yearning to reclaim an interrupted cosmopolitanism.