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.