Slumdog Millionaire
The title is inspired, if you know anything about India, because everything about the subcontinent is a wedding of unimagineable extremes, and in the broadest of terms, it pretty well describes the nation that is just beginning to explode on the world stage, the wings of which it has been lurking in for centuries.
Haven’t seen the movie, have only a general idea of what it is about from a couple of reviews … an inspiring tale of love, money, injustice, triumph, all that, with a game show in Dickensian Mumbai, and Hollywood is agush about it. I’ll try not to hold that against what might be a great movie. Pick your review here. The stars, as seen on the Golden Globes the other night, seemed engaging, and the starlet is world-class hot.* NPR’s On Point is doing a Slumdog segment right now. Dan Drezner at Foreign Policy wonders how sensitive Indian audiences will take the depiction of wretched Indian poverty and injustice … of which there are vast quantities … when it opens on the subcontinent next week, and predicts a panning would be doom for SDM at the Oscars. I doubt that. Hollywood’s far too convinced of its own righteous sensitivity to give a damn about either reality or what anyone else thinks. FP today reports the beginning of an Indian backlash. Notes however that the cinematic slum looks sanitized. My guess is the most ambitious movie about the slums of Mumbai … I have a hard time getting past ”Bombay,” but it’s not my country or my city, so I’ll let it go … can barely manage to dip its toe into the roiling contrasts and deep mysteries of India.
Here’s the thing about India. When people talk about the mysterious east in mystic tones, it’s usually about yogis and inner navel-gazing truths and the Kama Sutra, that kind of thing. Hindus and Jains and Sikhs and Sufis and Shiites, along with Christians, Jews and tribal animists. All pretty exotic and mysterious. Greater mysteries and contrasts are much easier to find, lying around in plain view, significantly less than navel-deep. The subcontinent is one of the most beautiful and terrible places on Earth. Quick semi-informed, impressionistic tour. (My credentials, which are superficial, include a couple of weeks in Delhi and Indian-held Kashmir and a couple of weeks in Lahore, Islamabad and Pakistani-held Azad Kashmir in India’s estranged sibling nation as a reporter, a job that offers quick, intensive studies. Also, three years as a boy in Dacca and various parts of Bangladesh, when it was still known as East Pakistan; a fair amount of reading; and many, many years in the company of the fine people of the great South Asian diaspora, from Thailand to the Middle East to the United States, at various social levels. For our purposes we’ll consider India and Pakistan part of the same thing, though different things, as there are as many similiarities in these conjoined nations as there are important political, cultural and social differences.)
A Lonely Planet edition a few years ago compared public sanitation conditions in Pakistan to London in the 16th century. This is more or less true. A lot of things about India and Pakistan are in the 16th century, from sanitation to the social order and social customs, and it’s a good place to go if you want to see what life was like was like then. Large parts of the subcontinent, in fact, are probably better described as being in the Middle Ages or maybe even pharoanic times. It is a place where 21st century technology, such as cell phones and computers, butts right up against timeless industries such as blacksmithing, basketweaving, woodcarving and painstaking stone-chiselling of everyday goods and equipment, in hole-in-the-wall workshops that make the notion of “cottage industry” sound grand. India has a space program, and India and Pakistan both have nukes, of course. In both places, you can still see animal and human dray labor, and in India, the domestically produced autos, when you get under the hood, look like they were hammered out in one of those hole-in-the-wall shops, which parts of any older model Ambassador sedan probably were.
India is a country where abject poverty is an industry. First thing that happens when you get off the plane, you get mobbed by professional beggars, who are very adept at making nuisances of themselves until you pay them off. A former British Raj policeman who was a family friend told of busting in on someone who was crippling a prospective beggar back in the 1940s. I don’t know whether that still goes on, but a lot of other dark sides persist, according to news report, so I don’t know why that one shouldn’t. In the space of two weeks, my accommodations ranged from the $400-a-night five-star Oberoi in Delhi … we figured the company could swing a couple of nice nights for us as we had been living rough and had been shot at … to a $5 a night inn in a Himalayan resort town which had both electrical and plumbing fixtures, but neither worked, so I berated them down to $2.50, and I know we were still paying more than anyone else in the place. During that brief time, I witnessed two violent canings by businessmen running public nuisances off their premises and no fewer than eight people relieving themselves in plain view. I don’t mean peeing, I didn’t count that. In India the myth is that cows wander the street because they are holy and no one can interfere with their whims. There is probably some truth to that, but there and in Pakistan, the fact is that barnyard animals of all kinds and mangy curs go where they will. Travelling across country, I noticed that the mud-walled and thatched villages of my Bengali youth were present in the Punjab and elsewhere, and that, much like the previous 1,000 years, not much had changed in my absence. It’s noteworthy that while the subcontinent in home to more than 120 languages, it also has broadly unifying elements, and I recognized Bengali words from my youth in the conversation of Urdu and Hindi speakers. Not such a surprise, I suppose, when you consider that the English “borough” and German “burg” is linguistically related to the Indian “pore” and Thai “buri.”
Speaking of my Bengali youth … where as previously noted I first saw a man without a nose at age eight and many other lepers, and sights such as a sun-wizened woman of about 26 smashing brick to be mixed in the concrete at a construction site with a couple of brats in the ditch beside her, and Shiite torchight self-flagellation parades … it was there I first received a fundamental lesson in economics. There was a story about a UN road-building project with Japanese contractors who wanted to bring in modern equipment. The Bengali authorities reportedly were aghast and turned it down, noting that the graders and pavers would put a thousand dollar-a-day loincloth-wearing laborers out of work. Other persistent quaint ways of doing things in some parts of the subcontinent, according to news reports, include the marriage of children, the beating, murder and enslavement of wives, and the burning of widows.
You know, I could bash India and Pakistan all day. But let me sing some of their praises. India is the world’s largest democracy, and has been highly successful as such given the widespread poverty, vast economic divides, and multiple ethnic divisions in the 60 years since the Raj ended and the British decamped, leaving English institutions as well as the English language grafted onto the ancient mosiac of Indo-Aryan society. After the wrenching, violent experience of partition, India and Pakistan have fought numerous large and small wars, and both have also had to deal with numerous long-running internal insurgencies, from Waziristan to the Punjab to Nagaland to Assam, to Bengali independence in 1970. It is probably a remarkable achievement that these great nations, three of the most populous on Earth, still exist in only three states, and it has been managed with the exercise of politics as well as violent crackdowns. A lot of it is relatively simple. As a former Pak Army major, turned to religion in retirement, put it, “They have 33 million gods. We have One. They worship the cow. We eat the cow. How can we ever get along?” He was also keen to known whether I was a Christian, really a Christian. It wasn’t the Christianity that was a problem. It was his suspicion that like many westerners, I might have no God at all. Or as a Hindu refugee from Kashmir, living in a Delhi slum, presciently observed in 1998, “We thought mighty India and world opinion, led by mighty America, would cause these terrorists to retreat. We were never prepared to leave for good … It is not the problem of Kashmir only. It is the problem of the whole civilized world. They don’t believe in live and let live. They are not going to spare America also.”
All of it slams together in places likes Amarnath, in Indian Kashmir, where Hindu pilgrims by the tens of thousands swarm the glacier and mountain paths under Indian Army machinegun nests and constant threat of mujahideen attack, to pray in a cave where an ice stalagmite represents the penis of Shiva. A necessary step on the path to escaping reincarnation in this vale of tears.
As a matter of balance it should be noted that India has no shortage of Hindu and Sikh religious extremists who have also exercised political violence, and some would argue as matters of state policy. In fact, there are both Indian and Pakistani Muslims and Hindus who are willing to live and let live, but it is a constant struggle in those nations as in the world at large to keep the advocates of nihilistic violence from driving the agenda. The Mumbai attacks, which ironically gave “Slumdog Millionaire” a publicity boost, appear to have been a cynical effort by Islamists to fuel the great rivalry, bring it to the brink of war, and thereby take the heat off jihad on the Afghan-Pak border. The gambit has enjoyed some success, although that game has yet to play out and may yet backfire.
Stepping away from the ancient animosities, the people of the subcontinent make truly delightful company and highly competent associates. Their art, ancient and modern, is intricate, astonishing, often breathtaking. Some people think Bollywood productions are a joke. Much like American B flicks. But if you’ve seen Channel [V], you may have seen some remarkable, highly sophisticated fusions of western and eastern art and music … nothing new about Rahman’s “Slumdog” soundtrack. Indians and Paks are highly industrious and clever people. When graced with education, they can be brilliant, often far outperforming first-world scholars. In the Middle East, if you need to get something done, and you want it done well, you engage an Indian or a Pak for the job, and he will energetically and creatively pursue your goal. Which is why, in addition to cost factors, many tech and finance firms have gone to India for support services. The same is often true in the United States, as well, where the medical and high-tech fields, as well as scientific research fields are heavily loaded with Indians and Paks. They are also among the shrewdest businessmen in the world, vying historically with the Chinese in Asia as both economic cogs and powerhouses. As a result, much like the Chinese, they have often been resented and even hated in the nations to which they have spread.
I don’t know how the predicted ascendancy of India is going to play out over the coming decades. I do know that I welcome it as something that may bring those vast swaths of medieval India into the 19th, 20th or even the 21st century, while India’s ideals of democracy and multicultural unity** if not perfect in execution are world-class values, as well as free enterprise, as India attempts to break away from the trappings of socialism, imperialism and feudalism. We could do a lot worse for partners in the 21st century, and looking at the predicted rise of the authoritarian People’s Republic China, we may well do worse.
** Yeah, I used the “m” word. Its embrace and transcendance is something achieved in India, or strived for, not least by the designation of English as the official language, a point on which India is more advanced than us. Another issue. I started this talking about India and Pakistan as parts of a whole. Obviously quite separate if indivisible parts. Our future is also inextricably tied with Pakistan and has been for some time in the area of national security, a complex and problematic relationship that will require a lot of attention and finesse. In some ways, improved relations and peace between India and Pakistan is every bit as vital to our interests and maybe more so than Israeli-Palestinian peace.
* Here’s world-class hot starlet Freida Pinto and an interview, by the way. More from Bollywood, please.
Topics: india
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:09 am on Friday, January 16, 2009
3 Responses to “Slumdog Millionaire”
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January 16th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
PBS is currently airing The Story of India, a six-hour BBC production. It’s four hours in now (also available on DVD and a book), and is fascinating, mixing India’s history with its present day circumstances. I’ve read everything I could find about India since I was a kid, and the show has revealed things I never knew.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden also has an excellent essay on India up. Would Sasha be allergic to a slumdog, I wonder? Or (thanks, hf) a millionaire? [...]
January 16th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Jules,
A great article, much appreciated.
Before I die, I hope to visit India. ideally, I would like to be able to trace the route of Alexander, from Macedon to India, and all the side routes, but with today’s politics, it’s likely to be impossible.
My parents were host family for many of the Indian and Pakistani college students, and as a result, though I didn’t get to visit there, I was steeped in the music, foods, writings and all sorts of wonderful things to stoke a young boy’s imaginations. Add in the works of Kipling, cardamum-scented tea in the afternoon, and the wonderous flavoured fire of curries, and it’s hard to think of a better upbringing.
Every weekend, we’d hie over to the university for the latest edition from Ballywood. The flittering sound of the projection reels was a subset of the music and vocals that I often struggled to keep up with. There were subtitles for us english-speakers, but the panoply of colours, movement and lyrical voices often held me fixed to the screen.
I know that the India of my youthful dreams likely never existed, but still and all, it was real to me and I would very much like to travel there. Likely that that, too, is a pipe-dream, but at least one can still dream. The “lightworkers” haven’t figured out how to tax that yet, anyway :)
Thanks again, it’s always a joy to read your work…