Slumdog reaction is a more disturbing story
Despite its tremendous success at the box office and the Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire has not been enthusiastically received in India, where the movie is set.
Instead, it sparked controversy because it is set among the vast Indian underclass instead of the new and aspiring middle class or the super-rich. The storm highlights a little-examined and much deeper malaise than poverty which scars modern Indian's psyche. Indians are notoriously sensitive about how foreigners perceive them. The implications are profound for a world, especially Asians, whom Indians are eagerly courting.
Indians bristle at any slight, regardless of whether the assertions are based on fact. Shining too bright a light on the problems that plague India leads to the critique being dismissed as neocolonial racism or 'poverty porn', designed to titillate western audiences. Indians are shrillest if the illuminating is being done by a foreigner.
Taking umbrage at foreigners is a phenomena as old as the modern nation-state. Mahatma Gandhi condemned the American journalist Katherine Mayo's critique, Mother India, as a 'gutter inspector's report'. The French director Louis Malle's searing snapshot of 1960s Calcutta was banned. The Party, a 1970s film where Peter Sellers blacked up to play an Indian, raised a storm of protest leading to the film being temporarily prohibited. Most recently, the trite Hollywood film The Guru incensed Indian migrants in the US. Even the maestro Satyajit Ray didn't escape. Prominent political and film personalities accused him of pandering to western stereotypes with his sensitive portrayals of village life.
At the centre of the present controversy is a movie that takes the viewer on a rapid tour of the dirty underbelly of India. Many scenes are plainly gratuitous, designed to add 'colour'. Practically every ugly clich? of Indian metropolitan life - a lack of sanitation, child prostitution, religious bigotry and the endemic exploitation of servants - is packed in. No wonder that wealthy Indians, whose only knowledge of poverty is what they see through the tinted windows of their air-conditioned Mercedes, are fuming.
Yet mixed in with the outrage is a sense of achievement. Never mind that the film is British, as is the director. The cast is mainly Indian and A.R. Rahman, the composer of the score, picked up an Oscar. Indians rejoiced. Despite smarting at the portrayal, Indians crave international recognition.
For all of India's global pretensions, its people still suffer from a juvenile streak of taking quick offence. Slumdog is about hope and love. Indians need to see it as a film, not a social document. Like any work of art, it is a matter of taste. Yet the film's success indicates that it is undeniably compelling - even for Indians.
Most of all, Slumdog is disturbing, not because of the stark poverty it portrays but because of the fierce and confused outbursts of nationalist pride it can generate in a country attempting to forge links with the rest of the world.
Deep Kisor Datta-Ray is a London-based historian and commentator on Asian affairs
