Slumdog Millionaire and Q and A

The 2009 box office success Slumdog Millionaire is a compelling and gripping story leaving you on edge until the very end. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, taking home eight, making it the most successful movie at the Academy Awards that year. Something else that made it stand out from the other nominated films was its majority foreign non-western setting and actors. The studio, director, and writer of the film however, were white and had designed the movie for a western audience. Because of this, Slumdog Millionaire is actually a British drama based in India.

Audiences share great connection with the characters and stories told in the film despite the fact that it appears very foreign to them. Even for a large portion of the opening scenes which are spoken in Hindi, the audience can still see parts of themselves in the characters. This is because the movie is very aware of its audience and storytelling directed to a western audience.

Slumdog Millionaire was a departure from the many aesthetic familiarities of the vastly homogenous Hollywood film industry.

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Its Western director and writer (Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy) altered the film’s Indian source material (Q&A by Indian author Vikas Swarup) to fit with familiar sentiments, stereotypes and plot devices which help to effectively communicate emotion and give context to the Western audience at the cost of authenticity. This is a way that majority or dominant cultures can work to oppress and misrepresent minority cultures. Even though it wasn’t the intention of the British based force behind this movie, in many ways their presence in being able to frame and profit off of this story supports cultural imperialism and the plot devices used depend on the “othering” (Said, 2006) of the Indian characters and culture.

The movie begins after the first airing of Jamal’s impressive run to the final question of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he is being tortured and interrogated by the police. It is suspected that that he has cheated the game. This is because there is no good explanation as to why a person of his background and social class would know the answers to these questions. The movie begins with presenting the mystery to us and asking us to judge the situation: A: He cheated, B: He's lucky, C: He's a genius, D: It is written.

This opening que is a hint at the overarching theme of this movie, fate. In his defense to the police we go through Jamal’s life growing up in India. Each of the questions directly pertains to a very specific event in his life and this is why he knows the answers. By explaining how he knew the answers to all the questions we begin to see Jamal’s relationships with the other main characters developing.

Jamal and his brother Salim become orphaned together when their mom is killed. There is an internal struggle between Salim’s need to protect his brother and his desire to make money. The brothers’ lives are very much influenced by their socio-economic standing. While Jamal’s main concern with money is survival it seems that Salim’s intention is to make as much money as he can. Their place on the bottom rung of social class is emphasized through Jamal’s nickname chaiwalla, a person who serves tea.

The other main character is Latika, a girl who the brothers meet when fleeing from the raid. Latika is not given much agency in the film and is often at the whim of the desires of men. She and Jamal form a strong relationship, and end up falling in love. This becomes Jamal’s main motivating force in many things he does later on

The movie follows Jamal and Salim’s various adventures around India in hopes of making money, each adventure relating in some obscure way to a question that Jamal is asked later on the show. After a few odd jobs, Jamal demands they return back in order to find Latika, who Salim abandoned in their escape of an orphanage led by a man called Maman who was mutilating children in order to increase their chances of receiving more charity money. They decided to leave the life of scamming to work in a kitchen in Mumbai.

Eventually, Salim finds out that Latika is working in a brothel being trained to dance in order to be sold by Maman. Salim ends up shooting and killing Maman and they escape with Latika. After this they rest in an abandoned hotel at which point in time Salim decides to seek out the biggest gangster in the slum, Javed, to announce that he has killed Maman and be recruited. Salim gets drunk and engages in a fight with Jamal even pulling a gun on him.

We fast forward a few years and Salim has not seen Jamal since the night he pointed a gun at him. Jamal manages to make contact and they arrange to meet up. After a tense encounter, Salim arranges to bring Jamal back to his house, where he is now living quite wealthy as a result of being a gangster. Jamal follows him out one day and finds out where Latika is staying. She is with the abusive Javed who Salim is now working for. Jamal infiltrates the house and asks her to come find him. When she does finally arrive to meet Jamal the short romantic scene is cut by Salim and some goons arriving to retrieve Latika. Salim’s actions once again represent his contradicting emotions, in this moment his mind is only on making money working for Javed. However he does transcend this confusion by the end of the film. He frees Latika and locks himself in the bathroom. He fills the bathtub with money and lays in it waiting for Javed to bust in. Salim is able to fire off a couple of shots hitting Javed before being killed in the bathtub full of money. This image symbolizes the death of his overly aggressive, violent and negative desires in money. Money was always driving Salim and it eventually gets him killed. Jamal and Latika find each other and have a kiss, at which point everyone breaks into an elaborate Bollywood dance number.

The film follows several universal archetypes like the trickster archetype in Salim, the hero’s journey and a rag to riches plot. Unfortunately to adapt the film to Western audiences the British production and writers behind Slumdog Millionaire required alterations to the source material. These changes led to appropriation and “othering” (to create a perceived divide between the two cultures, creating hierarchical relationship between Indian and Western cultures and hiding the historical and social context of the film), as termed by Edward Said, of Indian society while claiming empowerment and representation. This Western influenced portrayal of a foreign culture is also an example of cultural and media imperialism.

A number of features are inconsistent between the movie and Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A, which the movie was loosely based on. One difference which highlights this western cultural imperialism and othering in particular is the religious backgrounds of the main protagonist in Swarup’s book Q&A, Ram, and Jamal. The secular character, Ram, can be seen as an attempt for the book’s story to carry a more nationalist message rather than a religious one. Present in the religiously incited violence that killed Jamal and Salim’s mother, there is deep religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims in parts of India. The producers realized that the Indian nationalism present in Q&A would not be a sentiment that would carry over well to a majority White Christian audience representative of the West. They would not share those same ideas or understandings of what it meant to be Indian. The implementation of religion re-engages the Western audience through religious violence but makes the deeply complex and troubling events of religious tension in India into a spectacle for the Western eye.

As well as this there are a number of features about the film which were inauthentic to how Indians perceived themselves. For one, “Boyle's take on slum life is largely comic (for example, the autograph-seeking scene featuring the excrement-coated Jamal). Few Indian filmmakers would tolerate a comic view of urban poverty” (Sharma, 2012). Settings and elements that are familiar to Western audience’s stereotypes of India such as the impromptu and unnecessary closing Bollywood dance scene, the world famous Taj Mahal, crowded call centers and poverty stricken sprawling slums perpetuate an orientalist gaze (Said, 2006).

Furthermore, many viewers might not realize the film is a colonizers perspective on a past colony. Boyle’s fascination with India likely comes from a colonial history that really cannot help but perpetuate orientalism. This theme is present in a number of popular Western films such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Eat, Pray, Love. When a historically oppressive group curates stories involving historically marginalized people, the result will almost always be a biased, inaccurate, and problematic product. Is it really appropriate for a person from a country (UK) which oppressed, exploited and massacred people from another (India) under colonialism to use their privilege and power to profit off of and create a celebrated piece of art that feigns authenticity? Their power to benefit off of this misrepresentation stems from the inequality in global media. Western film from Hollywood has more money and distribution capabilities than any other culture. When the commercial success of movies like this is defined by western viewership, films tend to support hegemony and further cultural imperialism.

Boyle has stated in interviews that he wanted to tell the perspective of a child living in the streets of India. However, due to Boyle’s background and intended audience we see an inauthentic product through an inauthentic lens. Anjana Mudambi calls this “(an)othering” which ‘makes the experience of watching the “other” more comfortable by commodifying the Oriental subject, reconciling the temporary experience of the film's foreignness with audience expectations and perceptive frameworks, and maintaining the Oriental subject as intelligible to Western subjectivity’ (Mudambi, 2013).

Although some may see the inclusion of foreign cultures in Western media as a good thing because individuals can be brought together to enjoy pieces of other cultures, stories aren’t accurate or fair when they aren’t necessarily representative of what those people who are the subjects of the film actually relate to. Individuals from marginalized communities should be given the power to produce their own stories and decide how they are portrayed in media in order to combat the everlasting effects of colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonic thought. As well as this, creators from dominant cultures should not have majority control to tell stories about people who they historically and systemically oppress.