A million dollar exit from the anarchic slum-world: Slumdog Millionaire's hollow idioms of social justice

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 599-616

  Sengupta, Mitu ^a  

^a RYERSON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADVOCACY; CULTURAL LANDSCAPE; FILM; INFORMAL SETTLEMENT; POVERTY; SOCIAL JUSTICE; SYMBOLISM; URBAN ECONOMY; URBAN HOUSING; URBAN SOCIETY; WESTERN PERCEPTION;

ARTICLE; AUDIOVISUAL EQUIPMENT; BEHAVIOR; CULTURAL FACTOR; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; HEALTH; HISTORY; INDIA; LEGAL ASPECT; POVERTY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL JUSTICE; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL SUPPORT; SYMBOLISM; URBAN POPULATION;

CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; INDIA; MOTION PICTURES AS TOPIC; POVERTY; POWER (PSYCHOLOGY); SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL JUSTICE; SOCIAL SUPPORT; SOCIAL VALUES; SYMBOLISM; URBAN HEALTH; URBAN POPULATION;

INDIA;

EID: 77954184027     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436591003701117     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. The film also won seven of the 11 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) for which it was nominated, including Best Film, and all four of the Golden Globe Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Drama Film.
2. The article builds on my earlier review of Slumdog Millionaire. M Sengupta, 'Hollow message', Frontline, 26(6), 2009, pp 14-27.
3. The UN has defined a 'slum' as an area that 'combines, to various extents, the following characteristics: inadequate access to safe water; inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure; poor structural quality of housing; overcrowding; insecure residential status'. This definition, as the authors readily concede, is restricted to the physical and legal characteristics of the settlement, and excludes 'some of the more difficult social dimensions'.
4. See UN-Habitat, Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, London: UN-Habitat, 2003, p 12.
5. D Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp 137-182.
6. See S Sengupta, 'Indians embrace the triumph of ''Slumdog'' as a victory for their country', New York Times (online), 24 February 2009, at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E3DA1331F937A15751C0A96F9C8B63.
7. Such was the basis of much of the criticism of the film in India. See M Singh, 'Slumdog millionaire is no hit in India', Time (online edition), 26 January 2009, at http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1873926,00.html.
8. TT Minh-ha, Framer Framed, New York: Routledge, 1992, p 117.
9. R Stam & L Spence, 'Colonialism, racism and representation', Screen, 24(2), March-April 1983, p 4.
10. J Hutnyk, The Rumour of Calcutta, London: Zed Books, 1996, p 196.
11. According to Box Office Mojo, Slumdog's total worldwide gross for 28.3 weeks in release is US$61 273 610. Its production budget was $15 million. See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/?id=slumdogmillionaire.htm.
12. V Swarup, Q&A, New Delhi: Black Swan Books, 2005.
13. For the third question of Millionaire, Jamal is asked, 'What weapon does Lord Rama hold in his right hand?' He answers correctly ('bow and arrow') because he recalls running into a child dressed as the Hindu deity while fleeing from the site of his mother's murder.
14. The film's central characters, Jamal, Salim and Latika, are played by three sets of actors to correspond with three different stages in their lives (childhood, early teens and young adulthood). The child actors are Ayush Khedekar (Jamal), Azharuddin Ismail (Salim) and Rubena Ali (Latika).
15. R Ebert, 'Slumdog millionaire', Chicago Sun Times (online), 11 November 2008, at http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081111/REVIEWS/811110297.
16. P Travers, 'Slumdog millionaire', Rolling Stone (online), 13 November 2008, at http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/20192670/review/24013911/slumdog_millionaire.
17. E Wax, 'Protests and praise: ''Slumdog's'' Mumbai realism is divisive', Washington Post (online), 23 January 2009, p CO1, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012204082.html.
18. R Chin, 'Slumdog millionaire: debate poverty not ''poverty porn''', Huffington Post (online), 6 March 2009, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-chin/slumdog-millionaire-debat_b_172646.html.
19. G Deleuze, quoted in Hutnyk, The Rumour of Calcutta, p 194.
20. E Said, quoted in R Shome, 'Race and popular cinema: the rhetorical strategies of whiteness in City of Joy', Communication Quarterly, 44(4), 1996, p 507.
21. The fifth question asked of Jamal is, 'Whose picture appears on a $100 bill?'. He is able to answer this question correctly because he recalls chancing upon the childhood friend blinded by Maman's gang of beggar-makers in a dirty Mumbai underpass. When Jamal gave his friend a $100 bill (which he'd extracted from an American tourist couple), the latter impressed him by pointing out that Benjamin Franklin's image is on the note.
22. Stam & Spence, 'Colonialism, racism and representation', p 3.
23. This novel is central to the film's plot. As children, Jamal refers to Salim and himself as the 'musketeers' Athos and Porthos, and to Latika as the third 'musketeer', whose name he does not know. For Millionaire's final question, Jamal is asked to name the third musketeer.
24. My description of Dharavi draws, among other sources, on an untitled essay posted on www. dharavi.org by Katia Savchuk, Matias Echavone and Rahul Srivastava, academics affiliated with the research collective Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR). See http://www.dharavi.org/B._Introduction.
25. D McDougal, 'Waste not, want not in the £700m slum', Observer (online), 4 March 2007.
26. 'Inside the slums', The Economist (online), 27 January 2005, at http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3599622.
27. TB Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp 70-100.
28. A Appadurai, 'The capacity to aspire', in V Rao & M Walton (eds), Culture and Public Action, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp 70-71.
29. MG de la Rocha, The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
30. J Beall, 'Social security and social networks among the urban poor in Pakistan', Habitat International, 19(4), 1995, pp 427-445.
31. K Gill, Of Poverty and Plastic, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
32. J Wrisley, 'Real people, not slumdogs', The Atlantic (online), 23 February 2009.
33. P Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
34. Savchuk et al (see note 23).
35. Appadurai, 'The capacity to aspire', pp 72-73.
36. Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, pp 40, 46.
37. See also Taylor in this issue for a discussion of spaces of informal economy and 'non-capital' as constituted by capital accumulation itself.
38. The expression 'culture of poverty' is associated with anthropologist Oscar Lewis's 1965 study on peasants in urban contexts, who experience acute dislocation and rapid social change as they move from the countryside to the city.
39. O Lewis, 'Further observations on the folk-urban continuum and urbanisation with special reference to Mexico City', in PM Hauser & LF Schnore (eds), The Study of Urbanization, New York: Wiley, 1965.
40. D Matza, 'The disreputable poor', in R Bendix & SM Lipset (eds), Class, Status and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, New York: Free Press, 1966.
41. L Chevalier & F Jellinek, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
42. On this, see C Gore, 'The rise and fall of the Washington Consensus as a paradigm for developing countries', World Development, 28(5), 2000, pp 789-804.
43. D Harvey, Social Justice and the City, Oxford: Blackwell, 1973.
44. J Sen, 'The unintended city', Seminar, 200, 1976, pp 33-40.
45. See, for example, N Kanji, 'Gender, poverty and economic adjustment in Harare, Zimbabwe', Environment and Urbanization, 7(1), 1995, pp 37-56.
46. M Davis, 'Planet of slums', New Left Review, 26, 2004, pp 10-11.
47. Davis's stinging indictment of neoliberal reform draws heavily upon UN-Habitat's groundbreaking report, The Challenge of the Slums, which grimly states that 'the main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state' (p 48).
48. These concerns are articulated in some detail in S Patel & J Arputham, 'An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai?', Environment & Urbanization, 19(2), 2007, pp 501-508.
49. 'Urban poverty in India,' The Economist (online), 19 December 2007, at http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10311293.
50. L Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p 195.
51. PK Das, 'Slums: the continuing struggle for housing', in S Patel & J Maselos (eds), Bombay and Mumbai, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, p 208.
52. Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, p 147.
53. See A Baviskar, 'The politics of the city', Seminar, 516, 2002, pp 40-42, for a critique of judicial orders in Delhi calling for slum demolition or industrial relocation in the name of the 'environment'.
54. Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, p 156.
55. D Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
56. See N Barucha, 'Dharavi remake a land grab, says panel', Times of India (online), 8 July 2009.
57. An exception to this rule is Nivedita Menon, 'Reading Swarup, watching Boyle,' Outlook (online), 28 January 2009, at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?239578.
58. K Mohammed, 'Cuts straight to the heart', Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition), 23 January 2009.
59. L Zecchini, cited in Shome, 'Race and popular cinema', p 505.
60. Hutnyk, The Rumour of Calcutta, p 193.
61. Shome, Race and popular cinema, p 505.
62. Hutnyk, the Rumour of Calcutta, p 209.
63. Swayze apparently stated at the film's Melbourne premier that, while he would normally command $7 million for a film, he accepted just $1 million for City of Joy.
64. BD Johnson, 'Misery's happy face', Maclean's, 20 April 1992, p 48.
65. Hutnyk F, The Rumour of Calcutta, p180.
66. See P Boulanger, Le Cinéma Colonial, Paris: Seghers, 1974.
67. Shome, 'Race and popular cinema', p 508.
68. Many Hindi films in the 1950s depicted these ideals, although by the 1980s they conveyed more cynicism towards the state. See R Bakshi, Raj Kapoor: from Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai to Ram Teri Ganga Maili, in A Nandy (ed), The Secret Politics of Our Desires, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp 92-133.
69. The contrast between 'citizen-worker' and 'consumer-citizen' is formulated, most insightfully, by Fernandes, who argues that the 'identity of a consuming-liberalising middle class is transformed into a generalised form of consumer citizenship, one that is marked by a shift from workers' rights to the rights of the consumer'. Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, p 182.
70. One must be careful, however, not to treat 'middle class' as a homogeneous category that is synonymous with 'elite.' Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, for example, provides a more complex account of such middle class discourses than is possible in this paper. She points out that middle class anger has also been directed at 'perceived cultural and political elites' (p 184).
71. TT Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red, London: Routledge, 1991, p 97.