They Call It Poverty Porn

Slumdog Millionaire is sweeping awards and audiences. And yet, in India, specifically Mumbai, where it is set, there are rumblings of discontent. Okay, more than rumblings. Many are calling it poverty porn, graphic images of disturbing poverty opened up as entertainment for a predominantly Western gaze. Others are protesting the use of the word "dog," a huge insult for Indians. One of the biggest protests was in Dharavi, Asia's largest slum where the screenwriter lived for six months. Do they feel a sense of betrayal by someone they welcomed into their midst? Despite the fim-makers' intentions do they feel insulted by being called 'dogs?' Judge for yourself.



Here's a caveat: I have not watched the movie.

I can't bring myself to watch it. It's not because I am unaware of poverty in India. It exists, of course it does. It does so in horrifying, mind-numbing ways. And while I think some of the criticism is a bit over the top, I do understand it. India as presented to Western eyes is always a source of some discomfort to me. It's not that situations or events are necessarily fabricated...much of it is factual. It is the discomfort of an alien gaze, dissecting us from a rather lordly distance. And more than that, that these are the only images of India on film that make it into the consciousness of most Western film-goers.

We watched the Raj films in the 1980's, where dashing British officers rescued lily-white maidens from India's ubiquitous heat and dust. Is India hot and dusty? Yes! But it is also cold and snowy and mild and temperate. It is also the land of eternal snows and coastal waterways. In the Raj films India and its life under the British fell away beneath the weight of English nostalgia for the jewel in its crown.

Then, for a while we were ignored by film-makers, except for an occasional Merchant-Ivory film. But that was not wholly foreign, for Ismail Merchant was a Bombay boy. Then there were the splutters of 'Fire,' or 'Salaam Bombay.' The latter was also set in Bombay's slums and was made by Meera Nair and was a truly intimate look at life in a slum.

Here's another caveat: I have read Vikas Swarup's Q & A, upon which Slumdog Millionaire is based.



So I know the story and I don't remember as much violence and distress as I hear about in the movie (the opening torture scene, the acid blinding, etc.). Perhaps they were there but they melded into the book so much that I don't remember them three years later. I remember, while reading the book thinking that it was written almost as a screenplay. It's not a well-written book, but the concept is interesting and it was executed well. And there are definite changes from the story.

Even the central character's name has been changed. Ram Mohammad Thomas. An evocative Indianness, reminiscent of Amar, Akbar, Anthony. Those three names, markers of three religions, are stories within themselves in the book. Ram, therefore, typifies all of India and none of it. He symbolizes its three major religions and because he has all three names, none of them. He is in effect, India.

Slumdog's Jamal, on the other hand, becomes an easily graspable entity, a slumdog with a Muslim name.

I watched Danny Boyle on The Daily Show. He called it a love story, that Jamal wanted to sit in the gameshow chair long enough to be sure Latika saw him and so that they could find each other again. No matter how much he calls it a love story, the predominant images that most viewers seem to carry away are the images of violence and poverty. Those seem to be its predominant images from what I've heard about it.

And perhaps that is what its Indian detractors are responding to. Perhaps that is why, depsite all the great press (and the fact that despite all this I am sure it's a great movie) that I cannot make myself watch it. Perhaps when it is out on video I might watch it. But I can't right now amid all its hype.

Is it over-sensitivity, or is it a country cringing to watch itself yet again through alien eyes and feel its complexities being stripped away? Yes, there are movies about the Paris riots for instance, but there are also dozens of movies on its beauty and its romance.

Is it the discomfort of being measured against just one truth by a movie-watching world that will move on to the next big thing soon, and all it will remember about India are its slums and its human miserty and not much else?

I am not sure but I am thinking. And wondering.

Thanks for the Miseries

What makes you feel fulfilled and satisfied and thankful about what you have? Why...seeing someone who clearly does not have what you have, of course. Remember that old adage about being sad that you have no shoes until you saw someone who had no feet. Bullshit! What the hell is that? There's no empathy or sympathy for someone with no feet....just satisfaction that you have them. Why not run circles around the poor guy, crying Nyah nyah?

Someone else's misery is uplifting because it reminds you of what you have? I remember, the modern day angel and all round smokin' and kickass Ms. Jolie talking about how her travels to the sorriest places on earth made her grateful for what she has. You know what Angie...you visit any normal middle class home--with a mom fighting cellulite and a dad trying to be the best he can, and kids without nannies, barely hanging on to one home-- and you should be grateful for what you have. But visiting war-torn countries and seeing orphaned kids (not even you can adopt all of 'em in your Farrow-like zeal), and witnessing starvation and death shouldn't make you grateful about anything. It should make you pissed off and sad and depressed and homicidal. Not grateful. About anything.

And then I read this article linked on Sujatha's blog and, while it raised many excellent points about a family deciding to return to India after many years in the U.S., it also pissed me off. The author talks about how earlier she would tell her kid about not wasting food because there were starving children somewhere (how does eating when someone is starving help anyway?), but now (lucky her) she can actually show her child the starving children in person. Wow! Glad their starvation's helping her child-rearing skills. She also talks about teaching her child charity by waving back to the 5-year old poor girl at the school bus stop. Well, to be fair, she has taught her child to give old toys and clothes to the girl. What a great way to get rid of excess stuff when there's no Salvation Army to be found. But all she's taught her child is to be glad she is not hanging around a bus stop waving to a privileged girl and her mommy, while she is still too young to fully appreciate her own dead-end life.

Okay, maybe I'm being hard on this woman but I've heard this sentiment a lot and I find it most selfish, self-absorbed, and insensitive. Not all of us actually do something positive and active to help someone else. But please, can we not degrade someone's suffering further by using it to bolster our own self-esteem and by patting ourselves on our own back?

There is no romance in poverty, no satisfaction in suffering. Yes, we've seen poor people (and I'm talking grinding poverty here) smile because they're human and perhaps sometimes they forget the fragility of their existence, and they grab at their momentary joys as and when they can. They don't announce their emotions to the world so we can say inane things like, "the poor may have nothing but they still smile. They are happier than us." Fuck you!

When someone doesn't have enough money to eat properly, or money to tend to a sick child, or their roof leaks, or they have no roof...and there is nothing they can't do about it they are not enjoying their poverty. If they smile or laugh it's more a testament to their strength, their ability to live in the moment perhaps, and to the human hope that keeps us all going. It's not so that you can feel better about yourself.

And when they are mired in their misery, trapped in poverty, unable to break out of it, the last thing they'd want is to have some rich, phoren-returned memsahib (or sahib) use that as a way to teach their brat life lessons or teach them to appreciate what they have.

They're human beings, not teaching aides or life lessons. They're people with hopes and desires even if they are stillborn, and joys even if they come few and far between. Perhaps that's all they have. And you want to even take that away from them?