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T P Sreenivasan
Slumdog Millionaire? I hate that film!” said a much decorated, liberal and well-travelled former submariner.
“It is poverty porn at its worst. The Mumbai marauders are supposed to have done their deed to hurt India, to challenge its success, to expose its soft underbelly. But this movie has done the job better”
He did not say it, but suggested that the movie was cinematic terror against India. But he had not seen the movie or read the novel. “What kind of diplomat is he, who does the job of a drain inspector? Isn’t he supposed to project India in a positive light?” he said of my
former colleague, Vikas Swarup.
I teased my friend, “You are like the Soviet citizens of yore, who used to say they hated Dr Zhivago though they had never read the novel.” We were both in Moscow in the seventies.
I too had not seen the movie or read the novel, Q&A, now christened Slumdog Millionaire with an eye on the bestseller list, and I too had heard horrible things about the shit pit, the blinding of children with acid and such other horrors of Dharavi slum that the movie presents graphically.
I had also heard that the movie was nominated for the Oscars and A R Rahman had already won the Golden Globe. But I said I would read the novel, see the movie and judge whether the artistic excellence of the film absolves it of its obscenity.
Having read the novel and seen the film, I cannot say that it has done more good than harm to India. This is not a matter of my wanting to shove the reality under the carpet. Vikas Swarup, or any other diplomat, cannot lie abroad for his country anymore.
But the film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success. The curiosity today is not about maharajas and snake charmers, magic or rope trick, but about the market and the malls, the computers and the cell phones.
The question is whether India is a boom or a bubble. It seeks to reassure the world, as Jamal says to an American tourist couple, when he rolls on the ground after a brutal beating by the police, ‘You want to see the real India? Here it is!’
Vikas Swarup can explain his novel away, as he has done, by saying that he merely held up a mirror to nature and made a hero of a boy from the slums in celebration of his keen eye and keener brain. Even the word ’slumdog’ was not his creation. He found a clever story line and wrote a readable novel, though replete with horrible scenes and
unpalatable descriptions of his country.
His book would have raised some eyebrows, but passed to obscurity, like some other creations of diplomatic wordsmiths. But he walked into a trap and sold his rights, without caring to insist that the movie should at least be faithful to his novel. The screenplay has very little to do with the novel itself, except the theme of a millionaire rising from a slum to win a fortune by sheer luck.
Even the questions in the book are different from those in the movie. So are the events that helped Jamal (not Ram Mohammad Thomas) to win his millions. Vikas Swarup, the Indian diplomat, became a willing instrument in the hands of his exploiters. ‘I am not a millionaire as yet,’ lamented Swarup in an interview!
Take the opening scenes of torture. An idiotic policeman carries out the orders of his cleverer and sympathetic boss in the expectation that Jamal would confess to even graver crimes at the end of it. But Jamal did not cheat. The reason he won was that ‘it was written.’
Torture is internationally banned and the director of the film knew that India had not joined the global consensus against torture. He also knew that India is obsessed with Amnesty International raising issues of human rights when they hear about torture. The police officer mentions Amnesty as the disaster, not the possible death of the victim of torture. The police man appears to enjoy torturing and even insulting the victim. He provokes Jamal by referring to Latika as the ‘bitch of the slum.’ The torture scenes do not add much to the story, but denigrates India even more than the slums do.
As though the depiction of squalor, crime and cruelty is not enough, the film challenges India’s success. In a relatively harmless scene, in which Jamal and Salim look with pride at the skyscrapers, which had come up where their slums flourished during their younger days, Salim says: ‘Today India is in the centre of the world.’
As I heave a sigh of relief that there is at least one line in praise of India, he goes on to say: ‘And I am in the centre of it.’ He then goes on to say that he is with a gangster. Well, the movie was taken before the revelations about Satyam. Who then are the gangsters in the centre of India as it emerges as the centre of the world?
Consider a question that Jamal could not answer. The quiz master asks what is written below the Ashoka lions on the Indian national crest.
Is it truth alone triumphs or lies alone triumph? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that this is an insult, particularly as Jamal does not seem to know the answer.
The champions of the film, including my own sons, one, a journalism professor at Columbia University in New York and the other, a young manager and a music and movie enthusiast, say that Slumdog is a cinematographic wonder with excellent acting, soulful music, perfect direction and amazing photography.
‘Exuberant, exciting, gaudy, and gritty in a way that can only be called Dickensian, Slumdog Millionaire brings contemporary Mumbai to life from the seamy side up, and it does so with compassion and all-around cinematic excellence,’ exults Shashi Tharoor.
Many say that the film will do India proud if Rahman picks up three Oscars. In fact, the music is a redeeming feature of the movie. Even the redlight district scene comes to life with the melody of the anklets on dancing feet. But the celebrated song at the end of the
movie sounds like a parody of the national anthem with the use of the phrase, Jai ho!
It was not necessary to rake up the dirt in India to create a film to bring Oscars to India. India rejoiced at the Gandhi Oscars, but Slumdog Oscars, if any, will only highlight how India became a victim of exploitation.
Eminent writer Chitra Banerjee Divakurni claims that the movie is, after all, fiction and it should not hurt anyone. Could this not be dealt with by an inscription that any similarity with reality is pure coincidence? But the makers of the film took special care to shoot on
location and document every detail. The purpose was obviously to make the movie as authentic as possible and make an impact. The adverse reaction to the movie in India is precisely because of its authenticity.
The fact remains, however, that the novelist and the makers of the movie have brought to light the horrors of Dharavi. If the passion it has aroused could be directed towards a mass movement to combat the evils of the slum and to eliminate the slums altogether in stages, that would be an appropriate response to the movie.
If those involved in the movie would offer their profits from the film to that movement, they would elevate themselves from exploiters to benefactors.
T P Sreenivasan is a former ambassador of India to the United Nations, Vienna, and a former Governor for India at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna. He is currently the Director General, Kerala International Centre, Thiruvananthapuram and a Member of the National Security Advisory Board. 

Priya Abraham in Washington Times

Before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai rattled the world last December, the state of Orissa in eastern India was enduring its own gruesome and drawn-out version of religious violence.

Following the murder of a hard-line Hindu swami on Aug. 23, extremist Hindus went on a rampage against Orissa’s minority Christians, burning homes and churches; battering people; and raping women, including a nun. The violence has left about 70 people dead and displaced 50,000 into refugee camps.

As of last month, thousands remained in such camps. The All India Christian Council, an advocacy and relief group, was still distributing emergency items such as blankets and clothing even as its workers tried to help families earn a living again.

While the four months of violence have finally died down, Orissa’s history of Hindu-on-Christian violence means it may easily revive. And while it might be easy to chalk up the latest attacks to India’s occasional convulsions in communal strife, Americans are missing a crucial piece of the Orissa puzzle: Much of the funding for Hindu extremism comes from the United States.

In India, Hindu nationalist groups aspire to Hindutva – the concept of a “pure” Hindu nation where Hindus have an unassailable dominion over minorities such as Muslims and Christians and in which the caste system is rigidly preserved. During 2002 riots in Gujarat state, the ideology found a deadly outlet with the well-planned retaliatory killing of some 2,000 Muslims.

The Hindutva groups fall under the umbrella organization of the Sangh Parivar, and include organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – which helped incite the latest violence in Orissa – and the national Bharatiya Janata Party.

Sangh Parivar groups have affiliates in the United States that operate as cultural or charitable groups and gather most of their funding support from U.S. diaspora Indians. Their funding, in turn, of Hindutva groups in India has helped to both fuel and prolong the harassment and attack of Christians in Orissa and other Indian states.

U.S. sources of funding for Hindu extremism is not a topic that attracts much press, but California-based anthropologist Angana Chatterji has been following the money for years. She has made 18 trips to Orissa since June 2002, gathered facts in dozens of its villages and has also convened a human-rights tribunal in the state.

According to Ms. Chatterji, there are four major Hindutva-affiliated groups in the United States that have funded numerous organizations across India. The U.S. groups register as charities with tax-exempt status and carry stated goals of providing development and welfare work for needy Indians. In reality, Ms. Chatterji says, the charities offer facades for vast political activities that include the education, conversion and indoctrination of Hindutva ideology in traditionally poor and often illiterate tribal and low-caste Indians.

One example is the Maryland-based India Development and Relief Fund, which according to its Web site, has raised $10 million since 1987. According to a 2002 study that Ms. Chatterji helped author, the IDRF’s tax-exempt application form upon its founding named several Sangh organizations in India that it would support.

One such organization, Sewa Bharati, is well-known for introducing the regular observance of Hindu festivals in villages where little existed, or for sending in Hindu teachers to counteract the perceived influence of local Muslims or Christians.

The 2002 report further noted that half of IDRF’s funds were going to Sangh-related groups whose main purpose was to convert and Hinduize the poor and marginalized. Less than one-fifth of its funds, in fact, were going to its stated aim of development work, and the IDRF’s political activity has been in direct violation of its tax-exempt status.

In 2006, the IDRF disbursed $1.6 million in India, according to its tax records. Other Sangh-affiliated groups have raised similar sums, Ms. Chatterji says: Ekal Vidyalaya, which gave $2 million in 2006; and Sewa International USA, which allocated $284,000. Sewa International is the parent body to Sewa Bharati, the Hindu indoctrination group mentioned above. All told, such organizations form a complex and interconnected web through which U.S. funding travels.

In Orissa, the stakes for Hindu extremists are particularly high. Orissa is the country’s poorest state, with almost 40 percent living below the poverty line – double India’s national level. The majority of Orissa’s residents are low-caste Hindus or non-Hindu tribals who have little hope in the discriminatory caste system. Christians, Muslims, tribals and other downtrodden groups are the targets of Hindu extremists in Orissa.

Christian churches and groups that offer education, job training and ideas of a classless society understandably are appealing to many, to the anger of higher-caste Hindus who stand to lose their privileged status.

In most international religious conflicts, the United States can do little to curb the violence raging beyond its borders. But in India’s case, Ms. Chatterji notes, Washington can do something to help: investigate and reassess the charitable status of U.S. organizations whose funding is indirectly – or directly – enabling the bloodshed. The Hindu extremists’ 2008 campaign in Orissa was so well-orchestrated, the violence spread to five other states. For Christians still languishing in refugee camps, the next time could be chillingly worse.

Priya Abraham is director of communications at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/08/uncharitable-giving/