‘Slumdog Millionaire’: the day day after

This piece is not so much about ‘The Slumdog Millionaire’ as the numerous controversies that arose in India after the film was released. This by itself indicates that this piece aspires for a special place somewhere above the media din or attempts to clear the Augean stables or what I say must be seen as a privileged. Or does it any of that?

Let me crawl out of the brief tunnel of self-reflection and make my point anyway. The first comment on ‘Slumdog…’ I saw was written by a journalist before seeing the film. The word comment is not right. Incredibly, it was a long piece which started with a frank and I thought a daring declaration that the author is yet to see the film, but in the meantime, nevertheless …. I was left biting my nails in consternation.

In the following weeks I was unable to check if the prescient author wrote on Slumdog again after watching the film. My guess is probably not. The reason may be that everyone has now seen the film and the body of expert opinions on the matter have swelled to a noisy stampede. No one is listening to anyone anymore. People may be just looking at other’s opinions and placing their own in ever shifting alignments. The film is still doing extremely well in small town Bihar and our Chief Minister in Bihar, India, Niteesh Kumar rode on a cycle rickshaw to see the film at a cinema in the early weeks.

I propose that on issues like movies that rarely involve high levels of scientific precision or predictability, there should a be a system whereby we ‘experts’ write three analytical reviews of a film – one before seeing it to register all the effervescing expectations if any, another one which faithfully records our reactions during the viewing, and a last one that is formulated after much thinking and discussion, may be a few months after the owl of Minerva’s has already flown past. This makes for a complete hermeneutic life cycle for a text and the reader as well if he bothers to keep track. We will ignore the obsessives and addicts who would want to talk about Slumdog forever as well as the catatonics not sufficiently forthcoming.

As for me, I loved the film and was moved by it. Like a true Brahmin and a member of the middle class, the shit-bathed sequence seemed excessive to me in that I wanted to puke in the middle of what seemed an absorbing tale. May be this is the reaction the filmmaker sought - to show the cruelty of a life where tangible smellable shit seems more acceptable than its picture in paint box richness. Interestingly, I have managed to walk through foul smelling slums with more tolerance. May be it has to do with our theatrical cannons – according to our sage Bharata, live performances should not include organic/intimate matters such as eating and copulation. You will find family scenes in Hindi movies where a family settles over a large feast but no one seems to eat as the conversation flows. And no talking while chewing the food! Very unlike Hollywood movies where people are forever drinking coffee or munching sandwiches! Not to mention slobbery kissing over all variety of compliant lips made available by the production guys. I was forgetting – Salman Khan made farting fashionable in Hindi films for a whole year some time ago. All about Guajarati/wedding food!

To come back to the point, in the last few months I saw such a surfeit of comments on the film, my head is now bursting with controversy. Slumdog has gone out of my mind entirely. My experience of watching the film has completely faded. All that’s left is a bundle of woolly controversies. And now I don’t want to think of the film or talk about it. I don’t even have any good memories of it left. So when I write these lines it is with a sense of anger over the fatigue caused by the critical din. It is the irritation of a tired man sick of his own doxological effeteness. Is it a natural process whereby meanings dissipate over time or is it me?

All I know are these three or four stances which typify the whole range of critics. The stances are there but the movie is gone. Like in the ancient times, the text is gone, only the glosses are left. When the glosses go, just the brief quotes remain as surviving redactions. And finally the highly memorable footprints in the sand get wiped out. I am aware that my children may come back to Slumdog after a decade to remember a classic. But this is what critics have done to my martyred enjoyment of the film in the meantime. But the point is – I am one of them too.

I have written this piece to share a feeling of distaste and disquiet. I have now begun to wonder if cultural criticism may at times or rather too often lead to cultural exhaustion, a greedy scraping of cultural meanings from an essentially receding reality.

H’m, what was I trying to say really? Okay, here it is -

When a very pleasant film is made about India in soothing colours, the critics rush in to remind that parts of India are ugly too and that the filmmaker suffers from a reality deficit. On the other hand, if you focus on the harsher sides of India, everyone busily reminds you that Indian reality can be very quite pulchritudinous and that again the filmmaker has a warped sense of reality. In brief, just listen to what we say about ourselves and no further comments, please. Both your admiration and despise only confirm you are once again the ex-colonizer. You must have a balanced opinion of us and we’ll let you know as and when. The privilege of extreme views belongs solely to us. Oh, the ever slippery piety of repeatedly eternalized victimhood! Don’t I see enough of it in my own family-clan?

To wind up, let me dredge out the reasons why I liked the film from my long suppressed and muddied memory of the past few weeks. First, I liked the idea of a young boy telling his shitty life story to a torturer under duress. There was no other way the story would have been told. I find this very moving – the only time you get a chance to tell your tale is when it may save your life. There’s a touch of another Oscar rendering – ‘the Reader’, here, albeit in reverse. This is not a storyteller fondly remembering his past on a rainy evening with a finger of 100 Pipers on a Burma teak surface, if I may borrow an image from a widely viewed add for the scotch label in India. This story was retrieved from a black-shithole and carried to the Oscar stage. No big deal in itself and yet no excuse for snooty despise. That a lot of Oscar is crap does not go to prove that Slumdog is one too.

Second, the protagonist of the film finds all his quiz answers from the most painful moments of his life. Fates/furies in their most benign form compensate him for all the pain through a series of serendipitous coincidences. It is almost as if pain isn’t ever about nothing, is the anchored message. We know that that’s not true, and yet how many of us are able to bear pain better imagining a fat cheque in the next mail by way of repair. Even though endowed with a robust sense of reality as we are, we don’t exactly go rummaging through the mailbox next morning!

There were other reasons I liked the film, but I have forgotten most of them since I put on my argumentative airs hoping in all my vanity to put a debate to rest for myself and attain a state of interpretive repose.

Will these do for the time being?

May I suggest a certain ‘singularity’ here – sum of meanings of a film = sum of controversies it may create. Or even more strongly, that which is not objectionable is culturally insignificant. If this is culture I don’t know how to define politics. And there is in it an attempt to go at a tangent from the text in question towards other interpreters as the main text in running till the point of exhaustion and datedness. There are people who seriously argue for example that Boyle ‘encashed’ Indian poverty as the only way he knew to make money. To respond to such nonsense – our most famous folk playwright in Bihar, Bhikhari Thakur definitely did theatre as the only way to earn his livelihood although he was a barber by ‘birth’[caste] and training.

By meaning, I of course mean those intangible rays that scatter far and wide even if they never reach the soul. As meanings flow fast and thick past us, we are left grabbing ludicrously at any little fragment that makes sense or helps preserve self-respect in the interim.

There are these megalomanic moments when I feel mobbed by meanings I don’t want to shake hands with. And then there are moments too when I am begging for meaning on the streets, in the libraries, and among friends, asking for the semblance of a clue. Slumdog was good experience, I remember. I was neither begging nor turning away, and I came home with a heart full and heavy and a mind ready to think afresh. Does this sound a bit like religious conversion? Yes, but good art converts you n times - everytime you are ready for it.

Is all I remember about Slumdog now!