Title : Slumdog Millionaire
Year : 2008
Writer : Simon Beaufoy
Director : Danny Boyle
While praises from the entire world had been gained by the wining of Golden Globe Awards, Slumdog Millionaire, some critics come to highlight it from different point of view. Slumdog Millionaire tells the story life of Jamal Malik, an orphan Indian boy from the slum area of Mumbai, who has been going through a very hard life as an extreme poor person. In his childhood, he has experienced any kind of brutality and child exploitation in his own country. The pieces of scenes have successfully captivated the audiences. In contrast, at the same time it triggers disturbance to Indian self-esteem for drawing the outsiders to the cringe insight in viewing life among the poor in sattlement.
Potraying the extreme poverty and inhumanity of Indian slum life that is directed by a British director, Danny Boyle, this film has aroused the nagging question of authenticity whether it is possible for a non-native Indian to stand objectively making an authentic film about India. However, this argument has been challenged by the fact that Boyle worked with an Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan. Indeed, some Indian reviewers praised the film for its realistic foregrounding. Inspite of this, it deeply emerges a speculation about exploitation which is spotlighting narrative but inappropiate authenticity aspects for the sake of commercial value. Also, the exploitation is aligned with the too much westerner’s point of view in this film. It gives us, furthermore, the compelling enligtenment that this film offers an access for westerners having pleasure and enjoyment.
1. Disturbance to Indian Self-esteem
This film captures so many dark sides of Mumbai. For example, abusive action to children by either civilians or state security forces, exploited children that should be under protection, the ignorance of official government instrument, brutal conflict among different religion participants, disgusting environment, and social segregation showed by the contradictive view of slum area and an elite sphere in the same field. Infact, there are different sides of Mumbai which were contrasted to what the film presented. These represent the good sides that were not openly exposed.
Saumitra Jha , an assistant professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that how the slums are run depends on a variety of factors, such as their ethnic makeup, political connections, and how long they have been established. “Indian slums are incredibly productive. People are becoming much more aware that slums are where a lot of the economic activity is taking place.” His latest research has been to look at ethnic relationships in India, particularly the clashes that can occur between Hindus and Muslims. He cited in 2002, despite being one of India’s richest areas, there were 24 days of intense religious conflict in Ahmadabad taking the lives of at least 324 people. 140 miles south of there, the city of Surat, has seen virtually no religious violence even though, like Ahmadabad, it is about 13 percent Muslim. Another example is in Varanasi where Muslims are often in charge of weaving, and Hindus handle distribution.
“This fact doesn’t mean that Varanasi and Surat don’t have poor areas and the ingredients for conflict, just that they have found ways to cope successfully. You might think it’s poverty that’s driving it,” Jha said about the violence elsewhere, “but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Although we can not deny the fact about poverty and bad situation existed in India, it could not be true to darken the dark side of a country and leads prejudice from others about living elsewhere. Potraying the extreme poverty and inhumanity of Indian slum life, this film has caused disgust and pain among nationalists.
2. Exploitation of Inappropiate Indian’s Imaged Lives
In a sequence of Jamal pretending to be a professional tour guide,some thieves steal the foreigner’s stuff while they were outside the car. After their coming back, they realized that they even had lost the tires. The car driver, an Indian man, blame Jamal for this incident. He was very angry and fericiously beating up Jamal. The American tried to stop it. Jamal said “You wanted to see Real India, here it is” . The Americans say, “Here is a bit of real America son” and generously give him some money. This scene clearly demonstrates the comparison of Indian and American in which American is described as kind-hearted image while Indian is in contrast to it. This view, however, comes from the westerner prespectives as well as they inderectly try to make comparison which one is good and which one is bad. When we enter the position in westerner’s point of view, we would find what we called a pleasure of being an opposite to the antagonist.
In Western, Judeo-Christian world, chaos is synonymous with evil, while crisp, regimented order is considered next to divine. Since poverty is hell-is and disgusting, people need to cope with that condition whatever the way. Like the protagonist Jamal who had been able to reach 10 billion rupee in quiz of Who wants to be a millionaire, he was then forced to admit that he was cheating. It is related to his background as a poor man coming from slum area in which slum people are identified with stupidity. The answer is easy-you do not have to be genius to win the quiz. Jamal could answer the questions from his bad experiences living in the road. Indeed, he joined to quiz not for the money, but to be able to see his love agaian, Latika. The experience of a poor man blessed with luck for his successfulness to cope with the poverty and to reunite with his true love is just another modern version of Cinderella story that often appears as the usual topic of Western cinema.
The visualization in Slumdog Millionaire has also emerged another pleasure to western audiences. Since they might never find the exposed view of extreme poverty in their country, it becomes the new enjoyment to see that visual description throughout this film. The enjoyment of viewing pathetic description proposes different dimension of voyeurism in which it is not categorized in term of sexuality, but the voyeurism is the pleasure in viewing poverty as an object. Meanwhile, it hurts the nationalitity of Indian patriotists and degrades their self-esteem as human being.
In this regard, this movie has too much westerner’s point of view indicating its ambigious cores, whether it is to depict the reality or to exploit the “shining” spotlight of poverty. How the problem of the third world is seen and sold in world market. How the embarrassment of one’s nationality becomes the enjoyment for people in another countries.
Peny Rahmadhani 