“It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher is inexplicably callous. This is a place of sheer evil and decay.
But nothing is further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty, have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog.
In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally.”
Comment:
This is a short but really perceptive piece that reflects the way I felt about the film, as well as about other works on India’s urban poor, like the book, City of Joy. In addition, City of Joy – which is about Calcultta – seems to imply that it takes a foreigner to get something going among the poor in India.
Despite the strong appeal of both works, and they do have a good deal of charm, they’re ultimately a little patronizing. Slumdog also makes the fundamental mistake of showing poverty as almost inseparable from crime, when simple observation will tell you otherwise.
You’d think, with all the revelations about Wall Street, people would have figured that out.
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Hi Lila! I just got introduced to your blog today because i did a similar piece on Dharavi and the Slumdog Millionaire on my blog. Its always great to meet another Indian, libertarian woman.
There is a great video about Dharavi-
http://www.popmodal.com/video/1689/Save-Dharavi
Have you seen it?
That’s my impression of the hidden message in a lot of superficially “libertarian” or “progressive” films.
Take, for example, the Hallmark Cards TV movie version of Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
In the book, Jones and his neighbor farmers were seen as pretty much of a kind, and Orwell made a great deal of the parallelism between class exploitation by the farmers and by the pigs. In the movie, OTOH, Jones was treated as an aberration, with stress on the neighboring farmers’ disapproval of his cruelty and neglect.
And in the movie, after the farm collapsed into chaos under the pigs’ rule, a young Kennedy-esque farmer arrives in a sporty convertible (with Fats Domino playing, youthful wife and cute kids, etc.) to take over the ruins of the farm and rescue the poor animals by managing them competently.
So unlike Orwell’s original message that the farmers and pigs were manifestations of the same kind of evil, the message of the movie was that “animals” are incapable of managing themselves, and need the RIGHT KIND of “human” (young, charismatic, “progressive,” etc.) to manage them for their own good.