[Marxism] "Slumdog" subtext

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have not seen "Slumdog Millionaire" so I have no opinion about it. I
remember Louis Proyect gave it a very favorable review.

However, this item from the Nation raises an interesting aspect, and makes
me more interested in seeing it.
Fred Feldman

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090309/crossette?rel=hp_currently
sSlumdog Subtext 
By Barbara Crossette

February 23, 2009
Slumdog Subtext
By Barbara Crossette

The extraordinary success and resonance that Slumdog Millionaire has
garnered from audiences around the world has not been universally matched in
India, where there has been revulsion and occasional protest at the
portrayal of the brutality and squalor of Mumbai slum life. Indians can be
very prickly about the country's image abroad, even if the picture is
painfully accurate. 
 

But there is another undercurrent in this film, almost a subliminal message,
that is less talked about but of equal concern to Hindus. The improbable
story of an orphan tea boy rising to instant wealth and celebrity through a
popular television quiz show is in its way also a tale of personal
recompense--if not revenge--for a victim from India's largest religious
minority, the Muslims. 

As Jamil Malik, the fictional contestant, tells his story to police
interrogators (and sees the past flash into his own mind at each stage of
the contest) it becomes apparent that almost every step of the way, in
answer to question after question, his knowledge has been informed by Hindu
persecution and violence. 

What was that boy dressed as a blue-skinned god carrying in his right hand?
The image is seared in Jamil's mind: it came with the Hindu mob that
murdered his mother and other Muslims. Who was the author of the words to a
commonly known Hindu hymn or quasi-religious song? Jamil knew the answer
because it was a tune orphan children were forced to learn before being sent
into the streets to beg. He sees in his mind a boy who can sing it well
being blinded by having his eyes scooped out with a heated spoon. Blind
children are even more pathetic and lucrative as beggars. 

The scene at the dhobi ghat, the communal laundry where Jamil is beaten by
police as he takes on the role of an impromptu tour guide to two clumsily
portrayed Americans, is a little harder to parse in religious terms. But yet
another dose of the violence that attends his young life is clear, and the
$100 bill he receives from the shocked tourists leads indirectly much later
to another giant step up the quiz show ladder with the question, Whose face
is on the $100 US bill? Jamil's blinded childhood friend, still begging at
the time of the assault that earned Jamil the money, remembered that the man
with no hair on top of his head but a lot on the sides was Benjamin
Franklin. 

The irony is rich, if tragic. Jamil is not expected to know these things.
That he does, however, owes everything not to the benefits he has received
from life but from his marginalization, deprivation and vulnerability. This
life is not just the lot of Muslims, of course. Millions of Hindus also
suffer at the bottom of the economic and social ladder. 

Still, any Muslim watching this film could not miss one of its most
arresting lines. Near the end of the film, when Jamil's brother Salim, who
has fallen in with gangsters, sinks into a bathtub of his crime boss's money
after seeing Jamil win the top prize on television (and just before Salim
shoots the boss) he murmurs the universal Islamic words of praise and
thanks: "God Is Great." 

About Barbara Crossette
Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former
New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of
the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by
Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays
about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a
century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by
Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she
wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old
Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York.
She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by
Indiana University Press in 1993.



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