Pousha Amavasya
Click Here For Protesting movie SlumDog Millionaire
- Slumdog Millionaire: the prejudice continues? (26 Jan 09)
- Slumdog is about defaming Hindus (25 Jan 09)
By Saurav Basu
Back in the good old days when Satyajit Ray often made the most sublime neo-realistic cinema, one Ms. Nargis Dutt caustically charged him with selling Indian poverty abroad. Yet, Satyajit Ray"s films did not feature Calcutta"s slums but the villages of Bengal. There was an undercurrent of poverty in his major films like Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Pratidwandhi but there was human irony. No romanticizing poverty yet ultimately a resounding affirmation of human dignity. Who can forget the immortal scene in Aparajito where a guilt ridden Apu, a poor Brahmana boy rejects his priestly duties towards his mother"s last rites and opts to pursue a modern education instead. Ray"s father was a Brahmo and he himself a recalcitrant Hindu, yet his cinema encompassed everything that represented the best and the worst of Indian civilization ethos.
Through the vicissitudes of times, India has emerged as a global economy shedding both its Nehruvian rate of growth and the associated stereotypes, although we are admittedly a third world country with sub Saharan level hunger and human development indices. Yet, a share of its misfortune may be attributed to being surrounded by two failed states whose burdens of jihadi terrorism and poverty India has to suffer. Even the slum is an artificial socio-political construct and misrepresents Indian poverty. Indian slums have unpaid electricity accounts yet even today thousands of Indian villages wait electrification; slums have NGOs operating in vain while villages still await their first permanent school buildings. Slums create and sustain criminals yet millions of Indian villages represent a morally and ethical superior way of life and hospitality. Slums in India are infested by some over 30-40 million illegal Bangladeshi migrants who constitute a sizable secular votebank.
But contemporary film making seems to have appreciated little of these ground realities; instead we find a rehash of the old and improbable rags to riches story in an ultra-regressive style. A magnificent Mumbai slum, two Muslim brothers, a Hindu mob killing innocent Muslim women, criminally amputated children singing Surdas"s songs, Hindu policemen torturing an innocent Muslim boy and a diabolic Hindu game-show host who hands his Muslim contestant to his Hindu police which hates the Amnesty international, and voila, you have all the ingredients for a "secular" potboiler which is on the road to the Oscars! You might argue that it"s not realistic but only fantasy since there is greater probability of winning the jackpot on a lottery ticket without being abused by the police than winning the top prize on a quiz show with 15 unique questions.
But then you can be kidding with the graphic depiction of blood curdling anti Muslim riot in which a Hindu mob slits the children"s mother, the Indian policeman electrocuting the Muslim suspect or the gory scene of the amputation of the street children by the mafia who are then forced to sing Surdas"s bhajans. The book by Vikas Swarup has the main protagonist named as Ram Mohammad Thomas who was conveniently transformed into a Muslim boy, Jamal Malik who lost his mother to a Hindu mob to make it sound in the author"s own confession more "politically correct."
When was the last time in Indian History when an unprovoked Hindu population took to violence? For the record the Mumbai riots were incited by fanatical Muslim mobs in the face of the Baburi Masjid demolition. Moreover, it beats me how the consequent Mumbai bomb blasts triggered by local Muslim gangs can be disassociated from the Mumbai riots? And the much maligned Bombay Police recently lost sixteen of its bravest men while defending the city"s freedom of speech and expression against Islamist zealots who wanted to replicate in India, a 7th century Arabia.
More disturbingly, you have the depiction of the blue bodied Rama whom Hindus consider as Maryada Puroshottam [the best among men] threatening to terminate the existence of the innocent Muslim children. To a question on with which weapons is Lord Rama depicted with in popular iconography, Jamal Malik the protagonist does not remember the grand Ram Lilas which happen across the country or Ram Kathas on televisions. Instead, a Hindu kid dressed like immaculately like Lord Rama stand in the mid of a slum in a threatening pose. And one cannot miss the hatred being portrayed in the face and looks of that young Hindu kid, younger than even Jamaal. Even a 5 year old Hindu kid is a communal bigot and Rama is responsible for all the communal crap. Muslims are seculars and victims by definition. And we need one white director to tell these things to the whole world. Not only this we have forcibly amputated children singing Surdas"s bhajan pining for a glimpse of illusory Krishna? This insensitive jaundiced anti Hindu view is reminiscent of Indian leftist cinema where Hindu male characters are black and Muslims white! Remember, Mr and Mrs Iyer where a Hindu mob was searching for circumcised dicks and didn"t even spare a Jew in true Nazi fashion! Never mind that in world history, Hindus are the only people who don"t carry an atom of anti-Semitism, but the director"s flight of "secularist" fancy won critical acclaim. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya in his film Uttara shows a band of Hindu goons burning a Christian church made in service of the lord"s lepers and raping an orphan girl in the process. Expectedly, this rather original gruesome way of story-telling won him the national awards! In the Tamil hit, Dasavathaaram, we find an anti-historical situation fantasizing Shaivite intolerance against Vaishnavs where Ramanujam"s disciple is shown fighting Kulothunga Chola. Based on a solitary description of Chola antagonism in Ramanujam"s writings, we discover the Chola fanatic stealing the idol of Vishnu from Srirangam, ironically the same temple complex which was plundered at least five times by Islamic armies. Similarly, Kamal Hassan in his movie "Anbe Sivam", shows a pious Shiva devotee injuring the hero who is rescued by a group of benevolent Christian nuns. Previously, in the 70s when anti-Brahmana movement in Tamil Nadu was at its peak, we had Brahmana priests routinely paraded as rascals in Tamil movies.
"Islamic" sensitivities have extracted book bans from both British and Congress governments. Girja Kumar in his "Book on Trial" has reproduced dozens of cases where Hindu books critical of Islam or the Prophet were banned, and the authors faced arrest or were killed. Salman Rushdie"s flight and Taslima Nasrin"s plight is well known. Lajja almost faced a ban because she had exposed the genocide against Hindus in Bangladesh. Movies on the state of Kashmiri pundits, victims of Islamic genocide against Hindus of Bangladeshis, the Hindu victims of the North East against Christian separatism and also the historical crimes by the armies of Islam and inquisitory Christianity are taboo in a "secular country" They cannot see the light of the day because they are inimical to communal harmony and hurt minority sentiments.
This ostentatious display of anti Hindu sentiment is of course lost on the jingoists or those ABCDs who go gaga over such pernicious cinema. Sincere critics questioning the dumb plot where a slum boy grows up into a sophisticated leftist JNU product with a flawless English accent are censured by appealing to the authority of the Golden globe awards. They keenly forget the film was precisely designed for that, appeal to the racial sensitivities of those who really matter! Therefore, even the liberation of Jamal is not through out of any indigenous worth, but through an internationally funded poverty alleviation game show [Kaun Banega Crorepati recedes into its international avatar, Who wants to become a millionaire].
Source: blogs.ivarta.com
Slumdog is about defaming Hindus
Pousha Krushna Chaturdashi (Amavasya)
By Kanchan Gupta
In keeping with American politics of the times, Slumdog Millionaire has been nominated for as many as 10 Oscars and our deracinated media, which constantly looks for inspirational ‘good news’ stories that invariably revolve around Western appreciation of ‘truthful’ portrayal of the Indian ‘reality’, has gone into a tizzy. Saturday’s edition of a newspaper published from New Delhi had a blurb on the front page that read, "The Slumdog story: How ‘Danny uncle’ and his ‘moral compass’ created the biggest ‘Indian’ blockbuster — and why you should watch it." Predictably, the chattering classes, who had been blissfully ignorant of Vikas Swarup’s Q and A (as they had been of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger till its perverse denigration of India and all things Indian wowed the judges of last year’s Man Booker prize) are now making a beeline for the nearest bookshop for a copy of the novel, whose title has been suitably changed to Slumdog Millionaire so that the book and the film are eponymous and both publisher and producer can encash the extraordinary hype that has been generated. Late last year, there was similar hoopla over AR Rahman getting the Golden Globe award for the music he has scored for Slumdog Millionaire. An approving pat on the back by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, it would seem, is the most important marker in an artiste’s career. Those Indian musicians who haven’t got the Golden Globe are not worthy of honour at home just as Sahitya Akademi award winners are not worthy of finding space on our bookshelves, leave alone feature on news pages or news bulletins.
The larger point is not really about going gaga over an American award or a British prize, but how they are seen as India being admitted into the charmed circle whose membership is strictly controlled and is by invitation only. That invitation invariably follows a certain pattern; it’s not merely the keepers of the gate chanting, "Eeny meeny miny mo, catch a tiger by his toe, if he hollers let him go…" Apart from the fact that the ‘tigers’ in this case are not hollering but salivating at the prospect of seeing themselves clutching a handful of trophies on Oscar night, the nomination process is far more rigorous than we would think, with filters to keep out those films and books that do not serve the judges’ purpose or pander to their fanciful notions — in this case, of India. Aravind Adiga crafted his novel in a manner that it could not but impress the Man Booker judges who see India as a seething mass of unwashed hordes which worship pagan gods, are trapped in caste-based prejudices, indulge in abominable practices like untouchability, and are not worthy of being considered as an emerging power, never mind economic growth and knowledge excellence. Similarly, Danny Boyle has made a film that portrays every possible bias against India and structured it within the matrix of Western lib-left perceptions of the Indian ‘reality’ which have little or nothing in common with the real India in which we live.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Boyle’s film is about a slum where extreme social exclusion, political suppression and economic deprivation define the lives of its inhabitants. He has made every effort to shock and awe the film’s audience by taking recourse to graphic and gory portrayal of bloodthirsty Hindu mobs on the rampage — the idiom that defines India as it is imagined by the lib-left Western mind — laying to waste Muslim lives (a Hindu is shown slitting a Muslim woman’s throat in an almost frame-by-frame remake of the videotape that was released by the killers of Daniel Pearl) and property. There’s more that makes you want to throw up the last meal you had: Hindu policemen torturing Muslims by giving them ‘electric shock therapy’, street children being physically disfigured and then forced to beg, and such other scenes of a medieval society where rule of law does not exist and every Hindu is a rapacious monster eager to make a feast of helpless Muslims.
Nor is it surprising that Boyle should have cunningly changed the name of the film’s — as also the book’s — protagonist from Vikas Swarup’s Ram Mohammad Thomas (a sort of tribute to the Amar Akbar Antony brand of ‘secularism’ which was fashionable in the 1970s) to Jamal Malik. The name implies a Kashmiri connection, and we can’t put it beyond Boyle suggesting a link between Jamal’s travails — it is his mother whose throat is shown as being slit by a Hindu — and the imagined victimhood of Kashmir’s Muslims who, the lib-left intelligentsia in the West insists, are ‘persecuted by Hindu India’. Asked about the protagonist’s name being changed, Swarup is believed to have said that it was done to "make it sound more politically correct". There is a second hidden message: The Hindu quizmaster on the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ show has doubts about Jamal, who gets all the questions right, not because he is a ‘slumdog’ but because he is a Muslim; so he sets India’s Hindu police on the hapless boy. Swarup did not quite put it that way in his book, but the film does so, and understandably the critics in Hollywood who sport Obama buttons are impressed.
The last time depravity was portrayed as the Indian ‘reality’ was when Roland Joffé did a cinematic version of Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy. In that film, the Missionaries of Charity were shown as the saviours of an India trapped in filth, squalor, poverty and Hindu superstition. Some two decades later, Boyle has rediscovered Joffé’s India and made appropriate changes to fit his film into the Hindu-bad-Muslim-good mould so that it has a resonance in today’s America where it is now fashionable to look at the world through the eyes of Barack Hussein Obama.
In her review of the film, "Shocked by Slumdog’s poverty porn", Alice Miles writes in The Times: "Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn." Commenting on the BBFC’s decision to "place this work in the comedy genre", she says, "Comedy? So maybe that’s it: I just didn’t get the joke." It’s doubtful whether most Indians, Hindus and Muslims, would get it either if they were to watch Slumdog Millionaire.
Source: dailyopineer.com
