Slumdog Millionaire and What to Do About Global Poverty

I walked out of Seattle’s old Harvard Exit Theater on a cold Friday night in December. I had just seen the film Slumdog Millionaire and overheard two people talking. One was telling the other how she had seen Bollywood movies before and that all they contained were dance scenes and Jane Austen-like plots. She hesitated, “Actually, maybe what I’ve seen were spoofs of Bollywood movies and this was, like, a real Bollywood movie.” I smiled.

At the time, Slumdog Millionaire hadn’t yet won Best Picture at the Golden Globes. It hadn’t been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (nor was it running as the heavy favorite to win Best Picture and Best Director), and director Danny Boyle and the movie’s two young lead actors – Dev Patel and Freida Pinto – hadn’t yet been hosted and gushed over by Oprah and Ellen. It was playing at a single, mostly empty theater in Seattle. Contrary to what many American viewers believe, Slumdog Millionaire is no Bollywood movie, but it is certainly a film with plenty of genuine Indian elements. It is based on the novel Q & A by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup. Most of its music is by Bollywood super-composer AR Rahman, and it even contains a (relatively mediocre) song and dance routine. Lead roles are played by famous Indian actors Irrfan Khan and Anil Kapoor. It was filmed entirely in India and the child actors were all Indian – some of them slum dwellers themselves. There is plenty of melodrama and a love story. While Slumdog Millionaire clearly draws inspiration from Bollywood, it is directed by an Englishman and is mostly in English, leading many Indians to treat it as just another Hollywood movie.

By now you’ve probably heard of Slumdog Millionaire. It is the story of three street kids growing up in Mumbai. It is part rags-to-riches fairytale, part love story, and part horrifying look into the difficulties of street life. It has been scooping up awards and critical acclaim in the US and the UK while being dogged by more controversy than other Oscar-nominated films. Most of the debate centers around the poverty shown in the film, and whether a white British male (Boyle) has the right to present Indian society in such a way in a commercially successful feel-good (kind of) film. To tell an Indian story through the lives of impoverished street children embarrasses and enrages much of India’s upper-class who see the film as a stereotypically Western view of India as poor, chaotic, violent and dirty. They see Slumdog Millionaire as a “white man’s imagined India.” Some Hindu organizations accuse the film of denigrating Hindu gods. Some human rights groups in India have condemned the film for its use of the term ‘slumdog’ (a term not commonly used that recalls the days of British colonizers calling Indians ‘dogs’). Others see Boyle’s slick, colorful production of such impoverished settings as “poverty porn” – rendering Indian poverty visually appealing and exciting for a mostly white, Western audience. Finally, the compensation given to the film’s young actors is, with Slumdog Millionaire’s success, seen to be inadequate and a way of exploiting real life slum children. No matter how Slumdog Millionaire does at the Oscars, these controversies are unlikely to die down, even if they fall off the pages of US newspapers.

I do not intend to debate each of these controversies here, though I find some of the accusations frivolous while others have some validity. What is most interesting to me is the way in which Slumdog Millionaire has brought the issue of global poverty into the limelight (literally) and has exposed our collective squeamishness with having images of it thrown in our face by a film. If we middle-class Americans must see poverty, we like to see it portrayed in a particular way – most likely in a low-budget documentary that condemns it and that offers a way out. A movie like Born into Brothels does this very well. But Slumdog Millionaire treats poverty and those who live in poverty differently, not as faceless objects of pity, but as individuals – as a story must – with agency and the capacity to be happy and full of dreams in the midst of often horrifying surroundings. In this way Slumdog Millionaire resembles Rohinton Mistry’s impressive novel A Fine Balance – also set in India, that does not shy away from the poverty that is a given in many people’s lives, but something that need not rob people of their humanity, that need not reduce them to objects to be pitied by the world’s wealthy. With this perspective poverty need not limit the range of human experience and emotions. Those who are poor have a story like everyone else, and in fact, those who are poor make up a huge amount of the world’s population. Confronting middle-class Westerners (and Indians for that matter) with the horrors of poverty and the injustice of their own affluence, while avoiding defining the poor by this label alone is something few films do. Slumdog Millionaire does it well. And if it does well at the box office, all the better.

When discussing global poverty and the political and social attempts to alleviate it, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers and to be numbed to the experiences of individuals who must live in such dire conditions. It is easy to feel guilty that you are not the one living in extreme poverty or to feel that those who are poor deserve it, that they just need to try harder. It is also easy to feel hopeless in the face of such a widespread and complex problem. How exactly should the global community address the problem of poverty? Should we place an emphasis on greater individual incomes and saving and buying power? Or should the emphasis be in developing societal infrastructure to improve quality of life by ensuring better health care, education, access to employment, etc.? Some put their faith in the free market to lift all boats, but then the free market seems to demand that many people remain poor, and it doesn’t provide any plan for improving societal shortcomings that contribute to poverty. Some believe government programs are the answer, but improving education, health care, job training programs and the like can be costly and complicated, and simple welfare schemes may perpetuate poverty. A host of non-governmental organizations and foundations play a growing part in addressing poverty, but can arbitrarily bestow charity that perpetuates cycles of economic dependence. The work of groups like the UN’s Development Program connects these participants and strategies offering a practical and promising way of addressing poverty on a global scale.

But uplifting the poor is not all that is needed. Our relatively new found awareness of the toll we inflict upon the environment requires that the discussion about alleviating poverty must include the using and distributing resources. Ending poverty through growing economies and enabling hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese to drive gas-guzzling cars and to use energy as recklessly as we in the US do is no longer an environmentally viable option. And neither is telling people in poorer countries that they can’t have what we do, that they can’t live how we do. Rapidly developing countries need to do their part to make their growth politically and environmentally sustainable, no question. In a way, the more difficult task is ours however. If global economic growth continues (a given in most minds before the last six months of economic turbulence) most other people in the world will be increasing their consumption and use of resources. The Brazilian student may move up from a bike to a scooter, the Vietnamese family may upgrade to an oven from a cook top stove. In the US however, unless we plan on aggressively defending our unfair hoarding of resources from the global community, we will need to begin to reduce the amount of resources we use. Drastically. Even if free markets can lift all boats, it will mean environmental disaster. The middle class American lifestyle has never been sustainable. We are realizing this just as the world’s two largest countries are economically booming, and striving for that lifestyle. No longer will the United States – six percent of the world’s population – be able to consume 30% of the world’s resources. That’s a fact.

But, I suspect it is a fact that will go ignored or denied. Sure, we may use compact florescent bulbs instead of incandescents. We may recycle and compost. But most of us probably won’t give up our car (or even our second car). Most of us won’t give up our washer and dryer, or our oven, or our spacious homes. In the end, I suspect that we’re all just a bit too selfish and stuck in our ways to make large personal sacrifices for an abstract common good. We want to end poverty, but we don’t want to give up what we’ve been blessed with, and without this sacrifice on the part of the better-off, poverty will continue no matter how much effort is directed at alleviating it.

Like any movie, Slumdog Millionaire has its shortcomings. Its plot is somewhat thin and its characters are not very well-developed. It is a movie more about image than substance. Its details are easily refuted by Indian audiences. However, its vividly showing audiences who have not faced poverty and hardship the lives that many in this world are compelled to lead allows it to be more than just a film. It gives poverty a face and a story that will open most audiences’ eyes to something new – hopefully bringing tangible benefits to the world’s poor while eliciting an honest introspection about what people often must and can do without.