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Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 311 Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures

Rebecca Stephens Duncan Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

Abstract This essay examines the film Slumdog Millionaire and its reception as an intercultural encounter focused on romance and class conflict. While the Eastern and diasporic critical response registered outrage at the global exposure of ’s , an emerging critical discourse on Indian popular cinema adds cultural context and nuance to discussions of the film. Western viewers and critics, in contrast, are culturally prepared to approach the film as a generic hybrid or a postmodern romance. Innovative under both paradigms, Slumdog invites new consideration of the archetypical romantic quest in twenty-first century . Ultimately, the clear division between Eastern and Western responses challenges the notion of the global or transnational response to a regional or national narrative.

Keywords Slumdog Millionaire, Indian popular cinema, romantic quest, Northrop Frye, postmodern romance, , India, hybrid film,

In terms of its production, the Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire1 reflects a certain globalization of film-making, an attempt to break down cultural boundaries and re-signify generic conventions. Set in in the booming 1990s, it was based upon the widely translated novel Q&A by Indian author Vikram Swarup, produced by a consortium of Western studios, directed by Britain’s and marketed with great fanfare to both Eastern and Western audiences. In terms of its locale and narrative, the film seems also to cross a number of aesthetic and cultural boundaries, as it reveals – in full-tilt sensuality – the Dharavi and the dynamic city of Mumbai to the world. Yet responses to the

Copyright © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol 46(2): 311–326. DOI: 10.1177/0021989411404994 312 Journal of Commonwealth Literature film, reflected in reviews, commentary and even lawsuits and political protests, in some ways uphold certain cultural boundaries, particularly those regarding the genre of the and class-based access to the privileges and benefits offered by a globalized economy. This response may raise questions about the possibility of a truly global narrative or a transnational response to a regional or national narrative. To reach a context in which such questions may be raised, begin more modestly by examining the film and its reception as an intercultural encounter focused on romance and class conflict. Most broadly stated, my argument suggests that Eastern audiences (consumers of the Bollywood tradition) come prepared to value and accept aspects of the film that are disdained by Western audiences (consumers of the Hollywood tradition) and vice-versa. With the aim of initiating a critical conversation, I then respond to this chiasmus of reception with a reading of the film as a postmodern romantic quest. Through a combination of box office success, motion picture awards, critical reception and the socio-political discourse that it spawned, Slumdog has belied the conclusion of one critic that it “makes for a better viewing experience than a reflective one”.2 The film dramatizes the story of three poor children who escape a brutal orphanage and find ways to survive and thrive in globalized Mumbai on one side of the law or another, each ultimately reaching a fitting form of redemption. Jamal acts strategically to land a spot on the popular television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and his brother Salim seeks his fortune at the right hand of a crime boss. Their friend Latika slides between her roles as the crime boss’s kept woman and the object of Jamal’s love. For having produced such a range of responses and coverage, the film merits particular critical attention as an aesthetic and cultural artifact. Such an approach, incorporating cultural and literary theory and a growing body of research on Indian popular cinema and its viewers, acknowledges innovations in genre that characterize contemporary commercial film and the blending of high and low culture that has renewed and enlivened discourse in the Humanities in recent years. For additional context, I also look at the adaptation of Swarup’s novel to film as well as some relevant Eastern and Western literary/cultural paradigms. Although it is impossible to detail the exact demographics of this film’s viewership in each culture, it is reasonable to conclude that the reviewers in mainstream media addressed literate viewers, online reviewers reached a yet broader set of prospective and actual viewers, and that audiences around the world included all socio- economic classes that could afford the price of admission. This last profile may exclude many of the slum inhabitants whose lives were featured in the film, yet as Swarup’s novel and ’sMidnight’s Children Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 313 suggest, India’s poor admire popular cinema and will sacrifice much for a chance to enjoy it. Film reviewers can establish a certain disposition toward a film by assigning it a category or subgenre that acknowledges the audiences’ viewing repertoire. Faced with the unfamiliar locale of Mumbai and its slums, Western critics highlighted a compelling yet disturbing exotic beauty in their categorization of Slumdog. One reviewer summoned the “ghetto picaresque” portrayed in the Brazilian slums in the 2002 film,City of God.3 A New York Times reviewer found a sort of “armchair tourism” in the film’s travel episodes, particularly Jamal and Salim’s stint as vendors/thieves on trains and at the .4 This tendency to create new classifications echoes Ira Jaffe’s notion of hybrid genres in film, explored in her book Hollywood Hybrids. Following trends toward hybridization in modernist painting, sculpture and music, Hollywood film, in Jaffe’s view, began in the late twentieth century to blend genres to reflect “life’s distinctive complexity and indeterminacy”.5 While alluding to the otherness of the film’s setting, Western critics have done little to engage with the cultural significance of their rather euphemistic generic labels; instead they demur to aesthetics with descriptions of the film’s visual impact. Dargis of The New York Times writes of a “vast, vibrant, sun-soaked, jampacked ghetto, a kaleidoscopic city of flimsy shacks and struggling humanity”.6 Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers describes “an explosion of color and light with the darkness ever ready to invade”.7 Somewhat more traditional yet no less euphemistic are the London Telegraph’s and The Washington Times’ mentions of the film’s Dickensian elements. Bunch calls the setting an “alien landscape” and assures filmgoers that although Jamal’s “[fight] against history and his own culture’s expectations” may sound “heavy […] ’t worry; Mr. Boyle’s picture has a great sense of humor and knows just when to ratchet down the level of intensity”.8 The film’s focus on the Dharavi slum and its residents, seen by some critics as exotic or picturesque for Western viewers, provoked a much more politically and culturally engaged range of responses from India and its diasporic populations. A few film industry insiders and a number of Indian reviewers recognized Boyle’s cinematic achievement, while a much broader discourse range of artists, journalists, scholars, activists and slum-dwellers questioned the realism of the film’s depiction of Dharavi and its inhabitants, the fairness of exposing India’s poverty to the world via a Hollywood-style film, and the plausibility of a rags-to-riches story enacted under these socio-economic circumstances. These respondents located it in a very different set of descriptive subgenres, including “poverty porn”, “slum chic” and the “poverty tour”. 314 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Few would question that slums like Dharavi exist, that deliberately maimed children from such places beg on the city streets, and that great numbers of people there live far below their human potential. Vrindi Nabar writes that “Many of us who live in Mumbai hold no brief for its negatives of greed, inequitable distribution of wealth and unplanned development. We battle these as best we can and hope for change.”9 Yet journalists and scholars alike offered nuance, and hence a richer sense of realism, to discussions of the slum setting. Mitu Sengupta, writing for journal Frontline, deplores the “raw, chaotic tribalism” foregrounded in the slum scenes and notes that Dharavi teems with dynamism, creativity and entrepreneurship, in industries such as garment manufacturing, embroidery, pottery, leather, plastics and food processing. It is estimated that the annual turnover from Dharavi’s small businesses is between $50 and $100 million. Dharavi’s lanes are lined with cellphone retailers and cybercafés . . . and the slum’s residents exhibit a remarkably high absorption of new technologies.10 Sengupta also notes the strong cooperative societies and grass-roots associations that “tackle difficult issues such as child abuse and violence against women”.11 Such advocacy was apparent in the social protests organized by activists in several slum neighborhoods and in a lawsuit filed against Slumdog’s composer A.R. Rahman and actor alleging that the film violated the human rights of slum dwellers.12 Mumbaikars, some interviewed by international news sources, challenged the fairness of being labelled as dogs; one group vowed to protest until the film’s title was changed. , the Bollywood actor idolized by the young Jamal, questions the fairness of standards that reward an outsider’s vision of India while ignoring what he considers the superior work of native film-makers.13 Bachchan is not alone in being moved to anger. A South Asia correspondent for the Seoul Times writes of the film’s “demeaning portrayal of India. Poverty is celebrated, destitution, squalor, beggar mafia and stare at us from the frames – magnified to distortion, glorified silly and used as tools of titillation to please the smug white world.14 He concludes that “only India can do [the Bollywood genre] right”.15 From these condemnations it is a short step to critiquing the plausibility of the rags-to-riches genre itself. Sengupta wonders why Jamal’s success must rely on destiny “in the form of an imported show”, a narrative choice that she argues dehumanizes the country’s poor and allows for little agency on their part.16 Sudip Mazumdar of Newsweek reminds readers that “Most people in the slums never achieve a fairy-tale ending.”17 Further doubts about plausibility arise in discussion of the switch from subtitled to , with no accounting for how Jamal and various Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 315 other characters acquire their polished accents.18 Poised between two cultures, Salman Rushdie condemns both the film and Swarup’s novel for their poor deployment of fantasy, a judgement that inversely indicts their plausibility as well.19 Questions of plausibility also arise in Western responses. The emphasis of this criticism falls upon the narrative structure, which pairs each quiz show question with an experience in Jamal’s life. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers grants that “the concept bends coincidence to the breaking point”20 and The Washington Times’ Bunch notes the “astronomical” number of coincidences needed to make the story work.21 Yet plot credibility is minor compared to the poverty issues, and it can be overcome for some by acknowledging Boyle’s restless, surreal, curious, flashy, darkly humorous and/or shape-shifting style, developed in the treatment of drug addicts in Trainspotting and zombies in and continued in Slumdog. Although critics and academics intently focused on Slumdog’s treatment of urban poverty find little merit in the film at all, others forgive a measure of implausibility in the service of romance. Nikhat Kazmi writes that the cinematography “serenades Mumbai with unbridled passion”,22 and Nabar offers this generally romanticized view of the city: Mumbai’s other, better – one that has resisted unimaginable calamities both natural and man-made, refused to allow its cosmopolitan essence to be destroyed, and shows itself determined to remain unique. A city in which sensitivity coexists with despair, commitment with indifference, activism with inaction, and humanism with the inhumane.23 Family romance remains a staple of the popular film tradition in India, and a number of Indian and diasporic reviewers have categorized the film as a “Cinderella story”, a “fairy tale”, or a simple love story. Western reviewers echoed similar subgenres as well, and NPR’s Bob Mondello notes that Jamal remains “always intent – even when he’s appearing on TV – on finding and rescuing the love of his life, who forever seems to be just out of reach”.24 Beyond this observation, there is very little acknowledgement among reviewers that all of the film’s other plots subordinate themselves to Jamal’s romantic quest to locate and rescue Latika from her confinement in the Javed’s brothel. Both traditions admit romance in certain forms, yet I suggest that the particular packaging of romance in Slumdog forces each audience beyond its horizon of expectations. Whereas cinema in India was for many years sharply divided into high (or art) film and the popular genres, referred to somewhat derisively as Bollywood, scholars have recently explored the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the latter, now referring to this tradition as Indian (or Hindi) popular cinema. These critical endeavours have begun to characterize various subgenres of popular film, including the family romance, in ways that can 316 Journal of Commonwealth Literature establish a plausible Indian response to the romantic elements of Slumdog. Tracing the romance plot to ancient Sanskrit drama, Raghavendra writes that these tradition- and family-centred episodic stories move through a series of obstacles toward a pre-determined ending, generally a socially acceptable marriage. For Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Sanskrit drama continues to inspire the music-and-dance spectacles in which popular film plots are embedded.25 The traditional family and its rituals are central, and melodramatic conflicts between the morality of good and evil are staged between stereotypical, rather than psychologically individuated, characters.26 Rachel Dwyer calls melodrama “the underlying mode of Hindi cinema” and emphasizes “the suffering of the powerless good […] often at the hands of a villain who is known to the family”.27 She adds that “There are situations which can be resolved only through convenient deaths, chance meetings and implausible happy endings.”28 Although recent films have put pressure on traditional moral standards with stories of pre-marital sex or co-habitation, and inter-caste romances have received a degree of fantastic treatment over the years, Gokulsing and Dissanayake assert that in terms of cultural norms and social structures, popular film continues to affirm the rather conservative moral universe.29 In interviews with dozens of Indian and diasporic Indian youth about Indian films, Banaji confirms the persistence of such traditional values as duty and sacrifice for family stability; young filmgoers seemed hopeful for a love marriage while admitting they would accept an arranged match. It was not uncommon for male and female respondents to endorse not only a woman’s chastity before marriage but also the transfer of her affections from the man she loves to her parents’ choice for a husband. The critical and commercial success of the “clean” family romance film Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1995) attests to the fact that “the joint family is, if not a fact of traditional Indian society, at least a deeply held traditional value that continues to provide the underlying principles of household-building strategies in South Asia…”.30 Slumdog may not be the first to challenge these norms, but its particular “masala” breaks new ground for Indian audiences. While foregrounding poverty and a slum-based gangster life, the film remixes fragments of Indian popular cinema in ways that can be unsettling. The three orphaned children comprise a new and disturbing family configuration; Salim asserts himself as their patriarch, yet he hands Latika over to Javed, the crime boss, and forcefully sends Jamal away to fend for himself. Only intermittently does Salim embrace his younger brother. When he does so, he recommends that Jamal forget about Latika, and on behalf of his employer he subverts Latika’s attempts to escape. For Latika the traditional sacredness of a woman’s honour and purity are compromised when she becomes the property of Javed. Even Jamal’s repeated assertion that his quest is Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 317 destined or “written” seems an affront to popular cinema’s Sanskrit roots; the bootstrapping quality of Jamal’s rise from street urchin to millionaire suggests more agency than a predetermined plot line can withstand. The explicit kiss between Jamal and Latika likewise challenges a taboo against public displays of affection in film. Danny Boyle notes that “I think it’s sort of like nudity here” and considers “very gracious” for agreeing to do the scene.31 In a 1998 study of politics and Indian popular cinema, Ashis Nandy suggests that popular films create a bond along a spectrum of socio-economic classes, from the poorest slum-dwellers to the haute bourgeoisie, noting that even the upper middle class is too new and too small to feel securely distinguished from the poor who continue to arrive from rural areas. Popular films provide a fantasized future for the poor while idealizing the rural past for the bourgeoisie.32 Jamal’s rapid “class-jumping,” particularly his meteoric rise to bourgeois status via the quiz show, has the potential to disturb the gradual process of urbanization and upward mobility Nandy describes and therefore may produce anxiety among the recently gentrified. The film’s melodrama, on the other hand, fits Dwyer’s and Gokulsing and Dissanayake’s descriptions of Indian popular cinema. Maman, owner of the begging “school”, and Javed the gangster are flat and stereotypical bad guys, and Maman in particular enacts the role of the familiar villain noted by Dwyer. Likewise, there is little psychological realism in the fact that Jamal shapes his young adult life as a quest to recover a woman he met randomly as a child and knew very briefly. Nandy accounts for these elements by noting that in order to attract and unite India’s vast middle classes, “the popular film ideally has to have everything – from the classical to the folk, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the terribly modern to the incorrigibly traditional, from the plots within plots that never get resolved to the cameo roles and stereotypical characters that never get developed”.33 Film clips of action-hero Amitabh Bachchan supply the requisite “cameo”, while situating the story and the characters in the popular film culture itself. Also familiar to the Indian popular film audience is the song-and- dance routine, which usually features elaborate costumes and settings and expresses a degree of intimacy, sexuality and vulgarity not generally attempted elsewhere in the script. Scholars of popular cinema continue to wrestle philosophically with these routines, which “detract a terrible toll from the aesthetic value of Hindi films”.34 Gokulsing and Dissanayake also suggest that in romance films song-and-dance interludes enable a safe mediation between traditional, parental standards and the individual romantic impulses of the young protagonists. Regarding his choice to include the final song-and-dance routine inSlumdog , Danny Boyle has said, “Well you can’t live there and work there for about eight months without 318 Journal of Commonwealth Literature dancing. It’d be like filming a movie about America and not featuring a motor car.”35 Singing and dancing were apparently pervasive on the set during filming, and Boyle notes that his team tried unsuccessfully to incorporate a dance number into the story. Risking the perception that for Western audiences “the songs are the real deal-breakers” and the first Bollywood element to be jettisoned in a crossover film,36 Boyle uses the closing routine to hail his Eastern viewers and confirm them as an important audience for the film. Characterizing a general response by Western audiences, those familiar with the Hollywood tradition, is made more difficult by the paucity of recent critical inquiry into romance on the screen and in literature. Granted, Hollywood continues to turn out superficial romantic comedies, many featuring female actresses in contemporary yet stereotypical roles. Slumdog’s commercial success and its ongoing presence on YouTube and Facebook suggest that it appeals to the audience for such films. Yet productions with higher aesthetic and cultural aspirations – a classification I extend to Slumdog – seem to approach the romance genre with caution and subtlety. Strategies for success with such endeavours include generic hybridization, irony, the broaching of new taboos and historical/geographical distance. For the most part the focus of these films has also shifted from the hero to the heroine, and romantic quests often fall into the subgenre of the “chick flick”. While newly configured families no longer trouble most Western viewers and a kiss on screen is hardly scandalous, other Indian cinematic conventions can be more troubling for critics and viewers. For instance, reviewers are especially harsh on films that indulge in the sorts of melodrama and superficiality expected and accepted by Eastern audiences. Titanic, a disaster/romance hybrid, drew for its shallow dialogue between the lovers. Jerry Maguire, in contrast, earned high marks for a successful fusion of romance with the tale of an introspective “different drummer” hero amidst the high stakes competition of sports business, and superb acting is credited for pulling off the love story. explored the taboo of homosexuality and the romantic quest, and The Piano dramatized infidelity and passion in the “exotic” muddy regions of rural New Zealand. Ira Jaffe posits a hybrid genre called the teen romance and cites the experimental Blue Velvet as an example. And finally, I suggest that a combination of narrative irony, historical distance and strong heroines contributes to the successful recent treatment of Jane Austen’s novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Within the context of this viewing repertoire, Slumdog succeeds by remixing familiar genres, introducing an exotic new setting, and, most significantly, pacing and fragmenting the story-lines in ways that disguise the melodramatic and the superficial and simply turn the attention elsewhere. Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 319

Like any inter-cultural encounter, Slumdog leaves its mark on the participants in ways that cannot be ignored or erased. I have suggested that the film places new pressures on the traditions of Indian popular cinema, particularly those involving the role of social class in the family romance genre. For Western scholars and viewers, I propose that the film offers an opportunity to rethink the romantic quest paradigm in a postmodern and transnational context. To explore this possibility, I turn to literary contexts of the quest myth and argue that Jamal’s character carries the traits of the romantic hero from a critically stalled modernist state into the realm of the postmodern. Northrop Frye has called romance “the structural core of all fiction”. He has traced its genealogy through centuries of literature and folktales to its origin in the Bible and determined that romance expresses “man’s vision of his own life as a quest”.37 Central to this quest is a capable yet innocent hero who undertakes a series of adventures in pursuit of a worthy goal. Concurrent with Frye’s twentieth-century scholarship, however, runs a concern among some of his peers that modernist culture has stymied this hero and imperiled his quest. Ihab Hassan describes some of these cultural conditions, including the fear of technologies that enable vast destruction and the existential response to nihilism “in a context in which no action is meaningful”.38 Further, the modernist hero finds himself trapped in an historical position when “Eden is far behind, the millennium not appreciably near…. And the pattern of human actions in time yields no recognizable meaning.”39 Hassan writes that the modernist hero often displays a radical, “peculiarly aware” innocence that conflicts with the ever-diminishing pull of his “Edenic consciousness”.40 As a desperately poor orphan, Slumdog’s Jamal responds to similar conditions but from a very different vantage point as he pursues a romantic quest for the love of his childhood friend Latika. Concerned with basic survival, he experiences none of the existential angst of his well-fed counterparts in modernist literature of the Western tradition: Hemingway’s Nick Adams, Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, or Sherwood Anderson’s George Willard. Technology in these postmodern times seems less threatening and more enabling than its “potentially destructive” modernist counterpart. It infuses the lives of even the poorest Mumbaikars, as they gather en masse outside electronics shops to watch their hero compete on the game show. Cellphones provide momentum, opportunity and suspense, and Jamal’s ticket out of the slums is a servile job in an outsourced telecommunications call centre. Historical awareness also fuels a new sort of agency, although this is seen more clearly in the ambitious character of Salim, whom I address more fully below. An essential part of the character of the romantic hero, innocence captures and preserves an Edenic, “before the fall” moral and intellectual 320 Journal of Commonwealth Literature state against which to measure his transformation and the success of his quest. This innocence, particularly as we look back on it from a postmodern perspective, seems also to assert cultural stability, and that can explain why the unsettling cultural milieu of modernism posed a threat to the questing hero and to romance as “the structural core of all fiction”. Applied to Slumdog, the Western notion of Eden might be replaced by the boys’ carefree childhood in the slums. Until the random attack on Muslims in which their mother is killed, the boys play soccer on airport runways, skip school, and live in a poor but vibrant community. Even at Maman’s school, Jamal remains vulnerably smitten with his Bollywood hero Amitabh Bachchan and then with Latika, with whom he confides his dreams of wealth and fame. His fantasy of becoming an actor nearly costs him his sight at Maman’s school when his excellent singing puts him in line to become a blind beggar. Through the course of the story, Jamal reworks this innocence into a quality more secure and benign, yet “radical” in a strategic sense as well. The adaptation of Swarup’s novel shows an effort to position Jamal as ethically and aesthetically eligible to enjoy the state of innocence he seeks. Ram Mohammed Thomas, the narrator-protagonist of Q&A, combines qualities of the film’s Jamal and Salim. The Salim of the novel is a Bollywood-smitten friend of Ram and a minor character. Ram finds his friend’s dreaminess alarming and dangerous, yet he indulges the boy with brotherly affection.41 As a hero, Ram shoots a train robber and assaults a neighbour in order to protect women and avenge violence committed upon them. His primary quest, the game show appearance, is similarly an act of revenge on behalf of two additional female characters. The requisite accounting and forgiving do occur in the novel, yet the screenplay takes far less risk with the ethical spectrum of the hero’s behaviour and attitude. By delegating the violence to a newly-created hero, screenwriter Beaufoy removes any traces of guilt that might taint the ideal state of innocence that Jamal seeks. The division of Ram’s character into Jamal and Salim also echoes the narrative tension between romance and realism that Frye, Hassan and Steven Cohan have observed in their twentieth-century assessments of the romantic quest. Cohan suggests that nineteenth-century literary realism, associated with experience, drives a narrative forward, while romance, associated with innocence, provides a backward movement, a “competing imaginative energy” 42 that seeks to recover an Edenic or ideal state of mind. Cohan argues that modernist writers, especially Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, respond to the realism of the nineteenth century by exposing and foregrounding these narrative tensions in their novels. Likewise, Jamal and Salim direct the story with opposing paradigms grounded in realism and romance. From the moment he sells Jamal’s autographed photo of Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 321

Bachchan, the realist Salim displays ambition, confidence and an ability to read and manipulate circumstances. As the boys run from Maman and his men, Salim is clearly shown grasping and then letting go of Latika’s hand as she tries to board the train. Quick to seize an opportunity, Salim devises numerous schemes for selling merchandise and stealing food, and once back in Mumbai he murders Maman and attaches himself to the slum gangster Javed. In all of these roles he acts strategically to enhance his material position and to gain stature, in a typically realistic rags-to- riches plot line. Jamal, on the other hand, interrupts Salim’s progression with a backward- looking quest to recover Latika and position himself as a romantic hero. Although he convinces Salim to return to Mumbai, Salim asks angrily why they had to “return to this shit-hole”, which incidentally entails honest work in a restaurant. The boys’ treatment of Latika further reflects this forward-backward tension. Jamal admires her as an innocent girl, while Salim recognizes and capitalizes on her emerging sexuality. The boys’ later meeting on the concrete frame of a new skyscraper confirms their opposing trajectories. Salim gushes with excitement about the city’s growth and, historically aware, declares himself to be “at the centre of the centre” of this development. Jamal, in contrasts, attacks Salim for having left him (and for taking Latika), as an avenging hero might. When he asks about Latika, Salim tries to put the past behind them, saying, “Still? You’re still asking about her? She’s gone. She’s long gone.” This backward motion becomes visually literal once Jamal has won his record-breaking twenty million rupees and met with Latika at the train station. An earlier attempt to meet there resulted in her capture by Salim and punishment in the form of facial disfigurement. At this point the film literally unreels itself, moving backwards through – as if undoing – the earlier encounter. Latika, whose life with Javed raises questions about her sexual purity, appears at the station veiled in yellow, a celebratory colour in India. This veiling, seemingly without irony or social awareness, places Latika in the conservative, middle-class tradition of courtship that Jamal’s success has earned them as it replaces her sexual past with a second chance at innocence. On the threshold of postmodernism, mid-century romantic heroes persevere against absurdity and what Hassan calls “the terrible and the ludicrous” by developing a sense of “ironic humility”.43 The heroes of Saul Bellow’s fiction serve as examples of this stage. One can argue that harsh realities press down upon Jamal as well, yet the story as a whole is shaped not by the logic of realism but rather by the fluidity and fortuitousness of romance. The film enacts a kind of romance that Neil Ten Kortenaar identifies in Rushdie’sMidnight’s Children as “the genre of wish fulfillment”, as desire produces, rather than confronts, the ludicrous.44 In declining 322 Journal of Commonwealth Literature an ironic stance in favour of this sort of romantic desire, Jamal enters a familiar discourse on possible responses to the even more fragmented and often ludicrous postmodern culture. His desire often takes the form of nostalgia, which Linda Hutcheon contextualizes in useful ways. For Hutcheon, postmodern nostalgia is a longing prompted by a dissatisfaction with the present. A nostalgic subject may indulge this urge by summoning the past, but not as it actually existed. Rather, the nostalgic impulse selects and reorganizes memory into an alternate, ideal state. Postmodern irony, an offspring of disillusionment that Hutcheon traces to modernist narrative practices and finds ubiquitous today, rejects the possibility of recreating or even imagining such a version of the past, mostly because it never existed in the first place.45Yet, because both nostalgia and irony are perceptions and responses to, rather than attributes of, an artifact or event, they can be layered and framed in ways that present both options simultaneously, as they are in Slumdog. In a postmodern story or film, the characters may configure the two differently from how the viewer does, providing an experience unlike that of, say, a Jane Austen novel, in which the ironic narrative voice enjoys a certain privilege over the perceptions of the characters and in this manner colludes with the reader. The historical moment of the story, one of rapid economic growth in Mumbai, provides an exhilarating sense of opportunity that extends to agency in constructing identity. The different identities pursued by Jamal and Salim, described above in terms of realism and romance, can also be characterized by irony and nostalgia. Jamal seizes various opportunities to formulate himself through postmodern nostalgia. I have mentioned his very brief idealized and innocent past involving his film hero Bachchan and a short dreamy encounter with Latika in the slum and at Maman’s school. With no apparent sense of irony, Jamal grows into adulthood longing to inhabit the world these memories have inspired. Hence the backwards movement toward Latika, even as Salim pulls him forward and further away. An especially powerful tug of nostalgia and desire occurs when he happens upon an outdoor staging of Orpheus and Eurydice; a woman in the audience explains Orpheus’ quest into the underworld for Eurydice, and in the next scene the boys are abruptly bound for Mumbai. The irony in the subjectivity Jamal constructs is reserved for the film viewer, who can hardly imagine such a romantic desire emerging from these conditions. Even weighed against Jamal’s rosy perspective, the viewer’s irony may extend to the political stance that Bollywood exploits the poor of India with such impractical notions. Also ironic – to the viewer at least – is a secondary and highly coincidental rearrangement of Jamal’s past by the game show questions. He is able to extend his exposure on the show – he tells Latika, “I went on the show because I knew you’d be watching” – by mining the hellish details of his Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 323 past. In the process he must confront the pain involved in recalling his early experiences, pain that has coexisted with his youthful romantic impulses. Recalling a question associated with the riots that killed his mother, he says, “I wake up every morning wishing I didn’t know the answer to that question.” As he gains confidence, Jamal begins to assert his ignorance more boldly. He smilingly tells Prem, the show’s host, he has no idea who scored the most first class centuries in cricket. The juxtaposed with this question involves an encounter with Latika at the gangster Javed’s home when Jamal experiences his first adult interaction with his beloved and learns that she watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And so his puzzling burst of euphoria may be read as nostalgia in action or perhaps a sign that his present-day (perhaps destined?) romance is building positive momentum amid its many obstacles. Answering the “lifeline” call during the final question, Latika colludes in this ideal ignorance; when asked the name of the third musketeer, she says, “I don’t know. I never knew.” Ultimately the irony inherent in Jamal’s risky strategy gives way to a triumph, not only of nostalgia but also of innocence; Jamal succeeds in redeeming a cache of painful knowledge for the innocent bliss of not knowing the various impediments to his romantic quest. And when the actress playing the young Latika appears during the credits in a spanking clean version of the ragged yellow dress she wore as a slum- dweller, it is clear that Hutcheon’s revisionist nostalgia has prevailed. The film’s most sophisticated commentary on this tension occurs when the police inspector interrogates the selective nature of Jamal’s knowledge. Noting that even his five-year-old daughter knows an answer for which Jamal appealed to the audience for help, the inspector affirms his suspicion that Jamal has cheated. Jamal recontextualizes the disputed knowledge along the lines of class and privilege; he challenges the inspector to name the price of bhelpuri in a street stall as well as the person who recently stole a constable’s bicycle. The inspector is surprised at these questions, and Jamal observes that “Everyone in knows that. Even five-year- olds.” With the dynamics of knowledge recast in terms of privilege, the inspector softens his demeanour and offers Jamal a plea bargain. Salim’s compelling character further complicates the quest motif as well as the tension between irony and desire. Salim embraces Islam in ways that may disturb the Western post-911 viewer; he prays on his rug and then with no sense of irony packs his gun for a day of violent work. Yet in the context of the romantic quest, he serves in the role identified by Joseph Campbell as a helper or guide;46 at his own peril he ultimately seeks Latika’s forgiveness and equips her with a car and a phone so she can meet up with Jamal. Having rid the slums of two gangsters, he sacrifices himself in a bathtub full of tainted cash at the very moment that Jamal 324 Journal of Commonwealth Literature is dancing among his honestly earned rupees on the game show set. A second viewing of the film reveals – and offers narrative privilege to – a glimpse of Salim’s death scene during the opening credits. Anticipating more authoritative readings of his character than I can provide here, I suggest that Salim’s story induces a new blend of irony and desire by daring viewers, both Eastern and Western, to find a context in which his choices make sense. Similarly, Latika’s character calls for a cross-cultural reading that draws upon expected roles of the romantic heroine in each aesthetic tradition. She is not given the degree of agency demanded by Western viewers in recent romantic films, and her role merges that of the courtesan with that of the innocent, submissive daughter/wife familiar to Eastern audiences. She may, in fact, be an awkward attempt at compromise, as she shifts from the feisty child who lampoons Salim’s singing and places chili peppers on his genitals to a passive, bitter victim and then finally to Jamal’s romantic heroine. Ultimately the struggles and interactions of these “three musketeers” illustrate an effort to revive the romantic quest in a postmodern, cross- cultural narrative. The critical and popular responses to the film by Eastern and Western viewers suggest the risks inherent in such an undertaking while urging a continued interpretive dialogue that supports transcultural, and if such a thing exists, global innovation in literature and film.

NOTES 1 Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle, Films Ltd. and Channel 4 Television Corporation Motion Picture Artwork and Photography, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2008. Subsequent references are to this production and Slumdog Millionaire: The Shooting Script, New York: Newmarket, 2008. 2 Manohla Dargis, “Orphan’s Lifeline out of Hell Could Be a Game Show in Mumbai”, The New York Times, 12 November 2008. 3 Doug Saunders, “This Oscar-Bound Urban Fantasy Comes with a Twist”, The Globe and Mail, 14 February 2009. 4 Dargis, “Orphan’s Lifeline”. 5 Ira Jaffe, Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p.24. 6 Dargis, “Orphan’s Lifeline”. 7 Peter Travers, rev. of Slumdog Millionaire, Rolling Stone, 13 November 2008, RollingStone.com/ Accessed 8 March 2010. 8 Sonny Bunch, “‘Slumdog: A Prize Worth Savoring’”, The Washington Times, 12 November 2008. 9 Vrindi Nabar, “Slumdog Millionaire Bizarrely Plausible?”, www.dnaindia.com, 10 January 2009. Accessed 9 March 2010. 10 Mitu Sungupta, “Slumdog Millionaire’s Dehumanizing View of India’s Poor”, Counterpunch, 20-22 February 2009. Counterpunch.org/ Accessed 10 March 2010. Reading Slumdog Millionaire across Cultures 325

11 ibid. 12 ibid. 13 “Bollywood Star Criticizes Slumdog,” BBC News, 15 January 2009, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7829985.stm/ 14 Guataman Bhaskaran, “Slumdog Millionaire: A Warped Picture of India”, The Seoul Times, 6 December 2010, http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read. php?idx=7889/ 15 ibid. 16 Sungupta, “Slumdog Millionaire’s Dehumanizing View of India’s Poor”. 17 Sudip Mazumdar, “Mans Bites Slumdog”, Newsweek, February 21, 2009, http:// updateslive.blogspot.com/2009/02/sudip-mazumdar-man-bites-slumdog.html 18 Mukul Kesavan, “Lost in Translation: Slumdog Millionaire Uses Hindi as Authenticating Décor”, The Telegraph, 5 February 2009, http://www. telegraphindia.com/1090205/jsp/opinion/story_10485740.jsp 19 Salman Rushdie, “A Fine Pickle”, , 28 February 2009, http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/salman-rushdie-novels-film-adaptations 20 Travers, rev. of Slumdog Millionaire. 21 Bunch, “‘Slumdog: A Prize Worth Savoring’”. 22 Nikhat Kazmi, rev. of Slumdog Millionaire, TNN, 22 January 2009. 23 Nabar, “Slumdog Millionaire Bizarrely Plausible?”. 24 Bob Mondello, “Slumdog Millionaire: Mumbai Jackpot”, NPR.org, November 12, 2008. 25 M.K. Raghavendra, Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema, New Delhi: OUP, 2008, p.98. 26 ibid., p.99. 27 Rachel Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India, London: Cassell, 2000, p.108. 28 ibid. 29 Moti K. Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change, Stoke on Trent: Trentham, 2004, pp.28-31. 30 Shakuntala Banaji, Reading “Bollywood”: The Young Adult Audience and Hindi Films, New York: Palgrave, 2006, p.178. 31 Erik Davis, “Interview: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Director Danny Boyle”, Cinematical.com/, 12 November 2008. 32 Ashis Nandy, “Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics”, The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Nandy. New Delhi: OUP, 1998, pp.6-7. 33 ibid. 33 ibid. 34 Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema, p.148. 35 Davis, “Interview: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Director Danny Boyle.” 36 Gokulsing and Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema, p.148. 37 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976, p.15. 38 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961, pp.51-7. 39 ibid., pp.14-20. 326 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

40 ibid., pp.51-7. 41 Vikrum Swarup, Q&A, New York: Scribner, 2005, p.21. 42 Steven Cohan, Violation and Repair in the English Novel: The Paradigm of Experience from Richardson to Woolf, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986, p.172. 43 Hassan, Radical Innocence, pp.329-30. 44 Neil Ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004, p.194. 45 Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”, University of Toronto English Library, 19 January 1998, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/ hutchinp.html/ 46 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949; Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1956, p.69ff.