"Slumdog Millionaire": A Hollow Message of Social Justice

By Mitu Sengupta, AlterNet. Posted February 23, 2009.

Governing structures and productive social relations also flourish. The slum's residents have nurtured strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with grassroots associations to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, and tackle difficult issues such as child abuse and violence against women. In fact, they often compensate for the formal government's woeful inadequacy in meeting the needs of the poor.

Although it is true that these severely under-resourced self-help organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, it is important to acknowledge their efforts and agency, along with the simple fact that these communities, despite their grinding poverty, have valuable lives, warmth, generosity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard and purely individualistic, Darwinian sort portrayed in the film.

Indeed, the failure to recognize this fact has already led to a great deal of damage. Government bureaucrats have concocted many ham-handed, top-down plans for "developing" the slums based on the dangerous assumption that these are worthless spaces. The most recent is the "Dharavi Redevelopment Project" (DRP), which proposes to convert the slums into blocks of residential and commercial high rises. The DRP requires private developers to provide small flats (of about 250 sq. ft. each) to families that can prove they settled in Dharavi before the year 2000. In return for re-housing residents, the developers obtain construction rights in Dharavi.

The DRP is being fiercely resisted by slum residents' organizations and human rights activists, who see it an undemocratically conceived and environmentally harmful land-grab scheme (real-estate prices in Mumbai are comparable to Manhattan's).

Though perhaps better than razing the slums with bulldozers -- which is not, incidentally, an unpopular option among the city's rich – the DRP is far from a people-friendly plan. It will potentially evict some 500,000 residents who cannot legally prove that they settled in Dharavi prior to 2000, and may destroy thousands of livelihoods by rendering unviable countless household-centered businesses. If forced to move into congested high-rises, for example, the slum's potters and papad-makers, large numbers of who are women, will lose the space they need to dry their wares. For the government, however, that the DRP will "rehabilitate" Dharavi by erasing the eyesore and integrating its "problem-population" into modern, middle-class Mumbai.

It is ironic that "Slumdog", for all its righteousness of tone, shares with many Indian political and social elites a profoundly dehumanizing view of those who live and work within the country's slums. The troubling policy implications of this perspective are unmistakeably mirrored by the film. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all "solutions" must arrive externally.

After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal, a Christ-like figure, in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks to sheer, dumb luck, or rather, because “it is written.” Is it also "written," then, that the other children depicted in the film must continue to suffer? Or must they, like the stone-faced Jamal, stoically await their own “destiny” of rescue by a foreign hand?

Indeed, while this self-billed "feel good movie of the year" may help us "feel good" that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronizing, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not.

A version of this article appeared in the Toronto Star.

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Mitu Sengupta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.