Chapter 8 - Slumdogs, Coolies and Gangsters: Amitabh Bachchan and the Legacy of 1970s Bollywood in Slumdog Millionaire

Summary

An Old Debate

The representation of India in Indian and in Western cinema has always been a heavily discussed issue. One of India's most famous film stars, Nargis, argued that director Satyajit Ray would deliver poverty to the West, when instead he should produce images of a modern India: “[Pather Panchali] does not represent India's poverty in its true form […] It is not a correct image of India.” Ray, on the other hand, attacked the Hindi cinema that Nargis so famously represented:

India took one of the greatest inventions of the West with most far-reaching artistic potential, and promptly cut it to size, generating images that range from the absurd to the repulsive (by way of some wonderful songs, it is true).

This dichotomy of “selling poverty to the West” versus “the absurd and repulsive,” of realism versus melodrama, of social consciousness versus popularity or, as D. A. Windsor puts it, “the commercial and the artistic aesthetics, the formulaic and the radical, the mythic and the real,” was reproduced and mirrored in the West, as Rosie Thomas writes in her famous essay, “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity,” one of the very first scholarly articles that took Hindi cinema seriously: “Western critics […] take their cues from the Indian upper-middle class intelligentsia and government cultural bodies.” The “lack of realism” that Hindi cinema shares with Hollywood films in that view is compared to the different approaches and aesthetics of Indian art house cinema, especially the films of Satyajit Ray.