INDIANS HAVE been celebrating the success of Slumdog Millionairewhich has won eight Oscars, as thousands danced joyfully yesterday in the packed and heaving slum in Mumbai where the film was set.
Although the film, which portrays a rags-to-riches story of a teenage boy from Mumbai’s slum Dharavi, had a British director, producer and script writers, India is claiming it as its own because of the exclusively Indian cast, crew and location.
“The [Oscar] winners have done India proud,” said prime minister Manmohan Singh of the film that its makers originally had planned only for DVD release, convinced it would flop at the box office.
Two of the film’s child actors – Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (10) and Rubina Ali (9) who were taken from Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, to act in the movie – were the star attraction for their friends back home as they posed confidently on the stage at the Academy Awards ceremony.
“My eyes couldn’t believe that I was seeing Rubina in America,” her best friend Saba Qureshi said.
She was one of thousands who woke at dawn to catch the ceremony on the handful of television sets in the neighbourhood.
Azharuddin still lives in a lean-to made of plastic tarpaulins and moth-eaten, mouldy blankets. Co-star Rubina shares a tin-roofed shack with her parents and her six brothers and sisters. Stray dogs feed on mountains of trash piled high across the slum.
Although locals were thrilled about their stars, some objected to the film – and its title – that made them famous. “We are not Slumdogs,” declares a large poster at one of Dharavi’s many entrances.
“I’m poor, but no one can call me a dog,” said Fakrunissa Sheikh (40). “I work very hard.”
Calling any one a dog is an insult in India.
The pomp and Hollywood glitz, the red carpet and glamour of the Oscars could not be further from the reality of Dharavi located alongside filthy backwaters in the port city, between a highway and littered train tracks.
Many residents of the cramped slum – a labyrinthine sprawl of small brick houses, bamboo shelters and corrugated iron-roofed huts with overflowing cesspits, greasy fried food stalls and noisy, dusty workshops – dismiss the movie as pure fantasy.
“This sort of thing happens only to heroes in films, not to our lives,” said Avinash Sawant, a teenager whose principal ambition is simply to escape the slum where he was born. So many others spend their lives in that futile pursuit.
About 65 million Indians – roughly a quarter of the country’s urban population – live in slums where healthcare is almost non-existent, child labour rampant and the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty inescapable.
Many Indians however hold the view that the Oscars are a part of India’s “coming out” as it emerges not only as an economic power and information technology powerhouse but also a trendsetter in fashion, food and modern literature.
In his acceptance speech, AR Rahman (43), the Oxford-educated musician known as the “Mozart of Madras”, who won two Oscars for the best original score and best song, hailed “all the people from Mumbai and the essence of the film, which is about optimism and the power of hope and our lives”.
His own poverty-stricken life mirrored somewhat those of the Slumdog heroes. Rahman overcame adversity after his father died when he was a child, he won a music scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, and earned kudos and fortune in Bollywood.