Quotes of the Day

My favorite scene in Slumdog Millionaire comes toward the end, in the tense battle of wits between the supercilious game-show host, Prem, and the hero, Jamal. Prem expects Jamal to lose, and when he doesn't, assumes that he's cheating. Once Prem realizes that a kid from the slums might win — fairly — he angrily tosses him off to a waiting police van. "It's my show," he says. In two tight shots, with just a few lines of dialogue, the film manages to capture the ambivalence and, sometimes, anger that Indians often direct at those who don't stick to the script.

Watching the arc of Slumdog Millionaire's reception in India — it has moved speedily from obscurity to minor phenom to backlash to major phenom and now backlash again — I thought of all those indignant Indians denouncing the film as real-life versions of Prem the game-show host. India spent several years, and millions of dollars, promoting the story of "Incredible India," a shiny new world of prosperity, innovation and opportunity. That world certainly exists for millions of Indians, and for a while it was nice to believe that the lucky inhabitants of "rising India" would somehow lift up the other 900 million. It isn't quite happening that way, as most Indians are well aware, and the rest of the world is wising up. The story that the world is more interested in now is the one told by Slumdog Millionaire — the ugliness behind the glittering façade — and that's upsetting. The world is not following the script.

And so the self-proclaimed defenders of India's image have spent the past few weeks reciting what has become a rather predictable litany of sins committed by the film — that it is voyeuristic "poverty porn," that it is implausible and hackneyed, that it's a Western vision of India in which there is nothing but misery, filth and violence. (Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, which won last year's Man Booker literary prize, generated a similar round of complaints.)

It's all getting a little, well, implausible and hackneyed. Sandipan Deb, writing in the daily newspaper the Indian Express on the morning after the Oscars, insisted that despite the awards for composer A.R. Rahman, sound mixer Resul Pookutty and lyricist Gulzar, the film is still a "Western" film, made by a British director and financed by a British producer. "It's a non-Indian film which happened to have an all-Indian cast," he wrote. This is missing the point. Danny Boyle could not have made the film that he did without this cast and crew, and to pretend otherwise is to belittle their contribution. These Oscars ought to be seen as a validation of everyone who made Slumdog possible, particularly Rahman, who might finally take his place among the great film composers of any era or continent. As Pookutty said to the Oscar audience when accepting his statuette: "This is not just a sound award; this is history being handed over to me."

Drawing the easy distinction between the Indian and non-Indian cast also ignores the way many artists in India actually work. Their world is the world — not just India — and they proudly learn, borrow and are influenced by everything around them. That was obvious in the Japanese taiko drummers pounding behind Rahman on his Oscar-nominated song "O Saya." And anyone who noticed Irrfan Khan as Jamal's interrogator ought to have a look at his other, much more substantial role in A Mighty Heart, playing a Pakistani police captain opposite an American superstar in a British film.

The influence goes both ways. Slumdog, which is based on a novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, approaches India and Indians with a new sensibility. Slumdog's central trio aren't victims; they're individuals, and they each manage in different ways to rewrite the lives they've been born into. Jamal, in the film, talks a lot about destiny, but his story is really an argument against it. It's a long way from City of Joy, the 1992 film in which Om Puri's noble rickshaw puller shows Patrick Swayze's disillusioned doctor the path to enlightenment. Slumdog recognizes that poverty isn't ennobling; it's infuriating, and only the cunning escape.

Of course, Slumdog Millionaire is not the first to discover this other, more complicated India, as the film's critics correctly point out. It's real for the hundreds of millions of Indians who live in it, the thousands of social workers, nonprofit groups and civil servants who are trying to change it, and those who tell its stories. That includes a handful of young Indian filmmakers who are making movies that are as sharp, challenging and entertaining as the best of Hollywood, although few have been distributed outside India. Let's hope the rest of the world will soon have a chance to see them. It's now their show.

• Jyoti Thottam