Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire Ethnicized or Globalized? – Sana Elgamal

Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire: Ethnicized or Globalized?

SANA ELGAMAL

Danny Boyle’s acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire, set in one of the slums in Mumbai, India, narrates the life of Jamal, an uneducated orphan who, despite all odds, emerges from the slum and wins 20 million rupees in the famous Indian television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Through a series of gripping flashbacks, the film not only explains how Jamal knew the answers, but also serves as a lens to inspect the cultural foundation and urban landscape of Mumbai. The concept of globalization, commonly defined as the process entailing the interconnectedness between nations and the spread of practices and people between countries, is vividly integrated in the film. Globalization is portrayed as an indispensable aspect of Mumbai’s transformation, with numerous scenes serving to point to its significance in shaping new Mumbai. However, an anti-Muslim riot scene, which shows Hindu nationalists fiercely attacking a Muslim community in the slum, depicts violence stemming from religious unrest in globalized Mumbai. The scene showcases the puzzling, contradictory, and dual nature of Mumbai’s transformation – the growing ethnic discrimination and religious intolerance, and the simultaneous transformation from just another one of India’s cities, to India’s promising candidate for global city status. The riot scene in the film adds another layer of complexity to the projected image of Mumbai as a city. Taken together, this scene and the film as a whole articulate the contradiction that communicates a cracked and refracted image of globalization, dismissing the simplistic onesided image of development that is often associated with globalization, and replacing it with one that has greater multifacetedness and complexity.

The anti-Muslim riot scene is the predominant optic through which the phenomenon of ethnic violence can be thoroughly investigated. It begins as an idyllic, laughter-filled scene, with Muslim mothers washing clothes as they watch their children play in the water. This peaceful setting sharply contrasts what follows, where a group of rod-carrying Hindu rioters sprints in

to attack the Muslim community. The scene portrays armed rioters violently hitting Muslims with rods and mercilessly setting their property on fire. The scene captures Jamal’s personal tragedy of losing his mother, who dies in the riot after being beaten with a rod in the head by a Hindu fundamentalist. The tremendous force of the blow was depicted by the sound of the rod’s piercing crack upon the mother’s head. The chaos and terror of the riot was made palpable through an array of visual effects. The use of a shaky handheld camera serves to accentuate the utter state of disorder and confusion, while low-level closeups of the running feet of Jamal and his brother Salim amplify their desperation to escape the violence. The blurriness of the shots reflects the extreme state of disorientation of Jamal and Salim in their frantic attempt to escape. The extreme hatred and violence towards Muslims depicted in this scene is a fictionalized version of what Arjun Appadurai describes in his essay “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” where he writes “…[Muslims] would be hunted down and killed or evicted from their homes wherever possible” (649). The scene expresses the overwhelming violence that is borne by Mumbai’s Muslims.

The profound hatred and violence are accurately portrayed in the scene particularly in an over-the-shoulder shot where a Hindu rioter throws a flaming bottle that sets a Muslim man on fire. Through such depicted violence, the scene aspires to capture a crucial aspect of Mumbai’s transformation: “decosmopolitanization” and “ethnicization” of the city. In the context of Mumbai, the process of ethnicization, discussed by Appadurai, involves complete eradication of the city’s multiethnicity to create a purely Hindu space (630). Decosmopolitanization, a term also used by Appadurai, is a phenomenon in which values of inclusiveness and shared morality are gradually replaced by social, ethnic or religious intolerance (649). Appadurai introduces the birth of the xenophobic Indian party Shiva Sena which embraced a polarized vision for completely Hinduizing Mumbai. He writes “… [Shiva Sena] managed to violently rewrite urban space as sacred, national, Hindu space” (630). The party publicly attacked notions of cosmopolitanism and religious harmony, and instead cultivated a sense of immense unjustified hatred towards Muslims in the city. The ethnic cleansing depicted in the scene, with Muslims being driven from their homes by Hindu rioters, ties with

Appadurai’s statement that “…the massive sense of having no place in Mumbai was overwhelmingly borne by its Muslims” (649). The scene, therefore, does not solely capture ethnic violence; rather, it aims to accentuate the deepening Hindu-Muslim conflict, the growing ethnicization, and the fading ethnoreligious intimacy in the new decosmopolitanized Mumbai. The anti-Muslim riot scene, therefore, is a genuine embodiment of Shiva Sena’s efforts – a provoking glimpse into the dark side of Mumbai’s complex transformation.

While the anti-Muslim riot scene serves to highlight Mumbai’s ethnicization and religious unrest, the film is rich in connotations of globalization and depictions of Mumbai as a ‘global city’. The call center which Jamal worked in plays an instrumental role in the film as a microcosm of the prominent theme of globalization. This call center (of a British company) hires Indian employees rather than British citizens in order to save on employee wages. Jamal only learns about the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? from the call center, which results in him winning 20 million rupees after his victory on the show, and his transition from rags to riches. In this way, globalization is ultimately portrayed in a positive light; it is depicted here as a metaphorical vehicle for a better life, and as essential in today’s modernized world. Another prominent scene in the film that particularly emphasizes globalization is the construction site where Jamal and Salim reunite. Salim sweeps his gaze across Mumbai’s skyline, then, looking down at their unrecognizable former slum, said “We used to live right there, man. Now, it’s all business. India is at the center of the world, bhai” (Slumdog Millionaire). Salim’s statement succinctly encapsulates one side of Mumbai’s transformation; his words highlight the country’s escalating global competitiveness and growing enterprise, India’s astonishing ascent to become a global nation of emerging centrality and modernity. Appadurai writes “… Bombay became a site of crucial changes in trade, finance, and industrial manufacture” (630), clearly marking the city’s transformation to ‘the global Mumbai.’ The depiction of the demolition of the slumland where Jamal and Salim grew up and its redevelopment into a series of high-rise buildings highlights the concept of the diminishing cosmopolitanism in Mumbai, and its intolerance towards not just Muslims, but towards the poor as well.

Crucially, the riot scene captures the grinding poverty of slum-dwellers. The Hindu rioters in the scene, who are in dirty, impoverished attire, appear to come from a poor region as well, and hence probably inhabit a neighboring slum. To understand the relationship between poverty and violence implied by the riot scene, we can draw upon Appadurai’s statement that “…the most horrendously poor, crowded, and degraded areas of the city were turned into battlegrounds of the poor against the poor” (649). His description of the slums, which indicates that the battles and bloodsheds occurred mainly among poor and impoverished Hindus and Muslims, sheds an interesting light on the puzzling underlying link between ethnicization and globalization. Slumdwellers, who live in dire conditions with no access to basic amenities, are the segment of the society that suffers most from this wave of globalization. This is because globalization results in increased trade and global production, which results in higher demand for high-skilled workers. This translates to lower demand and hence lower wages for low skilled workers and impoverished people (in this case, slum-dwellers). Appadurai describes Mumbai’s globalized transformation when he writes “[Jobs] became harder to get…[Slums] and shacks began to proliferate” (629). He also writes that “… this process began to take its toll on all but the wealthiest of the city’s population” (629). By this description, he points out that the dynamics of globalization have the greatest adverse impact on the poorest sections of society, while the richest are unaffected. Hence, the daily life of slum-dwellers becomes a genuine struggle for survival, and thus, they explode in ritual acts of ethnic warfare. With the rise of globalization rises another parallel, which is the escalating inequality and class segregation. Such urban inequalities preoccupy both Appadurai as a theorist and Danny Boyle, the film’s director. These iniquities manifest themselves in riots of the poor against the poor, as described by Appadurai and depicted by the anti-Muslim riot scene. Taken together, Appadurai’s essay and Slumdog Millionaire illustrate that globalization can be perceived to be a cause for ethnicization – a potent catalyst for social stratification and ethnic violence.

The fact that the years in which Mumbai became globalized queerly coincided with the years when the city was being ethnically cleansed is a genuinely provoking observation that hints at the existence of an elusive

connection between both processes. The anti-Muslim riot scene in Slumdog Millionaire adds another dimension to the portrayed dynamics of Mumbai’s transformation, depicting an inherent contradiction in the fabric of the city. It projects a paradoxical image of Mumbai as a city aspiring to be truly global yet striving to be ethnically pure, raising the question of whether India is indeed a forthcoming globalized nation or yet another third world. The juxtaposition of the riot scene within the context of the film as a whole itself uncovers interesting theoretical insights into globalization as a complex multifaceted process with far-reaching effects. As such, perhaps the increasing ethnicization in Mumbai can be, in part, viewed as an unanticipated consequence of escalating global integration amidst the city’s transformation to global modernity. The juxtaposition of globalization and decosmopolitanization in the context of Mumbai’s transformation therefore raises the compelling question: to what extent is a cosmopolitan mentality central to modern globalization?

WORKS CITED

Appadurai, Arjun. “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial

Mumbai.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 627–651. Slumdog Millionaire. Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandon,

Performances by Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, and Saurabh Shukla, Celador

Films, Film4, 2008.