Mobility,
Modernity and the Slum: The Real and Virtual Journeys of Slumdog Millionaire, Abingdon: Routledge.
Book Launch, 06 October
2015, Social Sciences 12.25, University of Leeds
Routledge link here
£34.99 eBook available for individual purchasers, which can be ordered through VitalSource in November.
There is also currently a £41.99 Kindle version on Amazon.
I started writing this book as a contribution to the way
different mobilities intersect behind a movie. My focus was Danny Boyle’s
Slumdog Millionaire, a highly successful enterprise created by an international
community of artists spanning continents and cultures. The film is a
straightforward story of a youth from the slums of Mumbai, his struggle to earn
a living, self-educate, win back his childhood love and finally make it out of
poverty. Thanks to his knowledge on facts based on personal experiences of
exclusion, ethnic persecution and inequality, he wins on a quiz show and
becomes a millionaire.
The film weaves a rich intertextual web of cinematic
narratives from different eras, thus serving as a scholarly spyglass into the
ways the city of Mumbai and India struggled through modernisation. However, as
I researched more into the film, its production, reception and reproduction in
other cultural circuits controlled by the Indian state as well as global media
and tourist networks, the film itself became more a cosmetic starting point,
albeit an important one. Note that the book’s summary stresses that the film
became tangled in many controversies around India’s destiny in the world: it inserted
Mumbai into various financial, political and artistic scenes, increased tourism
in its filmed slums, and brought about charity projects in which celebrities
and tourist businesses were involved. As such, it served as a global example of
a ‘developing country’s’ uneven but unique modernisation according to Western
standards.
The presence of Western standards in the whole cycle of Slumdog
Millionaire’s inception, production and reception suggested that I don’t deal
just with a piece of art but with a controversial case of invisible
colonisation. That the application of Western representational methods for the
city of Mumbai and its histories of ethnic integration and conflict in its
slums presents us with an example of what decolonial theorists call ‘the captive mind’. This impossibility to narrate the past of a culture and imagine
its futures outside Western modernity and modernisation was shared to a great
extent by the makers of Slumdog Millionaire and their represented cultures, the
slumdwellers. With all their good intentions to support India’s disenfranchised
groups, the makers of SM were also trapped into their old roles as invisible
colonists. They contributed to reproductions of the captive mind, willingly as
philanthropists or volunteers and unwillingly as artmakers on whose work
tourist business capitalised to sell Indian slum tourism. As much as their
activist spirit produced a vision of Mumbai as a city of slums, a city of
ruins, a dark city, the happy ending of the film also suggested alternate
futures. But not outside capitalism and neoliberal policy-making. And not
completely outside the histories of slum tourism and its beginnings in European
industrial urbanisation, the tourist flanerie of journalists and
philanthropists in shantytowns as well as its coincidence with colonial racism
and domestic debates on welfare policies on poverty. Slumdog Millonaire’s
visions of modernity simply excluded alternative knowledge systems from
representations of Indian culture in film, e-tourism and on-site tourism in its
filmed slums.
Was this a problem or a solution for the already excluded
slumdwellers in India? Was it that bad to have someone interested in their
fates from the West? The book does not offer straightforward answers, only
different interpretations of harm, charity and benevolence. Reminding us that
racism, exclusion and trafficking are also in the eye of the beholder, that
victims can be perpetrators of inequality; that our scholarly interpretations
contribute to the production of socio-cultural identities.
In short then, this book is about the ways different media
regimes, including those of film and digital tourist industries shape the image
of places. As what we call ‘worldmaking agents’ the original makers of
such images do not necessarily hold control over these representations which
enter global capitalist circuits, may instigate nationalist reactions even by
the very disenfranchised they support or end up serving the political interests
suspect interest groups. As such, the book aspires to advance debates on
representations of place in the context of an all-consuming Western modernity,
which constantly excludes consideration of intersectional inequalities based on
race, gender, class and status as malleable conditions. Bringing together
state-of-the-art tourism theory, work on professional migration flows and
debates on decolonisation it suggests that mobilities continue to operate on
the logic of Western knowledge systems for better or worse.
