Wrangling India

It’s worth seeing Slumdog Millionaire just for the Bombay character which is ever-present. The film begins with a long chase scene through the slums; two small boys followed by a policeman. They have been playing cricket on the tarmac of an airport runway. As you do. It’s a great opening sequence that sets up the whole film; these kids are resilient, cheeky survivors in a city that requires these qualities.

Mumbai/ Bombay was the first Indian city I ever went to. Here is what I wrote back in 2000 about arriving:

“I had been wondering how long it would take for the work 'teeming' to enter the thought process- I had to wait no longer than the Qantas In-flight video where Mumbai was described as "magnificent and teeming" , a "city of contrasts" - great cliché writing. A night journey into Mumbai- hot, heaps of men in the streets, zooming little 3 wheeler auto cabs, no women to be seen anywhere, my driver attempting to keep me awake (4.30 am Melb time) by making a left turn in front of a bus going straight ahead. Buses are invincible in India - just scary in their intent.

A day in Mumbai - caught the train into the 'city' squashed into a carriage full of saris and Jill in her stolid navy! Lovely being with the women and when I finally worked out that I was blocking the way out of the train (10 stops later) they welcomed me and gave me a seat.”

Unlike a lot of my life, I remember this arrival very vividly. I flew in late at night into a world where people careered round in the little mechanised autocabs. I caught one to my hotel in Juhu, a beachside suburb close to the airport which features a bit in Slumdog Millionaire. Juhu was a strange mix of seeming hipness (lots of bars and clubs) and deadset sleaze. Once inside my hotel room I bounced off the walls. I felt frightened and vulnerable. It was my first time overseas by myself.

The next day I planned to go into the “city” to go to the museum. I caught the suburban train. It cost 2 cents. The description above doesn’t do it justice. I missed several trains because they were too full and people sort of waved me off. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to get into the wrong carriage; I should be in the women’s carriages which were at one end of the train. My journey took a long time. It’s no wonder I found India hard going on that trip; there was no cushion of protection from ‘real’ India as I experienced in later trips. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel. I looked at a lot of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire with a kind of wonderment that I managed it at all. And have been back. And love it.

An English guy, Danny Boyle, made Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t seen any of his other films. He said that working in India was not like “wrangling India’ as one interviewer suggested; it was like “accumulating India”. It’s a version of “Don’t fight the Ganges”, the very sage advice I learnt on my first trip. The notion of wrangling anything in India is kind of hopeful. Boyle said "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." Ironically it's a film about survival when the very process of making the film must have felt about as scary and out of control.

If you accept the film as homage to Bombay, it works about as well as it could. Like being in India you need to go with the heavy melodrama and the obvious villains and innocents. It’s not subtle. The theme of exploitation of slum kids was done a whole lot better by Rohinton Mistry in the novel A Fine Balance and more recently in Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Jamal, the main character in the film, is only interesting for what happens to him and for his doggedness and honesty; he is otherwise without screen exuberance. I probably agree with The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis who says "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit." All true but Boyle gets away with it because of Bombay.

As a postscript, I read Paul Theroux's book The Elephanta Suite recently. I have not loved his writing in the past but I really liked this book which is a collection of three novellas. It's very very self conscious fiction; it's not his comfort zone. It doesn't flow sweetly. But he is wrestling with the encountering of American and Indian cultures and I loved what he was trying to say about the process. Here is a snippet from a review in The Guardian: "Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' "That's India for you - big enough for all these stories AND Slumdog and more...