Arundhati Roy is right about Slumdog Millionaire. In an interview with the Observer, she says:
Only her compatriots could have celebrated the victory of Slumdog Millionaire on Oscar night. "The fact that the film – not even an Indian film – won these prizes sent people into orbit. But it is an odd movie for a country to be proud of. What were we celebrating? Child poverty? If it wasn't so tragic it would be comical."
I could not see what was so great about the movie. There have been far better movies made about poverty in India by Indian directors. Satyajit Ray's Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) is a classic based on the famine in Bengal during the Second World War when people starved to death. The Bengali film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1973, but never reached an international audience like Slumdog.
I have nothing against anyone highlighting the poverty and corruption in India, but Slumdog is too stylized, too overtly arty, for me. It is garish, which Ray never was. I was surprised it ended up as one of the biggest all-time Oscar winners, winning as many as eight Academy Awards.
It was only a coincidence perhaps that a tale of corruption and poverty in India also won the Man Booker Prize last year.
The White Tiger by the Indian author Aravind Adiga is a taut, chilling little tale. But it can't be compared with two panoramic historical epics which were also in the competition – The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie and Sea Of Poppies by another Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh.
Sea Of Poppies also depicts poverty and corruption in India but it is set in the 19th century. It is about exploitation by the British. There is not a single sympathetic British character in the novel. In The White Tiger, on the other hand, set in modern India, all the villains are Indians.
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