Slumdog: Mother India and other India

There is no villain in Slumdog Millionaire. There are pimps and rogue policemen but no politically identifiable villain

Jawed Naqvi Delhi, Hardnews

In the Nilgiri mountains of southern India, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, French filmmaker Louis Malle found the ideal society - the Toda tribe.

In the 1960s, when the French legend made his celebrated - or notorious, if you were Indira Gandhi - documentaries on India there were only 800 Todas left. For untold centuries they had lived in the isolated mountains where solitude was undisturbed until the arrival of the British.

Certain ethnologists claimed they were of Sumerian origin. They're also said to have been descendants of Alexander's soldiers. But, the Toda believed their mother goddess waved a magic wand and magnificent buffalos emerged from the river. Hanging from a buffalo's tail was a Toda.

"No Toda girl is a virgin past the age of 13," Malle recorded in his documentary. "Before puberty, they are entrusted to an experienced male to learn lovemaking. These lessons are part of their education, just like singing and cooking. Sex is a natural need and throughout their lives, the Toda practice free love."

In fact, the Toda language had no word for sex. They used the words ‘fruit' or ‘food'. Children didn't go to school. Their education came from their contact with nature. "The Toda have never waged war, never had weapons. They have no laws, leaders or hierarchy." Malle may have described the kind of people that Beatle John Lennon would have liked all of us to become. Indira Gandhi, who had not watched the film, banished Malle after non-resident Indians, who saw it in Europe, whined about it. They complained to one of the Indian embassies about the negative publicity the documentary was doing for India.

However, the other day, India's political class, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, cheered Slumdog Millionaire when the movie, based on a story about Mumbai slum-dwellers, won eight Oscars. Of course, there is no comparison between an award-winning feature film and a reviled documentary film, just as there is no comparison between their directors. And yet, the different reaction to each reveals a common thread.

Thanks to rapid economic changes in the last two decades, India's social divide runs along a 30:70 equation - 300 million Indians in the market, 700 million nowhere near it. Filmmakers entirely and film-watchers mostly belong to the 30 per cent of the middle classes. To that extent both Malle and Danny Boyle can be accused of social voyeurism, as they both deal with themes on the wrong side of the class divide. But what accounts for the different reactions they got?

For one, Malle's film threatened the middle classes, which Slumdog didn't. He held India's political class responsible, by suggestion, for the imminent harm the idyllic Toda community faced. Moreover, he shattered the illusion of Mrs Gandhi's anti-poverty populism and questioned the axiom of the socialist, democratic republic of India. He turned the State virtually into a villain. Was he wrong? Well, today Indian newspapers are frequently replete with reports of how young tribal girls are being turned unwed mothers by the civilised half of India.

By contrast, there is no villain in Slumdog Millionaire. There are pimps and rogue policemen but no politically identifiable villain. This is a remarkable new trend in Indian movies, particularly those that create dreams popular among non-resident Indians.