Slumdog Millionaire and the Knowledge-Based Economy: Poverty as Ontology

The problem is therefore moved from political philosophy to first philosophy (or, if one likes, politics is returned to its ontological position).

—Agamben, Homo Sacer

“IT COULD BE YOU”: IN THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED ECONOMY

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is a prototypically neoliberal narrative of the entrepreneurial individual who succeeds by capitalizing on their knowledge; it excludes the possibility of collective and political responses to the poverty it represents. In valorizing Western knowledges over Indian knowledges and assigning an important function to tacit knowledge as a determinant of success, Slumdog Millionaire is symptomatic of the structural inequalities that both shape the knowledge-based economy and are perpetuated by it. The film’s claim that Jamal’s success is his destiny, which is reinforced by the narrative structure, turns poverty from a political problem into an ontological one, thus removing it from the realm of history and agency. Slumdog Millionaire’s weak conception of agency is typical of Boyle’s oeuvre, where the trope of the game show conceptualizes human life as ambiguously poised between determinism and contingency but, in either case, inaccessible to transformative agency. The ineffectuality of agency is partly a product of the atomism of Boyle’s films, which is only disrupted by sparsely sketched romantic relationships that do not provide any ground for transformative practices. Relationships beyond that of the romantic couple are dismissed as subject to betrayal, failure, and abuse, so that they, too, are eliminated as the basis of transformation.

The opening scenes of Slumdog Millionaire are set in a police station. The protagonist, Jamal Malik, is being questioned because he “is one question away from winning twenty million rupees” on Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of the British game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? An extradiegetic question asks the viewer to decide how this could have happened. Like the questions on the show itself, it has four possible answers, only one of which is correct: Jamal may have been lucky, he may be a genius, he may have cheated, or “It is written” that he will succeed. The police assume Jamal must have cheated, as it is inconceivable that a “slumdog,” employed as a chai wallah in a call center, could advance by honest means where “doctors, lawyers, and general-knowledge wallahs” have failed. They torture him in their efforts to extract a confession. Jamal insists that he knew the answers, and the inspector eventually asks him to explain. As they watch the previous evening’s show on video, Jamal tells the inspector the story behind each answer. The stories behind the answers turn into a story of his life, told in a series of flashbacks. The drama of Jamal’s struggle against apparently insurmountable odds is emphasized by the film’s pace as well as by Boyle’s use of the canted camera (Koehler, 76). Once Jamal has accounted for his success, he is cleared, and the police drive him to the studio in time for the show’s second installment. At the studio, Jamal correctly guesses the answer to the show’s final question, wins twenty million rupees, and is reunited with his childhood sweetheart and true love, Latika. Meanwhile, “It is written” is revealed to be the correct answer to the opening question.

Criticism of Slumdog Millionaire has hitherto mainly focused on the film’s portrayal of India. The film itself, as well as its enthusiastic reception by reviewers and audiences, engenders or at least perpetuates the metonymic reduction of India to slums and Bollywood (Desai, 75; Gehlawat, 6; Koehler). Nevertheless, the film’s representation of poverty both understates its real extent and impact¹ and sensationalises, romanticises, and depoliticizes it (Sengupta, 603). The portrayal of India in Slumdog Millionaire is, therefore, profoundly orientalist (Desai, 76–77; Gehlawat; Sengupta). The film’s overt message is upbeat: “It could be you,” the first advertising slogan of the UK National Lottery, could also serve as a tagline for Slumdog Millionaire. For if even a so-called slumdog can win a game show like Who Wants...