‘Slumdog’ and the ravages of neoliberalism

by on March 2, 2009 12

My friend Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has picked up Arundhati Roy's harsh review of Slumdog which she dismisses as poverty porn. I'm not with her. This is not a political film. It's a romance about destiny. And the dignity it has lent the poor of Mumbai is an achievement that compares with Dickens's treatment of the London slums or Van Gogh's and Millet's paintings of country people, which were considered inappropriate subjects at the time.

That said, I am deeply curious about the politics of poverty in Mumbai, a city I've visited many times; and here's Idrees Ahmad's analysis:

The slums have vastly expanded under the neoliberal policies of the Indian government (both BJP and Congress). The past 10 years have seen an epidemic of farmer suicides as the Indian agriculture sector was decimated by imported agro produce from the US, which often sells below market price thanks to the massive subsidies. Many have been migrating to the cities where they form vast pools of cheap labour for the benefit of sweatshops. While all of this was going on, the governments' policies were cheered on by the likes of Thomas Friedman who held up Mumbai's extravagant shopping malls as the triumph of globalizatoin. A couple of years back when the French rejected the neoliberal EU constitution, Friedman wrote a bombastic letter from India berating 'pampered' Europeans for demanding 35 hr work weeks and healthcare while in India people at call centers were working 35 hours a day and were still able at night to log on to Ebay to buy their girlfriends American teddy bears. He went on to pronounce the earth flat.  Today the same people who created the slums are out taking credit for the success of the film, so naturally, it irks someone like Arundhati who has long been warning against the ravages of neoliberalism. 

I must however point out that I enjoyed the film (even though I felt it was derivative in style; too much City of God in there), and I share your view of its impact.

Posted in Beyondoweiss, Israel/Palestine, US Politics

{ 12 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Ed says:
    March 3, 2009 at 12:08 am

    "when the French rejected the neoliberal EU constitution, Friedman wrote a bombastic letter from India berating 'pampered' Europeans for demanding 35 hr work weeks and healthcare while in India people at call centers were working 35 hours a day"

    Neocons, Neoliberals, Zionists…when it comes right down to it, their mentality is all about squeezing the last ounce of blood, sweat and tears from the cattle masses, and feathering their own nests with the profits, no matter the ultimate costs to society, soul, humanity… Post-modern contempt for morality might be all the vogue, but these people are moving humanity towards pure nihilism and institutionalized survival of the fittest. Ultimately, I don't think they'll like the consequences, but they'll deserve every ounce of retribution coming down the pike. In fact, they're really begging for it, aren't they?

  2. TGGP says:
    March 3, 2009 at 12:45 am

    Are Indians on the whole less nourished, clothed, sheltered or educated than they were in the past? I'd like to hear some numbers from Roy. All the mainstream economics reporting I've heard (including from India itself) is that India has to a lesser extent imitated China in massively lifting out a huge portion of its populace out of poverty. To gapminder.org!

    Ed, you don't actually know what you're talking about. Mickey Kaus and Brad Delong are neoliberals. They opposed the neocons on the Iraq war.

  3. Kaveh says:
    March 3, 2009 at 1:21 am

    Although Indias economy has become alot stronger in the last decade
    that only benefits only the few who are born in the right social group
    , the fact is India is still a poor country whith high amount of uneducated population who live below poverty in slums , and get alot of infectious diseases like tuberculosis because alot of them do not
    belive in none indian medical advice and treatment or don't know about them , also it dosen't help that in a decade or two india is going to become the most populated country in the world and those facts want change untill indian goverment gets rid of its cast system and get in and educates its population about birth control .

  4. Kaveh says:
    March 3, 2009 at 1:31 am

    my neighbour who went to India this past summer
    ( because his parents spent couple of their childhood years their keept telling him he should go their) told me about the information abouve from what he saw and experianced their .

  5. akak says:
    March 3, 2009 at 2:30 am

    I lived in India during my teens through my mid 20s. I left in 1999, and each time I go back the materialism and consumerism is shocking, yet I see more and more shacks around delhi and mumbai. but many of the rickshaw-wallahs and the milkmen and other urban poor have cheap cellphones, various vehicles on credit, their daughters wear jeans and western tops (unimaginable 10 years ago).
    It is a weird paradox, there is clearly more wealth and consumption, but the agricultural base is getting decimated as large corporations buy up lands and set up Cargill and Dole style operations (Reliance's Ambani, celebrated by Fortune and Forbes is at the forefront). The percentage of people below the poverty line is the same, but the line (about 2 dollars a day, ie the ability to feed yourself, not get shelter or anything else) hasn't been revised.

    That said, I enjoyed Slumdog… it is a joyous story, but I understand the concerns of people like Arundhati.
    for more perspectives, check of , a progressive Indian blog.

  6. akak says:
    March 3, 2009 at 2:31 am

    Oops, i ate up the name of the blog, it's called Kafila, kafila.org

  7. Ed says:
    March 3, 2009 at 11:24 am

    @ TGGP on Neoliberalism and the Iraq war:
    –
    "The New Republic and Slate.com, the two most obvious vehicles for the liberal hawk sentiment, weren't filled just with passionate argument but with accusations of support for totalitarianism and with comparisons to the appeasers of Stalin. People like Peter Beinart and Jon Chait and William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg and Tom Friedman and Jeff Goldberg and others didn't merely argue passionately for American invasion of Iraq, nor did they argue just that the left should support such an invasion. They brushed up close against eliminationist rhetoric, and implied or stated that those who did not see the wisdom or virtue in the invasion should not merely be marginalized, but excluded from the ideological base and the ranks of the serious or principled entirely."
    link to lhote.blogspot.com
    />
    –
    As I said, Neocons, Neoliberals, Zionists all share the same basic mentality. The question, TGGP, is why are people like you trying to hide that self-evident fact by lying about it? Let me gander: the same mentality with different packaging is a back door means to the same agenda.

  8. TGGP says:
    March 3, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    You are right about the New Republic, but the New Republic is not synonymous with neoliberalism. Saletan claims to be a conservative (or liberal Republican, I forget which). I might be confusing Weisberg with someone else, but I think he claimed to be a libertarian. Neoliberalism is primarily about domestic policy, so there shouldn't be anything odd about a domestic neoliberal being completely at odds with neoconservatives on foreign policy.

    Nothing I said was a lie. That people such as the ones I mentioned declare themselves neoliberals yet publicly opposed the neocons is simply a fact. Whether they "share the same mentality" is speculation. For my own part I am a paleolibertarian with some interest in the localism of Bill Kauffman and the pluralism of Keith Preston (both vocal opponents of U.S hegemony). I arrived here because I read sites like Lew Rockwell, AmConMag, TakiMag, Steve Walt and Glenn Greenwald.

    I'll try to post on Gapminder data for India later tonight.

  9. TGGP says:
    March 3, 2009 at 9:59 pm

    Ed, the very post you linked to points out the distinction between neoliberals and "liberal hawks":
    Michael Kinsley, maybe the patron saint of neoliberalism, wrote one of the most moving and cogently argued texts advising against the war. The neoliberals have traditionally denounced "unreconstructed" leftists, but when bashing leftists became not just internecine fighting but the supposed duty of all right thinking people, they weren't the ones engaging. No, it was the liberal hawks who were enthusiastically excluding people with whom they disagreed from the ranks of the serious and or the principled, not the classic neoliberals of the '80s.

    The New Republic has hosted liberal hawks since its founding (they were called "Progressives" back then), neoliberalism only arose when the failure of establishment liberalism became evident in the 70s. Mickey Kaus claims they are carrying on the New Left tradition of critiquing establishment liberalism, and while I find that a bit far fetched I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about what he believes his own motivations to be. The commonality between neoliberals and liberal hawks is that they are generally considered "centrist" Democrats, while leftists are more openly anti-war.

    L'Hote's mention of "classic" neolibs of the 80s reminds me of Steve Sailer's damning of today's neocons by comparing them to their preceding generation. Like him, I similarly looked up to people who might be considered at least fellow travelers of neocons when I was young, but I extrapolated from things I learned from them to arrive in a camp that considers neocons their greatest enemy.

  10. TGGP says:
    March 3, 2009 at 10:54 pm

    It is difficult to directly link to findings with the Gapminder gadget, but as mentioned here they have data for life expectancy for India now from the early 20th century to about 2005. There's less data on inequality, but in 1994 India had 36% of it's population in poverty, down to 28.6% in 2000. You can find links to all their indicators (with brief explanations) in spreadsheet format from here.

    From my perusal I didn't notice any stats on which India has gotten worse since the advent of neoliberalism and the end of the "license Raj". I do offer a challenge to all readers to point out a number by which it has gotten worse. You can find my blog linked from my name and my email address in the about page, so if you send me an email I will put up a post giving you kudos.

    Regarding the number of births, I was watching a video on Gapminder called "Bangladesh Miracle", and while it starts on Bangladesh it also goes into China & India. They have greatly reduced the number of births per woman as well as the mortality rate of infants.

  11. akak says:
    March 5, 2009 at 12:34 am

    From what I understand, the poverty line has not kept up with inflation and rising prices.. in urban areas it's about 450 rupees, or $10 a month, so even with about 80% of the population living on less than 50 cents a day, Indian officials can say there are fewer poor.

  12. Miriam says:
    April 30, 2009 at 3:13 pm

    I was not originally going to see Slumdog..thinking it was just another silly bollywood piece…but I was blown away by a number of things…its sweep, story, characters and backdrop of 5000 yr culture…the second time I went (15 minutes earlier thus not missing the whole beginning) I saw/felt more that I'd missed in first showing…and was drawn in to the characters and their environment….the THIRD time I was on time and thus got to see what became nearly palpable experience to me…and reinforced a portion of the story that was a 'downlow' sub story…one that is NOT regularly understood nor presented to western audiences..that of the characters though INDIAN not Hindu but Muslim. that was eye opener..especially inlight of the fact that BJP and hindutva would like the world to think only one way about the subcontinent…and that Islam is an anomaly. that was a brilliant move on Boyle's part to introduce that subtle inference of substratification and misery for so many –yet whenever I asked filmgoers if they'd noticed the introduction of Islam not one person 'noticed'…so injecting the humanity of global Islam can be done without 'author's message' in blinding neon flashing lights…yes it was a sublime love story of 'destiny' and even divine intervention — And despite the poverty –as Mother Theresa said after her experience w/US homelessness in NYC –she found the 'spiritual emptiness and grief' of US homeless far worse to deal with than ANYTHING she'd found in Calcutta..not to make homelessness anywhere seem okay..but her point was there exists a coldness and uwillingness to recognize our own vulnerabilities and relationship to hard times/suffering here in the US..there but for the grace of God go I…Instead we're hearing that the tens of thousands of foreclosed working poor or now unemployed poor 'got what they deserve' for buying homes they shouldn't have bought'…not blaming the mortgage vultures, or appraisers, but the working stiffs and their families for trying to live an American dream…There were many levels of appreciation …but especially the humanity told in a truthful manner..thanks for writing this one up…for sharing your impression…

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