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This article analyses the British fi lm Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle. The fi lm has created hype all over the world by supposedly showing a “true India,” thus generating a number of negative responses, mainly from India. The article employs postcolonial criticism in analysing particular visual and narrative aspects of the fi lm. As the research revealed, despite Slumdog Millionaire’s attempts to recreate the authentic voice of India by employing hybrid cinematic aesthetics, the fi lm remains an ambiguous project whose certain visual and narrative strategies contribute to the construction, exploitation and dissemination of exotic discourses and (neo)colonial relics. In the introduction to his book India Through the Western Lenses, Ananda Mitra has emphasized the enormous role cinema plays in creating and disseminating images related to certain countries. According to Mitra, “[...] when one thinks of India it is more likely that a fi lm like Gandhi or Gunga Din would easily come to one’s mind than an obscure news story on television or a “page” on the Internet’s World Wide Web” (Mitra 14). These ideas are still valid in today’s discussions of media’s role in shaping and constructing identities. Today Mitra’s point about India’s image can be updated, replacing the classic fi lms he focuses on with only one fi lm – Slumdog Millionaire, directed by British fi lmmaker Danny Boyle in 2008. Slumdog Millionaire was screened in many important fi lm festivals, won eight Academy Awards (Oscars) and more than a hundred other cinema awards all around the world. This fi lm has not only become a part of the world’s cinema history as one of the most infl uential cinematic creations of the twenty-fi rst century, but also “a cultural event, a phenomenon that speaks to many issues of our time” (Gehlawat xv). It is not surprising then that since its release Slumdog Millionaire has received a vast amount of attention not only in media and public discourse, but also in academic research: from the fi lm being seen as a certain reboot of romance in postmodern and transcultural perspective (Duncan 2011), refl ection on post-national globalization (Mukherjee 2013), 236 Deimantas Valančiūnas to a criticism aimed at the representations of poverty and slums (Sengupta 2013, Mendes 2010, Chandra 2013). Filmed in Danny Boyle’s trademark style using a mobile and playful camera combined with colourful aesthetics borrowed from Indian popular cinema (Bollywood), Slumdog Millionaire is the story of Jamal Malik, a boy from Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Jamal takes part in a popular TV quiz show Kaun Banega Carorepati (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) and answers correctly all the questions. Before the grand fi nale and the last question where Jamal is about to win 20 million rupees, he is arrested by police on suspicion of cheating in the game. During the questioning, it appears that each of the questions in the show is related to some important events of Jamal’s life: childhood spent in the slums of Mumbai; travels, and, most importantly, Jamal’s love to his childhood sweetheart – Latika. Despite the enormous success at fi lm festivals and the commercial tag-line of “the feel-good movie of the decade,” the reception of Slumdog Millionaire was not unanimous raving appraisals. The fi lm also accumulated a certain amount of negative responses from moviegoers, particularly in India. The criticism was mainly aimed at the (mis)representation and alleged celebration of commodifi ed poverty in the fi lm1 As noted by Mike Walsh, these issues hurt the patriotic sentiments of many Indians and fuelled up discussions about the “right” of an Englishman to (allegedly) misrepresent the country to which he does not belong (Walsh 71). This debate demonstrates the persistent importance and problems associated with cultural representations and cultural translations in the postcolonial context, as confi rmed by Margery Fee: can majority group members speak as minority members, Whites as people of colour, men as women, intellectuals as working people? If so, how do we distinguish biased and oppressive tracts, exploitative popularizations, stereotyping romanticizations, sympathetic identifi cations and resistant, transformative visions? (242) The aim of this article however is not to engage in the debates about the “right” of members of diff erent cultures to speak about the cultures other than their own, but to off er a postcolonial reading of the fi lm, exposing and investigating the possible pitfalls of such representations. For decades India served as an ideological playground and battlefi eld in British popular imagination from which cinema is not an exception. From the “imperial cinema” of the 1930s and 1940s to the heritage fi lms of the 1980s, British fi lm production has constantly been engaged in constructing imaginary India, its own exotic Other. Evidently similar practices, even if modifi ed, are still prevalent in today’s popular culture. For example Anjana Mudambi, in her analysis of Slumdog Millionaire, speaks about a new and redefi ned version of Orientalism in the fi lm. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of the intimate public, Mudambi contends that this intimate public “commodifi es the Oriental subject, suppressing the racialized diff erences and colonial relationships created Questioning Slumdog Millionaire: Ambivalent Practices and Imaginary Truths 237 in and justifi ed through Orientalist representations by encompassing him/her within normative fantasies” (Mudambi 280), transforming the cultural Other into (an)other, a global sentimental community of sameness and diff erence. However, romantic narrative of the fi lm aside, the problem with Slumdog Millionaire remains in the treatment of the fi lm as an authentic depiction of India as well as the fi lm’s mixed reception within the diff erent audiences and a number of the ambivalent images and narrative strategies employed. Since the largest amount of criticism aimed at the fi lm was regarding the (mis)representation of poverty and has been already covered extensively (see above), the present article sets to explore several narrative and visual strategies in Slumdog Millionaire which received less attention in the scholarship on the fi lm: namely, aspects related to tourism, gender, and religion. These three perspectives confront the supposedly universalistic mission of the fi lm and confi rm ideological and exotic context, which will become especially evident when compared to the novel by Vikas Swarup Q&A from which the fi lm was adapted. Despite Slumdog Millionaire’s attempts to recreate the authentic voice of India by employing hybrid cinematic aesthetics and disowning the practice of earlier fi lms to include mandatory “white characters,” I argue that the fi lm remains an ambiguous project whose certain visual and narrative strategies contribute to the construction, exploitation and dissemination of exotic discourses and (neo)colonial relics. 1. Slumdog Millionaire: Genre and Realism A certain amount of criticism aimed at Slumdog Millionaire was concerned not particularly with the story, but with some of the images and representational strategies deployed in the fi lm. One of the possible ways of explaining these representations in Slumdog Millionaire is through genre theory. Genre theory in fi lm studies developed in the 1950s and focused on conventions associated with a particular body of fi lms and the expectations spectators have about them. Even though fi lms about India do not exactly constitute a separate genre, they are nevertheless connected with a specifi c geographical location which also creates expectations for the spectators. For example, a subgenre of British heritage fi lms of the 1980s is called “Raj Revival” and is concerned with colonial India (fi lms like A Passage to India, Heat and Dust, The Far Pavilions etc.). These fi lms continuously used and reused specifi c sets of images in their mise-en-scène, such as the eastern market, train station, ruined temples, lush jungles etc., complying to the conventions of the genre and catering to the demands of spectators. But genres are not stable and are always changing, and, according to Leo Baudry, serve as a “barometer of the social and cultural concerns of cinema-going audiences” (qtd. in Hayward 168). The images of India in heritage fi lms (which often exploited nostalgic feelings for the colonial past) and Slumdog Millionaire are diff erent. With the passage of 238 Deimantas Valančiūnas time the historical context has changed and the old sets of images do not work properly anymore for a more global India. Accordingly the old images have to be supplemented with the new ones. Slumdog Millionaire, therefore, sets out to explore the new stereotypes of India which would cater more eff ectively to the expectations and imagination of a contemporary spectator. Slumdog Millionaire thus incorporates these new sets of images related to India, such as cricket, call centres, Bollywood and its star cult following, poverty, slums and last, but not least – the Taj Mahal (images related to places, habits and practices). These images, however, are not one-dimensional, they are ambivalent, to use the term from the framework of postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha. Robert Young observes that the term of ambivalence Bhabha borrowed from psychoanalysis, where it was used to express “a continual fl uctuation between wanting one thing and its opposite (also “simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person or action,” Young 153). Homi Bhabha employs this term in his critique of colonial discourses and sees it as an essential practice in the construction of the specifi c relation between the coloniser and the colonised. On the one hand, the coloniser tries to expose and confi rm the colonised as exotic, radically strange and bizarre Other (hence the appearance of certain stereotypes related to the fearful aspect of the colon

Re-establishing Class Privilege: Questioning Slumdog Millionaire: Ambivalent Practices and Imaginary Truths