World’s largest universities

So what of the adaptations in last months Oscars?What can one say about Slumdog Millionaire, adapted from the novel Q&A by the Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup and directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, which won eight Oscars including Best Picture? A feelgood movie about the dreadful Bombay slums, an opulently photographed movie about extreme poverty, a romantic, Bollywoodised look at the harsh, unromantic underbelly of India well it feels good, right? Its probably pointless to go up against such a popular film, but let me try.The problems begin with the work being adapted. Swarups novel is a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief: a boy from the slums somehow manages to get on to the hit Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and answers all his questions correctly because the random accidents of his life have, in a series of outrageous coincidences, given him the information he needs, and are conveniently asked in the order that allows his flashbacks to occur in chronological sequence. This is a patently ridiculous conceit, the kind of fantasy writing that gives fantasy writing a bad name. It is a plot device faithfully preserved by the film-makers, and lies at the heart of the weirdly renamed Slumdog Millionaire. As a result the film, too, beggars belief.The movie piles impossibility on impossibility, exceeding even the crassness of the book. Two boys from the Bombay slums, who grow up speaking Hindi and Marathi, flee a fire and suddenly acquire perfect English, good enough to talk to and hoodwink western tourists. Oh, and when they run away from the burning slum they demonstrate extraordinary fitness, because the next thing you know they are at the Taj Mahal, which is in Agra, hundreds of miles away. A moment later they are back in Bombay and the older boy has miraculously acquired a gun, and bullets, and the skill and courage to use both. How did he get a gun? It is never explained. India is not the United States, and consequently it isnt easy for anyone there to acquire a weapon, unless they are already in one of the criminal mafias, and at this point in the story that is not the case. To watch your home towns story being told in this comically absurd, tawdry fashion is, finally, to grow annoyed. Such is the sentimentality of Slumdog Millionaire that were its setting somewhere more familiar to western audiences, it would be recognised as the banal fluff it is.It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but its still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.