Slumdog Millionaire isn't poverty porn, says author

NEW DELHI: Diplomat Vikas Swarup, whose novel was used as the basic story of the film Slumdog Millionaire, has an answer to all those crying themselves hoarse about the "negative" portrayal of India: Slums are a reality in India.

Diplomat Vikas Swarup

Swarup, whose 2003 debut novel Q and A, featured slums mainly towards the end, tells STOI the Hollywood-funded, British-made film doesn't depict them as places of "unmitigable despair".

He says on the phone from Pretoria where he is posted as India's deputy high commissioner, "There is nothing negative about the slums as depicted in the film. Slum dwellers are not shown as people wallowing in sorrow. On the contrary, they are trying to make their life better, they have aspirations, dreams and desires. The fact that the slums are giving way to skyscrapers is a reality. In the end, the film is about hope and survival."

Ever the diplomat, Swarup is polite to a fault about the film straying from the original plot of his novel. Q and A was primarily about luck but the film is about destiny. Swarup's book featured an illiterate boy winning the biggest prize on a quiz show because of miraculous good fortune, namely a full and active life having adventures in orphanages and brothels, with gangsters and Bollywood celebrities.

But Swarup is not worried that the film has changed all that. For him the biggest change is in the name of the protagonist, Ram Mohammad Thomas, who becomes Jamal Malik. "Obviously, unlike a book, a film doesn't have the leisure of space to explain all the details. Anyway, a film is a creative interpretation of a director. He can take liberties with the script," Swarup says this without a hint of disappointment in his voice. Instead, he jokes that if all films were true to the books they were based on, why ever would the books be read?

In actual fact, Swarup has little reason to complain about Hollywood betraying his book. Slumdog, the film, has made his book a bestseller years after it was published. The film rights were sold even before the book was released.

When Boyle started working on the film, Swarup was shown the first and second draft of the script but didn't have any role to play in the final production of the film. So, when he saw the film in London, it was like "meeting friends whom one had known all one's life but had never seen before."

So, is the original slumdog creator's life any different from before? Swarup, who will be in India for the Mumbai premiere on Thursday, says he is constantly being asked the million-dollar question: are you reaping the profits? And what's the answer: "I have not become a millionaire in real terms," he laughs.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com