A little more than a year ago, a young, upstart British journalist set out to trash Indian cinema on the basis of a profound question: why do Indian films hardly win Oscar awards despite the country being the most prolific producer of movies in the world? Now that some Hollywood insiders have predicted that Slumdog Millionaire is set to sweep the Academy Awards, it is worth probing the mysterious success of the film (something that has even baffled its own makers) and ask whether the world has, indeed, woken up to the delights of an Indian story in an Indian setting and Indian talent.

Slumdog is good cinema, there can be little disagreement over that. It is a gritty story told in a no-nonsense docu-drama style, and the poverty and pain it portrays is real and undeniable. The rags-to-riches story of Jamal Malik is not, and yet is, one that has been told several times over by Bollywood. The likes of Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra and Ramesh Sippy have been there and done that in their own loquacious styles decades ago and what Danny Boyle has done now is to export that in a style that suits Western palates, a la chicken tikka masala.

So what then explains the critical hosannas and the popular appeal of Slumdog across the Western world? Simply put, it is the success of a story set in a clichéd perception of India. This is not just about poverty — it could have been eastern mysticism, hysterical religiosity, crime, conflict or corruption, or even global security threats emanating from this part of the world — all easily grasped by the West, thanks so selective media coverage of the region.

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