Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy, Christian Colson, the director-screenwriter-producer troika, is British. Some of the crew is, too. Eighteen-year-old Dev Patel, who is at the pulsating heart of the film, is both — he’s Indian of British origin. Everyone else, cast and crew, is Indian. Anil Kapoor is still a Bollywood A-lister, and now his profile will be bigger than the Khans — Shah Rukh nixed the role — on a global platform. Irrfan Khan and Saurabh Shukla are among our finest performers. And Resul Pookutty, who’s a magician with sound, and A.R. Rahman, who changed the way Indian cinema made music, are ours, ours, ours.

Make no mistake, even if the sea of faces holding aloft the Slumdog Oscars in the first week of March is predominantly white — it’s got nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, among others — with Rahman and Resul the only Indians, as the former looks like a shoo-in for the score if not for his two songs, the film is, at its core, as desi as can be. Because it’s a British production, the film has jumped right into the middle of the main awards (no hanging about on the periphery, in the foreign film category). But it’s there because India, to borrow the phrase of one of its characters, is at the centre, of its centre.

One-third of it is, fittingly, in Hindi. Casting director, and subsequently co-director Loveleen Tandon made the point that you can’t have Indian slum-kids talking only in English. Wisely, both her director and screenplay writer read her lips. When we listen to Jamal and Latika and Salim, we hear Hindi, which is what we expect. And when we do begin to hear the English, it’s all fine. Because we’ve segued into the language, all of us. Even slumdogs are allowed to speak Angrezi in today’s India.

... contd.