Back in 1980, Richard Attenborough had come to our country, armed with an ensemble cast including Ben Kingsley, Candice Bergen, Edward Fox and John Geilgud, to tell the story of a man credited with making the very concept of India possible.  

Gandhi (1982), a soufflé of Attenborough’s stars from the West, with some distinctly Indian ingredients in the form of Alyque Padamsee, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey and Amrish Puri, wowed both international audiences and hard-nosed critics.  

The film won eight Oscars and got Kingsley and Rohini Hattangadi, who played Kasturba Gandhi, a BAFTA each. After Gandhi, both actors went as far as they were allowed to by their respective film industries. Kingsley became Sir Ben and acted in films such as Turtle Diary, Bugsy, Schindler’s List, Artificial Intelligence and House of Sand and Fog; Hattangadi is best remembered for her flimsy, tufted-hair, lipstick-on-cheeks portrayal of an evil aunt in Chaalbaaz.   

Now, 27 years after Attenborough’s magnum opus — which plays on our TV sets every national holiday — another British filmmaker, armed with another local narrative, a tale of poverty, oppression, aspiration and love, has brought India into the spotlight.  

Slumdog Millionaire, quickly appropriated as “our” movie, is up for nine academy awards — having already won four Golden Globes — and India is finding it hard to keep its excitement under check. But is it right for Bollywood and the local media to celebrate it as a coming of age of our 300-titles-a-year cinema? On the contrary, isn’t it proof of the inadequacy or our film industry rather than a monument to it?  

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