Dear Academy, It’s Time You Looked Beyond Poverty in Indian Films

‘Lion’ is a stellar movie, but why do the Oscars have a penchant for choosing Indian films with a recurring theme?

The 89th Academy Awards is only days away and like a true cinema buff, most of the nominated movies have been devoured.

Some movies have split me up – like Florence Foster Jenkins and Toni Erdmann – while some have left me with a sense of brooding – like Fences and Manchester by the Sea. Still others have wowed, like Hidden Figures, The Salesman and Arrival.

But this list won’t be complete if I don’t mention Aussie filmmaker Garth Davis’ film Lion – the emotional journey of Saroo Brierly, the Indian kid who found his way back home after 25 years.

Taking none of the cinematic experience away from the film, what disappoints the average Indian cinema lover is that, yet again, our country has been captured in all its ‘filthy glory’. For Hollywood, India is strangely enough, always about the poverty.

What About the ‘Other India’?

In Lion, Saroo Brierly, played by little Sunny Pawar – and later by Dev Patel – goes to the railway station with his elder brother hoping to get a night’s worth of work and gets lost. What happens next is even more difficult to watch – the five-year-old survives being locked inside a train compartment for days, escapes from being abducted by the beggar mafia, sits soaking wet in garbage during Kolkata rains and is almost trafficked. How he reaches Australia and becomes a part of a kind family and returns to find his mother and sister in an obscure village in Madhya Pradesh, may well be called a miracle.

The movie has captured the imagination of audience across the globe and has found its way to six nominations – for best supporting actor in male and female categories, for best picture, for cinematography, for music and writing. The last time a film on India did so well was Slumdog Millionaire, made by yet another foreigner – British filmmaker Danny Boyle. A movie replete with poor children, mafia that forces them to beg and inhuman living conditions, it is a ‘winning against all odds’ story. Full of things that India seems to be cinematically synonymous with for the west, the film won eight out of nine nods at the Oscars in 2009.

But here’s the thing – being millennials who were born and brought up in India, we may understand the social evil of poverty all too well, but we don’t relate to it as ‘the only Indian thing’. Most of us, born to middle class families, studying and working hard, getting jobs in various industries within and outside the country, are only trying to be the very best in whatever we do. We’ve made our mark in space science, information technology and arts and are not just about poverty. It would be fantastic to find some of our stories being adapted into movies.

But when we say this, we don’t mean call centre hits like Outsourced. We mean tales of people who live in an ever changing world, in a time when internet outrage leads to falling of governments, when feminism has found its loudest voice.

Of course, our own filmmakers have a role to play here. Unless they make movies that portray a rich or middle class India with all its frailties, the western world will continue to see us as a montage of dirty railways tracks.

The Movies We Send to the Oscars

It ain’t only the foreign filmmakers who portray India as a struggling third world nation.

Closer home, the Film Federation of India (FFI) that is responsible for sending one Indian film to the Academy jury for the foreign language film category every year, also chooses stereotypical films. Why stellar films like Monsoon Wedding, Khosla ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Masaan, Shahid or even Dangal are not given a thought is a mystery.

However, the Academy has definitely shown a penchant for choosing a recurring theme. Sample this – the last few Indian movies that actually got through the final list of foreign language film nominees was Mother India, Salaam Bombay! and Lagaan. Mother India is about a poor widow who fights social evils and makes sacrifices to raise her son single-handedly. Salaam Bombay! is about a little boy on the streets of Bombay and his tryst with everything from stealing and arson to prostitution. Lagaan, a film widely known as a sports drama might appear to be the odd one out here – but not so much if you see the underlying theme of oppression, racism and poverty-stricken farmers under a ruthless British Raj.

While the morbid reality of slums, poverty, child trafficking and local gangs do exist, so does the other India. The India that earns well, wines and dines regularly, goes from one smartphone to another in months and suffers heartbreaks and every other emotion with social media as their witness. This India makes for great viewing too – as films like Piku and Queen affirm. It is disappointing, therefore, to be neglected by both Indian filmmakers and the Indian narrative globally.

Maybe it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. And be inspired by something other than poverty.

(Runa Mukherjee Parikh has written on women, culture, social issues, education and animals, with The Times of India, India Today and IBN Live. When not hounding for stories, she can be found petting dogs, watching sitcoms or travelling. A big believer in ‘animals come before humans’, she is currently struggling to make sense of her Bengali-Gujarati lifestyle in Ahmedabad.)