The Slumdog School of Awards

WANT TO WIN an international literary, film or social award? Perhaps a Booker, an Oscar, a Magsaysay?

There are rules. First up: your book, film or NGO must highlight Indian poverty, sinister godmen, the horrors of the caste system, and the decline of religious and media freedom. Show Indian misery and you’re halfway to a global award.

Arundhati Roy perfected the art decades ago with The God of Small Things. The Booker Prize came calling. The book was about an illicit inter-caste romance in South India. It was Booker-perfect.

Never mind that Parul Sehgal, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, wrote in her column: “A writer who had judged the Booker the previous year publicly called Roy’s book ‘execra­ble’ and the award a disgrace.”

It took Roy 20 years to write her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. It had the right cast: a transwoman who struggles to make a living in debauched Delhi. Utmost happiness in the book’s title is code for utmost misery. The literary global commons loved it. Roy’s tirade against India on Jammu & Kashmir earned her bonus brownie points.

Sehgal, writing for The Atlantic magazine’s July-August 2017 issue, exposed Roy as an authorial dilettante: “Roy has said that she never revises her books, that her essays and fiction write themselves, and that she rarely takes edits. I’ve always interpreted—and enjoyed—such statements as a bit of swagger. It’s dispiriting to see that they might be true. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is plagued by almost rudimen­tary errors: There is near-total confusion about point of view. Messages and morals come ponderously underscored. The two central stories never convincingly come together. In the absence of psychological development or real suspense, chapters end with portentous rhetorical ellipses.”

This hasn’t prevented a cascade of global awards for Roy: the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004, the Norman Mailer Prize in 2011, and the PEN Pinter Prize in 2024.

Roy set off a generational outpouring of internation­al awards for showing the underbelly of India. Not India’s space programme, not the establishment in India of Global Capability Centres (GCC) by virtually every Fortune 500 company, not India’s digital revolution. Just the underbelly.

IFS officer Vikas Swarup’s debut novel Q&A was about an incongruously named waiter Ram Mohammad Thomas who wins a quiz show and is later arrested for having cheated on the show.

British film director Danny Boyle, sensing an opportuni­ty in Ram’s rags-to-riches story, turned Swarup’s innocently titled novel Q&A into the film Slumdog Millionaire. The signature excreta scene was a mix of peanut butter and chocolate sauce. But no filmgoer knew that at the time.

The film predictably went on to win eight Oscars in 2009, including Best Film and Best Director. Boyle confessed only years later in 2016 in an interview with the Daily Mirror that the excreta was pea­nut butter mixed with chocolate sauce. Enough time had passed, he believed, for Western stomachs to have churned.

American journalist Katherine Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker, spent four years living in another Mumbai slum, Annawadi. She described her immersive experience in a 2012 book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.

Global awards dutifully followed: the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

All of this doesn’t mean India’s underbelly must not be shown in literature and film. Of course, it must. But so should well-made docuseries like Rocket Boys on scientists Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, pioneers respectively of India’s nuclear and space programmes.

Global awards for Rocket Boys? None. The nearest Rocket Boys got to a global award was an international Emmy nomination for best performance by an actor (Jim Sarbh).

International political awards, too, have causation. The Magsaysay award, for example, has over the years been given to three Indians: Election Commissioner James Michael Lyngdoh in 2003 shortly after the Gujarat riots; Arvind Kejriwal in 2006 when along with Manish Sisodia he was running the Kabir and Parivartan NGOs; and journalist Ravish Kumar in 2019.

India should welcome the Arundhati Roys and Ravish Kumars. They demolish the notion that dissent is in jeopardy in India. Quite the contrary. We even allow, with­out a murmur of protest, the Danny Boyles of the world to pretend peanut butter and chocolate sauce are excreta.

Indian miseryIndian povertymedia freedomNGOssinister godmenSlumdog School