"Slumdog Millionaire" And "Khuda Kay Liye": Windows Into Modern India and Pakistan

As it happened, I watched "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Khuda Kay Liye" on consecutive days (yesterday and today). Having done so, I feel I am eminently qualified to talk about these two films.

Spoiler alert! These are NOT reviews, but full-blown discussions. If you haven't watched either of these films and wish to do so at some point in the future, then please read no further.

First, let's get the superficial commonalities out of the way. Both films speak about important sociopolitical currents in a subcontinental country. Both are purportedly feel-good stories but are substantively so only for people with double-digit IQs; for the rest of us, the films are dark and a touch depressing. And both have a very overt Manichean sense of good vs. evil suffused in them, which results in rendering both films fantastical as narratives (intentionally so, I might add).

The films, despite these similarities, actually have a great deal dividing them. The first distinction - and most glaringly obvious - is the gulf in class between the two. "Khuda Kay Liye" is not a very well made film. The acting in it is terrible (paritcularly by the Mary character whose British accent is less authentic than Shoaib Akhtar's). The script is only slightly better - it is overly cliched, and the writers clearly thought they were writing for an audience of five year-olds, because they left absolutely nothing to interpret and instead spelled everything out in excruciating explictness. And the screenplay is tragically comical at times - the "'war" scene when the village in Afghanistan is being bombed actually made me laugh, and the torture scenes could have actually contained waterboarding. "Slumdog Millionaire", by contrast, is simply a better product.

This is not to unnecessarily pile on "Khuda Kay Liye". The film's appeal derives not from its quality as an artistic product per se, but for the important themes within Pakistani society it takes head-on. I have always complained about the lack of serious scholarship on (and from) Pakistan, but this pales in comparison to the lack of serious art on (but not from) Pakistan. Pakistan's film industry is essentially defunct. We produce very few plays. The state of painting and photography is better but could be better still. The point to take home is that the film's willingness to take on the moderate vs. extremist divide (even though I am beginning to be convinced that this is a spurious cleavage in Pakistani society) as well as the physical and emotional abuse women (especially in rural areas) are subjected to is bold and much-needed.

That said, the way in which these issues are dealt with leave something to be desired. To explain why, you first have to ask yourself these questions: first, how uncomfortable will the average middle-class Indian be watching "Slumdog Millionaire"? Second, how uncomfortable will the average middle-class Pakistani be watching "Khuda Kay Liye"? If you're like me, you believe that the answer to the first is "quite a bit" and the second is "not that much". The discrepancy, I think, would arise from the fact that in "Khuda Kay Liye" it is made abundantly clear that the "bad guys" in the film (the main Maulvi, the led-astray brother, the father who got his daughter married in Pakistan against her will) exist outside the normative guidelines laid down by Islam and Pakistanis' interpretation of Islam. In other words, these people and their actions are not supported by the vast majority of people in their social sphere. What they do and what they say are portrayed as existing outside "normal" behavior - inaccurately, I might add.

On the other hand, the "bad guys" and their actions in "Slumdog Millionaire" are shown to be exceedingly normal. Communal violence is shown with a numbing sort of expectedness. The widespread poverty of Mumbai's slums is not hidden; if anything, it is brandished proudly as obstacles to surmount for the film's "good guys". Organized crime, begging and prostitution are too shown to be "normal". Thus, there is a more realistic and accepting account of Mumbai's vices in "Slumdog Millionaire" than of Pakistan's in "Khuda Kay Liye". The writers of "Slumdog Millionaire" say of Mumbai: this is the way things are. The writers of "Khuda Kay Liye" say of Pakistan: this is the way things are, but...

My final comments concern the foreground of the two films. Here, "Khuda Kay Liye" edges "Slumdog Millionaire". I liked the fact that "Khuda Kay Liye" ended on a melancholy note - the movie did not deserve a happy ending, and did not get it. I'm happy the main guy ended up mentally disturbed, even if we had to endure the ridiculous "I love USA" markings on the wall in his cell to get there. Meanwhile, "Slumdog Millionaire" ended on too happy a note - the writers should have either given Jamal all the cash or Latika, but not both.