World | India
Indian film captures what the poor feel but dare not say
Raja Menon's film Barah Aana (Short-Changed) and Aravind Adiga's novel White Tiger are searing indictments of how affluent Indians behave towards their domestic staff.
- By Amrit Dhillon, Correspondent
- Published: 22:59 September 12, 2008
New Delhi: A driver consumed with hatred for his stingy master who treats him like a cockroach, makes fun of how he speaks, dresses, and smells and forces him to double up as cook and cleaner on quiet days, is not a character usually found in Indian films or novels.
Millions of maids, drivers, and servants slave for rich Indians every day without anyone knowing what they think about their de-humanised lives or their bosses.
But now a new film and prize-winning novel have brutally laid bare what the poor feel about the rich but never dare say out loud.
Raja Menon's film Barah Aana (Short-Changed) and Aravind Adiga's novel White Tiger are searing indictments of how affluent Indians behave towards their domestic staff.
They offer, for the first time, a provocative insight into how the "have-nots" perceive the new India - a fast-changing and rich society where wealth is flaunted and where there is no place for them.
Driver's confession
Adiga shows a young couple setting up their illiterate driver from an impoverished village, Balram, to take the rap for a crime the wife commits. Drunk after a night out, she grabs the wheel from the driver and insists on driving.
When she hits and kills a beggar child who runs across the road, the family compel Balram to sign a confession saying that he was behind the wheel.
At other times, he drives his master around Delhi with bags stuffed with millions of rupees to give as bribes to ministers but lashes out at Balram when he loses a five rupee coin in the car.
A wide-eyed Balram sees the immense wealth and opportunity in the city - the malls, restaurants and hotels - and knows that he can never have access to any of it. Even walking into a shopping mall requires mustering up courage.
"What is astonishing, given the mad disparities of wealth, is the phenomenally low level of crime by servants," said Adiga whose novel is on the long list for this year's Man Booker prize. "But we are seeing the beginning of a change. They are no longer prepared to accept their fate. They can see other options."
Servants usually endure cruel treatment and indignities. Having cooked, cleaned, mopped, polished, washed, baked, dusted, and ironed all day, seven days a week for a monthly salary of Rs2,500 (Dh201), if a maid asks for a day off, the reaction is usually outrage.
Daily gestures by employers betray the conviction that servants are sub-human. At meal times, "memsahib" doles out the food onto their plates lest they eat too much.
Families dine in restaurants while making the "ayah" or nanny (taken along to mind the children) stand beside their table.
"A friend in Bangalore told me she saw a maid sitting in a hotel toilet. The family was eating in the restaurant and had told her to wait there," said Menon whose film shows a security guard in Bombay, Yadav, being similarly humiliated.
Menon and Adiga are exploring a totally new theme - the underbelly of India's soaring new prosperity. Till now, novels in English have generally portrayed the well-off or focussed on exotica - all swishing silk saris and aromatic spices.
TV serials revolve around bitchy and scheming middle class women in joint families. Bollywood too churns out escapist stories about the gilded lives of the rich.
Servant and prince
"You haven't really had films depicting the world from a servant's point of view. Even if you have a driver as a main character, he turns out later to be a prince," said film buff Parsa Venkateshwar Rao.
Menon's film takes a brutal look at how the poor in Bombay, a teeming metropolis full of extremes, cope with their everyday problems.
When Yadav tries to borrow money - the equivalent of what a family would spend on a pizza - from the tenants in the building where he works, they brush him off without a thought for the fact that he needs it for his son's medical treatment.
Menon, who plans to release his film in the UK, fears that foreigners will not believe the callousness he portrays in Barah Aana.
On a recent visit to Scotland, he walked into a pub and ended up talking to a CEO who was drinking with a plumber. Foreigners, he says, would struggle to understand why this does not happen in India.
"Some employers here don't even call drivers by their name. They'll just summon him with 'Driver'!" But I'm seeing small reactions to these indignities. People want to be treated as human," said Menon.
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