Slavery and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
Having won eight Oscars including Best Picture, the standout film “Slumdog Millionaire” has seized the interest of a broad American audience with its beautiful acting, cinematography, and soundtrack. Yet the movie resonates with Americans not least because of the injustice it portrays: human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
Human trafficking involves people robbed of control of their lives and treated as dehumanized commodities, whether or not they cross a border in the process. It takes many forms from migrant maids and construction workers, to brick kiln workers and seafood processors in debt bondage, to prostituted women and children. Some estimate as many as 27 million people are in this contemporary form of slavery.
“Slumdog Millionaire” accurately depicts India – for all its democratic and economic successes – as the global epicenter of slavery. The story of Latika and the two brothers Jamal and Salim is that of human trafficking victims. After they are orphaned and left homeless by ethnic violence, the children are lured into forced begging. The traffickers cruelly disfigure children to make them more sympathetic, effective beggars for their masters.
Jamal is determined to find his love Latika when the brothers escape this fate without her. He finds her in the brothels of Mumbai dancing for older men, only able to save her when his brother kills her exploiter. This is the first of many ways we see Latika trapped in the sexual and domestic servitude of sadistic, corrupt men.
For two years serving in the U.S. ambassadorship created by Congress to combat slavery worldwide, I saw the reality of slavery in 28 countries, including India.
In Tamir Nadu, I met some of the few Indians freed from bonded labor and given restitution. Provided government housing which any American would consider tiny and spartan, they beamed with the joy of freedom denied to millions of others in disadvantaged castes.
Outside Delhi, I met children freed by nongovernment activists, who marched hundreds of miles to raise awareness of forced child labor. One child I met discovered a girl trapped in domestic servitude who took her own life. Others had organized to protect children from being lured into slavery at train stations.
I toured the dirty, cramped brothels of Mumbai, seeing firsthand the fate of girls like Latika. Children played a few feet away from the beds where their mothers were prostituted. Later, I sat in my pristine hotel room taking off my soiled shoes. My head spun as it sunk in how these people — every bit as human as me and the Indians in the hotel — were stripped of their human rights and basic dignity by traffickers.
So as “Slumdog Millionaire” earns deserved acclaim, viewers should appreciate the depth of its reality. People are enslaved in India, on every continent, and on a significant scale right here in the United States. There are prostituted minors, forced migrant laborers, and even prosecuted cases of Mexican children coerced into begging here. All are human trafficking victims under the law.
As the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to combat human trafficking, there was one thing that made the frank assessments and assistance we gave other countries most effective in getting them to combat slavery. It was sharing our own record at home of helping the victims and punishing traffickers – much good and some not. America has to be an exemplar to be the most credible leader for global human rights.
In February, I joined Polaris Project as the Executive Director. It is an opportunity to avoid human rights hypocrisy at home at the same time as we rightly fight slavery on behalf of the “slumdogs” of India and every continent worldwide.
5 comments
Excellent idea! Thanks for starting this blog! We welcome the opportunity to work with you and your partners to serve our clients (the victims of human trafficking) in Dubai and Ethiopia!
peace and love,
Sharla, Yeshi, Andy and the team at
UNITED HOPE UAE,
“United Action for Empowerment!”
888.206.3264
http://www.uaelawdirectory.com
http://www.unitedhopeuae.org
Good to see someone talk about forced-begging. Most people don’t think about it as something that is controlled or organized though it has proven very profitable for those who have no problem exploiting children. I haven’t seen that movie yet but I have seen controlled begging of children (and elderly) in other parts of the world. In many cases, the kids have quotas. They are expected to reach that quota, even if they have to steal it (or worse), or face severe punishment of some kind. Wish more attention was brought to this, especially for unknowing tourists. Hope to see more on forced-begging in the future. Would also love to see something on organ trafficking. Maybe a story from one of the orphanages in Eastern Europe auctioning off kids, covered by fake adoptions? I first read of this in 2005 after a conviction while touring the East.
I too am interested in learning more about forced begging. In New Orleans I saw some kids dancing for at least 5-6 hours on Bourbon St for money. They seemed very sad and refused to talk to us. We asked them how old they were and they would not answer. We asked them if they liked dancing and no answer….just kept dancing and would look the other way when we would speak. Its like they were told not to talk to anyone.
Despite the millions of dollars the film has made, the child actors in the film still live in poverty:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/123542/slumdog_millionaire%27s_child_actors_still_live_in_%27grinding_poverty%27_in_mumbai/
For an alternative view of Slumdog Millionare, please read the following critique:
http://www.alternet.org/movies/127845/%22slumdog_millionaire%22%3A_a_hollow_message_of_social_justice/
Excerpt:
The film’s real problem is that it grossly minimizes the capabilities and even the basic humanity of those it so piously claims to speak for. It is no secret that much of “Slumdog” is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the 213-hectare spread of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film’s depiction of the legendary Dharavi, which is home to some one million people, is that of a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the “slumdogs,” no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers, thieves, and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher, a thin, bespectacled man who introduces him to the Three Musketeers, is inexplicably callous. This is a place of evil and decay; of a raw, chaotic tribalism.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism and creativity, and is a hub of entrepreneurial activity, in industries such as garment manufacturing, embroidery, pottery, and leather, plastics and food processing. It is estimated that the annual turnover from Dharavi’s small businesses is between US$50 to $100 million. Dharavi’s lanes are lined with cell-phone retailers and cybercafés, and according to surveys by Microsoft Research India, the slum’s residents exhibit a remarkably high absorption of new technologies.
It is ironic that “Slumdog”, for all its righteousness of tone, shares with many Indian political and social elites a profoundly dehumanizing view of those who live and work within the country’s slums. The troubling policy implications of this perspective are unmistakeably mirrored by the film. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally.
After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal, a Christ-like figure, in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks to sheer, dumb luck, or rather, because “it is written.” Is it also “written,” then, that the other children depicted in the film must continue to suffer? Or must they, like the stone-faced Jamal, stoically await their own “destiny” of rescue by a foreign hand?
Indeed, while this self-billed “feel good movie of the year” may help us “feel good” that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronizing, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not.
[...] slavery. Ambassador Lagon was the primary contributor to the blog over the year, highlighting important films, recommending steps towards greater corporate social accountability, and describing situations of [...]
Leave a Comment