Imagining the Community of Beggars and Homeless: Constructing the Paradigmatic Third World City

Abstract

In movies like Slumdog Millionaire (2008) directed by Danny Boyle we see an orientalist discourse at work where knowledge lies in the power to define how the others live. The third world city of Mumbai is constructed within the oriental discourse for the benefit of the western gaze; the gaze that shows the city as not only practically unlivable but also dirty, dysfunctional and dangerous on a day-to-day basis. Contrarily, movies produced primarily for Indian diasporas living abroad especially in the West and the Indian middle classes show India as a nation with western-style development where you do not necessarily have to confront poverty and homelessness. My argument is that both the points of view are neo-colonial in character with a strong classist dimension because they are either representative of what the western bourgeoisie expects to see in the third world or how the nationalist bourgeoisie, which Franz Fanon views as the complementary other of the west, would like to present itself to the Eurocentric gaze. Both these perspectives are exclusionary in how they construct the paradigmatic third world city