ESSAY


VERLA, India - It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing; it isn’t about gurus or Gandhi.“Slumdog Millionaire,”in fact, may be the first worldtraveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing India.


Its novelty has given it a dream run in American movie theaters, and it recently was chosen best dramatic picture at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It has now picked up 10 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India as something India long resisted being: a land of selfmakers, where a son of the slums can, solely of his own effort, hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.


And that may explain the movie’s strange hold over Americans. It channels to them their own fantasy of selfinvention, and yet places it far enough away as to imply that it is now really someone else’s fantasy. Indeed, after the havoc wreaked on ordinary self-reliant Americans by the impenetrable workings of the markets, the mythology of self reliance is under siege in America.


The film, directed by Danny Boyle, opened in India on January 23 and will open throughout Europe and Asia in the coming months. It follows Jamal Malik, who rises from Mumbai’s shantytowns to compete on the Indian version of“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”


In India, clan is everything. But Jamal needs no one. He has no parents; his brother betrays him; even the gameshow host, feigning goodwill, deceives. In India, hierarchy rules. But Jamal treats the mighty no differently from the meek . He is that rare, but increasingly less rare, Indian creature: a man all his own.


The old restraints were formidable: family, caste, religious fatalism, Byzantine bureaucracy. But the new pull is toward a life of one’s making, in a city not one’s own, in a vocation not inherited.


“Why does everyone love this program?”Jamal, seeing the “Millionaire”show on TV, asks a friend .


“It’s a chance to escape, isn’t it?”she replies.“Walk into another life.”Oceans away, the United States was founded with the promise of such escape. Its early settlers were fleeing restraints much like those in old India.


But now, even as the myth of self-making spreads to India, a pause for second thoughts may have started in America. It was partly the crash of 2008, in which supposed masters of the universe sank the economy, then asked to be bailed out.


It was partly a dawning sense that policies that promoted the entrepreneur could forget communities. It was partly the fraying of American families.


As Indians sever their attachments, Americans reweave theirs.


Scientists are pushing the self-made from their pedestal, arguing that success is social: that certain cultures breed success, that genes influence skills .


The recent election was won by a candidate who is self-made but did not position himself that way; he spoke instead of roots and linkages.


It is roots and linkages that many Indians now seek to shed, and many Americans now seek to reclaim. And that may be the silent allure of“Slumdog Millionaire.”It is a tribute to the irrepressible self, filmed in a society now realizing it has given the self too little, watched in a society now realizing it has given the self too much.


‘‘Slumdog Millionaire’’shows a more realistic version of life in India. / RAJANISH KAKADE/ASSOCIATED PRESS


ANAND GIRIDHARADAS