Ian Jack: Some say Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn - but not many

A foreign director comes to India and shoots a film that in part depicts considerable cruelty, poverty and squalor. The Indian government is outraged when the BBC broadcasts the film. There are official protests; severe restrictions are imposed on the BBC and any other foreign organisation that wants to film in India; the director never enters the country again. Forty years pass. Another foreign director shoots a film in India in which the cruelty, poverty and squalor are even more horrid. It wins four Golden Globes and 10 Oscar nominations. Most of India is delighted; domestic film-makers are chided for the timidity of their vision and mindless escapism of their output. The first director is Louis Malle, whose documentary series, Phantom India, examined some indisputable truths about so much of Indian life. The second is Danny Boyle, whose Slumdog Millionaire, pictured below, takes some of the same truths, dramatises and exaggerates them inside a fantastical story - which slum boy is going to jump into an oozing latrine, even for the autograph of Amitabh Bachchan? - set to Bollywood melodies. Something has happened in the years between these films, to western as well as to Indian sensibilities. The reasons are complicated, but perhaps the main ones are that Indian society is a thousand times more confident, that the word "vulgar" has vanished from the critical lexicon, and that the world has grown very small. India has always had a difficult relationship with its easily observable poverty. Thirty years ago, the government's PR departments would express a sullen disappointment that foreign writers were so "obsessed" by it. Its depiction abroad was seen, with just a little justice, as a plot against national ambition. In the 1920s, the American writer Katherine Mayo had been helped by the British administration to research a book, Mother India, which demonstrated how unfit India was for self-government. Child marriages, hopeless sanitary habits. Mahatma Gandhi famously described it as "the report of a drain inspector", but while it may have been inspired as a work of imperial propaganda, many of its facts were true. In the 1960s, another foreigner, VS Naipaul, made squalor more vivid. His Indian ancestry offered no protection against unpopularity. Indians stood accused of selling the country short. Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali put Indian cinema on the map and is now considered a monument to humanism. But in 1955 its account of an impoverished family in Bengal drew a hostile response in some government circles and Ray was accused of "exporting poverty". The same charge is now levelled against Boyle. His "poverty porn" is damaging the image of a country on the brink of becoming a superpower. So far as I can tell, that's a minority opinion. Bachchan, the great Bollywood star, made some mild remarks implying that the world took notice of Indian cinema only when a foreigner hijacked its techniques, and he was widely condemned for what was taken to be spite. Fewer people now believe that a single film can represent the Indian generality - supposing such a thing exists - to a foreign audience, who knows, or should know, of India's tremendous variety and compelling social change. And there are now so many ways to know - mass tourism, business travel, the web, hundreds of satellite channels. And anyway, who cares? It's only a film, and not a serious one at that, dealing as it does in the bestselling cliches of the Mumbai film industry. Poor man makes good, finds lost love, gets rich, lives happily ever after. The more interesting question is: whom do we trust to best describe the experience of the poor? Ideally, the answer should be the poor themselves, but even in much more equal societies than India's that has always been a rarity. Dickens spent some of his childhood in a blacking factory, DH Lawrence's dad worked down the pit, but usually descriptions of the poor come from higher social castes. Writing is essentially a middle-class activity for a middle-class audience. In India, very few accounts of poverty have come from the people who know what it means. Literacy, opportunity, time, inclination: these are formidable barriers. Almost every Indian novel heard of in Britain has come from the Anglophone elite. The author of Slumdog is no exception. The film was adapted from a first novel called Q&A (now retitled as a film tie-in) by Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat. This week I met him at the Jaipur Literary Festival, where he was one of the week's big events. Schoolgirls queued to get his signature, displaying all the grave and intelligent deference ("Thank you, sir, please put 'To Priya'") that will one day be put to use ruling the world. He was modest and polite. In the evening, among the large audience gathered on the lawn to hear him speak, a deferential questioner asked, "Sir, you have become a very famous writer. Many of us wish to write. Can you tell us, sir, how you did it?" And Swarup replied that he just sat down and wrote, and if he could do it, anybody could. He was born into a distinguished legal family and entered the foreign service in 1986. He had no great ambition to be a writer. What struck me was his immense practicality. He grew up enjoying James Hadley Chase and Alastair Maclean and ignored India's fashionable new generation of novelists until his early forties. They were all very "literary". He had spotted a gap in the market. He would write an Indian thriller. While posted in London, he was intrigued by the story of Major Charles Ingram on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He sat down to write. Several agents turned him down, but one took him up. The novel was finished quickly - "20,000 words in one weekend", he said. And a year before it was published, there were rejections here, too, the film rights had been bought. Five years later, it has been translated into 36 languages. Swarup has never been inside a Mumbai slum, but poverty in India was impossible to ignore. "The brown arm snakes through your car's open window and asks you for alms," he said. "No man is an island in India." This contradicts my own experience. Many people are islands, joined in an archipelago of social position. Becoming island-like offers you best hope of enduring sights that seem impossible to alter, and prevailing against the consequent despair. Still, even as I write that sentence I see in it an old-fashioned attitude, dating from the time when India was filled with conversations about what could be done, when the poor were fretted over and documentarians such as Malle put anger into their work. Much good did it do. As objects of pity, the poor were one-dimensional. Swarup and Boyle show instead what they call the triumphant human spirit of the slums, and there are now trips around Dharavi, the Slumdog slum, to show tourists that feistiness at work. It certainly shows they are human, as imperfect as us, but could it be that our new approach also reveals self-interested pragmatism? Some facts can't be changed. The poor will always be with us, and we may as well make the best of them.