The hope and despair of 'Slumdog Millionaire'

Ian Jack, former editor of Granta, has a column in the Guardian discussing how attitudes towards Indian attitudes towards 'poverty porn' have changed. He uses, as framing devices, the differing responses to Louis Malle's highly controversial Phantom India and Danny Boyle's universally applauded Slumdog Millionaire.

"A foreign director [Malle] 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 [Boyle] 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"

Why the change in response? What happened over the last 40 years to make Indians more accepting of such depictions of poverty?

"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"

The rest of the article fleshes out this hypothesis, drawing (among other things) upon a section of India's response to Mother India, Pather Panchali, and an interview with Vikas Swarup. It's very interesting, and provides quite a bit of food for thought, but I have one little doubt about it all. If Boyle had shot a documentary which went into corners of India rarely discussed in the foreign (indeed, even the Indian) press, and which didn't emphasise as much the triumphalism of the Indian spirit, would we still be as unflinching in our praise?