I arrived in India this past February 7 and stayed through March 2—my visit began and ended in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), a city I have visited many times. During my stay, I read the English-language Indian newspapers everyday, local, regional, and national, not just the articles and news but also the letters-from-readers section, and watched Indian English-language TV on many evenings. Much of the news was dominated by the discussion of Slumdog Millionaire, a film about a poor orphan and tiffin-boy (waiter) from Mumbai’s slums, who, at the age of eighteen, wins 20 million rupees on an Indian quiz show. The film has justly received many international prizes: It is well-directed by Danny Boyle and well-acted. When it won eight Oscars, Indians were overjoyed. Some got up very early in the morning to watch, in real time, the award ceremony in California. In the days before the winners were announced, the Indian press and television were full of speculation about how many Oscars it would win and who would get them. The film was analyzed and analyzed and analyzed.

My main concern, though, was not with this Indian ecstasy; ecstasy seen in retrospect is always boring and what is there to say about it? The more interesting comments are those made by carping left-wing Indian journalists and academics, who disliked the film for a variety of reasons, all of them bad.

The most frequently expressed negative criticism of the film was that it showed India and