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

Abstract

Movies like Slumdog Millionaire (2008) made in an orientalist mode where knowledge is the power to define how the others live construct the third world city, Mumbai in this case, 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 don’t 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 are deeply exclusionary in how they construct the paradigmatic third world city.

My paper intends to examine the politics of exclusion that goes into defining cities like Mumbai and Delhi; the beggars and the homeless not only occupy the landscape of the senses but they also define the “physical” experience of belonging to the city; while their marginalization by mainstream media and film makers is deliberate the fact remains that no one forgets the smells of street life made possible through the existence of the poor who, although rendered invisible, define the stage through their presence as working classes.