Cinema, like theatre, must use real people in order to exist materially. And ‘use’ is not the cleanest of words. Linked in its roots to ‘usury’, it has to work extra-hard to keep itself pure from the taint of money. Commercial cinema is a hugely more expensive and lucrative affair than theatre. So it is not surprising that cinema, with its higher stakes in the real, uses people rather more problematically than does the theatre. Ever since its release, Slumdog Millionaire has been at the centre of a storm in India and abroad. Now that the film trails clouds of glory in a world grimly focused on the impermanence of wealth, it is impossible not to notice how big a role money plays in all the palaver around the film. It is, of course, no accident that the film is itself about a poor Indian boy winning a life-changingly astronomical cash award on screen, and this makes its reality-effect a hall of mirrors that should make an ethical viewer positively giddy with unresolved worries.

Nay-sayers have had two problems with the film. First, by portraying slums in the way it has, the film has tainted India’s image to the world. Second, the film has exploited the slum children who have acted in it by paying them disproportionately less in relation to the profits made from its success. Exploitation is defined here purely in terms of money, and this is what the producers have picked up too. They have planned their reparations as acts of materially generous concern. Hence, trust funds, educational assistance, trips to the award ceremony and oodles of exposure and fun (although the actual sums of money set aside for the children remain undisclosed, so as not to make them more vulnerable). And now, with all the Oscars, paying the children back has come to a spectacular conclusion. What is seldom thought through in all this is the question of representation: how reality can be turned into stories and images that fit the desires and motives of those who produce and consume them. It is India’s global prestige that has mattered most to those who have raised their voices against the film’s portrayal of poverty, just as the Oscars have now become the achievements of the nation. How India wants to see itself and how the world wants to see India are now part of a global traffic in which the viewer and the viewed are locked in a beautiful embrace of mutual use.