Gully Boy

In the circumstances read by the articles provided to us, about India’s economic system, about the
poverty in Mumbai, about the state of the lower class (and castes) in India, I find myself saddened,
especially with the context of the film we just watched: Gully Boy. In commercially successful films
like these, it serves as a form of escapism, especially for those in poverty. When film first became
popular outside of elites initially, the poor would scrape together their coins in order to see a film
about people not like them. Is this truly healthy as a society? 

I find myself wondering this in the case of Gully Boy because it’s not realistic to the everyday
person, let alone the everyday Indian. The individual doesn’t make a difference in a broken system—
it’s a group of people. This is why we have revolutions. Gully Boy made me think about my time this
past summer at the International Writing Program, where one of my friends was from the Indian side
Kashmir (we had three Kashmiris; two from the Indian side and another from Gilgit on the Pakistani
side). 

He kept telling our group to watch this amazing video, and the session we had our Indian poetry and
screenwriting mentor, Rochelle Potkar, she finally let him show our cohort. It was a Kashmiri rap
video that had apparently gone viral on the Indian side and it was lamenting about the oppression the
Kashmiri people had faced since Partition. However, none of the non-Kashmiri Indians had heard of
it. It was only popular among Kashmiris. 

Now, in the case of Gully Boy, we have a Muslim rapper from the slums winning the chance to open
for an iconic American rapper. What are the odds of this ever truly going viral, ever even happening?
Very slim. The general public’s reaction would be very different, especially considering the context
of the rising nationalism in India. 

This brings me back to film as a form of escapism. India is one of the only countries in the world
where the Hollywood films account for less than <10% of the entire cinema scene’s market.
According to the United Nations Development Index, India is ranked #130 out of #189 countries,
thus suggesting a lower standard of living. Shah Rukh Khan, one of the biggest Indian actors, has
been cited to have said: 
“The standard of living [in India] is quite low, for them to watch a film, perhaps, sometimes,
forgoing a meal. So for them, the film becomes bigger than starving, becomes more important than
life itself. So when they go there, and [Khan] gives them a film, with one rasa, or about one thing, or
it is a linear film, and they don’t find one of the things they do belong to, they don’t feel cheated,
they don’t feel angry, they feel you have taken their food from them” (Coy).

This is where the idea of escapism is acknowledged in the industry. Many Bollywood movies tend to
dwell on these lighthearted ideologies of love, of self-discovery, of renewal. Like Shah Rukh Khan
says, the poor might choose to watch a film instead of having an actual meal for the day. They are so
fixated on these good feelings arising from the film they’re consuming they forgot that they are
hungry, that they are a part of a majority. They are poor peasants in a low standard of living, in a
country that isn’t doing much for them, but it doesn’t matter because Alia Bhatt just got together with
her love and that poor Muslim boy is escaping the same exact situation. 

Then, as a double-edged sword, these films serve as propaganda. The viewer will remember that little
Muslim boy escaping his situation through rap, not the act of not eating to watch the film. They
forget that their hunger can be solved, that the money used to see the film can buy food or help
alleviate their situation. They come to learn that by watching movies preaching Indians escaping
terrible circumstances or finding true love, that India is great. India is the best. You’re lucky to see
these films as an Indian even if you’re in complete and utter poverty. 

That is an extremely dangerous situation to be in as a society, to be so disillusioned and detached

from the reality of the situation. The Indian army spends $15 billion each year on what they dubbed
defending Kashmir from the Pakistanis. Corruption is rampant. The very same Muslim boy you just
saw rapping his way to the top could’ve been lynched for eating meat. Maybe it’s his friend who was
killed, maybe it was him, maybe he starved to death. 

What do you do when an entire society wakes up and sees the reality of their situation? This is why
we have revolutions. In Iran, the Shah’s regime toppled by a group many thought to be a minority,
only prominent in southern Iran: the religious fanatics. How much meddling should Western
countries do? 

In regards to the Arundhati Roy article provided to us, I find this idea that capitalism is failing to be
absurd, especially considering we shouldn’t have capitalism or complete democracy in every
country. Now that sounds terrible, but not every country functions well when expected to be a copy
and paste of the United States or Great Britain. This quote in the article really calls into question this
practice: 

“By the 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funding several NGOs and international
educational institutions, began to work as quasi-extensions of the US government that was at the time
toppling democratically elected governments in Latin America, Iran and Indonesia” (Roy). 

In the case of Iran, which is what I’m quite familiar with, the West meddled completely with
democracy. The democratically elected Mossadegh was outed in a joint UK-US coup, Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi takes over once again, then Khomeini comes onto the scene. Khomeini
was exiled from Iran and had asylum from the West—he lived in France during exile. When
Khomeini, who had been backed by France, came and took out the Shah during the revolution, the
West did not support the Shah anymore but denounced the Ayatollah. 

 And what was the result of that? Iran is now struggling, the poverty gap widening between the ultra-
rich and the poor. There was a point where the value of the rial changed every day, causing
widespread panic and forcing people to buy foreign currencies and then hoard said currencies. 

In a way, India has already seen this history with Partition. Partition happened because of British
negligence. When the two countries were announced in 1948, the lines between the nations were
drawn by a British lawyer who did not know anything about the Indian subcontinent. On August
16th, 1946, the riots in support for the creation of Pakistan were what ultimately convinced the
British that the Hindus and Muslims could no longer live together (Bates). But, in the end, a large
population of Muslims were left behind in India and families were forever split.

Now, the question is, how will these societies move on from external countries meddling in their
affairs? Recently, Donald Trump and Modi met in Texas, and thousands of Americans of Indian
descent shouted their support for Prime Minister Modi. As the world becomes more globalized in the
digital era, Bollywood is becoming a crucial export to the Indian diaspora.
When movies like these are made, it implants the idea that this is fiction. Especially in regards to
coming of age stories—we normalize the content of films labeled “drama.” When the moniker
“based off of a true story” is added to the context of the film, such as in the case of Gully Boy, that
adds another level of normalization. Big marketed movies aren’t about everyday tales of people in
the slums of Mumbai. No, they want something big, bold, better than the everyday people.

The conclusion? Oh, the Muslims aren’t struggling in India, look at this one Muslim boy from Gully
Boy. He made it, so why can’t the rest of them? Is it because they eat beef? Or because they support
Pakistan?  In Development Economics, just the past week, we discussed how many of those born into
poverty will never truly escape their situation. Cinema desensitizes us because it sells a fantasy, and
for a poor uneducated class, it could be taken as the truth since they don’t know any better. 

Bollywood convinces Indians that maybe everything’s okay. Look, we’ve given a poor little Muslim
boy a movie to shine, now let’s distract ourselves with the next big Bollywood movie. Let us forget
that Muslim boy, that the little Muslims boys in the slums of Mumbai had their moment, leave them
be. They’ll survive. They had their fifteen minutes of fame. But it never truly happened to all of them
and that’s okay. Just give them a happy love story in the next film, maybe that’ll shut them up.