Abstract

This essay is a critical deconstruction of the "Savior/Salvation Myth" in the sleeper-turned-blockbuster hit Slumdog Millionaire in response to the opposition toward it mostly from Indian viewers and critics who condemned it as “poverty porn.”  Raising the research question why Jamal Malik, the young errant and indigent homeless Muslim youth, was uniquely positioned to receive Western global media acclaim and monumental monetary gift this writer refuses the salvationism ideology by incorporating Nietzchean frameworks of Apolline form and Dionysian substance and spirit. The paper uses thematic analysis to extract three themes of salvationism that are underwritten by the binary opposition between salvationworthy and those unworthy of salvationism. Contemporary critical political implications are drawn in the essay. The writer exhorts the obliteration of the Savior/Salvation myth whose only, paradoxically and iteratively speaking, predatorial sustenance is a hierarchichal relationship among those deemed "salvationwothy" and "abject unsaveable" exacerbated by a pervasive and insidious gendered theme of "saved saving fragile womanhood, " toward a global ethos of communal empathic cosmopolitan solidarity as a politics of unification to alleviate human and non-human suffering for perpetuity during transoceanic postcolonial and global times.

Key Words: Postcoloniality, Salvation, Saviorworthy, Apolline, Dionysian, Solidarity

^JCMR Journal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 14, No. 2, October 2022, pp. 178-187

© Association of Media and Communication Researchers of Nigeria (AMCRON).

About the author

* Karudapuram E. Supriya, Ph.D., (also known as Dr. Supriya Karudapuram) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of North Dakota, 213 O’Kelly, Grand Forks ND, U.S.A. He specializes in postcolonial power relations and cultural identity with emphasis in Indian identity.

Article Citation

Supriya, K.E. (2022). Savior myths, savior colonialism, “poverty porn” and the Indian Slumdog Millionaire movie. Journal of Communication and Media Research, 14 (2): 178-187.

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