The interest in the lives and struggles of marginalized communities in India has recently received renewed interest. In the media, novels such as The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and the rags-to-riches fable of a Mumbai boy from India's largest basti Dharavi was immortalized in the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. The White Tiger, written by Arvind Adiga, tells the story of a poor man from Bihar who becomes a domestic servant in an upper-class household in the affluent suburb of Gurgaon near Delhi. The poor man achieves his ultimate release from the shackles of servitude thorough trickery, stealth and murder, after which he begins rebuilding his life as an entrepreneur in India's IT metropolis – Bangalore. Slumdog Millionaire is a film that employs the Bollywood style and formula, enticing the audience with its fairytale story of a slum-dweller, whose life story and everyday struggles provide a resourceful foundation for him to answer the questions levelled at him in the Indian version of the TV show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire!?’

Such stories however present us (both Indian and foreign audiences) with a somewhat conservative vision of Indian society. In such renditions, the poor are reduced to the ‘other’, and emancipation and redemption are contingent upon escaping their social context, which is characterized by hate, crime and backbiting by the poor themselves. Consequently, liberation can only be achieved through unlikely methods and only by individuals whose movement upwards reaffirms the structures of domination.