Controversial movie inspires more ‘slum tours’ of Mumbai

I’ve never really understood how movies inspire people to travel, but for better or worse, they do seem to — consider what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand or what Australia is supposed to do for Australian tourism.

Both of those cases probably fall in the “better” category. Vagabonds might not be the target audience, but if it gets a few people out on the foreign roads, that’s generally a good thing.

But there’s also the more disturbing scenario, such as the film Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film about an orphaned street child in Mumbai who overcomes hardship, wins a fortune on a game show and gets the girl of his dreams. The film recently picked up ten Oscar nods and has proved a hit with western audiences.

I haven’t seen the film, so I withhold judgment (though I will say it sounds pretty cliche), but the Telegraph reports that Millionaire is inspiring an uptake in westerners who want to join one of Mumbai’s already-controversial “slum tours.”

Couple that with a film that Indian’s have called “a white man’s imagined India,” adding that it’s “not quite snake charmers, but it’s close ,” and you might begin to see why many Indians are a bit upset about Millionaire.

But as with thorny travel questions — like, should you go to Burma? — the reality is never as cut-and-dried as we’d like it to be. Your first instinct is probably to see the slum tours as exploitive and a “very bad thing.”

But the Telegraph’s Nigel Richardson actually went on a slum tour and reports:

A television programme damned them as “poverty tourism” and a government tourism minister threatened to have them shut down, although they are run perfectly legally, with the blessing of the local police as well as residents.

But they are conducted with exemplary sensitivity, and the cooperation of the residents, and 80 per cent of profits are donated to local charities. Most importantly, they certainly did not feel exploitative to me. In fact I found touring a place like Dharavi to be an education.

It’s hard to outright condemn the film, the slum tours it might be inspiring or the people going to either. After all, the idea of seeing the slums of Mumbai isn’t in itself a bad thing, it all depends on the context in which it’s presented. If Richardson’s portrayal reflects the typical slum tour, then perhaps they aren’t as bad as I’ve been imagining them.

I’m curious how Vagablogging readers feel about slum tours and other controversial travel ideas — is it exploitive? And if it is exploitive, is it possibly still worth it if the tours inspires participants to help, or at least opens their eyes? Or is it simply too ethically murky to judge?

[via World Hum, photo by Wen-Yan King, Flickr]