Bachchan slams into Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle's movie Slumdog Millionaire may have picked up four Golden Globes and 11 Bafta nominations, making it a front-runner for the Oscars next month, but not everyone is won over by its charms. Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's top actor, has voiced bitter complaints about the film and its crass portrayal of India in what appears to be a very bad case of sour grapes.

Writing on his blog, Bachchan, who is univerally know in his native country as the Big B, says that "if SM [Slumdog Millionaire] projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations."

Bachchan, 66, adds that an Indian director making a western-style film might not meet with the attention that has been lavished on Danny Boyle, who also directed Trainspotting: "It's just that the SM idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative globe recognition. The other would perhaps not."

These are strong words, especially as Bachchan himself features in the movie. The young protagonist, played by British teenager Dev Patel, is obsessed with the actor and in an early scene is swims through a pool of excrement to get his autograph.

Bachchan is also angry at the critical praise that Indian arthouse cinema received down the years, to the detriment of the type of brash, all-dancing, all-singing Bollywood movies in which he appears. He picks out the “adulation given” to the legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray at such film festivals as Cannes and Berlin, where there is never any appreciation for the “entertaining mass-oriented box-office blockbusters” made in Bollywood.

One reason being put forward for Bachchan's caustic words is that he was the original TV host of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But instead of casting him in the role, which is central to Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle chose his rival star Anil Kapoor, who puts in one of the best performances of the film.

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