Indian wealthy under fire for cruelty to servants

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In all the thousands of glitzy Bollywood films one character is rarely found: the driver consumed with hatred for his stingy master who makes fun of his accent, dress sense and body odour.

Yet millions of maids, drivers, and servants slave for rich Indians every day without anyone knowing what they think about their dreadful living conditions and unkind bosses.

Now a new film and a prize-winning novel have changed things - brutally laying bare what the poor feel about the rich, but never dare to say out loud.

Raja Menon's film Barah Aana ("Short-Changed") and Aravind Adiga's novel White Tiger are searing indictments of how affluent Indians behave towards their domestic staff.

They offer, for the first time, a provocative insight into how the "have-nots" perceive the new India - a fast-changing and rich society where wealth is flaunted and where there is no place for them.

Mr Adiga shows a wealthy couple setting up Balram, their illiterate driver from an impoverished village, to take the rap for a crime the wife commits.

Drunk after a night out, she insists on driving. When she hits and kills a beggar child who runs across the road, the family compel Balram to sign a confession saying that he was behind the wheel.

Balram's life is already difficult. While he ferries his master around Delhi with bags stuffed with millions of rupees to use as bribes, he is castigated for losing a five rupee coin in the car.

A wide-eyed Balram sees the immense wealth and opportunity in the city – the malls, restaurants and hotels - and knows that he can never have access to any of it. Even walking into a shopping mall requires mustering up courage.

"What is astonishing, given the mad disparities of wealth, is the phenomenally low level of crime by servants," said Mr Adiga whose novel is on the long list for this year's Man Booker prize and is hotly tipped to make it to the final short list next week.

Servants often endure cruelty and indignities. Having cooked, cleaned, mopped, polished, washed, baked, dusted, and ironed all day, seven days a week for a monthly salary of 2,500 rupees (£30), if a maid asks for a day off, the reaction is frequently one of outrage.

At meal times, "memsahib" doles out the food onto their plates lest the servants eat too much. Families dine in restaurants while making the "ayah" or nanny (taken along to mind the children) stand beside their table.

"You haven't really had films depicting the world from a servant's point of view," said film critic Parsa Venkateshwar Rao. "Even if you have a driver as a main character, he turns out later to be a prince."

Departing from tradition, Mr Menon's film takes a brutal look at how the poor in Bombay, a teeming metropolis full of extremes, cope with their everyday problems.

When Yadav tries to borrow money – the equivalent of what a family would spend on a pizza - from the tenants in the building where he works, they brush him off without a thought for the fact that he needs it for his son's medical treatment.

Mr Menon, who plans to release his film in the UK, said: "Some employers here don't even call drivers by their name. They'll just summon him with 'Driver'!" But I'm seeing small reactions to these indignities. People want to be treated as human."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...Barah-Aana.html

[maya62 7]

A touch of realism in Bollywood... how refreshing!

Ever since reading a couple of books by Rohinton Mistry (which I could not put down), I have been interested in the caste system in both India and Nepal (my husband's country, and very similar in many ways). It is supposedly illegal in both countries, but still very much a part of everyday life. The caste system, cruelty of the wealthy perpetrated against the poor, and the whole chai pani thing are just like a bad car wreck that one can't look away from...

There is a lot of this sort of cruelty in Nepal, too. The only video I've seen that was made by and about my husband's ethnic group has a plot theme of injust treatment by upper caste people. No wonder the lower caste people flocked to the Maoist revolution in droves.

And just recently, the new Maoist govt has made indentured servitude (sort of like sharecropping I think) illegal. It remains to be seen how the govt will provide for these people who may now find themselves landless and unemployed unless land reform is also in place simultaneously.

And I learned recently that there are more enslaved people alive today than ever before in the history of humankind. It is a smaller proportion of the total population, but the total population is so vast nowadays, that even this smaller segment is a larger population of enslaved people than ever before.

Maya