The Million Dollar Question: How Do You Sell English on the Silver Screen? - A Visio-Linguistic Analysis of Slumdog Millionaire

IntroductionYears ago authors Barnet and Cavanagh portended: "The new world economy rests largely on global bazaars" (15). Today, India is a major economic promontory in the voyage of western filmic expansion into the East. As a "movie-mad country" (Chopra 18), with its own yearly production output of "over a thousand movies in Mumbai alone" (Beaufoy, Boyle and Feld 142) - numerically translated as "3 billion movie tickets per annum" (Lakshmi 8) - Bollywood unlike Hollywood boasts a 13% increase in movie ticket sales since 2007 (Chopra 18). Film scholars have for years tracked the so-called "economic moribundity" (Cowen 73) of European cinema. In contrast, "India's film industry, now at $2.2 billion, is estimated to grow to 3.3 billion by 2013" (Lakshmi 8). Cowen claims that the "English language, combined with America's role as a world leader, has strengthened Hollywood exports" (75). In India, the linguistic "legacy of English" (Bhatia and Baumgardner 384) makes the economic venture eastward into "the prized Indian market" (Tyrrell 260) a viable option as increasing economic research confirms that "the global market has generated more dependable returns than the local market" (Dissanayake 405). Esteemed linguist, David Crystal calls India "a linguistic paradise" (173) with "a special place in the record books" as a country with "the largest English-speaking population in the world" (173) at "350 million speakers" (173). This figure is "far more than the combined English-speaking populations of Britain and the USA" (173). Two decades ago in a comprehensive analysis of Hollywood versus Bollywood, Tyrrell claimed that "Hollywood has not defined what makes a film work in India" (260). Twenty years later, Slumdog Millionaire has demonstrated that when it comes to "the battle of the dream factories" (Tyrrell 260), "Hollywood's colonization of Bollywood" (Tyrrell 272) can indeed be achieved via a twin strategy of linguistic and cultural syncretism.The filmic genius of Slumdog Millionaire lies in the meticulous manner in which the hybridity of language and lore of both West and East have been glocalized to suit "the viewing tastes and linguistic preferences" (Bhatia and Baumgardner 380) of cross-continental audiences. Film critics are unanimous in their praise: "Slumdog Millionaire is the film world's first globalized masterpiece" (Morgenstern 1) raves the economically savvy Wall Street Journal. How did Slumdog Millionaire do it? The answer lies in the innovative use of verbal and visual English as cinematic strategy - as "an aural and visual spectacle" (Garwood 174) within the "diegetic space of film" (Garwood 179). Visual English consistently dominates screen-space in Slumdog. The film's economic and aesthetic genius rests on the nuanced, multiplex manner in which visual English "functions in the ever-evolving techno-aesthetic space of cinema" (Dissanayake 406) - as a filmic device which reflects at the very same time as it sustains a place for global English evanescence. The effective incorporation of tokenized Hindi in the movie as a vehicle for highlighting verbal and visual English is accomplished in and through a plethora of potent filmic strategies including but not limited to: spotlighting, achieved via filmic prominence given to visual English; synchronization, accomplished via a savvy glocalization of tokenized local linguistic content in the service of linguistically dominant global interests; spectacularization, realized via an intelligent use of selective adaptation strategies which simultaneously translate and transliterate "Indian figurehead" novel-writing and music-making potential into globally appealing cultural products, and finally, syncretization - filmmaking strategies which "utilize an economic and cultural dynamic that combines both commercialism and creativity" (Cowen 101) - four cultural production strategies which use the local to sell the global. All four strategies are detailed below. …