Swarup promotes India to audiences

Indian bureaucrats — even suave, articulate ones in the foreign service — are trained to be self-effacing, but Vikas Swarup, author of the novel Q&A on which Slumdog Millionaire is based, has camera flashguns pop in his face wherever he goes. “I’m not used to it,” he says, but he’s using the exposure to tell audiences everywhere to travel to India and witness first-hand the “tremendous vibrancy there, and the successful fusion of the traditional and the modern”. 

In an interaction with DNA in Hong Kong on Saturday, Swarup said he couldn’t agree with the criticism that Q&A depicted a “dark side” of India or that it “celebrated poverty”. In fact, he said, the book’s message is “a positive one – the triumph of the underdog.” Slums, he says, “only provide the backdrop for a compelling human story. Eventually, the image the films leaves in viewers’ minds is not of the filth of the slums but of triumph of the human spirit”. 

Swarup, who is India’s deputy high commissioner in South Africa, says he wrote the novel to make the point that knowledge isn’t the preserve of the educated, but that even those from the working class have “street knowledge” — as opposed to “book knowledge”. “I’m not telling anyone not to get an education, but it’s also true that the greatest lessons in life come not from books, but from life.” “I also wanted to show that where you come from is not as important as where you’re going,” says Swarup.

The adapted screenplay of the film “is faithful to the soul of my novel” — as screenwriter Simon Beaufoy had promised, and the few changes that were made were required to cater to the different medium of film. “Thematically, the biggest difference is that my book is about luck: throughout, the protagonist Ram Mohammad Thomas is creating his own luck. In the film, right from the first frame, it’s about destiny.” 

Swarup’s second novel Six Suspects was published last year. He will begin work on the third  “once the current media scrutiny ends”. “It may be set outside India.” He’s not saying anything  more for now.