Narisha Reddy
Professor Gohar Siddiqui
English 2250 - 01
Intertextuality in Slumdog Millionaire
Scenes: First question and back-story
Slumdog Millionaire is a film adapted by the novel, Q&A (2005) written by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup. The film tells a story of a young boy named Jamal Malik who lived in the slums of Mumbai, India. While he was a tea server at a call center, he ended up on the Indian TV show version of a British TV show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? On the show he is asked a series of questions in which he correctly answers all of them. Because he gets so many questions right the police are suspicious that he is cheating. As a result, Jamal is taken to the police office and tortured into telling how he cheated. However, when the police officers replay each question, Jamal explains to them how he knew the answers with flashbacks that end up being linked to different key events in his life. Throughout this film there are many examples of intertextuality.
Intertextuality is when some text makes a reference to another text. In the movie Slumdog Millionaire, intertextuality is used to reference Hindi Cinema and the original TV show, Kaun Banega Cororepati. The scene that I will analyze in this paper is the scene where Jamal is in the hot seat of the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and he is asked his first question. The scene then goes onto a flashback to his childhood and unreels how he knows the answer to the question “Who was the star in the 1973 hit film Zanjeer?”
The first example of intertextuality in this scene is the name of the TV show Kaun Banega Cororepati, which translated in English is Who Wants to be a Millionaire. For Indians who watch Hindi TV channels, they are familiar with the show KBC and the setting of the show in the movie resembles the actual TV show. On the other hand, audiences that do not