Slumdog Millionaire's Bollywood Ancestors by Amitava Kumar

Slumdog Millionaire has a pedigree. Its director, Danny Boyle, says there are at least three Bollywood films that inspired him directly. Those films were themselves influenced by a long family tree that stretches back to the last days of the nineteenth century.

Here, then, is a list of Slumdog’s ten most flamboyant and influential Bollywood ancestors:

Black Friday (2004). This film, by young director Anurag Kashyap depicts the March 1993 bomb blasts that tore apart Bombay (as Mumbai used to be called). It was based on a book by journalist S. Hussain Zaidi and filmed in an edgy, realistic style. A famous sequence from the film, a 12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum, is mimicked by Danny Boyle in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire, where truant slum-kids take the place of Black Friday’s militants.

Satya (1998) a.k.a The Truth. This film was also cited by Boyle as an inspiration, as was The Company (2002). Both offer slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld. Both films were directed by Ram Gopal Varma, a director with a fine taste for brutality and urban violence. The screenplay for Satya was co-written by Saurabh Shukla (who plays a policeman named Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire) and Anurag Kashyap, who directed Black Friday; with its intense rhythm and captivating performances, Satya instantly became a contemporary classic in India....