"White Tiger": More questions than answers

Watched "White Tiger" (Netflix 2021) last night. Disclosures --Aravind Adiga is my cousin's wife's nephew. While the film was enjoyable it also seemed typical of a new genre of representations of India that appeal to a global audience with social justice aspirations (eg. "Slum Dog Millionaire"). I am reminded of similar and select presentations of life in the Indian subcontinent by English colonial missionaries and bureaucrats to a captive audience in England as a means of justifying British imperialism and colonization. See, for example the "Papers Relating to East India Affairs, viz Hindoo Widows and Voluntary Immolations" published by the House of Commons in London between 1797 and 1830. Are films like these just a newer version of viewing the other as "savage," intriguing, and exotic? Added to this, Adiga is a high class/ caste privileged Indian writing about the struggles of oppressed. Is he an Indian version of Kathryn Stockett, author of "The Help" (2009)? Is Adiga aspiring to be (or has he co-opted for his own financial gain) the voice of the subaltern? Can the same be said of me and my work in my CWRU class "Bollywood and Social Justice"? While these questions are good ones, one that I am troubled by (especially after the recent insurrection and violence in DC), is violence ever a justifiable means for instituting social change? And when resorted to by the oppressed, does it merely confirm the stereotypes set by the privileged that the oppressed are brutal, wild, and undomesticated, and, consequently, less than human? Great questions. No answers. Film was worth watching, if only to stimulate discussion about these issues.