How Apple TV's Shantaram is oblivious of its white-saviour complex ?

It’s hard to review a sprawling 12-episode mini-series – amounting to approximately 12 hours of television – based on the preview screeners of its first four episodes alone. Especially if it’s adapted from an internationally acclaimed 936-page novel. Gregory David Roberts’ quasi-memoir Shantaram, published in 2003, was a proper cultural moment. It went viral before the age of social media; every other college student owned a copy, with some even seeking the company of the ‘local’ author himself in the bylanes of Colaba. I remember associating the sight of the hardcover with my own first year in Mumbai, the metropolis at the center of the Shantaram story. In a way, the greedy scale of the narrative – a dizzying first-person cocktail of fact, fiction, action, crime, war, humanity, redemption, love – echoed the genre-fluid density of the city itself. Reading about a foreigner who came to India to find himself wasn’t new, but reading about a foreigner who escaped to Bombay to lose himself was.

Yet, it’s not hard to get a mini-series like Shantaram from a third of its running time. (The first three episodes debut on October 14th, followed by a weekly run till mid-December). In terms of plot, it’s only the setting of the stage: An Australian fugitive flees to 1980s Bombay for a fresh start with a fake passport (Dale is now a Kiwi named Lindsay or Lin-baba), befriends shady expats and kind locals, falls in spy-film-like love with a Swiss-French wheeler-dealer, lives in the slums, and is only just starting to engage with the underworld – the first act of a two-decade-long journey. But in terms of tone, Shantaram is tragically familiar. The Slumdog Millionaire syndrome is all too visible. Viewed through the lens of a distinctly Western gaze (the creators are not Indian), retro Bombay is presented as a melange of Middle Eastern exoticism and South Asian colour.

It’s all quite artificial – the people, the flashbacks, the conversations, the locations, the filth, the deep voiceover. Lin’s stock Indian friend, a guide named Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), punctuates the terms “fatafat” and “yaar” so that global viewers can feel like tourists who aren’t entirely alienated by the plurality of Indian culture. A brothel called The Palace is built like something straight out of an Arabian desert; a Mondegar-like Irani cafe-bar is lit like a cosplay set in a school contest named Colonial Hangover. A Colaba apartment feels like a rustic East European space tucked away in a park at the corner of Manhattan. The slums – allegedly a version of Mumbai’s Navy Nagar hutments – sound too composed. It’s not so much the look; it’s the spirit that lacks authenticity in such productions.

A dead giveaway is the language of the ‘bustling’ in the background of busy frames. We see very few brown humans in any space that’s not the slums – the bar, the markets, the streets. The ones we do see are always doing something, like movie extras might when they’re instructed to look and move a certain way. A ‘warm’ country like India is very difficult to reproduce on screen – the visual chaos, the jostling of noises, the muddiness of the sky and heat, even the manner of walking – which is why shows like Shantaram (or even the recent The Serpent) struggle to transcend that curated exterior. The story of a foreigner trying to blend into an environment like this requires a sense of physical conflict. The discomfort is never apparent in Shantaram, mostly because the film-making is designed to propel its protagonist from one experience to another.

I like Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam as a performer. Other than being a dead ringer for the late Heath Ledger, he also possesses a sparkling sense of wonder in his eyes – one that naturally lends itself to the role of a refugee nursing a love-hate relationship with the idea of freedom. But Hunnam’s casting in and as Shantaram is sort of a deal breaker, for no real fault of his. I’ve nothing against good-looking actors in general, but Hunnam’s inherent charm locates the protagonist in firm White Saviour territory. This wasn’t a term back when the novel came out, but the series does itself no favours by turning a complex individual – a former heroin addict and bank robber who is attracted to darkness and danger – into a white hero and victim adopting a downtrodden place to distance himself from the past.

By the end of the fourth episode, Lin has already transformed into a global version of the upper-class Brahminical/male do-gooder often portrayed by superstars like Amitabh Bachchan (Aarakshan, Pink, Jhund) in Bollywood movies. He is driven by classic White Guilt, donating both his time and money to hapless slumdwellers who need his saving. Even if I were to intellectualize his quest – by believing that Lin is rescuing to be rescued – it’s the simplifying of his personality that stands out like a sore thumb. The narrative seems to be blaming everyone but Lin for the messes he keeps getting into – including the jailbreak, bank robbery in Australia, the murky company in Bombay – and subconsciously paints the foreigner as a misunderstood man of virginal intent. This dilutes the very concept of Shantaram, robbing it of nuance, greyness, instinct, emotional continuity. At no point does it feel like he’s even capable of causing harm to anyone; he protects an old mate, counsels a new junkie, rebuilds a village, becomes its doctor, and flirts with the underbelly of the city for resources to heal ‘his’ people.

Lin is constantly seeking redemption, but Hunnam makes it seem like he’s also seeking attention – from not just the characters in the story, but from the story itself. The moment the narrative gets distracted from Lin and gets busy with the dealings of an Arab crimelord (Alexander Siddig) or the mysterious Carla (Antonia Desplat), Lin yanks it back by getting into some kind of moral or physical trauma. That’s not to say the source material is self-righteous; it’s the treatment that stops short of nominating Lin for the Nobel Peace Prize. Every other scene is replete with White guilt, as if to repeatedly say: He thought he had a short end of the stick until he met…Bombay. It’s not unusual for foreigners to be fuelled by sympathy and sudden spurts of humanitarian angst, but reducing the Shantaram arc to a cause-and-effect cycle of penance and sacrifice reeks of cultural condescension. The narrative might go through its high and low points over the next eight episodes. But it’s safe to say that this gaze won’t be going anywhere. I won’t be holding my breath either – mostly because Shantaram is all duty-free perfume.

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about.

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