Serve the servants: why cinema loves to play with class stereotypes

“India is two countries in one,” our hero Balram observes in The White Tiger: there is an India of light, preserve of the rich and powerful; and an India of darkness, where millions toil in poverty. The White Tiger is a vivid study of caste and servility, as Balram (Adarsh Gourav) ingratiates his way into the service of a wealthy family, until he realises he is consigned to reside in the darkness. “And don’t believe for a second there’s a million-rupee gameshow you can win to get out of it,” he says, in a dig at that other fantasy of Indian class mobility, Slumdog Millionaire. There is rarely a magical mechanism by which people are lifted out of poverty, but the movies are often happy to peddle that notion.

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We would be kidding ourselves if we thought The White Tiger’s class/caste analysis only applied to India. Elsewhere, it is either better disguised or presented as a fact of life, especially when it comes to stories about servants. The Hollywood equivalent to Slumdog would be a Cinderella fantasy such as Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez’s lowly hotel cleaner is whisked into the light by senator Ralph Fiennes. Nor is there much difference between Balram and, say, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves, or the dozens of other downstairs domestics in British period fare such as Gosford Park or even the recent Bridgerton. They might detest their overlords but they know their place – usually serving tea in the background.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The White Tiger readily brings to mind The Servant, Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter’s subversive 1963 study of a sly manservant (Dirk Bogarde) who steadily takes over the Chelsea home of his upper-crust employer (James Fox). Similar tales abound in European cinema: Losey’s follow-up The Go-Between for one, or Diary of a Chambermaid – following a young woman’s ordeal at the hands of the haute bourgeoisie. Jean Renoir filmed it in 1946; Luis Buñuel turned in a more unsettling version in 1964; there was also a 2015 remake.

France’s infamous Papin sisters – maids who murdered their mistress in 1933 – inspired a host of works including Jean Genet’s play The Maids (Glenda Jackson and Susannah York starred in the 1975 film), Sister My Sister, and Claude Chabrol’s terrific La Cérémonie, starring Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert. Then there is that masterclass in British servility The Remains of the Day, in which Anthony Hopkins’s terminally repressed butler rues a lifetime of loyalty to a Nazi-sympathising toff (Fox again).

Many of these stories are conveniently set in the past, which makes The White Tiger a dangerous modern rarity, although last year’s Parasite struck a very similar chord. Let’s not pretend the gap between the haves and have-nots has narrowed. Maybe the movies have some catching up to do.