Will Anuja’s brilliance transform her life?
In 1988, Mira Nair directed her first feature film, Salaam Bombay!, a drama built around the lives of Mumbai’s street kids and ragpickers. Soon after, Nair started a nonprofit called Salaam Baalak Trust in Delhi, to support kids like the ones she depicted in her film. Cut to 2025: Sajda Pathan, a 9-year-old girl who was rescued from the streets of Delhi by Salaam Baalak Trust, plays the title role in Anuja, a 21-minute Hindi film that has been nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category.
The award ceremony is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on March 2, 2025.
Written and directed by Adam J. Graves, Anuja is backed by heavyweights like Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Mindy Kaling and Guneet Monga, among others.
In the film, Sajda’s character (Anuja) and her older sister (Palak) — played by Bharatnatyam dancer Ananya Shanbhag — are slum dwellers who work for an exploitative garment merchant who represents just one face in what is a vast, ugly network of child labor in India.
It’s a simple plot based on their struggle to break out of the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, hunger and illiteracy, and to find the road that leads to social mobility and freedom from oppression.
Anuja has a high IQ and a real inclination for mathematics. Aware of her talents, Palak wants to do her best to send her little sister to school. A well meaning social worker spots potential in her and invites her to take an exam that could help put her on the path to education. But, also aware of her intelligence, the aforesaid garment dealer — symbolic of all the negative forces that have the power to keep Anuja in the clutches of poverty — wants to keep her back at his factory and use her skills to grow his business.
Will she heed the good guy’s word and take the exam that could change her life? Or will she stay back and work for the bad guy? The film doesn’t answer that question, but allows the audience to hope.
This is Sajda’s second film; she made her acting debut in a 2023 film called The Braid, directed by Laetitia Colombani. Before that, she lived a life of abject poverty; as her director Adam J. Graves heartbreakingly recounts in interviews, she used to beg outside a Hanuman temple in Delhi before someone from Salaam Baalak Trust came forth to help her.
“Poor India” needs to go out of fashion
Looking at Anuja in the light of its Oscar nomination, it’s hard not to think of what I have come to call ‘the Slumdog Millionaire syndrome,’ which packages the worst side of Indian society in the best cinematic style, in the hope that an international jury will love it. Hand on heart, to me it’s the ultimate productization of poverty.
We all remember the Chinese tourist in Munna Bhai MBBS, who, only interested in photographing what he believes is “real India,” tells Arshad Warsi’s Circuit, “I want poor people, hungry people…” Or the scene in Gully Boy in which a chirpy group of foreign tourists comes to survey the slums of Mumbai; when Ranveer Singh’s Murad raises a palm to shield himself from the flash of a white man’s camera, the subtext is clear. This is a formula that needs to go out of fashion.
But only a change in real life statistics can make that happen. I hope the film’s popularity helps organizations like Salaam Baalak Trust, and others like it, change the destinies of children like Sajda, who pretty much plays her former self in Anuja. Thanks to the film, her future looks bright.
If an Oscar can catalyze that for the millions of Sajdas out there, then so be it.
Anuja is now streaming on Netflix.