The phrase “poverty porn” spread across the Indian media as commentators nodded in agreement or shook their heads even before the film premiered in its native Mumbai and India could (legally) watch it.

A group of the city’s slum dwellers, including children, protested against the word “dog”. A social activist filed a defamation case in Patna. And this week, hundreds of slum dwellers in Bihar’s capital ransacked a movie theatre demanding the title be changed.

So, is it really “poverty porn” for the Westerner’s delectation? Are beatings, torture, and the maiming of street beggars a sick form of adult exotica?

Perhaps the question can be rephrased: does a morbid fascination with the suffering of others find a place in art and is “Slumdog” are a striking example of this?

Be it a film on the Nazi holocaust, or based on crime, or a painful examination of the horrors of drug abuse (Trainspotting?), viewers can gawk at the world’s dirty underbelly whether or not they would describe themselves as pain perverts.

But the film has caused real offense in some parts. According to some bloggers Slumdog is just every scrap of dirt picked up from every corner and piled up together to try and hit back at the growing might of India. And the awards almost seem like a sadistic effort to show the world — look we knew that this was India, and these are the slumdogs we are outsourcing our jobs to.

Some also opine that the film crosses the line into stereotype in a way that “stinks of racial arrogance” and is designed to undermine India’s inevitable rise on the world stage.

The director of “Slumdog”, Danny Boyle, is up for an Academy Award. But some panned the film on its own perceived demerits and said it does not deserve 10 Oscar nominations — three for music director A.R. Rahman will do. The three people I went to see it with were underwhelmed.

Some saw the film as trite and inconsistent. For example, the hero’s sudden knowledge of English after his stint as a guide at the Taj Mahal came under scrutiny, especially since it allowed Boyle to shoot large chunks of the film in his native tongue.

Whether or not a moviegoer wants to spend his money on a film set in slums seems a matter of taste, but with more expected protests in India, the controversy has not died down.