Danny Boyle’s movie Slumdog Millionaire – rather oddly billed as “the feelgood movie of the year” – has five Critics’ Choice awards, four Golden Globes and 10 Oscar nominations; it is also currently topping the British box-office charts. Reviewers worldwide have, with a tiny handful of exceptions, heaped dazzling praise upon the film – praise that is, in my view, completely deserved.

But now the carping has started. On his blog, the revered Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan said that there was “anger by some on [the film’s] content” and noted that “the Slumdog Millionaire idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative Globe recognition. The others [Indian-made films dealing with India’s underbelly] would perhaps not”. He added that the movie could cause “pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots”. These comments were, inevitably, taken to mean that Bachchan saw some sort of injustice in a westerner winning acclaim for making a movie that arguably “exploited” India’s poor.

There was always the risk that Slumdog would be seen by some as merely tourist porn – something grim but uplifting, with amazing cinematography and beautiful colours. Something that would make western audiences feel better about their own lives but would also present the worrying plight of Mumbai’s street and slum children as surmountable through a combination of ambition and resourcefulness.

Both these qualities, unhelpfully, are seen by some in the West as hardwired into the Indian psyche; if you were a certain kind of person and followed that train of thought, you might conclude that poor Indian children don’t really need help since they’re basically crafty, hard-working darkies, and even those orphaned in riots and then captured and abused by sinister gang leaders, like the children in the film, somehow manage to wriggle out of the situation if they’re clever enough.

There’s also the question of whether said hard-working slum darkies (the vocab is okay – the darkies are my people) disporting themselves for the entertainment of fat, popcorn-stuffed western audiences isn’t a bit repulsive. In fact, an Indian slum-dweller is taking the film’s Indian stars to court over its portrayal of Mumbai’s shantytowns, while another activist is filing a suit demanding that its title be changed because he says the word “slumdog” is insulting. Ker-ching! Except, good luck to them, really – when people are that unimaginably poor, letting them win a bit in a lawsuit is almost an act of charity.

Bachchan has now tempered his original statements: he was, he says, merely reporting opinion, not expressing a personal view, and says he apologised to Danny Boyle in India last week. But his comments were widely reported and they paved the way for others, including some well-meaning white people, to express their discomfort at the film. Bishakha Dutta, a documentary film-maker who has made several films about Mumbai slums, said that Slumdog “[takes] each and every cliché there is about India and Mumbai. The result is a film that takes you from one horror to another, in a plot that is incredulously [sic] unbelievable”. In the UK, there was much blogging over the rightness or wrongness of a white man making a film about a country that wasn’t his and that reinforced – and then some – many prejudices western audiences might have about India in the first place.

The writer Nirpal Dhaliwal, who suggested that only a western director could have made Slumdog because Bollywood directors were “too blind to what India really is to deal with it”, got a lot of abuse for being an Oreo (brown on the outside, white within). There are Indian directors making films about “the real India”, apparently, whatever that is – with 1 billion-plus people, 28 states, 75% of people living on less than $2 a day, tens of thousands of street children in Mumbai alone and the world’s second-fastest-growing economy, there is an unimaginable number of variations. As platitudinous tourists are wont to comment: land of contrasts, innit.

What all of this really boils down to is the desire for a fair, non-exploitative representation of India, and the idea that, imaginatively, Indians “own” India, or their personal, entirely subjective idea of India, more than western people in general and Danny Boyle in particular. But nobody owns India, or Britain, or Venezuela – not even the people in it, and only the most reactionary imbecile would argue that only Brits should be allowed to make films about the grittier aspects of life in the UK, or that only people from Caracas should be allowed to express an opinion on Simon Bolivar, because any foreign eye is automatically bound to feast on pain and misery.

But why? I see no such creepy undertone in Slumdog – or in Shane Meadows’s This Is England, or in Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, or in Mathieu Kassovitz’s brilliant La Haine. Nor do I see it in novels about other countries written by non-natives: you’d have to be quite a strange person to find JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, to take one example, a piece of offensive postcolonial tourist porn.

Slumdog premiered in Mumbai last week to rave reviews and celebration. Anil Kapoor, who plays the quiz host in the film and grew up in a slum himself, said the movie would be “a terrific inspiration to kids around India . . . It’s a film of hope”. It’s also a film that has unblinkingly brought the plight and suffering of millions of children to a huge western audience, an audience that might otherwise have been forgiven for thinking that India was about elephants and curry and exotic photographic opportunities.

Slumdog’s greatest achievement is in combining a social conscience with pure entertainment. I can’t think of an equivalent mainstream film with such broad box-office appeal having come along in the past 10 years. And that’s what matters: Slumdog educates as it entertains – British and American audiences as well as Indian ones. That’s a fairly towering achievement, regardless of the colour of the skin of the bloke who made it, and that’s enough for me.

+ Jonathan Ross was back on telly on Friday, opening his show with the rather good line, “So, where were we?” He followed with yet another apology, saying he would be more aware of the “responsibility that comes with such a gift [the gift of being free to broadcast]”, and then he got on with his show, which featured no female guests.

I mentioned at the time of the furore/ collective madness/utterly weird spasm of national moralistic outrage (at a point when the news included horror in the Congo, the US presidential elections and the US Federal Reserve cutting interest rates to 1.5%) that Ross’s problem – which he shares with Russell Brand, who is currently on tour and using the whole Sachsgate hoo-ha as extremely funny material – wasn’t making one teeny little ill-advised telephone call broadcast on Radio 2. His Achilles heel was a sort of knee-jerk, leery, ogling misogyny that is not always comfortable to watch.

I still believe that this was, and remains, the BBC’s problem. Ross is how he is and is employed because he is him. Despite the forests’ worth of stuff written about him, Ross remains the most consistently watchable and entertaining “personality” the BBC has in its stable. Provided his bosses control his inbuilt “phwoar” reflex – I remember him once interviewing the Page 3 stunna Maria Whittaker, and you could practically see the strings of drool – we’ll all be happy.

Times Recommends

• We have kit and leadership. Let’s go
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal
• Conferences — what a waste of money