Mr Alangur, the middle-aged owner of one of the scores of illegal backroom cinemas found among the teeming alleyways of Dharavi, Asia's biggest slum, considered the question carefully before answering.

"No", he said, finally, scratching at his string vest, he had not heard of Slumdog Millionaire, the most-talked about British-made film in years, which is set in his very neighbourhood in Mumbai and won four Golden Globes – including the gong for best picture – in Los Angeles last night.

"Is it an action movie?" he asked, picking at his red, beetle nut-stained teeth with a fingernail. "We mostly like action films. If it's got lots of action, well we might consider showing it." He gestured inside his tiny "lobby", to where a small boy was pasting onto the mottled plaster a freshly photocopied poster for Blade 2, the Hollywood vampire film from 2002. "That's what we like."

In truth, it is hard to say to which genre Slumdog, which is directed by Danny Boyle, the Briton behind Trainspotting, belongs. The plot, based on the best-selling novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, a former Indian diplomat, tells the story of Jamal Malik, a dirt-poor orphan from Mumbai who stuns India when he reaps success on the country's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?". Jamal, played by the British actor Dev Patel, draws on his life experiences, many of them shockingly brutal, to answer the game show's questions, aiming to stay on air for as long as possible in a bid to win back the love of his life.

There is a song-and-dance routine and a third of the dialogue is in Hindi with English subtitles – hardly the stuff of your average Hollywood blockbuster. Yet, in terms of revenue per screen, the film broke all records when it was released in the US in November.

Inventing a new term in its honour, The Wall Street Journal called Slumdog "the film world's first globalised masterpiece".

The film won every award for which it was nominated at last night's Golden Globes – best film, best director, best adapted screenplay and best original score. The clean sweep confirmed it as this year's Oscar front-runner.

But its biggest challenge might just be reaching Indian audiences.

Slumdog is due to be released in India on Jan 23, but has yet to make it past the country's notoriously prickly censors. Other "edgy" Oscar contenders have been cut to shreds while negotiating the same hurdle.

At the censors' insistance, the "Indianised" version of Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's gay love masterpiece of 2005, a film that explored the complex romantic and sexual relationships of two men in the American midwest through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, became the tale of two guys who go on a camping trip. That was it.

Nevertheless, Slumdog's distributors have prepared a Hindi-dubbed version in an attempt to crack the Indian mainstream. It now awaits to be seen whether the film will draw the same plaudits from the slums – which home half of Mumbai's population of 18 million people -- as it has from Hollywood's swooning critics.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of cinema theatre in India, each corresponding to a different portion of society. In recent years, a handful of western-style multiplexes, with about 600 screens between them, have sprung up in the largest cities, catering to the wealthy middle class. Despite hosting less than a tenth of the country's screens, they account for about half the cinema industry's revenue.

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