The Indian public may not have seen Slumdog Millionaire yet but already the nation has taken the most talked-about British-made film in years to its heart.

After its triumph at the Golden Globes, the film, set in Mumbai, has unleashed a torrent of national pride across the sub-continent. “Indian tale catches global fancy,” the Hindustan Times trumpeted. “The Slumdog Has Its Day,” said The Times of India.

The biggest plaudits were reserved for A. R. Rahman, Bollywood’s best-known composer, who became the first Indian to win a Golden Globe, for the best original score. The film also scooped three other awards — for best director, best film and best adapted screenplay.

In the process it has become the movie to beat at the forthcoming Academy Awards. The film’s distributors are predicting that Slumdog will prove a massive popular success when it is released in India on January 23, largely because of its Bollywood credentials.

Vijay Singh, head of Fox Star Studios India, which is distributing the film in India, said: “It’s an exceptional film, it has Indian emotion much like a Bollywood film.”

Indian audiences are known for their love of melodramatic musicals but it is hard to say to which genre Slumdog, which is directed by Danny Boyle, belongs.

The plot, based on the bestselling novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, a former Indian diplomat, tells the story of Jamal Malik, a dirt-poor orphan who wins the country’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Jamal, played by the British actor Dev Patel, draws on his experiences, many of them shockingly brutal, to answer the game show’s questions, aiming to stay on air for as long as possible in an attempt 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. Yet, in terms of revenue per screen, the film broke all records when it was released in America in November. The Wall Street Journal described it as “the film world’s first globalised masterpiece”.

Its biggest challenge, however, might be reaching Indian audiences. Slumdog, which is graphic in its depictions of the nation’s darker side, has yet to make it past India’s notoriously prickly censors. Nevertheless, the distributors have prepared a Hindi-dubbed version in an attempt to crack the Indian mainstream. It remains to be seen whether the film is popular among the slum-dwellers, who make up half of Mumbai’s population of 18 million. In recent years, multiplexes, with about 600 screens between them, have sprung up in cities, catering to the wealthy middle class. These account for about half the cinema industry’s revenue and are where the 200 prints of Slumdog initially being released in India will be shown.

Then there are 7,000 traditional single-screen cinemas — called “talkies”. Known for their conservative tastes, there had been concerns that these audiences might find Slumdog too avant-garde. In the past fortnight, however, a trailer that emphasised the film’s masala (spicy) credentials has persuaded experts that it is poised for success. “It looks to have emotion, drama, songs, dance, romance: all the trappings of Bollywood,” Taran Adarsh, a leading critic, said. “The single screens would be crazy not to show it.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010