Bollywood has been extremely vocal on the subject of caste inequality. Sujata (1959) was directly inspired by Dr. Ambedkar’s treatise on the abolishment of the caste system. Sujata is a haunting, ever-renewable, ever-relevant meditation on blood ties and social inequality. Nutan won her Filmfare award for portraying the socio-economically backward orphan adopted by an upper-class couple, played by Tarun Bose and Sulochana. The mother can never bring herself to love Sujata as much as her own biological daughter, Rama.
When Sujata falls in love with an upper-caste Brahmin boy, played by Sunil Dutt, all hell breaks loose. This delicately drawn film, best remembered for Nutan’s nuanced class act (pun intended), could address Dr. Ambedkar’s thoughts and feelings directly. The sequence where Sujata sobs under Gandhiji’s statue in the pouring rain remains emblematic of the inequality that still rules our socio-political conscience. Sooraj Barjatya made a fluffy version of Sujata called Vivah, where Shahid Kapoor delivered every dialogue as if he didn’t want to wake up his wife.
Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen (1994) was the mother of cinema on oppression, subjugation, and caste politics. Bandit Queen remains a gut-wrenching experience 27 years after it was completed. Brutal in its critique of upper-caste arrogance, unsparing in its contempt for Brahminical superiority, and starkly candid in using rape as a tool of oppression and disempowerment, this film comes from a place of great anger. Shekhar admits he was seething in rage when he made Bandit Queen. His anger remains undiminished as he finds the privileged class in India flaunting its wealth in the face of the socio-economically backward classes.
Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1974) still remains a powerful treatise on class oppression. At a time when brutal oppression is a way of life, when a girl gets molested on the street by a mob while civilized society watches in mute submission, it’s befitting to remember the celebrated finale in Ankur, when after watching a mute-and-deaf peasant being whipped by a bratty Zamindar’s son, a little boy picks up a stone and hurls it at the glass windowpane of the oppressor. It was a decisive moment when Hindi cinema resolved to turn revolutionary.
Shabana Azmi, Sadhu Meher, and Anant Nag, all new to the movie camera, were brought in to play out a triangular drama where the peasantry gets a sensitive, heartbreaking treatment. Ankur, his directorial debut, remains to this day his most searing indictment of oppression set within an extended feudal system in Andhra Pradesh, where the Zamindari system is gone. Zamindars are no more. Though abolished, the feudal mindset lives on.
Carrying forward the tradition of cinema set in the poverty of the Indian heartland, Ankur took forward the feudal fable of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, though the language used to convey the sharp-cutting contours of socio-economic oppression in Ankur is far removed from the way Ray and Roy envisaged it. Outwardly, Ankur is an immensely tranquil film. The green stretches of land are barely able to hide the vast acres of pain and angst of a society built on inequality and injustice. Nothing has changed over the years. The seedling (Ankur) of social protest is still to grow into a powerful collective protest. Equality on every level is still a dream.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan is not an easy film to ingest. It sucks you into its world of characters doomed by caste and ruined by wrong choices. The main protagonists are played by Sanjay Mishra, Richa Chadha, and Vicky Kaushal, actors whose deep link with the middle class helps them to maneuver their characters in and out of the trauma and anguish that the underprivileged classes are perpetually subjected to. The caste system is smacked on its head before it proceeds to smack all of us in places where it hurts the most. The young lovers, played with unspoiled naturalness by Vicky Kaushal and Shweta Tripathi, build an atmosphere of lulling gentleness around the plot that shatters to bits as the script moves to a zone of unexpected explosion. Splintered lives shatter and mend in this penetrating portrait of lives lived on the edge. Compelling and devastating, Masaan marked the remarkable directorial debut of Neeraj Ghaywan. I wonder why he has not made another feature film since Masaan.
The great Satyajit Ray made only two Hindi films. One of them is Sadgati (1981), a little-seen television film, a scathing indictment of the caste system featuring Om Puri as a backward, disempowered laborer who goes to a Brahmin, played by Mohan Agashe (billed simply as ‘Brahmin’ in the credits), for financial help. The exploitation of the underprivileged class has never been more starkly portrayed. In the end, the Harijan simply collapses and dies of overwork. Caste exploitation couldn’t get any more blunt than this. Sadgati leaves with a ray of hope for the exploited. Pawn intended.
Anubhav Sinha’s stunning film Article 15 says a lot of things we don’t really want to hear about social discrimination in the cowbelt areas. Article 15 takes us to a dusty little town in Uttar Pradesh, where a sophisticated liberal cop (Ayushmann Khurrana) joins duty and immediately stumbles onto a horrific caste crime whereby two girls are gang-raped and hung from a tree. A third girl is missing. Sinha imparts to the search for the girl a ‘thriller’ element that in no way over-dramatizes the film’s incessantly grim mood. The director has no songs even in the background because there is nothing to sing about. Not now. Not here. In telling this hideously messy tale, Sinha makes no effort to spare us the details. The caste system and gender discrimination are so deeply embedded in the social fabric of rural India that men, or at least a section of them, feel entitled to teach women a lesson if they don’t comply. Listen to the casual, almost blasé tone in which the criminal tells the cop, Ayan Ranjan, why the women they raped and killed so brutally had to be taught a lesson.
I heard the same unrepentant tone in the Netflix series Delhi Crime, when one of the rapists tells the cop the girl had to be put in her place. Nothing has changed for the underdog. And it probably never will.
