Journal of Indian Cinema

Tag: Dalit Cinema

  • Violence: a Rite of ‘Dalit Identity’ Discourse?

    Violence: a Rite of ‘Dalit Identity’ Discourse?

    “Idhu namma kaalam. Ezhundhu vaa!”

    (lit. “This is our time. Arise & Arrive”)

    Dialogue from Pa. Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai, which revolves around boxing, a bloody, violent sport and identity of clan prestige.

     

    Mahatma Gandhi epitomised non-violence as a potent tool to express one’s strong dissension against injustice. His peaceful protests against the brutal force unleashed by the mighty British Raj to cow down citizens into servility and submission ultimately won India her freedom. It is now nearly 125 years since that child from Porbandar, the young lawyer from South Africa, rose to singularly take on the mantle of leading India to independence. Answering violence with peaceful, pacifist protest, dialogue and reasoning, affirmative action, rather than by baton for baton and bullet for bullet, Gandhi epitomised what non-violence and civil disobedience can do to unreasoning powerful State authority and its venal, brutal ways.

    It would have been great if our blue blood, modern day young and aspiring film directors took lessons from India’s painful past and gave wings to it in their works of art as they bring to centre stage of public discourse the various ills that still dog the Indian society. However, that is not to be. Filmmaker after filmmaker, in recent times, with wanton disregard to the fact that violence only begets violence, have been celebrating violence as if it were a virtue and their birth right.

    Vicious, vituperative violence is being extolled in film after film as a legitimate form of registering the filmmaker’s displeasure at how the marginalised and underprivileged, especially the Dalits, are being treated in society. Dalit-oriented films have become the staple fodder to draw unsuspecting crowds of late. So much so that every second or third film that graces the movie marquee today, be it at traditional single theatres or streaming platforms, invariably revolves around championing the cause of the much-abused Dalit minority.

    While one does not dispute their legitimate desire to present the problems that have been haunting the marginalised ilk since eons even to this day, what is problematic is the way these directors advocate violence as a necessary and inevitable recourse to protect one’s identity and also earn respect in society. Bikas Mishra correctly avers, “the politics of identity – caste – are central… Things have to be destroyed and demolished for a new world to emerge.” And there is a proper /better way to do it. In the recent past, there have been films such as Chauranga, Court, Fandry, Sairat, Masaan, Anhey Ghore Da Daan, Papilio Buddha, Pariyerum Perumal, and Mandela that capture the humiliation and discontent in the lives of the marginalised and underprivileged sections in a much more humane, subtler, and sensitive manner.

    Currently, particularly in the cinema of Tamil, the erstwhile servile, subservient Dalit character has taken a 360 degree turn. They are now the protagonists and take on their powerful oppressors by fighting back tooth for tooth and eye for eye.

    This change occurred with the emergence of filmmakers belonging to the marginalised class; filmmakers such as Pa. Ranjith, Mari Selvaraj, Balaji Shaktivel, and Vetri Maran. The criticism is that by foisting aggressively assertive, heroic Dalit figures, the filmmakers have conveniently cultivated a commercial narrative rather than reflect the actual reality in a more nuanced and subtle manner. While it is important to make the Dalit empowering, assertive, and aspirational, the manner in which this is carried out is equally important.

    Violence is promoted by the cultivation of a sense of inevitability about some allegedly unique—often belligerent—identity that we are supposed to have and which makes extensive demands on us (sometimes, of a most disagreeable kind)… Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible peoples, championed by proficient artisans of terror. (Amartya Sen)[1]

    Replace ‘gullible people’ with ‘mass audiences in India,’ and ‘proficient artisans of terror’ with ‘filmmakers and lead actors who portray the injured Dalit,’ and the ugliness of the complete picture gets revealed. The blinkered approach of these filmmakers, some of whom have had the luxury of good education, raises an abject sense of disquiet and anxiety.

    Our society’s engagement with caste—whether it is cinema or any other domain—has been very poor. We have reduced the narrative to caste as a problem that concerns only Dalits, and involves the perpetration of physical violence. In reality, caste in India works in a myriad of ways. But most of our filmmakers do not seem to see the value in representing these aspects. (Rajesh Rajamani)[2]

    To instigate a new discourse in public sphere, both among afflicted and perpetrators, on subaltern struggles of marginalised and oppressed underprivileged sections of society, their brutalised existence, these new age filmmakers, get carried away depicting visual violence without realising the deleterious effect it may have on the consuming, participative audiences.

    Be it Palasa (1978) or recent releases such as Asuran, Karnan, Kaala, and Kabali, with Dalit protagonists, violence becomes the baton of battle against the dominant and domineering class. The Telugu film Ardha Shathabdham goes to the extent of having a tagline that screams, “Democratic Violence”.

    Playing to the gallery by populating the visual narratives with gratuitous, gruesome and vengeful violence, and streaking the screen in blood, has become the new normal. A pointer to this tempestuous trajectory can be gauged by the dialogues of the sword-wielding Dhanush in Karnan, “They beat us for just asserting ourselves. Now that the assertion has started, we won’t back down,” and Rajnikanth in Kabali, “We will sit, putting foot over foot”.

    Visual violence by idolised icons is an enticing market-driven demand. Therefore, there ought to be a law to ensure that filmmakers and stars take responsibility on how their films are received by impressionable fans eager to mimic their larger-than-life screen idols.

    Dalits are consistently shown as powerless. It is as though Dalit existence has meaning only in relation to caste society, and that victimisation is the essence of ‘Dalithood’… Popular cinemas narrativise the social experiences of the communities corresponding to their constituencies… Strategy is to place a key social happening at the centre of the narrative and use it to relay a ‘political truth’ to then be learned by a chosen protagonist/character… It is therefore easy to confuse the star with his/her role – which might also explain the phenomenal success of some film stars as political leaders. Stars rise into prominence when their physiognomies and screen presences answer to the requirements of the time, and it is uncommon for film stars to play against the types they are habituated to playing… The audience is invited to identify with the protagonist, and it is evidently intended to imbibe the same truths. The effect this has on film narrative is that characters then become empty receptacles for instruction. (MK Raghavendra)[3]

    These new age filmmakers may be making an effort to instigate a new discourse, both among afflicted and the perpetrators. However, instead of abjuring excessive visual violence as form of retribution, they are merely stoking a dormant volcano of impressionable audiences into angry avengers. Instead of extolling machismo virtues and overt caste and identity glorification, Dalit filmmakers should be careful and conscious in every aspect of filmmaking. Shouldering immense responsibility, they should shun over-glorification of violence, pride and bigotry to emphasise on alternative education, constitutional resolution and empowerment.

    Dalit cinema should be careful to not set a wrong example for the Dalit community. Will that happen? Future films and their makers may provide the answer. Till then, violence will continue to rule the roost in Dalit cinemas, as Dalits fight for affirmation, acceptance and assimilative identity in the socio-political scheme of the public discourse.

     

    References

    [1]Sen, Amartya. Identity & Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. 

    [2]Rajamani, Rajesh. Dhanush’s ‘Asuran’: Turning Dalit Atrocities Into Pulp Fiction Is Nothing To Celebrate. Huffington Post. October 23, 2019.

    [3]Raghavendra, MK. Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema. Routledge. 2021.

     

    Bibliography

    Viduthalai, P, Divakar, AK, Natarajan, V. Failure of Dalit Renaissance: A semiotic analysis of Dalit and Non Dalit films. Periyar University. Amity Journal of Media & Communication Studies. Vol. 7, No. 1. 2017.

    Susairaj, Antony. The Paradigm shifts in the Portrayal of Caste in Tamil Cinema and its impact on the Tamil Society. Journal of the Nanzan Academic Society Humanities and Natural Sciences (20), 121-138. 2020. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/328007935.pdf

    Naig, Udhav. From ‘Attakathi’ and ‘Kabali’ to ‘Pariyerum Perumal’: How this decade changed caste representation in Kollywood. The Hindu. December 30, 2019.

    Pudipeddi, Haricharan. Kaala, Aramm, Pariyerum Perumal: Dalit-themed films are getting mainstream acceptance in Tamil cinema. First Post. January 6, 2019.

    Yengde, Suraj. Dalit Cinema. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. June 3, 2018.

     

    See also:

    https://filmcriticscircle.com/journal/dalits-and-victimhood-in-indian-film/

  • Ideology matters: film criticism in new Malayalam cinema

    Ideology matters: film criticism in new Malayalam cinema

    Throughout the history of cinema, the dominant ideology determined the content. It is predominantly capitalistic, male and heterosexual. Likewise, film criticism too established its territory. Malayalam cinema

    Film critic Chintha Raveendran

    Tracing back to the fifties, film criticism popularised by the trio Cinic, Kozhikodan, and Nadhirsha was mostly engaged with the text, rarely exploring the sub-text, inner dynamics, or political unconscious. In the early eighties, film critics like Dr. T. K. Ramachandran and Chintha Raveendran initiated the ideological film criticism, exposing the nexus of money invested in the films and the content generated. I myself was attracted to this line, which probably evolved as a part of the active film society movement of the period. To have legendary filmmaker John Abraham in the movement fanned the flame. His radical people’s movement called Odessa was a real alternative for filmmaking, but unfortunately it found no succession.

    The arthouse films could never serve as a real parallel. It had to yield to the power play of state-run machineries, the way mainstream films were, and still are, to private production houses. Radical initiatives with variant perspectives as Dalit, feministic or queer was almost impossible to be materialized. Malayalam cinema could not evade censorship

    of capital and power that is devastating.

    Old or new, commercial or arthouse, all shared the same ideological fallacy due to this dual censorship. The celebrated “new” is not new enough for me. Though seemingly new at the outset, they are mere modified versions of the old. Illustratively, look at the way it is continuing with explicit anti-women, anti-Dalit content.

    Book by film critic Dr. TK Ramachandran

    In recent times, a new path seems to be evolving; one that utilizes amazingly low budget productions. Independent cinema, as they are being termed, with hardly any support from the mainstream, are but travelling across boundaries. Dr. Biju, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, Dr. J. Geetha, Jeeva, the Babu Senan brothers, Pratap Joseph, Sudevan, and Jayan Cherian are a few at the forefront of this movement. Even popular film director Jayaraj falls in this line. These filmmakers have marked their presence in the international film circuit, expanding the horizon of the medium through thematic brilliance and depth.

    This is where I find the “new” Malayalam cinema—the real radical, parallel, experimental alternative.

    Back to my area of film criticism. In the last 35 years in this career, I have dealt with criticism in many forms, being in charge of the film page of a leading daily newspaper, and later editing the film journal of our publishing house. In my journey, I have noticed a fundamental difference in film criticism since 1991. Globalization marked the change. Earlier it was relatively possible to criticize films. Post-1991, the threat of advertisement ban has made criticism near impossible—ads being a major source of revenue. Capital is becoming more arrogant and intolerant towards criticism in any form.

    Film criticism has given way to film promos today. You can see that almost all mainstream media has stopped film criticism per say. Smaller, independently-run magazines attempted a parallel stream, but social media with a bang has taken over. Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are much ahead with film analysis compared to the print and visual media.

    I conclude with the observation that I can spot the New Malayalam cinema in independent filmmakers and social media film critics—of course, not the paid online PR agents. Hopes lie in those who can transcend the challenges enforced by capital and the dominant ideology. This could mark the history of New Malayalam cinema and New Malayalam criticism.

     

  • Nostalgia for the Future: Dwelling as Denotation

    Nostalgia for the Future: Dwelling as Denotation

    The primary proposition of Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar’s Nostalgia for the Future is dwelling (in the Heideggerean sense) as denotation. Contrarily the voice, Kishore’s voice, is the embodiment of this denotation. Over the course of the film this denotation becomes a volume, concentrated or rarefied, which creates a mechanism (instead of an ideology) for a withdrawal of violence, that the moving images force on the viewer.

    Kishore and Shivkumar are successful at creating a dialectical cinema at many levels. The primary dialectic exists between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (DG) conception of smooth and striated space. Smooth spaces, for DG, comprise of spasmodic bursts of space that cannot be fit into a rhythm whereas striated spaces are frozen music or architectural. For Kishore and Shivkumar, space itself is poetic, in the Bachelardian sense, indiscernibly split into crystalline architecture (striated) and its handheld filming (smooth). There are several other layers to this dialectic between smooth and striated in the film: the handheld camera and fixed camera shot, the zoom in to denote a vertical expansion instead of the pan that emphasizes horizontality, and the shot of blowing soap bubbles that turn the liquid into the gaseous.

    Kishore and Shivkumar view the nation as the body emptied out (DG’s concept of the Body without Organs (BwO)) so that the Bauhausian dictum of materiality (film versus digital) overtakes the form (the cut as having a physiological aspect). Time is spatialized in three dimensions: that of universal time, the middle-class notion of a universal as solving the problematic; the particularized lived time, as blissful ekstasis i.e. the duree of the film; and historical time as it brings about a withdrawal of movement (the freeze frame shots of Gandhi and Ambedkar). Cinema itself is this violence that requires the force of history so deny itself movement and therefore violence. However taking a shot is against the force of history and can be considered a-historical, like any other creative act. The city is space for DG’s mechanosphere, whereas the individualized time is Derrida’s differance in temporality so that every shot is new.

    The Bauhausian concerns of the film are such that the materiality of the image is more important than its crystalline form so that the denotations of Le Corbusier’s architecture either break into surficial perception (Deleuze’s liquid perception) or directly show the source of light (represented through the sun itself entering the composition of the shot). The smooth version of the space finds its denotational culmination in the shot of the waves, whereas the smooth and the striated find their middle point (or rhizome) in the sequence with the spiral  staircase. This spiral is nothing but an icon for consciousness itself.

    The universalized temporality forms a middle-class socio-political stratification that finds its materiality in the quoted films from Bombay cinema of the ‘50s. For Shivkumar and Kishore this middle-middle stratification is a ‘fozzilization’ of space; that finds its cinematographic contrast in the sequence where the aakaar of a raga becomes the State-sponsored All India Radio/Doordarshan jingle and culminates in the final shot where the Dalit rhythm creates a microcinema in which movement is extracted from matter, and representation is taken outside the domain of intentionality.

  • A pale, placid take on female empowerment

    A pale, placid take on female empowerment

    Women centric films, in the garb of female empowerment, have become the new normal in Bollywood lately. Focusing on issues that women negotiate in today’s times, these films seek to provide a new ideological template by which they seek audiences’ indulgence in the dramaturgy they unspool through their women protagonists.

    Taking incidents from real life, and providing fictionalised construct to them, more so, to burnish them with enough visual “oomph” to woo the gullible and not so “literate” cinema audiences, these film makers are doing grave injustice to women folk.

    Providing their own quick fix, quirky solutions to fight women victims’ demons of their lives, instead of an engaging, eclectic and realistic cinemas, dealt with subtlety and sensitivity their subjects deserved, these film makers, more with eye on box office, turn them into perfunctory exercise than with seriousness they deserve.

    Instead of a well-meaning social treatise to enlighten and open up their audiences to the harsh new realities these directors and their films merely indulge in tokenism their loyalties remaining elsewhere, tacitly with the producer and where the moolah is.

    For the solutions or closures these film makers provide to their troubled female protagonists, turn more damaging and damning than realistic and plausible, thereby perpetuating the already prevalent social ills that one sees and reads every day.

    It is in this context one likes to explore Aruna Raje Patil’s Marathi film Firebrand, steaming on Netflix and produced by Hollywood diva Priyanka Chopra’s Purple Pebble Pictures.

    Director Raje, one likes to posit in this treatise that, skimming the surface of the problem she dwells into, woefully provides a skewed prescription that does great disservice to her own ilk rather than turn into a wonderful and creative cinema it could have been had she not so succumbed to the dictates of box office and banal economics.

    At the heart of Firebrand is a Dalit. A rape victim, seriously suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at that. She is a feminist lawyer as well to boot. Every epitome of modern day go-getter woman. In fact, director Aruna Raje had a cracker of cinema at hand with such a protagonist in Firebrand.

    But, for Raje, whose earlier visitations at cinema reads Rihaee, Tum: A Dangerous Obsession, et al, bred and brought up on Bollywood brand of formulaic money spinners, to change her syntax of film making keeping with the times and provide more meaningful closure to her protagonist’s woes, was indeed ambitious and aspirational.

    With film’s commercial prospects weighing heavily at the back of her mind, Raje, instead of handling the throbbing topic of a Dalit rape victim, trying to confront the demons of her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptomatic past, with sensitivity, nuance and subtleness the subject deserved, simply uses these tropes as excuse to drum down her own rather, too facile, off the cuff, shocking solution to say the least.

    Not that Raje’s body of works has anything to laudable or praiseworthy expect that of her being a woman director. Each of her films, at least, as this critic is concerned, are below par, more in tune with commercial cinema’s calculus, which is also self-evident in her latest visitation Firebrand, being dissected in this essay.

    Here was a film crying desperately for a searing and plausible probe. Raje being a woman, one expected she would, in today’s times, truly explore the theme in a mature and masterly manner. But what we get instead is a convenient, clichéd, caricatured, and typically formulaic fare, especially rather depraved denouement she delivers in Firebrand as a closure to her woman protagonist’s traumatic past and moral marital dilemma of present she is caught betwixt.

    Firebrand revolves around two different sets of couples. Divorce lawyer Sunanda Raut and her husband Madhav, and a feuding Divya and Anand Pradhan. The film’s moral fulcrum and social conflict pivots on these two diametrically opposite couples. The trajectory of the two disparate couples provided a perfect platform to examine modern relationships but Raje uses it as a convenient tool for his cringing, convenient climax.

    The Pradhans though appear bit late into the film whose court fight turns into closure of sorts for Sunanda, who is exorcised of the ghosts of her past in most bizarre of “sexual”, “victim” and jaundiced elitist take on relationships.

    If Sunanda and Madhav present perfect, blissful middle class marital home, despite personal trauma affecting their physical lives, Divya and Anand Pradhan are modern day’s feuding couple with foul mouthed wife out to extract her every pound of flesh from her promiscuous businessman husband.

    Investing a strong persona in her ‘feisty’ lawyer Sunanda, and neurotic, vengeful attributes to Divya, making their husbands, ‘willing victims’ of their situation, director Raje seeks to make out a classic case for a feminist film with contrasting repercussions.

    It is Raje’s facile and frivolous attempt to press home her point and kill two birds in one stone – trauma of rape and marginalisation of Dalits, besides, larger gender politics, with over the top acting, set piece scripting, on what constitutes female empowerment, leaves Firebrand with much to be desired delectable cinema.

    Divya’s justification to walk out of a marriage from her philandering husband Anand, a “great womaniser” she tells lawyer Sunanda, reasons for her divorce, which has left them with a neurologically challenged child, is understandable.

    But Raje caricatures her as totally neurotic, vengeful and vindictive woman who would go to any extreme, including inflicting self-injuries, to extract every ounce of flesh from her ‘immoral’ husband to leave him humiliated and in dire straits.

    In Sunanda’s case you have Raje go the other extreme. She has Sunanda conveniently letting a stranger, in this case, Divya’s “womaniser” husband Anand into her household late into night, have him give her a neck massage, indulge her in puerile, psychological game of “Let Go” and “So What” before the two have roaring physical union.

    An act of infidelity which conveniently and cathartically allows Sunanda to purge herself of her traumatic “childhood rape” past and fight the ghost of her humiliation she faced being a “Dalit.”

    This when her own husband’s touch would send Sunanda into frenzied hysterics compelling Madhav to postulate “sex and love” are two different things in a marriage and does not matter when two people are deeply in love. Oh! What a philosophy, Ms Raje.

    An act, which Sunanda confesses to her “understanding” and “accommodating” husband, stating the nocturnal visitor (Anand) was just an acquaintance and she was not Sunanda at all, during the entire night of sexual intimacy.

    Madhav, on hearing her confession, bemusedly says he does not believe in “middle class moralities” as if elitist were more liberal and open-minded with their spouses’ extra marital dalliances. With theatrical and totally absurd scenes leading to its climactic and cataclysmic “liberating sexual encounter” between a defeated Sunanda and thankful Anand (Divya’s husband), Raje defeats the very purpose of Firebrand with her contrasting “sexual mores and morality” so full of vacuous, pontificating verbosity.

    Unable to provide amicable, appreciable solution to her convoluted plot, Raje, pandering to familiar box office formulae, drums up her own regressive and degenerate denouement to Firebrand defeating the very cause of social injustice against a Dalit woman.

    Raje turns Firebrand (so ironic title itself), into a frivolous facile and fecund fare even as she ensure the film is reflective of problems that dog society, and in a way partially creating awareness, among her women audiences.

    But then Raje wilfully compromises on the public morality with her propagation of a closure she provides for her protagonist, least concerned at its dubious repercussions in reality and the debilitating and demoralising effect it would have on the already crumbling and sacrosanct marital edifice in India.

    In trying to pander to the familiar feminist trope that women are equal or more equal than their men in this millennial age, Raje, without realising the enormous impact the film would have on the psyche of her women audiences, panders to a prosaic solution than leaving the film either open ended or providing a trail-blazing solution.

    As Feminist film theorist Jackie Stacey in ‘Star Gazing: Hollywood & Female Spectator’’ so rightly posits ‘identification is the means by which women conspire and become complicit in the process’ turns woefully true in the case of Raje’s Firebrand.

    For, women identifying with women characters onscreen and finding common cause with them, as propelled, by films of Raje’s kind, only turn them into fantasies of power, control and self-confidence, while reality is a different sum game altogether.

    It is such treatment of women that this is rather very worrisome and very antithetical to the innate idea of empowering women in today’s #MeToo times where women are breaking the glass ceiling while their personal and marital situations are taking a severe beating.

    While the very idea that cinema is primarily meant to entertain, especially in in India is in itself repugnant, than a pure-play art form which can, if rightfully delineated, could play a pivotal role in molding objective opinions, by constructing images and reinforcing dominant cultural values, Raje’s Fireband is self-defeating despite trying to address the most sensitive and highly topical theme with a feminist lens.

    For, if one were to a take a cursory look at incidents of violence both within the homestead with rampant domestic abuse, dowry, divorces for flippant reasons, and family honour deaths and outside the home with increasing incidents of acid attacks, brutal rapes and even murder, with both Internet and Mobile contributing their own to the societal malaise fracturing the male female relationship, by projecting her strong protagonist in such simplistic terms is nothing but naivety on Raje’s part.

    By trying to free her protagonist from the shackles of familiar culture constructs and accepted social mores, Raje, caught as she is like her film’s victim, in a Catch 22 situation, fails as a responsible director, given that even today audiences are influenced by what is shown in films, primarily because of lack of knowledge as well as lack of one’s own sense of self.

    With mainstream cinema expectedly continuing to influence audiences’ thinking and behaviour post their theatrical experience, the responsibility squarely rests with directors how they realise the larger vision of their middle of the path cinemas.

    In that sense, Firebrand comes across as a perfunctory attempt by director Raje provide a perspective peek into Dalit dilemma and her cocking a snook at Indian middle class mentality with her uppity elitist take on the social issue she so conveniently caricatures as middle class foibles and comeuppance of the likes of Madhav and his accommodative, understanding and well-meaning mature nature at the psychological conflict his Dalit & rape victim wife Sunanda is faced with.

  • Dalits and Victimhood in Indian Film

    Dalits and Victimhood in Indian Film

    Art cinema in India began as a movement partly in order to intervene in social injustices by propagating the right attitudes among the public, although popular cinema had also done it much earlier. Dalits and caste discrimination have frequently been the subjects in Indian cinema from Achhut Kanya (1936) to Sairat (2016) and the general consensus about these films is positive, that they are courageous attempts to deal with a burning issue that has stubbornly refused to be resolved, and will probably continue to resist resolution for a long time to come. Still, it would be useful to look at the representation of Dalits in Indian film as it could tell us something about dominant perspectives on social victimhood in India that could well stretch beyond film, perhaps into every aspect of culture.

    If one were to consider international films dealing with social conflict and victimhood, one could place them under several political categories like Colonialism (Battle of Algiers), Fascism (The Great Dictator), Capitalism (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich), Stalinism (Man of Marble), Maoism (To Live), Patriarchy (The Life of Oharu), the films coming usually from countries (or set in countries) where the particular form of political oppression is pertinent. An aspect common to the above films is that while they all deal with victims they try to present well-rounded pictures of the situations they engage with.  Much of The Great Dictator is taken up with life before the spectre of Fascism gains ground, with the barber’s dealings in the ghetto. They pursue mimesis in that they try to base their political discourses on social observation and the victimhood of the protagonists by forces without is only an aspect in their lives, although an extremely important one. This gives them a degree of complexity that might have been elusive if bare victimhood was all the films were about.

    When we come to Indian cinema we find victimhood treated differently and this is true of the portrayal of Dalits as well. The tendency is to show the Dalit victim as belonging to a monolithic category transacting only with those outside. A common issue here is that of the forbidden inter-caste romance in which one of the lovers is Dalit. There are a series of films which work by this formula which, when analysed, yields the sense that ‘Dalithood’ gains significance only in relation to caste society. One does not, for instance, find romances between two Dalits from different strata which might also have been opposed. Films about Dalits appear to proceed from social preconceptions rather than unbiased observation and this is apparently because Indian cinema has not favoured mimesis.

    Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term pertinent to the arts that carries a wide range of meanings – including imitation, representation, mimicry of life, and the presentation of the self. To paraphrase the general understanding of the notion, art was considered to be an imitation of the world that also allowed for individual expression, i.e.: the subjectivity of the creator of the work of art was accorded a due place. Cinema, because it begins as an imprint of reality is ideally placed to pursue mimesis and the earliest films (by the Lumière brothers) were recordings of events – like workers coming out of factory and train coming into station. A little later, a magician named George Meliès understood that since what was projected on the screen was taken to be reality by the spectator, cinema could also promote illusion or the imagined. This then became a way of introducing subjectivity into film and that is what cinema has broadly been – a recording of reality with subjectivity as a constituent element.

    In India, however, film took a different route when the first films by DG Phalke were neither documentaries nor fantasies but mythological films. Phalke insisted that his films based on themes from mythology were ‘realistic’ because they were bringing known ‘truths’ to life. Even when Indian cinema moved out of the genre of the mythological film it continued to purvey familiar truths from the epics and puranas, though most of them were nominally set in contemporary times. Unlike films from world cinema that pursue mimesis (including fantasy films where inner reality often becomes the subject) Indian popular cinema has been preoccupied with transcendental truths not reliant on empirical knowledge but on traditional wisdom and beliefs. If films follow mimesis, complexity and ambiguity become virtues – since the world itself is complex – and their interpretation by critics becomes pertinent. Indian films, because they purvey truths that precede experience, rarely permit/provoke interpretation. This is not true only of popular cinema but also of art cinema where the truths from social texts replace puranic truisms or truths pronounced by tradition. As an instance, working class solidarity and the deceitfulness of the powerful would be ‘truths’ preferred by Marxist filmmakers.

    Why Indian cinema takes this separate path can only be speculated about but one recollects a popular maxim heard within India from the school level onwards – that ‘knowledge is within us.’ The question to be put here is what kind of knowledge this might be, since it cannot pertain to agriculture or industry; the answer that presents itself is that it is received knowledge handed down and /or realized by our traditional wise people. To all appearances this would be ‘Brahminical’ knowledge since the Brahmins were custodians of the theoretical propositions underlying most Indian beliefs.

    To all appearances the portrayal of Dalits has been ‘theory down’, victimhood made the essence of Dalit life.  This is evidently a view from above since a Dalit would be aware of more aspects of his/her experience – while someone from above would only take note of what his or her own class has inflicted upon the Dalit. Most films about Dalits has come from upper-caste filmmakers and one could cite a series of films where Dalit /Adivasi portrayals are patently unconvincing: Devika Rani in Achhut Kanya, Shabana Azmi in Ankur, Smita Patil in Aakrosh, Nutan in Sujata; still, there is more to it than unconvincing character portrayals.

    Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry (2013) is much more convincing because Manjule is himself a Dalit but there is an aspect to Fandry that merits specific comment here. This has to do with the portrayal of the family’s vocation which is pig catching or breeding and the members are shown to be unable to go about it effectively. For instance, when their task is the capture of a pig, they throw stones at it, which only drives it out of reach. The argument offered here is that when people are tied to a vocation they would develop some expertise in it and the film is portraying the Dalits thus because of its disdain for the vocation itself. A Lithuanian film Miracle (2017) seen in recent film festivals (like GIFF) deals with pig farming without fixing such a disrespectful gaze upon it and my proposition here is that the gaze in Fandry is ‘Brahminical’ – since it would be a Brahminical view that Dalit vocations are ignoble. It would seem therefore that Brahminical ideology is all-pervasive – ‘ideology’ used here in Engels’ sense of ‘false-consciousness’, i.e. the motives in the representation once historically engendered now seem autonomous .

    Pushing the argument further one could propose that the tendency of Indian cinema to see the Dalit experience only in terms of its relationship to caste society stems from Brahminical ideology. Dalit communities (like all other communities) would have conflicts of their own and also be rich in interpersonal relationships within, but this is not given expression to. A comparison here would be the African-American experience in Hollywood films where people from within the community are shown to transact with each other. Where African-Americans are shown to wield some power (as in gangster films) Dalits are consistently shown to be powerless. One supposes that a Dalit activist as in Court (2014), performing in an urban centre, would find political patronage, which the film does not allow; its apparently Brahminical viewpoint is that unrelieved victimhood is the essential condition of the Dalit.

    It is difficult to recollect an Indian film in which diversity within Dalit communities is acknowledged, so monolithic are they seen to be because of the gaze being consistently from the top. Such essentialization – although it may be the product of a ‘liberal’ outlook – is consistent with Brahminism itself, which proceeded by essentializing the jatis as varna categories and placing them within a hierarchy. The varna system was the result of classifying and hierarchizing various vocations – but it can be argued that any kind of vocation would be better placed than that of ‘victim’ since the latter category is not even allowed to take pride in its work, the skills it has developed doing whatever it has been doing.

    It is in this context that mimesis becomes a necessary way of portraying social conditions since it relies on observation and experience rather than apriori ‘truths’. Eschewing mimesis in order to be ‘politically correct’ and taking acceptable positions may be a safe alternative for filmmakers today but in such a course can also be detected a ‘hegemonic’ Brahminical perspective – that places preconceptions over empirically derived knowledge. A ‘hegemonic power’ is one that defines the rules of the game and Brahminism has apparently defined the rules for Indian cinema in its portrayal of the Dalit experience.

     

    See also:

    https://filmcriticscircle.com/journal/dalit-identity/