From Achhut Kanya in 1936 to Article 15, how Indian cinema has dealt with caste

Seema Chishti

From Achhut Kanya in 1936 to Article 15 in 2019, how Hindi cinema has looked at caste. 

Across the Divide: Article 15 grows on you as a sophisticated whodunnit as its central protagonist, a Brahmin, Stephanian IPS officer played by Ayushmann Khurrana, tries to navigate caste hierarchies and maintain santulan or the status quo.

Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit (1939) is a rendition of a poem on racism in a time when lynching of Black men was common in America. More recently, rapper Kanye West used it in his album Yeezus (2013), the haunting lyrics speaking of strung-up bodies of Blacks lynched for acting above or outside their station and breaking the harsh code of the times: Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Strung-up bodies serve as a warning universally. So, like in the deep south in the US, in India, too, two minor Dalit girls, raped and murdered, were found strung on a tree in Badaun in UP in 2014. Ever since he read a news report on it, filmmaker Anubhav Sinha could not get the image out of his mind. He looked deeper into the story and built a simmering narrative around it, of the system, its politics, the acceptance of caste as well as the revolt against it in his recently released film, Article 15.

Award-winning BBC journalist Priyanka Dubey who has written powerfully on this case in her No Nation for Women: Reportage of Rape from India, the World’s Largest Democracy (2018), says, “Caste is an undeniable reality of today’s India and women’s bodies are often used as a tool by upper-caste communities to prove their false pride. My reporting experience on the Badaun double-murder case reinforced my conviction that the road to justice becomes much tougher if the victim(s)’s family belong to the ‘lower caste’ or are Dalits. I followed up the story till after one year of the murders and the ruthless highhandedness with which the investigative agencies behaved with the victims’ family made me feel that their parents have absolutely no agency as citizens of this country.”

  

As far back as in 1936, the Ashok Kumar-Devika Rani starrer Achhut Kanya told the love story of a Dalit girl and a Brahmin boy, sundered by the caste system.

Article 15 grows on you as a sophisticated whodunnit as its central protagonist, a Brahmin, Stephanian IPS officer played by Ayushmann Khurrana, tries to navigate caste hierarchies and maintain santulan or the status quo. But its strength lies in its success in looking caste in the eye, unflinchingly.

Much before Article 15, caste was explored in Hindi cinema — even before Independence. As far back as in 1936, the Ashok Kumar-Devika Rani starrer Achhut Kanya told the love story of a Dalit girl and a Brahmin boy, sundered by the caste system while Bimal Roy’s Sujata in 1959 placed a Dalit character at its centre. But essentially, the focus of these films remained on the personal struggles of their Dalit characters and not on the issues that the the community faced. It was left to Goutam Ghose to take on the issue in his powerful Shabana Azmi-Naseeruddin Shah-Om Puri starrer Paar in 1984.

A decade ago in 1974, Shyam Benegal had trained his lens on feudal relations and the exploitation written inherently in them in his directorial debut Ankur. Says Benegal of the character played by Shabana Azmi who is betrayed at the end, “She was, of course, Dalit, but at that time, no one used that phrase. The term, perhaps, was also not much in use 40 years ago. It was more ‘us’ and ‘them’. Caste and class were deeply interlinked then also, but things were not stated so explicitly.”

More recently, down south, while Pa Ranjith’s Rajinikant-starrer Kabali (2016) was a response to the 2012 Dharmapuri caste riots, Marathi film Sairat (2016) with its story of young love and old barriers caught the imagination of cinema-goers outside Maharashtra as well. But Sairat‘s remake in Hindi, Dhadak (2018), a much watered-down version, showed just how Hindi cinema skirts around the uncomfortable questions of caste and its reluctance to confront the full horrors of it.

      

Though there have been occasional films centred around Dalit characters like in Neeraj Ghaywan’s sleeper hit Masaan (2015), Dalit characters are mainly missing in Hindi cinema.

Though there have been occasional films centred around Dalit characters like in Neeraj Ghaywan’s sleeper hit Masaan (2015), Dalit characters are mainly missing in Hindi cinema. Says Dr Amit Thorat, an economist who has written on exclusion and disparities faced by marginalised groups, “I think Dalit heroes need to be represented more in popular cinema. They also need to be presented as normalised in their social and personal relationships.”

A common criticism against Sinha’s Article 15 has been on its choosing a Brahmin as its central protagonist. “I don’t know if the film loses out by not having a Dalit hero. That would have been a different film. In this film, I wanted the camera to enter the landscape from the point of view of our young colleagues who think caste differences and atrocities are a thing of the past. I wanted the camera to firmly rest on our shoulders. It is addressed to all those who will make the New India in the next 10 years,” says Sinha.

How caste is chosen to be spoken about in the news or in popular culture often shows us what exactly the issue of the time was. The term ‘Harijan’ or ‘people of god’, eventually got negated as patronising and was replaced by the term ‘Dalit’, popularised by Dr BR Ambedkar, that means ‘suppressed’ or ‘downtrodden’. But the films made then and even afterwards steered clear of the term. “We were masters of shorthand then, with words, with expression and how to show what was not stated upfront. People did not say, ‘I am Dalit’ with pride then and if the term untouchable was used, it was like abuse,” says Benegal.

Shorthand goes a long way today, too. Sinha says this is the most arthouse he has gone in in any film, with symbolism imbued in almost all shots of Article 15. Water, particularly, is shown with a menacing air. “Throughout the film, water is trouble. You don’t know what will be fished out from beneath. The shot of a Dalit boy going down to clean the sewage is the only one which is 150 frames to a second as I wanted the audience to be completely up close to him. We usually think someone else cleans all the sewage. We have no awareness of the task he performs,” says Sinha. Hindi cinema may be gradually beginning to train its lens on these overlooked tasks but does, or can, a film like Article 15 show the full extent of the horrors of some Dalit lives?

Perhaps it can’t. Truth, after all, remains stranger than fiction.

This article appeared in the print edition with the headline ‘Anatomy of Atrocities’

Source: indianexpress

Behind the viral video: Caste is changing in rural Haryana – but not losing its power

Caste Relations

Upper castes have no direct control over the lower castes, yet they still feel the need to dominate.

R.G - tHe CreAtoR, YouTube

Shoaib Daniyal

Violence on video is India’s new pastime. Every day, images of public assault and in some cases even lynchings flit by on phone screens. On June 24, a short recording of two men brutally beating a young man went viral on social media. Faced up against the wall in a small room, his trousers down, the man is thrashed with a stick on his buttocks as he cries out in pain, begging for the assault to stop.

The attackers, Mohit Kadyan and Jitendra Kadyan, are Jats from Bajana Kalan, a village around two hours north of Delhi in Haryana. Ankit, the young man who was beaten, is a Dalit from the Balmiki caste, also from the same village. The immediate reason for the assault can be gauged from the angry comments in the video: the Jat men wanted the Dalit to work in their fields and bathe their buffaloes.

While forced labour based on caste might have been common in this part of Haryana once, this is hardly the case now. This incident, then, is more complex than that. At one point, the beating stops and one assaulter ask: “Why did you blacklist my number?” Strangely, Mohit and Jitendra were feeling slighted that Ankit wasn’t taking their calls.

Scroll.in travelled to Bajana Kalan and found that behind this gory video lay a tale of complex social change. Situated in a highly industrialised area, the Dalits of Bajana Kalan are now largely independent of the economic control of the village’s land-owning Jats. However, social change has been slow to catch up, leading to Jats to still feel a sense of caste-control over the Dalits, which they now have limited scope to enforce.

  

A tractor in Bajana Kalan with a message of caste pride in the Haryanvi language: "One day this Jat will buy even you". Photo Credit: Shoaib Daniyal

‘They abused me using my caste’

Still in shock, Ankit speaks slowly and needs encouragement from his father to tell his story. “Mohit asked me to come with him,” said Ankit describing events which took place on June 2. “And then he took me to a small room in the middle of the fields and beat me.”

Mohit and Jitendra wanted Ankit to leave his current job and work for them. “They asked me to sell alcohol,” said Ankit. Ankit’s refusal to leave his job at a factory nearby making mobile phone screen protectors enraged them. The fact that he blocked their number on his phone even more so.

Read full article: scrollin

Not jihad, but love: The Hindu-Muslim marriage that brought Kashmir to a halt in 1967

History revisited

The arc of the controversy has startlingly contemporary resonances.

The arc of the controversy has startlingly contemporary resonances.

Hilal Mir

On July 28, 1967, Parmeshwari Handoo, a sales representative at the government-run Apna Bazar in Srinagar, married her Muslim co-worker Ghulam Rasool Kanth. Eight days earlier, the Kashmiri Pandit woman had converted to Islam and taken a new name, Parveen Akhtar. The love marriage set off a storm in the state.

Unlike in the recent Hadiya case, where the High Court annulled the marriage of a Hindu woman from Kerala who converted to Islam and later got married to a Muslim man, the tale of Handoo and Kanth had a happier ending. The case against the couple didn’t go anywhere.

But half a century later, the Akhtar-Kanth case makes for an interesting study. Startlingly, it bears many markings of the politics that currently inform the Sangh Parivar’s bogey of love jihad – the term used by Hindutva groups to accuse Muslim men of entrapping Hindu women on the pretext of love in order to eventually convert them to Islam.

Police complaint

Eight days after the Akhtar-Kanth wedding in 1967, her mother registered a complaint with the police that her minor daughter was missing and had probably been abducted by a colleague for “immoral purposes”. A case was registered against Kanth. A day later, Akhtar appeared at Srinagar’s Jama Masjid to announce her conversion and appealed to the congregation for support.

The police eventually detained the couple at a police station, where Akhtar’s mother, maternal uncle and a few Kashmiri Pandit elders attempted to talk her out of the marriage. Akhtar’s father had died some time before.

Akhtar was then separated from Kanth and taken to another police station where a group of Kashmiri Pandits led by Triloki Nath Dhar – who was then the president of the Kashmir branch of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (the future Bharatiya Janata Party) – was allowed to meet her twice. Akhtar’s mother and uncle were allowed to stay with her at the police station.

The police released the couple a few days later after establishing that she was an adult and after Akhtar insisted that she had got married of her own free will.

Inter-religious marriages

Before the Akhtar-Kanth marriage, two high-profile marriages involving Kashmiri Muslim men and Kashmiri Pandit women had merely set tongues wagging. Communal tensions had not been not stoked either when a Muslim woman from an elite, conservative Naqshbandi family married a Sikh in the late 1940s, or when a Muslim woman married a Kashmiri Pandit lawyer.

Read full article: scrollin

Charles Darwin said all humans have a common ancestor but could not reject racism as bad science

BOOK EXCERPT

Angela Saini’s ‘Superior’ tracks the troubling return of so-called scientific attempts to prove that some races are greater than others.

Angela Saini

In 1871 biologist Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, sweeping away these religious creation myths and framing the human species as having had one common ancestor many millennia ago, evolving slowly like all other life on earth. Studying humans across the world, their emotions and expressions, he wrote, “It seems improbable to me in the highest degree that so much similarity, or rather identity of structure, could have been acquired by independent means.”

We are too alike in our basic responses, our smiles and tears, our blushes. On this alone, Darwin might have settled the race debate. He demonstrated that we could only have evolved from shared origins, that human races didn’t emerge separately.

On a personal level, this was important to him. Darwin’s family included influential abolitionists, his grandfathers Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood. He himself had seen the brutality of slavery first-hand on his travels. When naturalist Louis Agassiz in the United States spoke about human races having separate origins, Darwin wrote disparagingly in a letter that this must have come as comfort to slaveholding Southerners.

But this wasn’t the last word on the subject. Darwin still struggled when it came to race.

Like Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the same day, he opposed slavery but was also ambivalent on the question of whether black Africans and Australians were strictly equal to white Europeans on the evolutionary scale. He left open the possibility that, even though we could all be traced back to a common ancestor, that we were the same kind, populations may have diverged since then, producing levels of difference.

As British anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, Darwin saw gradations between the “highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages”. He suggested, for example, that the “children of savages” have a stronger tendency to protrude their lips when they sulk than European children, because they are closer to the “primordial condition”, similar to chimps. Gregory Radick, historian and philosopher of science at the University of Leeds, observes that Darwin, even though he made such a bold and original contribution to the idea of racial unity, also seemed to be unembarrassed by his belief in an evolutionary hierarchy. Men were above women, and white races were above others.

In combination with the politics of the day, this was devastating. Uncertainty around the biological facts left more than enough room for ideology to be mixed with real science, fabricating fresh racial myths. Some argued that brown and yellow races were a bit higher up than black, while whites were the most evolved, and by implication, the most civilised and the most human.

What was seen to be the success of the white races became couched in the language of the “survival of the fittest”, with the implication that the most “primitive” peoples, as they were described, would inevitably lose the struggle for survival as the human race evolved.

Rather than seeing evolution acting to make a species better adapted to its particular environment, Tim Ingold argues that Darwin himself began to frame evolution as an “imperialist doctrine of progress”.

“In bringing the rise of science and civilisation within the compass of the same evolutionary process that had made humans out of apes, and apes out of creatures lower in the scale, Darwin was forced to attribute what he saw as the ascendancy of reason to hereditary endowment,” writes Ingold. “For the theory to work, there had to be significant differences in such endowment between ‘tribes’ or ‘nations’.” For hunter-gatherers to live so differently from city-dwellers, the logic goes, it must be that their brains had not yet progressed to the same stage of evolution.

Adding fuel to this bonfire of flawed thinking (after all, we know that the brains of hunter-gatherers are no different from those of anyone else) were Darwin’s supporters, some of whom happened to be fervent racists. The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”, argued that not all humans were equal. In an 1865 essay on the emancipation of black slaves, he wrote that the average white was “bigger brained”, adding, “The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.”

For Huxley, freeing slaves was a morally good thing for white men to do, but the raw facts of biology made the idea of equal rights – for women as well as for black people – little more than an “illogical delusion”.

In Germany, meanwhile, Darwin’s loudest cheerleader was Ernst Haeckel, who taught zoology at the University of Jena from 1862, and was a proud nationalist. He liked to draw connections between black Africans and primates, seeing them as a kind of living “missing link” in the evolutionary chain that connected apes to white Europeans.

Darwinism did nothing to inhibit racism. Instead, ideas about the existence of different races and their relative superiority were merely repackaged in new theories. Science, or the lack of it, managed only to legitimise racism, rather than quash it. Whatever real and reasonable questions might have been asked about human difference were always tainted by power and money.

Excerpted with permission from Superior: The Return of Race Science, Angela Saini, HarperCollins India.

Source: scrollin