From Achhut Kanya in 1936 to Article 15, How Indian Cinema Treated Caste

Billie Holiday Strange Fruit (1939) is an interpretation of a poem about racism at a time when lynching men blacks was common in America.More recently, rapper Kanye West has used it in his album Yeezus ( 2013), haunted words evoking chained bodies of blacks lynched for having acted above or outside their station and breaking the harsh code of time: The trees of the south bear a strange fruit / Du blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swaying in the breeze of the south / A strange fruit hanging from the poplars.

Tense bodies serve as a warning to all men. Thus, as in the Great South of the United States and India, two minor Dalit girls, raped and murdered, were found hanging on a tree in Badaun in UP in 2014. Since he's read an article at that subject, the director Anubhav Sinha did not manage to get rid of this image. He deepens the story and builds a story about the system, its politics, the acceptance of the caste and the revolt against it in his recently published film, Article 15 .

Award-winning journalist Priyanka Dubey of the BBC, who wrote forcefully on this case No Nation for Women: Report on Indian bad, the World's Largest Democracy (2018), "Caste is an undeniable reality in India today and women 's bodies are often used as a tool by upper caste communities to prove their false pride. My reports on the case of Badaun's double murder reinforced my conviction that the path to justice became much more difficult if the victim's family belonged to the "lower caste" or was made up of Dalits. I followed the story until one year after the murders and ruthless brutality with which the investigation agencies behaved with the family of victims and made me feel that their parents had absolutely no agency as citizens of this country. "

Article 15 invades you like a fantasy.A sophisticated polar, its central protagonist, a Brahmin, an officer Stephanian IPS interpreted by Ayushmann Khurrana, tries to navigate the hierarchies of caste and maintain santulan or the status quo, but its strength lies in its ability to look caste in the eyes, without flinching.

Long before Article 15 Caste was explored in Hindi cinema – even before independence. 1936 already, the character of Ashok Kumar-Devika Rani Achhut Kanya told the story of the love of a Dalit girl and a Brahman boy, shattered by the caste system while that of Bimal Roy Sujata in 1959, he placed a dalit character in his center. But essentially, these films remained focused on the personal struggles of their Dalit characters and not on the issues facing the community. It was up to Goutam Ghose to take up the issue in his mighty Shabana Azmi-Naseeruddin Shah-Om Puri of Paar in 1984.

A decade ago, in 1974, Shyam Benegal had trained his objective on the feudal relations and exploitation that are written there in an inherent way in his directorial debut Ankur . Benegal says of the character played by Shabana Azmi who is betrayed in the end: "She was, of course, dalit, but at that time no one was using it. The term may not have been widely used 40 years ago. It was more "us" and "them". Caste and clbad were deeply linked at the time too, but things were not spelled out so explicitly.

More recently, in the South, while Rajinikant-starrer Kabali (2016) of Pa Ranjith was a response to the 2012 Dharmapuri caste riots, Marathi film Sairat ( 2016) with his story of young love and old barriers has also captivated the imagination of spectators outside of Maharashtra. But The remake of Sairat in Hindi, by Dhadak (2018), a very diluted version, shows to what extent the Hindi cinema solves the uncomfortable questions of the caste and its reluctance to confront on