How Bollywood is starting to deal with India's caste system
Caste is a contentious issue in India, and one rarely commented on in
Bollywood films. But political change is on the way, and Indian cinema
will have to reflect that
Nirpal Dhaliwal
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 December 2010 22.30 GMT
Caste is a contentious issue in India, but not a predictable one. In
2008, I watched television footage of violent protests in Rajasthan,
as rioters clashed with the police in battles that cost dozens of
lives. Their outrage was driven by the government's refusal to
categorise their caste as one of the lowest. They were fighting to be
relegated to a lower social rank. India has the most comprehensive
affirmative action programme in the world and downgrading would have
qualified the protestors for valuable quota schemes in welfare,
education and government jobs.
As with so much in India, caste is an ancient institution that
pervades everyday life, the mechanics of which remain a convoluted
mystery. There was a buzz in 2007, when a dalit (the caste formerly
known as "untouchables") was Bollywood's first-ever lead character in
Eklavya: The Royal Guard, but the character was played by Sanjay Dutt,
a scion of one of India's leading film dynasties – his father Sunil
was a brahmin and his mother Nargis a descendant of a "tawaif", an
aristocratic courtesan. Despite there being more than 150 million
dalits in India, not one has made a major dent in Bollywood.
Still, Bollywood is one of the most campaigning and progressive forces
in Indian society. Stars such as Amitabh Bachchan are outspoken in
their opposition to casteism, and most major figures are associated
with some humanitarian activism. Preity Zinta, for instance, sponsors
an entire school of lower-caste girls.
However, discussing caste is hampered by official taboos. One cannot
refer to anyone as an "untouchable" in India, the term being analogous
to "nigger" in the west. But while "nigger" can be employed in western
cinema to make a social point, "untouchable" will be edited out by the
censors there.
Its not surprising that India's cinema has been so reluctant to tackle
it. The first major attempt to deal with the subject was Achhut Kanya
(Untouchable Maiden) in 1936. Like most films that have dealt with
caste since, it framed the topic in a Romeo-and-Juliet tale of
star-crossed lovers, undone by the gossip and intolerance of their
families and surrounding community.
The brutal realities of caste, its violence and sustaining context of
superstition, ignorance and social neurosis have rarely been addressed
head-on. The 2006 Bollywood movie Omkara, again borrowing from
Shakespeare, remade Othello in the frontier regions of northern India,
with a lower-caste political gangster substituted for the Moorish
general. The theme remains that of a powerful outsider, paranoid about
his status and manipulated because of it, rather than the banal
cruelties and thoughtless traditions that blight everyday life across
India.
India's own political correctness also stifles the debate. In the
mid-90s, the novelist Arundhati Roy vilified the makers of Bandit
Queen, the most realistic and politically challenging film ever made
about caste. The heroine was the real-life Phoolan Devi, whose
gang-rape by the men of a higher-caste village turned her into a
mass-murdering vigilante. Roy objected to Devi's sexual abuse being
shown (albeit very inexplicitly) on screen while Devi was alive –
despite the fact that Devi had given her express consent. Roy's
hyper-sensitive Indian sexual mores dominated the larger debate on
caste.
"But gender and caste could not be separated," says Farrukh Dhondy,
who wrote the film. "The fact is that Devi was raped because she was
lower caste and those men thought they could get away with it. A
woman's life in India is very much defined by caste."
After 60 years of Indian democracy, lower castes have now established
themselves as powerful voting blocs, leading to the rise of Mayawati,
the first dalit woman to be elected to India's parliament and chief
minister of its largest state, Uttar Pradesh – one of the most
powerful figures in the country, able to make or break a government.
Dhondy is currently working on a treatment for her biopic. "I want to
show how she and her ancestry were treated and how, under democracy,
she has galvanised the dalit vote to become such a political
phenomenon," he says. "She is empowering them and radically
transforming society."
Caste will become an even bigger issue in India as the historically
downtrodden consolidate themselves and take power from traditional
elites. Even the habitual timidity of Bollywood will have to change as
it is forced to address a subject it has previously kept to one side.
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