Caste and Gender Dynamics in Indian Cinema from 1930s to 2000s

This paper aims at drawing a trajectory of how Indian cinema has grown in its portrayal of caste and gender issues over the decades. A rear view would reveal that Indian cinema’s first decade both before and after Independence did respond quite strongly to the socialist nerves as issue of caste became a part of the popular film narratives like in Achhut Kanya (1936) and Sujata (1959). The 1960s however, saw cinema narrowing down its concerns to the socio-economic confines of the upper-middle class people. Then from the 1970s began the Amitabh era which shifted the Indian cinema into a very imaginative space with the ‘angry young man’ trope at its centre. It never occurred to any filmmaker to portray a Dalit protagonist fighting against social evils. However, the parallel or the new wave cinema did make efforts to bring the lower caste subjectivity on the big screen. The social questions like of caste-based gender violence and feudal exploitation gathered remarkable momentum through films like Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1974). The latter part of the paper deals mainly with films belonging to the later decades of the twentieth century and portrays the change that a Dalit woman’s persona has gone through over the decades. The stereotypes are done away with; and the rebelliousness and the fighting spirit among rural Dalit women, which is a novel phenomenon has been explored in these offbeat films, namely, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994), Jag Mundhra’s Bawandar (2000), and Priyadarshan’s Aakrosh (2010).