ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I analyse three contemporary films explicitly based on caste, made by Savarna film-makers—Court, Life of an Outcast, and Article 15. I examine these films for the manner in which they portray casteism as violence and trauma, and their varying representations of Dalit subjectivities (whether through abjectness or subversive consciousness) and correspondent depictions of Savarna agency and complicity. I show how these films, whether based in urban or rural India, are united in their portrayal of the caste order as a delicately maintained social balance that is deeply entrenched in institutions like the court and the police. While the films are critical of the framing of Dalit subjects as agents of self-destructive violence and serve to highlight the inescapability of caste-based discrimination as the reality of Dalit experience, I demonstrate how they differ in the faith that they profess in the Constitutional framework and judicial process as means of ensuring legal justice for the caste-oppressed. In this, my overall emphasis is on how they depict the conflict between the law and discourse of the Constitution and the law and discourse of Caste. Especially given the context of the rise of an identifiable wave of Dalit cinema, I read the deployment of the Savarna gaze—individual and institutional—in these films in terms of their potential for shaping an anti-caste spectatorship.
