Anti-Caste Cinema Against the Savarna Imagination: The Screen May Be Common, But the Eyes Are Not

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Every anti-caste film is a direct challenge to the popular claim that India has moved beyond caste. When an anti-caste film releases, it does not arrive on level ground. It lands on the slope of a society built on hierarchy. The screen may be common, but the eyes watching it are not.

In India, even the act of watching a film is shaped by caste. Cinema is supposed to be a shared experience, yet what we see and how we feel are filtered by social locations. A Savarna viewer and a Dalit viewer do not watch the same film, even when they sit in the same theatre. Some viewers leave disturbed; others leave affirmed. The discomfort of one becomes the recognition of another. The same film creates two very different experiences. One of guilt, another of belonging.

This difference does not end inside the theatre. It travels into the language of criticism, conversation, and memory. What one audience feels as truth, another interprets as attack. Savarna critics and commentators carry this divide into how they write and speak about these films.

Savarna critics often respond to anti-caste cinema in two predictable ways. The first is through dismissal. They use vague words like boring, repetitive, or preachy to hide their discomfort. When the film speaks of pain they have never known, they dismiss it as excessive. When it confronts privilege, they call it heavy-handed. When it shows the internal struggles and generational trauma of the oppressed, they call it a thing of the past.

A recent post from the verified X (formerly Twitter) account @TheAakashavaani shows this attitude clearly. The tweet about the film #Bison read:

“Don’t these guys get bored with making films again and again and again on the feuds between the upper caste and the oppressed caste people? A brilliantly shot and brilliantly performed, BORING film.”

The second mode is more subtle. Here, the critic offers analysis for some technical aspects like cinematography, music, vfx or acting, but empties it of everything the film says about caste. Even when they talk about politics, they try to avoid the word caste. They speak of corruption, fascism, class, gender, or inequality, but not caste. These reviews feel superficial and totally detached from the urgent conversations the film is trying to evoke.

For instance, both Vishal Menon and Subramanian Suryanarayanan, in their separate reviews of Kaala, never mention caste or acknowledge the film’s anti-caste politics. In their silence, the film’s radical voice is contained and its political urgency softened.

Savarna criticism, in both its forms, protects the comfort of the Savarnas. In doing so, it empties cinema of its power.

Then there are the social media pages & trolls, the self-appointed defenders of caste. These Savarna accounts, often hiding behind anonymity and sometimes speaking openly, use every tool they have to spread hate against filmmakers from Dalit community who dare to make films against caste. They mock anti-caste cinema by calling it “oppression–depression” or “suppression– depression” cinema, trying to delegitimize both the cinematic language and the lived realities through which anti-caste cinema speaks ( 1, 2, 3, 4 ). This pattern repeats every time a film by Pa. Ranjith or Mari Selvaraj is released. The attacks are most visible all over the social media spaces, where Savarna profiles and troll networks attempt to drown out any conversation about caste with ridicule and hate.

"Anti-caste cinema refuses the distance between the viewer and the cinema; it does not offer the Savarna gaze the comfort of detachment. The Savarna gaze cannot hold that mirror for too long."

Because of this, anti-caste cinema is not received on equal terms. Anti-caste cinema refuses the distance between the viewer and the cinema; it does not offer the Savarna gaze the comfort of detachment. The Savarna gaze cannot hold that mirror for too long. It either reacts with hostility, or intellectualizes what it cannot bear to feel. But anti-caste cinema does not wait for their understanding or acceptance. It has built a new language that refuses Savarna’s mode of perception and speaks from the flesh of experiences of the oppressed.

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I now turn to three crucial films made by filmmakers from Dalit community – Karnan (2021), Sairat (2016), and Thangalaan (2024). Each of them confronts caste violence and historical amnesia that structure Indian cinema itself.

Let me start with Karnan by Mari Selvaraj. Many Savarna critics described Dhanush’s character in Karnan as yet another “angry young man,” ( Bharadwaj, 2021, onlykollywood, 2021). But the anger in Karnan is not personal; it is historical. It is the rage of a community repeatedly denied humanity, forced to watch its dead go unacknowledged and its living treated as disposable. They would have never used such a term if the hero had been Savarna. Karnan’s anger grows not from individual ego or revenge, but from collective pain and repeated dehumanisation of his community.

To call Karnan merely an “angry young man” is to erase that history. This pattern of misreading extends beyond the negative reviews. Haricharan Pudipeddi, in a post praising the film with five stars, called Karnan an “extremely powerful, haunting drama about class divide and fighting for one’s identity.” But Karnan is not about class; it is about caste. The substitution of “class divide” for caste is a familiar form of erasure. By calling it a film about class, the Savarna critic can engage with oppression without feeling implicated in it.

Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, offers an ethical framework that helps us understand this anger and violence in Karnan.

“With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation.

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognise others as persons – not by those who are oppressed, exploited and unrecognised….

Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human… As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.”

Freire’s insight helps us understand that the anger and violence in Karnan are for the reclamation of humanity. The film does not glorify violence. It shows it as an inevitable response to dehumanisation. It is not revenge, but a step towards the recovery of humanity for both the oppressed and the oppressor.

In Nagraj Manjule’s film Sairat, love, the most intimate human act, becomes political in a caste society. He talks about it with an honesty Indian cinema had long avoided, exposing how Savarna cinema speaks of hierarchy in love only through the language of class, never caste. Sairat avoids that substitution. The film depicts that caste decides who you can love and what the consequences will be if you love outside the boundaries it draws. No filmmaker before Nagraj Manjule had addressed this truth with such care and responsibility. The ending is not for shock; it is an indictment of those whose comfort depends on pretending that caste violence is a rare occurrence in this country. They refuse to see it as systemic because admitting that would mean recognising their own place in it. I think it was the savarnas who were shocked by the ending.

One of the prominent critics in India, Bharadwaj Rangan in his review said “Manjule really likes climaxes that shock his audiences, even if these climaxes can be seen coming. Still, it’s hard not to flinch, which is what Manjule wants.”

For the Dalits, there is nothing shocking or unexpected in that final act. The murder is not narrative closure but social continuity. It is the Brahminical system reinstating caste order. The camera slows down. The sound fades. What remains is a quiet so dense it becomes unbearable. Then comes the slow-motion shot of the child entering the room & leaving the room crying. It is one of the most devastating images in Indian cinema. It does not dramatize grief. His parents are gone, and with them, the brief dream that love could be free. Their love and rebellion against caste, though destroyed, survive as history inside him. Manjule does not end Sairat with death; he ends it with a beginning. The beginning of another life already scarred by the violence of caste. It confronts the Savarna audience with their own moral decay & asks them if caste has rendered them incapable of feeling and hearing anything at all? The question is are they alive enough to hear those scenes, or has caste already killed whatever humanity they had left?

If Sairat reveals how caste controls the most intimate form of connection, Pa. Ranjith’s Thangalaan shows how Brahminism controls the memory of an entire civilisation. It reminds us that the violence of caste in the present is sustained by the erasures of the past. Thangalaan reminds us that when people lose the memory of who they were, they become adrift and disconnected from the cultural and moral roots that once gave their lives meaning. This loss breeds an internalised inferiority, where one’s worth begins to depend on how others (oppressors) choose to define it. Their identity is not taken all at once. It is chipped away, piece by piece, over generations. What once defined them is worn down until it becomes unrecognizable. Generations later, their own history and culture begin to feel like distant myths, stories half-remembered and half-erased. The film challenges this brahminical erasure and takes Dalits back to their Buddhist roots. It frames the recovery of memory as a radical act of resistance.

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For Dalit viewers, these films are more than narratives or entertainment. They remind us that we are not alone, that our histories matter, that our pain has form and meaning. They fill the gaping hole that Savarna cinema left behind.

For a long time, Dalit characters existed in Indian cinema only as background figures or moral symbols. They were used to complete someone else’s story, often to redeem an upper-caste hero or to display Savarna compassion. They had no voice, no depth, and no freedom to be ordinary. Anti-caste cinema has changed that. It has turned the Dalit figure from a passive presence into an active subject. These characters now think, speak, resist, and love with agency. They are not waiting to be saved; they are saving themselves. This shift is not only about representation. It is about reclaiming the right to define one’s own humanity.

In all these films, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar may not always be at the center of the story, yet his presence is constant. His portrait on a wall or his ideas guiding a character’s choices quietly affirm that his vision continues to shape every act of the oppressed, whether actively or passively. This may seem like a small detail to Savarna viewers, but for Dalits, it carries enormous meaning.

Through its songs, anti-caste cinema has expanded the vocabulary of resistance.. For decades, songs in Indian film were crafted within a Savarna world, detached from the lives of the oppressed. It is hard to find a song that talks about experiences of Dalits in cinema created by Savarnas. Anti-caste filmmakers disrupted that order, turning songs into resistance. 4 songs that come to mind while thinking about the impact are Lafda zala and Aaya ye Jhund hai from Jhund, Uttradheenga Yeppov from Karnan and Naan Yaar from Pariyerum Perumal. Finally we can listen to songs that speak of our experiences.

Anti-caste cinema is also a form of education. It visualises ideas that many might never encounter in books or classrooms. Through stories, it reveals how power operates, how discrimination feels, and how resistance begins. It turns the screen into a space of learning where empathy, awareness, and revolution coexist. In doing so, it performs a task that formal education in India has often failed to do. School textbooks in India rarely teach about caste, and when they do, it is through the Savarna lens that downplays its cruelty and normalises its structure. Watching anti-caste is an act of unlearning, of breaking the illusions that savarna cinema has created over the years.

Caste divides not only land and labour, but also imagination and culture. Caste operates in the imagination as much as in physical life, defining who is seen as human and who remains invisible. Anti-caste cinema shatters that hegemony. It builds a cinema that dismantles hierarchy and reclaims authorship, where experience, identity, and collective memory assert themselves as the foundation of a new cultural imagination. In the hands of filmmakers from Dalit community like Pa. Ranjith, Nagraj Manjule and Mari Selvaraj the camera no longer observes from a distance. It speaks from within the world of the oppressed. By doing so, it dismantles the aesthetic order that has long sustained Savarna culture and imagination in cinema. It frees cinema from the illusion of savarna objectivity and reminds us that cinema is, and has always been, political. There is no neutral gaze. Every camera is positioned somewhere in society. Anti-caste cinema breaks that allows new ways of watching cinema and creates a place for contemplation. Dalits begin to see through the lies they were made to believe and unlearn what Savarna cinema taught them about themselves and the world. It also gives the Savarnas a chance to confront and understand the dehumanisation they have caused, both to Dalits and to themselves.