The Portrayal of Dalits in Contemporary Indian Cinema with the special reference to Akrosh(2010), and Masaan (2015)

Bollywood is celebrating a hundred successful years of Indian Films, but now is the time for some audit and reflection. Indian cinema has broken free from a range of technological, geographical, thematic and picturisation related taboos, restrictions and limitations but it has yet to free itself from the stranglehold of the Chaturvarna System. That is why, since its initial days, Savarna actors, producers, directors, writers, technicians, distributors, etc. have been dominating the world of Indian films. There have been a very few mainstream Dalit stories and characters that left impression on the masses in more than a hundred years of Indian cinema. 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 the issue of caste became a part of the popular film narratives like in Achhut Kanya (1936) and Sujata (1959).In the 60s, however, cinema was 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 center. It never occurred to any filmmaker to portray a Dalit protagonist fighting against social evils. However, the social questions like of caste-based gender violence and feudal exploitation gathered remarkable momentum through films like Shyam Benegal‘s Ankur (1974).In the second part of my paper, I deal mainly with those films belonging to the latter decades of the twentieth century which portrays the change that a Dalit woman‘s persona has gone through over the decades. The stereotypes are done away with; 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), Priyadarshan‘s Aakrosh (2010) and Neeraj Ghaywan‘s Masaan (2015), etc. This paper aims at retelling the role of Indian Cinema in the portrayal of the plights of Dalits in our Society with the reference of two films i.e. Priyadarshan‘s Aakrosh (2010) and Neeraj Ghaywan‘s Masaan (2015).