Re-Visioning Caste in Indian Cinema

Adding nuance to the accusation of sustained caste blindness against Indian cinema, this article situates Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi blockbuster Sairat (2016) within the trajectories of Marathi cinema, and vis-à-vis the historical traffic between the Hindi film industry and its southern counterparts. The article grapples with sociological and formal valences of realism and melodrama, which co-constitute Sairat, so as to argue that the re-visioning must address the “invisible” embeddedness of caste in universalized abstractions; or more appropriately, in its (mis)translations away from the “limiting” particularity of caste politics to be subsumed under more universally legible aesthetic of social justice.