Among some of the best Indian films of recent times exhibited in Delhi, I found compelling the diversity of voices and themes. The most significant were those that thrust centre-stage faces and voices from the margins of unequal India.
What should be compulsory viewing in every school and college is Nagraj Manjule’s debut Marathi film Fandry , which means Wild Pig. No other motion picture evokes the torment and shame of growing up within a stigmatised caste in contemporary India as poignantly as Fandry . A teenage boy, Jabya, in an untouchable family which is forced over generations into the most despised caste vocation of rounding up wild pigs, develops a secret love for an upper-caste classmate. He watches her in wordless devotion as she studies at her bench in class, or walks the dusty pathways of the village. She is not deliberately unkind to him, but as a low-caste boy he hardly exists in her consciousness.
The boy still hopes that one day she will return his affections, and dreams endlessly about that day. But in a heart-rending climax, she joins her classmates in mocking Jabya when he is forced to help his family capture some wild pigs in the village. As his fellow students watch him undertake work which they regard as most unclean and humiliating, he painfully realises that his country may give him the right to study today alongside other children, but the stubborn inequities of caste still mark him as separate and lowly because of the accident of his birth.
In a study of rural untouchability in ten states a few years ago, we found that in one in three, and sometimes one in two rural schools even today, dalit children are forced to sit separately in the back of the class, and eat from separate plates in separate lines. Some teachers even ask these children to clean school floors and toilets, chores never assigned to upper-caste children. Fandry offers, in Jabya’s longing and ultimate humiliation, an affecting glimpse of what transpires in the hearts and minds of children who study beside children marked as socially superior because of their caste.
India’s pitiless inequalities are also at the heart of a Kannada film 1 December , an ultimately tragic satire written and directed by P. Sheshadri. In a small village Basupura, Madevappa gives up his life as a truck driver to labour hard in a small flour mill, while his wife Devakka supplements her family income by making rotis and selling these in a nearby town. They are mystified when the Chief Minister decides to spend one night in their hut. As the district administration descends on their home to prepare for the visit, villagers look upon the indigent couple with new esteem, and their own hopes begin to mount for a better future.
The Chief Minister is again not disrespectful to the couple, but his focus is on the symbolism of his visit and on ensuring its widest media coverage. Therefore he has little time for his host family, and they become outsiders in their own home, even as their illustrious guest sleeps within. But their world collapses completely when the Chief Minister publicly announces after his visit what they had kept secret from the entire world, that the couple was living with HIV AIDS. He chose them for his night stay, to show that he did not spurn them. But Madevappa is immediately dismissed from the flour shop, no one buys his wife’s rotis , and their son is shunned from his classroom.
An equally biting political satire is Firoz Abbas Khan’s Dekh Tamasha Dekh . An unknown impoverished worker is crushed to death when an oversized cut-out of a political leader crashes down on him. Born a Hindu but converted to Islam, no one spared a thought for him when he was alive, but a virulent and violent battle breaks out between fundamentalist leaders of both religions to claim his corpse for his last rites.
We live in an age when the voices of people outside the limits of shining and aspirational India are muffled, their faces invisible, because they are seen to be the losers in India’s great surge forward. Films like these which restore voice and dignity to these people, and recognise them not as losers but as oppressed people, are moral and political documents for our times.
