Views From an Anti-Caste Movement: Caste, Labour, and Religion in Sangharsh
- Social Change 2024
- 208-228
While the sociology and anthropology of India are replete with the thematic of caste and caste-based oppression and inequalities, the world of ethnographic film-making is largely silent on these issues. This article analyses an exception to this situation-Sangharsh: Times of Strife [Dir. Nicolas Jaoul, 2018], filmed in the late 1990s-early 2000s and revolving around activists of the Bhartiya Dalit Panthers, an anti-caste formation in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. I examine the film's enactment of caste relations through its focus on this anti-caste movement and its activists. To this end, I attend to questions of cinematic form and structure, link the film's representational strategies to film-making lineages, and analyse sequences in which some of the most contentious, topical issues are developed-namely, the connections between caste and labour as well as between caste, religion, and communalism. The article therein analyses the implications of these cinematic engagements to our understanding of caste relations.