Ayushman Khurana’s has emerged as a popular choice away from mainstream Bollywood. His recent movie trailer “Article 15” has successfully created a buzz about how the movie is bringing ‘caste’ to the big screen even though it has historically been silent about this issue.
The movie trailer flashes an image of Ambedkar in the beginning and inserts the word ‘Dalit’ accompanied by a hushed question “Is she also a Dalit?”. A closer look at the trailer reveals that the movie might not be as radical as the trailer purports it to be. In fact, it seems that instead of illuminating the Caste issue, the movie trailer suggests that the movie will probably complicate it.
The trailer seems to have given away the story and plot of the movie which is comparable to the serious police genre in Bollywood movies similar to Ajay Devgan’s ‘Ganga Jal’. In the aforementioned movie, the senior officer moves to India’s disorderly country life, and ‘Article 15’ seems to build upon the same journey motif from the orderly urban to the unruly rural landscape. This is not just the journey of a police officer, it is the journey of a modern bureaucratic framework to rural India’s social disorder. This is made clear in the scene where a Big Police SUV moves down from the Highway to the narrow road surrounded by fields.
The story seems to assume that caste is just a problem of deep-rooted traditions which are strongly held in rural areas. The city spaces, with their modern lifestyle and cosmopolitanism, are free from the caste-based discriminations. So, the overarching narrative of the movie seems to be misplaced in time at least by a few decades if not more, when Dalits still found cities to be hopeful spaces bereft of discrimination. But of late, that trust in urban spaces has been constantly questioned. The most recent case being that of Payal Tadvi. To that list, one can add names like Rohit Vemula, alongside the thrashing of Dalits in major cities like Gurgaon and widespread Manual scavenging in urban cities.
Another problematic element in the narrative seems to be the role of Ayushman Khurana as a Brahmin administrator who is going to uphold the constitution and bring justice to the poor Dalits who are ironically suffering due to a Brahminic social order in the first place. The question that arises is who is this IPS officer trying to improve? The answer most likely seems to be his upper-caste allies but perhaps of a certain lower stratum in terms of class.
Caste And The Indian Constitution
Another interesting aspect of the narrative is the reference to the constitution as a ‘Kitab’ (book), the narrative voice seems to highlight a layman perspective of the constitution, a perspective that fails to distinguish and identify the spirit and rationality of it. But the rejoinder that the officer gives ‘us kitab ki chalani Padegi, ussi se chalega desh‘ (Our country will only function properly if we adhere to the tenets of the constitution) identifies the value of Kitab/constitution with a certain institutional rationality as he is a part of that larger institutional mechanism put in place by the constitution.
Kitab, however, is an interesting word choice for the constitution and its most closet connotations might be understood in the broader framework of the Indian higher education system which is still trying to build its legitimacy for the larger masses in India. Kitabs/ books are repositories of knowledge that are sometimes tedious to grasp, a recent trend among students to study from the Guidebooks or Summaries from Internet Websites should be placed in this changed cultural context where the readership of books has fallen dramatically especially after the rise of social media and YouTube.
Books, particularly among the majority of first-generation learners, haven’t been able to earn much legitimacy. These first-generation learners are the progenies of the Mandal expansion of reservation and also include a big section of SCs and STs.
The movie starts with the narration ‘Mei or tum inhe dikhaye hi nahi dete, hum kabhi harijan hojate hai or kabhi bahujan hojate hai, bas jan nahi ban parahe hai, ki jan gan man me hamari bhi ginti hojaye’ ( We are practically invisible to these people. There are times when they treat us as ‘Harijans’ and at times just as a part of the crowd, only never as individuals with rights).
The narration foregrounds the voice of the Dalits who have been invisibilized and more so politically misappropriated/mistreated with sharp criticism of the Dalit-Bahujan Politics of the 90s.
This disavowal of Dalit-Bahujan politics is especially important in the context of BJP led Hindutva populism which, I believe, has come to power precisely after weakening this Dalit-Bahujan political consciousness. The movie seems thus particularly divorced from any essential beliefs in the rationale behind Dalit-Bahujan Politics.
The next line ‘insaf ki bheek mat mango, bahut mang chuke (Don’t keep begging for justice, you have begged enough) has two very interesting Hindi phrases whose historical significance provides them with a strongly Anti-Dalit utterance. “Bheek Mat Mango, bahut mang chuke”, a popular understanding of reservation has interpreted it as a charity given to Dalits since they are inherently understood to be devoid of merit in this understanding of reservation.
Who the narrator is addressing this to, isn’t clear, so it seems to be targeted either at the audience’s conscience or the Dalit characters in the movie. In either case, there is an appeal to discontinue faith in the established institutions of Indian democracy and what is being considered as ‘favour’ but is actually constitutional ‘right’. The movie here seems to foreground unfulfilled democratic promises, particularly those made to its deprived populace and popular perceptions around such failure. But if it is directed towards Dalit characters in the movie, it reminds one of anti-reservation spirit.
Immediately after this narration, the trailer shows us visuals of what appears to be a woman getting raped. The running narration and visuals perform a very crucial shift; it places under the idea of Dalit, a female. This can be understood as a critique of Dalits as a masculine identity. But what follows from there is an interesting narrative because the issue of Dalit women is overlapped with the issue of homosexuality as the narrator tells the audience that both the girls were hanged supposedly under the pretext of homosexuality. One needs to see how this relationship is developed and explored in the movie, however, Dalit female writing has not largely dealt with homosexuality as a pervading issue. To me, this interesting twist suggests the comingling of two progressive discourses in the Indian public sphere- the issues of caste discrimination and the emergence of sexuality as a fluid category.
A ‘Brahmin’ Hero Fighting Against Casteism
Finally, Ayushman Khurana’s role as an IPS officer might become the centre of criticism as the movie places him in the position of a hero trying to bring order to a society rendered troubled due to the presence of caste. But, as a brahmin, he is fighting precisely against the same social order which has been created by a Brahmanical doctrine. The scene where Ayushman is interrogating fellow policemen about their gotra highlights that the brahmin administrator has forgotten history and the social organisation is extremely obfuscating to his English trained mind as reflected in his immediate violent outburst “What the hell is going on?” He is then shown pasting a printout of Article 15 in the Police station, symbolically upholding the constitutional rationality, also suggesting that the upper-caste need to uphold the constitution.
Another interesting scene to understand the predicament of this Brahmin hero is a dialogue where he is perhaps talking to a press lady over the phone. He says ‘tumhe ek hero chaiye Aditi’ (you want a hero, Aditi) and the visuals show him sitting in his office with pictures of Ambedkar and Gandhi hung beside each other, important however is the turning of his head towards Gandhi when the word “hero” is pronounced.
This perhaps indicates the central tension of the movie; the predicament of a Brahmin administrator who is faced with dire circumstances of a Brahmanical social order, an order which was preserved in the post-independence era with thinkers like Gandhi as opposed to Ambedkar who sought a radical option to undermine them. The story seems to explore his predicaments in the face of these crises. The movie, however, highlights the growing attention to Caste as a serious problem to reckon with.