ABSTRACT
At the root of this volume are the myriad ways in which caste, in its far-reaching and deeply dehumanising scope, has been made visible or invisible, legible or illegible, in Indian cinema, endeavouring to decode how the sphere of Indian mainstream cinema has maintained and sustained a dominant caste hegemony and, deliberately or not, a casteist ethos. This is thus not a volume on Dalit cinema per se nor on the presence or absence of Dalit or lower-caste characters in films. Nor is it a volume on the political stand of Dalit film-makers raising social awareness through the film medium, as if raising an anti-caste critique was only to be left to Dalits, lower castes, and, more generally speaking, Bahujans. In a fresh and perhaps ambitious move, the co-editors and the contributors have adopted a somewhat different angle since the volume emerges from the desire to tackle the multifarious and endless manner in which caste is always there—any caste and all of them—whether it jumps out of the screen or creeps in through the back door, whether it is easy for the spectator to notice and pin down, or seeps into their unconscious and is accepted as a given, something that could almost appear as the ‘norm’. The volume attempts to create an anti-caste critique of India cinema.
