38 – Anti-caste Experiments in Indian Cinema: Figures, Aesthetics, and Technology

This panel would explore anti-caste experiments in cinemas of India by particularly foregrounding figures (filmmakers, artists, and technicians), aesthetic figurations, and the embodiment of technology as experience and practice. Who are the intervening figures in Indian Cinema—its production, representation, distribution, and publicity—against caste as a regime of culture? What are their major contributions towards an anti-caste cinematic experience? How do they engage with caste-gender questions? Do they subscribe to a dominant aesthetic, or do they radicalize? What is the role of technology in its production, dissemination, and reception? Keeping these questions in mind, this panel would examine emancipatory aesthetics at the level of visuals, sound, and haptics through the intervention of technology. While caste works as a cultural norm in many films, it is important to study how film narratives also treat caste as a problem and engage with it. Instead of focusing on the absence and erasure of caste oppressed communities in cinema, it is indeed pertinent to highlight alternative productions by Dalits and other caste oppressed communities which ‘reject the rejection’ (Guru, 2009), offering affective and embodied registers of resistance and engagement. This prompts us to examine not only the representational questions that haunt the present, but also seek answers to the questions on presence in the historical practice of cinema. From early silent cinema to contemporary digital cinema, didn’t cinema as a medium of entertainment and a socio-cultural institution engage with the unsettling questions on caste across forms (documentary, popular films, art films), genres, languages, and cultures in India? This panel would particularly reflect on how filmmakers, artists and technicians (including junior artists, production workers, background dancers and musicians etc.), especially from the caste oppressed locations; negotiate, resist, and break the caste structures of cinematic practice.

Convenors

Dr. Manju Edachira
- Dr. Dickens Leonard -