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

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H09
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

Presentations

Reconstitutive Aesthetics and Fight Scene Choreography in Malayalam Cinema
P Shyma - Payyanur College, Kannur Universoty, Kannur, India
‘He who stood up for Tamils is a Tamil’: Affinity, Affect, and Identity in anti-caste Tamil Cinema
Pazhani Aadhavan - Department of English and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Interrogating ‘Anti-Caste Feminism’ of Manju Mai in Laapta Ladies
Verma Shainal - Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi, Delhi, India
Reel Histories and Nationalism: Historical Narratives and Caste Politics in Marathi Cinema
Pol Prabodhan Aravind - Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India
Embedded Economies: Caste and Capital in Tamil Film Production
Priya K Manju - M.O.P.VAISHNAV COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, Madras University, Chennai, India
Towards sensory responses to caste’s sensory regimes
Ranjan Ram Krishna - HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
From Representation to Critical Presence:Artists and Anti-Caste Expressions in South India
Edachira Manju - South Asian Studies, Brandeis University, Brandeis University, Waltham, Boston, United States
Can Humiliation be an Aesthetic Experience? Anti-caste History and Tamil Cinema
Leonard Dickens - Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India
Constructing Ambedkarite Gaze and Ambedkarite Spectatorship through Select Anti-caste Films
Bunkar Neeraj - Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom