Views From an Anti-Caste Movement: Caste, Labour, and Religion in Sangharsh

Abstract

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.