Indian cinema almost makes it looks like caste is experienced only by Dalits, says Rajesh Rajamani

Rajesh Rajamali, a filmmaker and film critic who primarily writes on Tamil cinema, is making news with his satirical take on the caste blindness of upper-caste people in his short film The Discreet Charm Of The Savarnas. Presented by Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Productions, the film follows three upper-caste filmmakers from South Mumbai who are on an urgent quest to find a protagonist who, in their words, ‘looks like a Dalit’ for a shoot that is to take place the next day.

In an exclusive conversation with Cinestaan.com, the filmmaker opened up about the inspiration behind the short, his association with director Pa Ranjith, and his displeasure with Indian cinema for limiting caste representation to depictions of Dalits as victims.

How did you come up with the idea?

In 2018, I came across a Facebook post on a casting group. There was an advertisement which actually said that they were looking for an actor who looked like a Dalit. A lot of people also criticized it, and I think after some time it was taken down because of all the backlash. I thought the post was very amusing; it's not like Dalits are aliens. Actually, I had forgotten about the incident altogether, but much later I was watching an Italian film and there was a scene where three people were running to catch a train and it suddenly struck me: what if I combine this frame of three people running to do something and somebody looking for a Dalit-looking actor? So I came up with the story of a small film crew running around a city to find a Dalit-looking actor and, just to increase the drama, I thought 'what if they had only one day to do it?' That's how the idea of the short film came about.

How did Pa Ranjith come onboard?

Pa Ranjith had started the YouTube channel Neelam last year. They had called me to discuss the kind of content they could produce. I had made a two-minute short film called Lovers in the Afternoon for their channel. Actually, I had already shot The Discreet Charm Of Savarnas and  I was in the process of editing my film when I met Pa Ranjith. So I just showed him the film to get his feedback. He liked it and asked me if I would like to release the film on his platform. That's how he came on board.

Pa Ranjith had said in one of his interviews that he was a politician first and then a filmmaker. Do you subscribe to the same ideology?

I remember watching that interview of his. I think he said it in a slightly cheeky way. In my understanding what he wanted to convey is that when you are an artist, you are automatically political. Art and politics are not separate from each other, not just for him but for any artist in the world. Arts and politics are interlinked. Often art is just a medium. Somebody might choose to express his story through a song or a book, and people like Ranjith and I choose the cinema to tell our story. What the artist wants to say comes first, the art form and the medium are secondary. So I think what he wanted to say is that every artist first decides what they are trying to say and then they choose a suitable medium. So I think his statement was a cheeky commentary on very universal phenomena but if you ask me, I'm a storyteller first.

Of late, we have been seeing films and web-series about caste discrimination, but they are mostly about Dalits or lower castes.

We are a caste society. Caste exists everywhere in India, from where people are born to where they are buried, where people work to how people marry. Our personal and professional relationships are all dictated by caste, so caste is an omnipresent element in Indian society. There is no escaping caste in India. Indian cinema usually shows a casteless society. It pretends as if caste doesn't exist and whenever it wants to discuss the matter, the mainstream cinema only talks about Dalits. So I'm saying it's not like caste is present in only Dalits, its present in upper castes, OBCs. People who are higher in the caste hierarchy, they experience caste in the form of privilege and for the people below, the caste experience comes in the form of discrimination, violence. For one person caste is a privilege for another its violence and discrimination. My problem is Indian cinema almost makes it looks like caste is experienced by only Dalits and the rest of society is casteless. And even when they decide to tell stories about Dalits they are mostly about extreme violence, manual scavenging deaths and sexual violence. Beyond this, they not able to say anything. So the only caste narratives we have now are showing Dalits as victims, beyond this we have absolutely no representation of caste issues in Indian cinema.

You chose to focus on high-caste people in your short film. Why?

In this film, we thought why don't we invert this completely because actually the real caste structure is upheld by the upper caste. They are the beneficiaries of this entire caste structure but no movie is putting the spotlight on them. So we thought we would invert this gaze and show upper-caste people and how they behave concerning caste and how they knowingly and unknowingly uphold the caste structure. I thought we should make a movie that reflects this.

Are any of the characters from your short based on real people you have encountered?

The characters are not based on any particular person, but there are a lot of people we meet in our public and personal life. I used to work in a bank in Mumbai for six years. Now I'm in Chennai. So I have seen how people behave and talk in elite circles.  Each character is an amalgamation of different characteristics of a lot of elite people. So I would say that it is inspired by real people but not one person in particular.

Is it possible to separate art from politics?

Everything is political. All cinema is political. There is a general belief that only films that talk about caste, gender or some other social issue are considered political. Not just cinema, all art forms are political because every art form is making an argument knowingly or unknowingly. And when you make an argument you are reflecting on something so it automatically becomes political. There is a great French filmmaker Costa-Gavras; he says that all cinema is political; even films which are trying to be apolitical are political because trying to be apolitical is a conscious political choice.

Your film takes a dig at the hypocrisy of the liberal progressive types who are aware of international social issues but are completely caste blind and unaware of their privileges. The female character in the film is a prime example of that. How did you come up with the idea?

It's not about male or female, The three protagonists in my film are progressive people, They can talk about gender issues, mental illness, and a bunch of other social issues but when it comes to caste all three are the same. One character talks about African American writers and the female character talks about gender and mental health issues. They are very sensitive to other things but they are unable to see their role in upholding the caste system. The idea was not to single out any character but to show how people who are progressive in other matters lag when it comes to understanding caste issues and their roles in upholding the very caste hierarchy they criticize.

In one of your film essays, you criticized the trope of the Savarna Savior used by many films made on Dalit issues. But these films are based on real incidents, so how can one rewrite such incidents?

When any caste atrocity happens, it's a traumatic experience for the people of that community. But when we decide to make a fictionalized film on that incident, can a member of the community enjoy watching that film? Those are traumatised are not going to buy popcorn and watch that film. It becomes a watchable experience only for others. I think there is a certain ethical problem in trying to convert real-life atrocities into dramatized masala films. I'm not completely against the idea of telling the stories of Dalit atrocities but they should be told more sensitively, but we cannot convert them into pulp fiction. These stories are turned into commercial formulaic films and that is problematic. When we covert these real-life atrocities into commercial cinema we are essentially converting these people and their trauma into a commodity and, in my opinion, this is insensitive storytelling, 

The Dalit narrative has been an important part of Indian literature, but for some reason, it never got its due in mainstream media such as cinema or television. Do you think the emergence of the digital medium and OTT platforms will help bridge this gap?

No, on the contrary, I think mainstream cinema is a lot more democratic than OTT platforms. The thing we have to understand is that people who go to watch films in theatres are largely from the working-class Bahujan community. By Bahujan, I mean people from scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST), and other backward classes (OBC). If you look at OTT platforms, they are catering to a very elite audience and that's also reflected in the kind of stories they produce. So even if OTT platforms want to tell stories about the Bahujan community, I wonder what kind of stories they will tell. Because they would want to keep things comfortable for their core audience. If Bahujan stories are going to be told, it would be likelier to happen in mainstream cinema rather than on OTT platforms, or at least the former's stories will be more honest. Even if OTT platforms try to commodify Dalit stories, they will still make them palatable to elite audiences, and I don't know how much of honesty can be preserved there.