I have observed that the history documented by Eleanor Zelliot, Valerian Rodrigues, and political scientist Christopher Jaffrelot has been markedly different from the popular discourse sanctioned by the state. Her understanding of gaze resonated with my social position, and I began looking through the marginalised history of Buddha, Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, Periyar Ramasamy, and others. Evidently in that process, they have not only capitalised on such discourses, but have also stripped the marginalised characters of their dignity and agency replicating the same hierarchical structures of caste on screen.Īuthor, feminist, and social activist Bell Hooks (1992) talks about the “traumatic relationship” with “gaze,” and how the gaze informed black parenting and black spectatorship in the United States (US). This gaze of “othering,” silencing, and appropriating the existence of history, knowledge, and symbols of the marginalised communities have been tools employed by the upper-caste film-makers deliberately. Largely, the image of Indian nationalism in the popular imagination has been that of M K Gandhi, and Ambedkar and his social justice movements against Brahmanism have been absent from the public conscience. The assertion of the marginalised has hardly made it to the pre- and post-independence Indian cinema. Ambedkar has not been part of this popular imagination, and neither do the politics, history, and social movements of the marginalised.
India’s popular imagination of its colonial past has been that of a “haloed” history of Indian nationalism. This dual imagination of Indian nation, as B R Ambedkar forewarned, finds its manifestation even on the silver screen. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.” (Narake et al 2003) Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. “Indians today are governed by two different ideologies.