How Does Caste Influence In Cinema

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CASTE INFLUENCE IN BOLLYWOOD CINEMA

Submitted by:
Leora d’cunha
BA (J&MC) 5TH Sem

INTRODUCTION
Caste is one such factor in India where many controversies have been revolving around it. The notion that cinema is being developed in order to entertain people is been very critical. Films are more of political and ideological objectives. Hence, films are more biased and secure a negative position amongst the Dalits perspective during the past one century of the film world. Caste as a typical reality of India is a fact that is widely accepeted but it has been given a negative approach by the Bollywood film makers.
As with so much in India, caste is a olden institution that prevails in everyday life, the mechanics of which remain …show more content…

The decorative and bulging style of the city rich, Western attire, foreign locations and cosmopolitanism gripped the narratives making Shakti Samant and Pramod Chakravarthy household names. (Gooptu 2012) The bourgeois hero was a romantic lover, good hearted and indulged mainly to satisfy the burning emotional quench. In the times of Shammi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna as the spokespersons of Bollywood, it was difficult to assume that popular cinema could notice the other wretched world. Caste was completely blacked out as if the socialist dreams were already fulfilled within the first decade itself. However the upper caste names, brahmanical cultural rituals and Hindu aesthetics were portrayed as the natural assets of the entire …show more content…

In the mid-90s, the novelist Arundhati Roy vilified the makers of Bandit Queen, the most realistic and politically challenging film ever made about caste. The heroine was the real-life Phoolan Devi, whose gang-rape by the men of a higher-caste village turned her into a mass-murdering vigilante. Roy objected to Devi's sexual abuse being shown (albeit very inexplicitly) on screen while Devi was alive – despite the fact that Devi had given her express consent. Roy's hyper-sensitive Indian sexual mores dominated the larger debate on caste.
"But gender and caste could not be separated," says Farrukh Dhondy, who wrote the film. "The fact is that Devi was raped because she was lower caste and those men thought they could get away with it. A woman's life in India is very much defined by caste."
After 60 years of Indian democracy, lower castes have now established themselves as powerful voting blocs, leading to the rise of Mayawati, the first dalit woman to be elected to India's parliament and chief minister of its largest state, Uttar Pradesh – one of the most powerful figures in the country, able to make or break a

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