The cinema of invisible people - HARSH MANDER http://www.thehindu.com/featur
Nagraj Manjule’s debut Marathi film 'Fandry' (Wild Pig). No other motion picture evokes the torment and shame of growing up within a stigmatised caste in contemporary India as poignantly as Fandry.
India’s pitiless inequalities are also at the heart of a Kannada film '1 December', an ultimately tragic satire written and directed by P. Sheshadri.
An equally biting political satire is Firoz Abbas Khan’s 'Dekh Tamasha Dekh'. An unknown impoverished worker is crushed to death when an oversized cut-out of a political leader crashes down on him.
... In a study of rural untouchability in ten states a few years ago, we found that in one in three, and sometimes one in two rural schools even today, dalit children are forced to sit separately in the back of the class, and eat from separate plates in separate lines. Some teachers even ask these children to clean school floors and toilets, chores never assigned to upper-caste children. Fandry offers, in Jabya’s longing and ultimate humiliation, an affecting glimpse of what transpires in the hearts and minds of children who study beside children marked as socially superior because of their caste. ...
... We live in an age when the voices of people outside the limits of shining and aspirational India are muffled, their faces invisible, because they are seen to be the losers in India’s great surge forward. Films like these which restore voice and dignity to these people, and recognise them not as losers but as oppressed people, are moral and political documents for our times.
Nagraj Manjule’s debut Marathi film 'Fandry' (Wild Pig). No other motion picture evokes the torment and shame of growing up within a stigmatised caste in contemporary India as poignantly as Fandry.
India’s pitiless inequalities are also at the heart of a Kannada film '1 December', an ultimately tragic satire written and directed by P. Sheshadri.
An equally biting political satire is Firoz Abbas Khan’s 'Dekh Tamasha Dekh'. An unknown impoverished worker is crushed to death when an oversized cut-out of a political leader crashes down on him.
... In a study of rural untouchability in ten states a few years ago, we found that in one in three, and sometimes one in two rural schools even today, dalit children are forced to sit separately in the back of the class, and eat from separate plates in separate lines. Some teachers even ask these children to clean school floors and toilets, chores never assigned to upper-caste children. Fandry offers, in Jabya’s longing and ultimate humiliation, an affecting glimpse of what transpires in the hearts and minds of children who study beside children marked as socially superior because of their caste. ...
... We live in an age when the voices of people outside the limits of shining and aspirational India are muffled, their faces invisible, because they are seen to be the losers in India’s great surge forward. Films like these which restore voice and dignity to these people, and recognise them not as losers but as oppressed people, are moral and political documents for our times.
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