In Honor of the latest Hollywood Reporter India Cover Story

A year since 'Made in Heaven', how caste has continued shaping the Indian film and television space

Hollywood Reporter India’s first digital cover

Mix unchecked influence and generational wealth with colossal power in an industry so toxic that it eventually starts collapsing in on itself, and you get Hollywood. But if you add feudal nativism, remove any crumbs of collective bargaining power afforded through unions and set it through the murkiest layer of caste hierarchy and access, then that’s Bollywood.

The two might have had some overlaps in the past, but they have never been closer than the recent arrival of Hollywood Reporter in India (with no name change, of course).

As a validation of how much the Indian film industry has changed just over the last decade, Hollywood Reporter’s first digital cover ventures well beyond Bollywood into Tamil and Malayalam cinema, and features Vetrimaraan, Pa. Ranjith, Mahesh Narayanan, Karan John and Zoya Akhtar. Pa. Ranjith in particular, who is known for his deeply political, deliciously anti-caste and unabashedly Ambedkarite cinema is perhaps the strongest indicator of how Dalit cinema through directors like Ranjith has willed the industry to bend around itself.

But the more things change, more strongly they cling to their old selves. The cover also features Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar — two of the current most powerful old-world Bollywood dynasts, who recircuited India’s cultural imagination towards a more potent form of neoliberalization in the late 90s and 2000s.

Herein lies the rub.

Both Johar and Akhtar, are known for movies that focus on the stories of if not exclusively diasporic, then certainly mostly wealthy Indians (notable exceptions aside). Pa. Ranjith pointedly makes cinema that challenges the social and political hierarchies of caste in the Indian subcontinent. Together, on the cover of HR India, they embody, if not entirely, then at least symbolically, the spectrum of caste consciousness and engagement in Indian cinema.

Ranjith’s Dalit background and exclusion from elite spaces lends him a specifically intimate frame of reference around caste. Johar and Akhtar, both offspring of formidable and influential career building families in Bollywood, could plausibly understand caste from their own locations of dominance. A position that allows them to extract and in the case of Akhtar, exploit the narratives of marginalized subjects for cultural validation and glory. Particularly, in a milieu where such engagement is not only appreciated but, evinced from the HR India’s debut cover, handsomely rewarded.

In the summer of 2023, Zoya Akhtar’s Amazon Prime Series Made in Heaven — a show ostensibly focused on the lavish Indian wedding complex — unblinkingly created a character that lifted directly from my public work and likeness. Pointing out this seemingly obvious (to me and at least 50,000 of the show’s viewers based on reactions online) fact led the show makers to target an intimidating and vindictive publicity campaign that lasted for months, brutally picking apart my personal and professional life, on social media and in various Indian media and tabloid outlets.

Dragging behind a specter of casteism, misogyny, global access of region-specific media, shady media ethics, labor issues, and appropriation and profit making from the trauma of marginalized lives without credit or compensation, the ‘episode’ was endlessly discussed across continents and diasporas. Even inviting commentary from Mira Nair, the celebrated filmmaker behind cult favorites like Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala, who allegedly called the handling of this situation from the show’s makers as ‘deeply unfortunate’ at a private UPenn event earlier this year.

In those bleak months of doom scrolling as a way of shielding from vapid attacks, and bone deep exhaustion from staying awake in two separate time zones, I wrote a piece for a leading American media outlet that unfortunately never got published.

Now, almost a year later, as I’m more less healed from that scar tissue, seems as fine a time as any to release it into the world. Not to mention, HR India’s inaugural issue extended a sharp reminder of the stickiness of powerful institutions (Akhtar is undoubtedly one herself), and their dexterity in evading accountability for their unethical extraction of the lives of real people for profit.

I will be writing more about politics, culture and identity in the coming weeks and months. But for now, read, leave comments (respectfully), and welcome to Featuring Dalits.

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Late Oct, 2023

The strangest part about having your likeness depicted on screen is watching the visceral understanding you have of your personhood lose out to the imagined version of you that now lives in other people’s heads. Throw in a murderous hate campaign and soon you forget the difference. These lines got dangerously blurry for me this summer when Made in Heaven, a hit series on Amazon Prime, featured a character who spoke the words I had spoken, wrote a book I had written and whose life resembled starkly, if not entirely, to the one I had lived so far — all without my knowledge or permission. Over several weeks, as my demand for acknowledgment from the show made me a target for online hate so vicious and all-encompassing that a petition in my support labeled it as a ‘virtual lynching unfolding in public view’, I struggled to hold on to myself.

Pallavi Menke, a Dalit (formerly ‘untouchable’ caste) author in the show’s fifth episode graduates from Columbia University (where I graduated from), writes a book on ‘coming out’ as Dalit (the title of my book), talks about hiding her ‘lower’ caste and reveals with no hint of shame and even some gleaming pride how her grandmother “cleaned toilets” (my exact words in an interview)— a caste profession enforced on a few specific South Asian ‘lower’ castes. She then plans a lavish yet minimalist Buddhist wedding with her Indian American lawyer fiancé in a show whose main focus is planning different shades of ostentatious, expensive, and mostly urban weddings with a side serving of social justice. I’m not married nor planning a wedding anytime soon. But I am a New York-based Bhangi writer who has been speaking about coming out as Dalit at various universities, especially at Columbia, like Menke in the opening scene of the episode.

‘Coming Out as Dalit’, which focuses on passing and growing up in a ‘lower’ caste family hiding their caste by changing our last name, and where I extensively discuss the cultural humiliation of being raised in the Bhangi (manual scavenging) caste, released in India in 2019 and won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puruskar (Indian national literary award for young writers) in 2021. I also addressed in granular detail, in at least two dozen interviews between 2019-21, the painfully long time it took me to overcome the shame I experienced from my Bhangi background (the caste name is also a slur whose use is punishable by the Indian constitution). And to gather the resolve to admit in public that my grandmother’s job was to visit people’s homes to clean their toilets. A fact I had spent most of my life until then, attempting to escape and deny, which seemed to roll off Menke’s tongue without any evident discomfort on the show.

Raising me and my siblings in Rajasthan, an Indian state that’s among the most underdeveloped in India, into a family that was only two generations removed from our degrading caste profession of cleaning human excrement (339 manual scavengers in India have died on their job since 2018), changing our last name and hiding our caste was not a choice my parents made; it was made for them through survival. Passing allowed me to make it through one of India’s most elite colleges and work in advertising and then later in journalism (both professions with notoriously low numbers of Dalits) as partially undetected and somewhat scarred, but still, not fully brutalized. Yet hiding my caste also left me with the lifelong trauma of being ‘found out’ and a persistent sense of ‘lowerness’ that I couldn’t seem to shake.

That was until 2016, when reading a letter that changed my life and that of millions of other Dalits who read it around the world. Rohith Vemula, a Dalit scholar from Hyderabad University was forced to take his own life on account of the trauma and pushback he endured for calling out the institutional discrimination in his university. Aside from his powerful legacy, Vemula who was not hiding his caste, left behind a letter that is now considered one of the most powerful texts in Dalit English literature. It sparked a new chapter for Dalit rights in India, and across the world and gave millions of us the courage to reject the shame we were forced to bear in our existence. For me, it compelled to reveal my hidden caste in an online note I titled “Today I’m Coming Out as Dalit”.

Iconoclastic Dalit rights leader and the pioneering architect of the India’s constitution, Dr. BR Ambedkar famously said that caste is a state of mind. Moving to the United States, where I was able to own my caste without most of the humiliation that has been attached to it for centuries, allowed me to momentarily escape the prison of ‘lowerness’ that is enforced on millions of Dalits through systemic, social, and cultural guardrails. But here, I discovered that unlike India, caste wasn’t merely in disguise. It was buried under thick layers of cultural assimilation so deep that its toxic fumes went undetected for decades, even while it bled poison into the lives of Dalits Americans.

Discrimination at the workplace, in social scenarios, in neighborhood communities, places of worship and even modes of transport went mostly unnoticed until the summer of 2020. In a first in US history and a result of the unprecedented courage of a Dalit engineer, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Silicon Valley giant Cisco for failing to protect him from caste discrimination from his Brahmin managers that year. An extraordinary wave of caste recognition across American colleges and Universities followed and this February (2023), Seattle became the first city in the US to outlaw caste discrimination. More recently, California came close to making history as the first American state to pass a bill (officially named SB403) that would ban discrimination on the basis of caste. But Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it instead, giving in to opposition from mainly right-wing Hindu organizations and lobbyists, who worried that freedom from caste discrimination for Dalits would shatter the myth of Indian Americans as a model minority.

Like me, Pallavi Menke, the fictional Dalit author in the Amazon Prime episode lives and works in the United States. For her “personal is political”. The director behind this particular episode, Neeraj Ghaywan is a Dalit filmmaker known for his powerful female Dalit characters and was critically acclaimed for his most recent portrayal of a compelling Dalit queer woman for a Netflix anthology titled Ajeeb Dastaan (2021). He also ‘came out as Dalit’ in 2018 when he publicly revealed his ‘lower’ caste after several years of working in Bollywood. After the release of Ajeeb Dastaan on Netflix, Ghaywan recognized my contribution to the making of that episode on an Instagram post. Later the same year, he acknowledged in multiple interviews to various Indian media outlets, how ‘Coming Out as Dalit’ helped the dominant caste actor Konkana Sen Sharma portray the role of a Dalit queer woman on his show.

But upon asking from the makers of Made in Heaven, a dominant caste female director and writer trio of Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti and Alankrita Shrivastava, for a formal acknowledgement of the work — especially in the light of an hours-long meeting that Shrivastava had requested with me in New York last summer (in 2022) — their response not only denied what Ghaywan had already accepted but vindictively sought to erase even the previous contribution my work had made to the idea of coming out in the context of being Dalit.

Still for them, discrediting the work wasn’t enough payback. Going further in their attempt to teach a Dalit woman the time-honored caste lesson to ‘remain in her rightful place’, the show’s makers seemingly enlisted influential Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap, who is neither related to the show nor is a caste expert, to make unprovoked hateful remarks attacking ‘Coming Out as Dalit’. For several days, Kashyap engaged in blithe name calling of a Dalit journalist and writer he not only had never met but until that point had no connection. Several Indian media outlets, (minus few exceptions), gleefully repeated his claims with hardly any fact checking or resistance. Soon, the breathless coverage of Kashyap’s statements led to a cascading hate campaign that lasted well over six-weeks (edit: it lasted for five months, until January 2024).

In addition to the violent abuse, cyberbullying, doxing and threats of assault and violence that came my way, Kashyap’s exact words were repeated as retribution for demanding credit. That the awards and recognition for ‘Coming Out as Dalit’ had rendered its author with a distinct voice and public profile did not seem to deter any of this, nor did it inspire the kind of pushback or calls for accountability one would expect if this had happened to a dominant caste woman, or even a Dalit man. All that mattered was my caste, which is considered the lowest and is the subject of discrimination even among Dalits, and the deeply felt shared idea that a Bhangi woman, no matter her location, access or repute had zero right to stand up and ask to be rightfully credited for the work she had created painstakingly over several years, in full glare of media visibility.

The casteist course correction, which was also a response to the last few years of Dalits demanding for their rightfully owed representation, was so severe that it shocked even the most vocal and ardent anti-caste supporters into silence. It also explicitly relied on the absence of other Bhangi academics and public intellectuals who could speak in my favor; several dominant caste and Dalit folks eventually circulated a petition of support which received close to 600 signatures.

Rigidly stratified hierarchies that underscore Indian social structures have been recently cracked open through economic mobility across castes, and access to a global ecosystem through the Internet. The present social order is struggling to recast itself as separate from the starkly oppressive mores of the past yet is finding it impossible to let go of the caste based ranking that offers unchecked power to a few. Preying on the pain of those who are marginalized for profit, but punishing them when they demand to be acknowledged for it, is what happens when powerful institutions seek to reinvent themselves without conceding to any authentic engagement.

Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti and Alanakrita Shrivastava, and not to forget, Anurag Kashyap, have all been hailed as the agents of change against the slavish fiefdom of Indian cinema. Yet, their reactions to a relatively benign ask for acknowledgment culminated into publicly strong arming a writer from the same community they had initially claimed to support. Walking the tightrope of desiring accolades for socially progressive face values on caste while simultaneously undercutting Dalit writers and creatives does not ultimately benefit the goal of dismantling caste systems. It only allows those who wish to maintain their stranglehold on institutional power and influence to appear more palatable as they line their pockets, before moving on to the next ‘trending topic’ to benevolently appropriate. It’s a lesson for caste advocates everywhere, one that has come at steeply high cost.

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Support Independent Writing on Caste

Thoughtful writing on caste has never been more scarce. The diminishing landscape of journalism across the world has further pushed caste into the dregs of pitching hell.

This publication, Featuring Dalits, is independent and free to read. Sharing this letter, and subscribing to it will allow me to continue this work, regardless of the whims of editorial subjectivity. And provide the much needed motivation to face the proverbial blank page. If you value caste as an important lens for conversations around identity, politics and culture, then consider subscribing in case you haven’t already.

Thank you, as always for reading.

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Coming Out as Dalit Book Tour

I have spent a better part of this year touring with Coming Out as Dalit across the United States and I’m thrilled to report, there are no signs of slowing down. After visiting over 17 cities, I’m back in Brooklyn and will be speaking at the Brooklyn Book Festival, this Saturday. Then, I’ll be in Boston on Monday, where I’ll speak at two separate events. Come say hi and learn some more about caste.

• Saturday, September 28, Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event: I’ll be on a panel with amazing writers Marwa Helal, noam keim, Kyle Carrero Lopez, and Devika Rege, and we’ll be talking about Writing in Conflict and Literature as a Political Response at 4 pm. Event link here for more details.

• Monday, September 30, Asian American Pacific Islanders Commission: At an event hosted by publishing home, Beacon Press in Boston at 5 pm. RSVP by emailing here.

• Tuesday, October 1st, Tufts University: At the university for a lecture on caste, 7 pm.

If you’re intrigued and want to learn more, Coming Out as Dalit is available for order, wherever books are sold.