Why Indian Cinema Still Can't Imagine a Dalit Hero

For most of its history, Indian cinema has had a simple rule about who gets to be a hero: not a Dalit. Political scientist Harish S. Wankhede, who has written extensively on caste and representation in Hindi and regional cinema, lays out why in a long conversation on the Nous Podcast — tracing a line from the mythological films of Dadasaheb Phalke to the socialist cinema of the 1950s, the Dalit Panthers of the 1970s, the rise and fall of the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the handful of recent films that have finally allowed a Dalit character to be more than a victim.

A hero needs a history

Wankhede begins with B.R. Ambedkar, and with a deliberate distinction: a protagonist is not the same as a hero. A protagonist can be poor, pitiable, acted upon. A hero has agency — the capacity to challenge a system and imagine a different future. For most of the twentieth century, Indian cinema gave Dalit characters the former and never the latter.

Ambedkar's own political project, in Wankhede's reading, was an attempt to manufacture exactly that agency. The 'untouchable' identity handed down by Hindu social order was, in his analysis, too degraded to carry anyone into modern democratic life with any sense of dignity or aspiration. So Ambedkar reached backward as well as forward: forward toward constitutional democracy, legislatures and capitalist development, which he hoped would give the most precarious Indians a voice as 'political bargainers' rather than objects of charity; and backward toward Buddhism, recovering a historical claim that the so-called untouchables were the descendants of Buddhists defeated by Brahmanical forces — a lineage, not just a grievance. Buddhism gave the movement a dignified past to stand on while democracy supplied an uncertain future.

That dual strategy, Wankhede argues, was itself an admission of limits. Ambedkar's closing speech to the Constituent Assembly warned that India was entering an age of political equality while its social life remained starkly unequal — a contradiction that, left unaddressed, would make the political gains hollow. Gandhi, by contrast, wanted untouchables kept inside the Hindu fold, worried that formally separating them — as Ambedkar sought through a demand for a separate electorate, modelled on the safeguards given to Muslims — would fracture Hindu unity on the eve of the independence struggle. The 1932 Poona Pact was the compromise: no separate electorate, but guaranteed legislative representation. Ambedkar, Wankhede notes, was a pragmatist who took what was available while continuing to build toward more.

A cinema that could see poverty but not caste

Bombay's cinema industry grew up in almost the same years and the same city as Ambedkar's political career — he built his earliest organisations, newspapers and mass mobilisations in that city through the 1920s and 1930s, drawing on a Dalit working class employed in its textile mills and docks. Yet, Wankhede says, no film of that era engaged with the caste question even glancingly. Early Indian cinema, in his account, was never a neutral medium: Dadasaheb Phalke used it explicitly for a project of Hindu cultural nationalism, built on mythological epics, while Muslim and Bengali elites who entered the industry made films that memorialised their own social worlds. Whoever made films, in other words, made films about people like themselves — and in the aspirational hierarchy of early twentieth-century India, the conventional performers of lower-caste entertainment forms such as tamasha were pointedly excluded from the new, more 'dignified' art form growing up around them.

The pattern persisted into the socialist cinema of the 1950s and 60s, Wankhede argues, because that cinema was itself enlisted into Nehruvian nation-building. Filmmakers such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt made searing films about poverty, migration and agrarian crisis — Awaara, Do Bigha Zamin, Mother India — but treated poverty as a homogeneous condition rather than one cut through by caste. Introducing caste onto the screen, in Wankhede's reading, would have exposed a hierarchical, unequal society that the national project needed audiences to see as merely poor, not structurally stratified — and Ambedkar himself, as a political rival to the Congress vision of nation-building, was simply absent from the frame.

Even the parallel or 'art' cinema of the 1960s and 70s, which did put caste onscreen — in films like Sujata, based on a Prem Chand-adjacent story, or Ankur — did so in a narrow register: Dalit characters as wretched, powerless, rigid bodies without agency, frequently represented through a submissive Dalit woman rescued or dominated by an upper-caste man. Wankhede calls this an 'orientalist' flattening — a single sanctioned way of depicting Dalit life, true as far as it went, but excluding every other reality, including the revolutionary politics already erupting a few streets away in the same city.

The Panthers break with Ambedkar's own gradualism

By the early 1970s, the Republican Party of India that Ambedkar had built was fragmenting into rival factions aligned with Congress, with socialists, with communists, each claiming to best represent Dalit interests. Into that vacuum stepped a younger, more radical generation: poets, writers and students who founded the Dalit Panthers, consciously modelled on the Black Panther Party and inspired by the global wave of civil-rights and anti-colonial movements of the 1960s. Figures like Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale argued that waiting for the state to grant safeguards — the core of Ambedkar's own constitutional strategy — was itself a form of passivity. The Panthers wanted to 'smash the Brahminical citadel' outright, embraced confrontation and sometimes violence, and treated Dalits not as claimants of state kindness but as a revolutionary class capable of seizing power.

The movement did not last — internal splits between Dhale's Ambedkarite Buddhist line and Dhasal's Marxist-revolutionary line broke it apart within a few years — but it left behind a body of literature, poetry and theatre that, for the first time, imagined Dalits with courage and interiority rather than only grievance. It also, Wankhede notes, forced a reckoning that mainstream Marxist movements in India had mostly avoided: caste was not simply class in disguise, and a politics built only on class language would keep missing the specific structure of Dalit oppression.

Kanshi Ram's innovation, and its slow collapse

The next major rupture came from Uttar Pradesh rather than Maharashtra, through Kanshi Ram's Bahujan Samaj Party. Where Ambedkar had organised Dalits as a political constituency within the Indian state, Kanshi Ram's 'Bahujan' idea — literally, 'the majority' — proposed a coalition of everyone outside the small social elite: Dalits, Other Backward Classes, Muslims and Adivasis together, with Dalits as the most politically conscious leading group. It was, in Wankhede's account, a genuine innovation rather than a natural extension of Ambedkar's thought — an attempt to make the oppressed not petitioners for state kindness but owners of the state itself. The strategy delivered real power: Mayawati became chief minister of India's largest state, and the BSP won an outright majority there in 2007.

Its decline since roughly 2010–12, Wankhede argues, had several causes: an increasingly self-serving and insular leadership; a persistent image — not entirely undeserved — that the party's benefits flowed disproportionately to Jatav Dalits rather than the dozens of other sub-castes grouped under the Dalit umbrella; and a failure to build any lasting alliance with other Bahujan-identified Dalit leaders elsewhere in the country, whether Ram Vilas Paswan in Bihar or Thol. Thirumavalavan in Tamil Nadu. No single figure, Wankhede says, ever had the stature to weld these regional movements into a national Dalit political force, and Mayawati herself, despite the opportunity, never built that coalition.

How Hindu nationalism absorbed what it once ignored

The most unsettling part of the conversation concerns what filled the vacuum. Wankhede describes a deliberate strategic shift inside the BJP after roughly 2012: rather than relying solely on anti-Muslim majoritarianism, which had its own ceiling, the party began actively courting the same lower-caste and OBC communities that Kanshi Ram had once tried to organise against it. It did so, crucially, through a different register than politics — through culture. Local deities, caste-specific folk heroes and festivals were elevated and woven into a broader Hindu identity, offering Dalit and OBC sub-castes a sense of belonging inside Hindutva's tent rather than a political programme of rights or redistribution. Wankhede calls this 'subaltern Hindutva' or the 'Bahujanisation' of Hindu politics — an appropriation, he says bluntly, of Ambedkar's iconography without any of his radical substance: 'There's Ambedkar everywhere and there's no Ambedkarite thinking.'

This strategy worked, in his analysis, precisely because the Dalit and OBC category was never as unified as the term implies. In Maharashtra, Mahars and Mangs who carried strong Ambedkarite or Buddhist identification diverged sharply from dozens of other Dalit sub-castes with no comparable political consciousness; similar splits run through Jat and non-Jat communities in Uttar Pradesh and Paswan and non-Paswan groups in Bihar. It is precisely the sub-castes that failed to build an independent political consciousness, Wankhede argues, that became the easiest targets for cultural absorption into Hindutva — offered belonging and a share of welfare schemes, in exchange for folding their specific grievances into a larger Hindu identity that also, not incidentally, positions Muslims as the common enemy.

A reluctant turn onscreen

Cinema, in Wankhede's account, only began reflecting a different Dalit image after 2000, and the shift started in the regions, not in Hindi film. Nagraj Manjule's Fandry (2014) and the blockbuster Sairat (2016) in Marathi, and Pa. Ranjith's Madras and later Kabali — which built an entire 'Dalit hero' persona around Rajinikanth — in Tamil, demonstrated that caste-conscious, Dalit-centred stories could draw mass audiences rather than being confined to festival-circuit art cinema. Hindi cinema followed more cautiously: Neeraj Ghaywan's Masaan gave a Dalit protagonist aspiration and interior life; Article 15 widened the lens to show Dalit doctors and activists rather than only victims; Ghaywan's Homebound, India's recent Oscar entry, continued that aspirational register. A loosely Mayawati-inspired film, Madam Chief Minister, attempted something similar in a more commercial register.

But Wankhede is careful not to overstate the shift. He describes this new Dalit cinema as a small, intellectual, 'niche' genre — serious, slice-of-life filmmaking rather than mainstream commercial cinema — standing in sharp contrast to a mainstream industry he says is simultaneously drifting toward communal commercial cinema built around dominant-caste heroes (Chhaava's Maratha hero, Dunki's Jat hero) fused with anti-Muslim messaging. The appropriation of caste pride into Hindutva's commercial cinema, in his view, is already further advanced than the still-fragile emergence of Dalit heroism onscreen.

A movement without a unifying figure

Asked where the Dalit movement goes from here, Wankhede is candid about his pessimism. Reservation policy, he points out, was never designed as a poverty-alleviation programme — it was meant to secure entry into political and administrative power — and even on that narrower goal it has underperformed: quotas above the lowest (Group D) grades of government service have rarely been filled past single digits, blocked by what he calls 'last-mile subjectivity' in hiring. With no meaningful capital base — he notes there is still no Dalit billionaire, and barely a visible Dalit entrepreneurial class — politics remained virtually the only arena where assertion was possible, and that arena is now the one most clearly fragmenting: regional Dalit parties splintering further into sub-caste-based outfits, caste census debates threatening to entrench division rather than resolve it, and ageing leaders such as Mayawati failing, in Wankhede's words, to build the kind of national federation the moment calls for.

What endures, he says, is smaller but real: Ambedkar's image has become genuinely ubiquitous and cross-caste in a way Gandhi's has not; an intellectual and literary class continues to document atrocity and injustice even under pressure, as the arrest of scholar-activist Umar Khalid illustrates; and cinema, however niche, keeps inching toward portraying Dalits with interiority rather than only suffering. None of it, Wankhede cautions, has the institutional weight — schools, capital, a unifying national figure — to become a durable political force rather than a set of flickering cultural gains that 'can collapse any time.'