The Clauses within ‘Article 15’

Anubhav Sinha’s recently released film Article 15 has generated a wide range of reactions. There have been protests against its release and calls for its ban, alleging that it portrays Brahmins in poor light. There have been gushing reviews lauding it for not using its savarna protagonist to be condescending to Dalits by Brahminsplaining caste to them. But the first reviews that held my attention, were by dalit bahujans, and they commenced as soon as the film’s trailer dropped. The film was criticised for propagating a Brahmin saviour complex and ridiculed for implying that the savarna woke had to travel to rural India to realise in shock that casteism and its attendant evils still existed in contemporary times. The overarching criticism was of the savarna intellectual and artist speaking of casteism not in the voice of the oppressor, but that of the woke ally representing the oppression of dalit bahujans to the world, in the process accruing economic, social, and cultural capital by exploiting their trauma. I was taken aback — surely this was a premature, once-bitten-twice-shy (ok, a million times over) reaction to a film that had not even been released? I confess my spontaneous reaction was laced with irritation and ran roughly along these lines — why aren’t they ready to give us even one chance, we who are on their side? This anxiety on my part that the film redeem itself before its hasty detractors is only proof of how much I have to unlearn, and learn anew. After all, the question of representation of marginalised communities by those who were not from within it, is not new, the most recent case being the controversy surrounding Nandini Krishnan’s Invisible Men. Anyway, so I waited to watch the film. More than the mystery of the missing girl within the film, I was consumed by quite another mystery: would Article 15 succumb to the savarna gaze? As will be evident in the course of this essay, the target audience of this film is the well-meaning savarna who is frustrated about the ‘mess’ that is caste-ridden India, and is determined to ‘unmess’ it though clueless as to how. This essay is similarly addressed to fellow savarnas who have been raving about the film, urging others to go watch it. I am assuming all readers are familiar with the plot and characters and need no spoiler alerts, well, except of a different kind.

At the outset, let me acknowledge that of course, the film is to be appreciated for several reasons and there are numerous things it gets right. The filmmaker has faced vicious trolling and threats from various Brahmin outfits and individuals and one is compelled to stand up for the courage that Anubhav Sinha and his team has shown in making such a film that at least acknowledges caste-based discrimination in the first place, and then proceeds to enumerate its manifestations. It condemns the apolitical, weaves in references to many contemporary incidents of political importance and draws upon characters from real life, and even as it portrays an important contemporary politician in poor light, the film cheekily thanks him in its acknowledgements. It denounces the idea that caste-based discrimination is central to the maintenance of social balance, it exposes the powerful nexus of various social actors who cloak caste injustices, it correctly diagnoses the humiliation aspect of a hate crime of this nature, it lambasts the euphemistic ‘these people’ narratives that pervades casteist mindsets. It lays bare the intricate hierarchy of castes and sub-castes, and effectively portrays institutional apathy for caste atrocities. It is for these reasons and some more, that the film has been celebrated by critics and moviegoers alike, and has set the cash registers ringing. But for those of us in liberal circles who were never in the first place in two minds about the menace of caste-based exploitation and crimes, what is it about the film that we are so eager to acknowledge and refer to one another? While it is true that the film offers a counter-discourse to most of mainstream Bollywood fare and their nauseating escapism and jingoistic patriotism, what happens if we hold this film to a higher standard? (This review reads the film as part of a growing trend of successful mainstream Bollywood that forms a new genre of ‘entertaining social drama’ which is meant to play for the urban gallery in multiplex India.) Is it possible that despite the best and sincerest of intentions, in telling the story of injustice and oppression we ourselves have not undergone, we can still somewhere fall into old patterns of usurping voices and agency, and end up perpetuating the very values we sought to condemn in the first place?

To begin with, the film itself tackles the criticism against its urbane, upper-caste protagonist and his ignorance of the deep rot of caste — Ayaan Ranjan is a second-generation civil servant who studied in St Stephens and then Europe, before joining the IPS on his father’s insistence and being allotted his ‘punishment posting’ to Lalgaon in Uttar Pradesh. The layers of privilege rolling off this description can hardly be overlooked. His partner Aditi’s long-standing critique of him is that he lives like a ‘foreigner’ in his own country. And indeed, even as Ayaan messages Aditi that the villagers look at him as if he is a foreigner, we notice that his own gaze is a foreign one. And it is with him that the audience is supposed to identify. Is it really a matter of disbelief that savarnas can enjoy the luxury of caste-blindness, ignorant of their own caste status, until we find ourselves face-to-face with blatant caste discrimination? No. How much of that ignorance though is wilful ignorance? Well. In any case, it is indeed when such a self-absorbed character is thrust into the ‘wild wild west’ of hinterland India, that he can no longer ignore these realities and finds himself in confrontation with the flagrant, unapologetic practice of casteism in his immediate surroundings, where everybody is acutely aware of their position in the pecking order. When he remarks in amused wonder at the rigid practice of untouchability followed in the rustic countryside, Aditi is quick to remind him that closer home, their mothers too kept separate utensils for their servants. One wonders if the film would proceed to show Ayaan’s recognition of his own complicity in similar practices.

Throughout the film, Ayaan remains in his sheltered private world, down to this expensively-cut suits and perfectly-coiffed hair that make him stick out like a sore thumb. Even as he finds the rigid caste order, down to its sub-caste and sub-sub-caste preposterous — and it is important that this scene is laden with, and dissipates in, humour — he never once refuses any of the benefits that this very delicately-maintained order brings to him, a top-level savarna officer with people waiting upon him constantly. What the fuck is going on he thunders at his obsequious, ingratiating subordinates and barrels his way through administrative obstacles. He stares at people when they tell him that they cannot possibly share a plate of food with him or have water from his household utensils. His orders send his officers scurrying, the performance of his official duty is treated as his largesse and met with grateful deference and bowed heads by the stricken fathers of the dead girls. What is it if not the power or even arrogance, of his caste , that lingers over and colours the film — whether through his weighty dialogues, his aloof body language, or simply the screen time allotted to him. He is no Agastya of English, August, but an idealistic, genteel, morally upright, progressive-minded, entitled civil servant, shaken but never unsure, someone who reads The Discovery of India, listens to Bob Dylan, and sets about upholding constitutional principles. He is critical of the status quo, but his quest for justice demands little from him personally — there is no dilemma, no grave personal risk or sacrifice — there is no growth, only an opportunity to prove himself (to his partner?). It is never his own privilege that he questions. Seen in this light, even his faintly condescending applause for his men at the end of his successful mission seems an exercise in self-congratulation. Though through Aditi the film has conveyed that it is in favour of a culture that does not await heroes, it does little to support this contention.

Related to all this, is the question of gendered representation in the film. All the female characters in the film end up playing second fiddle to their male counterparts, as even this review grudgingly admits. This is true of Gaura and Aditi, and also of Dr Malati, who abruptly disappears from the story. But it is in the depiction of the three young girls who go missing, or die, that gender and caste imbalance come together. We hear of their rebellious demand for higher wages that ultimately causes their death, but never in their own voice. Their voice is only heard in muffled whimpers and frightened sobs, as they clutch each other awaiting their fate, or lie slumped, ravaged and frail. The visuals of the film regrettably portray them in their abject victimhood — cowering in fear, hanging from a tree, discovered in an old, defunct pipeline. Whose gaze is it that uncovers them, lays them bare for the audience? And then, as this article points out, there is also the matter of the end credits introducing the three girls as victim girl 1, victim girl 2, victim girl 3. For any story, the politics of selection determines half the narrative and some of the narrative choices the film makes by changing some aspects of the true incidents on which it is based, make me uneasy. Above all, there is one interpolation that is certainly worth our attention, and that is the addition of the third girl Pooja, who is not dead, but missing, unlike the Badaun case which saw two dead girls. What purpose does this serve? It enables the film to straddle the genres of truecrime, whodunit and missing persons thriller, drawing upon recent Hollywood. But more importantly, it offers hope, closure, and catharsis. Pooja is introduced to be found and saved. Although she is a survivor, we only see her lying unconscious — she has served her purpose, she has been ‘discovered’ by our savarna hero. We don’t hear her testimony, we don’t need it; the case is quite complete without it.

There is another teenaged girl in the film who acts as Pooja’s double. This is Amali, sister to one of Ayaan’s subordinates, innocent and cheerful, who comes to keep Ayaan’s house in order and cook for him. She is not Dalit, but definitely lower than him in the caste hierarchy. The film encourages her comparison with Pooja when it shows Ayaan rushing out of the house to look for her when he panics that she too has been abducted. A strange scene in the film left me flummoxed — one in which Amali comes across Ayaan shirtless, changing in his bedroom. She stops in her tracks, and turns away, but Ayaan spots her and bids her to enter, shrugging away the possible sexual dynamics of the scene. Later, he takes it upon himself to tell the vulnerable girl that in fact her brother was one of the gang-rapists in the case he was pursuing, and had killed himself in repentance, but that she had nothing to fear, since he and Aditi were there to protect her. The point of her character reveals itself: it is to help construct a parallel paradigm portraying another instance of a man with power over a teenaged girl, but who never exploits her. In other words, Ayaan can be presented to us as the exemplary savarna man who is to be trusted, not feared, whose touch is that of the responsible adult, not predator. The film here falters in a manner similar to Sinha’s previous commendable film, Mulk — there too, the film had erred too much on the side of caution and even as it interrogated the polarities of good Muslim/bad Muslim, had somewhere along the way fallen prey to those very dynamics, by erecting the figure of the exemplary Muslim.

How does the representation of other Dalit characters fare? There are some haunting images of caste atrocities — a simulation of the Una flogging of men tied to a jeep, which is followed by the men attacked grovelling at the police station and yelping in pain as their companions tend to their wounds. The brief and striking sight of a bare-bodied man descending and emerging from a sewer with its filth in his hands. These are piteous sights, meant to make us squirm, but not enter into the subjectivity of the sufferer. Whether this works, or becomes spectacle, whether we find ourselves as participant or observer, reacting with sympathy or guilt, is open to interpretation. There are two notable characters who are fleshed out to some extent. Jatav (Kumud Mishra) is a Dalit, the son of a sweeper who has risen in the social ranks and internalised the savarna gaze of the men he works amongst. We see ambivalence and growth in his character as he learns to acknowledge the oppression of his brethren as much as his own self, and his involvement in the pursuit of justice for the girls is evidently a personal investment for him. Yet one is tempted to ask what the film implies by making a savarna character so central to the raising of Dalit consciousness. But there is another character, more prominent and powerful, who despite being allotted less screen time, makes his presence palpably felt. This is the charismatic rebel leader Nishad (Zeeshan Ayyub), leader of the Dalit Sangharsh Sena, whose revolutionary ways stop just short of anarchic violence. His visage is drawn from the real life examples of Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan, activist and leader of Bhim Army who was similarly imprisoned under the National Security Act, and Rohith Vemula, in that both share unrealised dreams of becoming a science writer. Nishad’s voice takes us to the narrative spaces inaccessible to Ayaan, where we are introduced to the larger anti-caste revolution taking place beyond the immediate case.

Ayaan and Nishad are, in fact, dopplegangers. Both are idealistic, calm, and restrained. If Ayaan’s narration as an outsider in the form of his conversations with Aditi drive the film, Nishad’s voice once in a while takes over to yield the insider’s perspective. Nishad’s voiceover is presented as Whatsapp message forwards regaling and cautioning his dalit bahujan brethren. The one false note in Nishad’s arc is when he voices the witty line which I translate and paraphrase thus: at times, we become ‘harijan’ and at others, ‘bahujan’, never have we made it to the ‘jan’ of the ‘jan gan man’. I leave it to this article to explain to you why comparing the terms ‘harijan’ and ‘bahujan’ is to draw a false equivalence, and how ‘jana’ is not considered as a more desirable political category than ‘bahujan’ in Dalit politics. Ayaan cannot succeed in his mission without Nishad’s aid, and yet Ayaan cannot become the man that Nishad is, and he confesses as much to Aditi. Towards the end of the film, both are united with their beloveds and share intimate confidences, but their fates from thereon are drastically different. Surely it is noteworthy that in a film that otherwise ends on a note of hope, Nishad is shown as being killed in an encounter. It is Rohith’s tragic end that takes precedence here, not Chandrashekhar’s continued struggles. Why? Nishad owns the frames of the film he is in, whether with his consciousness-raising words, or that last night in his beloved’s arms, ruing the impossibility of romance in the pursuit of revolution, a la Faiz. As this piece asks and answers, why is it that Nishad could not have been the hero of this story? But the film had ultimately space for only one hero, and it chose in favour of the completely fabricated figure of Ayaan, who watches from a distance as Gaura and Jatav hug each other and mourn the death of one of their own. Having sacrificed Nishad, the film can now show the triumph of its upper-caste crusader against injustice. The substitute hope we are left with are Nishad’s words to his fellow martyr that they are not the last of their kind to fight. To borrow a striking metaphor used earlier in the film in another context, it is as if Nishad’s story had to be swamped in darkness to better lend Ayaan’s ‘victory’ a brighter glow.

And then there is the matter of the songs. The film commences on a dark, stormy night where Gaura and a few other villagers (ostensibly Dalit) are singing the Bhojpuri song, ‘Kahab toh lag jayi thaak se’. Now, in my limited acquaintance with this song (and I welcome corrections here), I know that this is a street play song, as playful as accusatory, that is sung before a privileged crowd that is invited to sing along the refrain ‘thaak se!’ See this, for instance. Placed as it is in the film, however, it becomes a performance that we impassively consume, and attains a very different tone. While one can appreciate that the use of Vande Maataram in the film certainly challenges its appropriation by the Hindutva brigade, one should also be mindful that the debate behind the context and connotations of the song has been a long-standing one. Then there is the protest rap song ‘Shuru Karein Kya’ with which the film closes. It suggests that a struggle against caste discrimination is to commence (under savarna guidance?), not that it is well under way and under the capable hands of several dalit bahujan students, leaders, intellectuals, artists. The song gestures towards glaring absences — that of any Dalit character from the film (while Ayaan naturally features in it) and also that of any Dalit rapper. Between its first song and its last, the film has managed to push out Dalit voices altogether in its arousing call to fight caste-based violence. I would also here add my voice to this review and build upon it to emphasise that although the statue of Babasaheb Ambedkar makes an appearance early in the film, and so do the slogans of ‘Jai Bhim’, there is no actual engagement with Ambedkarite thought and politics, and even though Mahatma Gandhi is obliquely critiqued for coining the term ‘harijan’, it is his bhajan ‘Vaishnav jan toh’ whose instrumental rendering finds place in the film.

And thus I conclude, much to my chagrin, that this is very much a savarna-made film, with a savarna gaze, made for a savarna audience. Well-intentioned and well-made as it is, the film’s many blindspots can be overlooked only by those of us ignorant of Dalit politics and aesthetics in films made by Dalit filmmakers like Pa Ranjith, Nagraj Manjule, and Neeraj Ghaywan. Read, for instance, this award-winning piece on how Kaala upturns the savarna gaze of Nayakan, or this thorough piece touching upon similar concerns in Fandry and Sairat, or this that discusses how Article 15 is vastly different from Fandry. I would leave this Facebook post, which is a response to Ayushmann Khurrana’s interview (which made me cringe with the use of terms like ‘reverse discrimination’ and ‘bucket list’) to demonstrate what we miss out on when instead of amplifying repressed Dalit voices, we insist on ventriloquizing their stories. Ayaan announces that it is time to look for a different vocabulary and new strategies to fight casteism, but the film does little by way of looking towards dalit bahujan political discourse or their symbols of hope and pride for this purpose. I wonder how differently the film would have played out, had its protagonist been modelled more on a Newton, who too is an officer on a mission, young, righteously idealistic, brave. Newton, who was subtly Dalit, with his touchingly naïve faith in principles of national belonging and constitutional democracy, whose idealism is put into perspective by other characters, and who pays a personal price for his dogged pursuit of his morals. But Article 15 is not that film, it is not interested in interrogating the root of caste-based discrimination — caste itself. This conviction is strengthened by Anubhav Sinha’s open letter, where he anxiously rushes to assure those who threatened and trolled him upon the release of the film’s trailer, of the film’s Brahmin connections, and his own. Even as the film acknowledges with a self-referential flourish that a Badaun or an Una are never far away, it fails to convey that caste-based crimes are not only located in rural India, but closer still, in urban families, neighbourhoods, universities, hospitals.

It is true that just as rape is not a women’s issue, so is casteism not a dalit bahujan issue. But how best can the savarna serve the cause of equality, and be an effective ally? When Anubhav Sinha mentions that he deliberately chose a savarna hero because he believes that it is the privileged who should challenge privilege, we must ask, whose privilege should we go about challenging? Telling the story of Dalit oppression by pitting good Brahmin v/s bad Brahmin is relatively easier, but reflecting on the good Brahmin’s complicity, wilful ignorance, and casual participation in the perpetuation of caste — now that would make for a compelling watch. It might do us well, all us well-meaning savarna folks wokeing our way to a more inclusive personal politics in hate-incentivised India, to introspect deeper, and let ourselves be educated by dalit bahujan voices. Every time we tell a story of the oppression of another, especially if it is structural inequality that has seeped into our very bones, whether related to caste, or gender, or sexuality, or religion, we must first question our own motives and complicity. Which battle are we fighting? Whom do we seek to educate? To what purpose?

So to return to my original question, what is it we gain from the making and watching of such a story? When we celebrate this film, it is our own guilt of privilege that we are assuaging, and our textbook theories of how caste is entrenched in the very systems that are supposed to ensure the functioning of the democracy, that we are confirming. In all this, the film demands little of us and causes little reflection, away from headline news, and comforts us by allowing us to fashion ourselves as the good/woke savarna, here to show the way to the bad/ignorant savarna.

The climax of the film sees Ayaan descend into and wade across the pig swamp (from which he emerges marvellously clean and untouched) that will lead him to the forest wherein he will find and rescue the missing girl. This is obviously the symbolic image sequence that is meant to stay with the audience. But it is quite another one that stays with me instead. This is when Ayaan crosses an overflowing sewer by stepping on the bricks strategically placed across it. He is untouched by the filth and his investigation comes to a standstill, before a manual scavenger dips into the clogged sewer to clear the blockage. Do we dare descend into that muck of our own making, the one that is lying thick in our own minds?