Having spent the first 22 years of life in the Hindi heartland, I have a distinct memory from school days. I may have been in Class V when a new classmate walked up to another — let’s call her K. “Suno, K. Hum apne papa ko kal bol rahe they ki naye school mei humaara koi dost nahi hai. Toh, papa ne bola ‘tumhari class mei koi Pandey hai?’ toh humne bola ‘Pandey toh nahi par Mishra hai ek’. Toh papa ne bola ‘toh usi se dosti kar lo’.”
I don’t remember how K responded to this unique offer of friendship, but what I do remember is being puzzled by it. Their surname is not even the same, so what even is this logic, I remember thinking. My family was not obsessed enough with caste to pass this knowledge down to us. My mother, having separated from her husband within five years of marriage, gave my brother and me a generic surname, giving nothing away about our caste.
Years later, as I learnt about caste and its hold over our country, especially the part of it that I call home, I realised what the similarity was between my two classmates: Both Pandey and Mishra are Brahmin surnames. I still marvel at how a girl not more than 10 years old had such extensive knowledge of caste.
As I grew older, I started to understand more about caste, which seemed to be a singular obsession of people around me. “Aapka poora naam kya hai?” was a common refrain, and if one’s surname seemed ambiguous, “ye kis side ke hote hain?” nudging the other person to reveal their caste. Despite not being imparted any knowledge about it from our mother, I became aware of my upper-caste privilege quite early on. “Hum log Thakur hain” is something, I must admit, I still use with doubting potential landlords, knowing that it would seal the deal should my single-at-almost-40 status and media job become deterrents. More often than not, it works.
So, one thing I particularly found jarring about Kal Ho Na Ho, the 2003 Karan Johar- produced, Nikhil Advani-directed blockbuster, was when Shah Rukh Khan’s character Aman Mathur introduces himself as “Chadha ji ka bhateeja”. How is it possible for a Kayastha and a Punjabi to be related by blood? Maybe if, instead of bhateeja (son of one’s brother), Khan had used the word bhaanja (sister’s son), it would have made sense. I put it down to Johar and Advani’s lack of knowledge about caste or their weak Hindi, where bhateeja and bhaanja were one and the same thing. Or maybe, they just didn’t care and gave whatever surnames came to their mind.
Over 20 years later, as I watched Dhadak 2 — which was released in theatres in August this year and has just started streaming on Netflix — I actually had to pinch myself. Could this really be from Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions? Instead of the streets of London, Dhadak 2 features the Bhopal lakeside; instead of the sets meant to represent Chandni Chowk sets, it is filmed in real houses to reflect how the disadvantaged actually live; and instead of a world filled with Amans, Rahuls and Rohans where the politics is unheard of, here it is a constant in the life of the hero — from his mother’s involvement in local affairs to his college senior’s organisation of protests and debates. For a brief second I asked myself, “Am I watching a Prakash Jha film?”
Indeed, from all of Jha’s filmography, it is his 2011 film Aarakshan which instantly comes to mind. Like the hero of Dhadak 2, Aarakshan’s lead is a young Dalit man whose best friend and love interest are from the upper castes. But that is where the similarity ends. While the protagonist in Aarakshan is a “Kumar”, a surname as common in a JJ cluster as it is at a south Delhi farm house party, the surname of Dhadak 2’s hero is Ahirwar — a clear indicator of his caste. I was expecting the heroine’s surname to be ambiguous to keep potential offence takers at bay, but not only is her last name a dead giveaway, a conversation at her home clearly states the sub-sect she comes from.
And while Aarakshan steers away from its stated goal of highlighting caste-based reservation and discrimination, eventually becoming a film about an elderly upper-caste man facing off against upper-caste goons, Dhadak 2 stays true to its hero’s immediate identity, which he finally embraces wholeheartedly after initially appearing ashamed of it. There is the exact moment where you can see how something inside him changes. In that, Dhadak 2 reminded me a little of another Jha film, Rajneeti, where the hero, after spending his life running away from the politics that defines his family, shows a moment of sharp political acumen. You instantly know there is going to be no looking back for him now, something you feel about Dhadak 2’s hero a decade-and-a-half later.
Another thing that separates Dhadak 2 from other Karan Johar-produced films is the Muslim representation. He is not your average Bollywood token Muslim here, whose job is to say “Mashallah” and “Aadab” every other second, and wear garish clothes. In fact, the Muslim principal here talks like any other character in the film, pronouncing “pehchaan” as “peychaan”, to reflect that he is from Madhya Pradesh like the rest of them. But as the film progresses, you learn how his Muslim identity has shaped him, and why his surname is Ansari and not the Bollywood-friendly Khan.
In the second half, when the hero realises that he would rather retaliate than cower like he has all his life, there is a scene in which he pays his tormentor back in the same coin, smearing the latter’s face with the sewage that was thrown at him a few seconds earlier. And a small cheer went up in the audience. Part of the job of a filmmaker is to make the audience empathise with the hero, to make them root for him. And in a society which is as caste-obsessed as ever, if a largely upper-caste audience roots for a Dalit hero, it is huge.
Not that Dhadak 2 is flawless. The one thing that has been niggling me from the start is why the hero, played by a light-skinned Siddhant Chaturvedi, looks so brown. What was the need to darken his skin if the heroine, Tripti Dimri, stays just as fair as ever? Do the makers really believe that all Dalits are dark-complexioned?
There is also the issue of the film having a too-good-to-be true climax. Is it possible for a romance between a Dalit man and an upper-caste woman in small-town India to have a happy ending? Sounds far-fetched. But I would side with the makers on this one. Because isn’t this what a film is supposed to do? To give one hope, a reason to carry on, and the optimism that things might change — even if in the distant future.
For now, I would say Karan Johar and Dharma Productions, whose gareeb hero usually arrives at a fancy Student of The Year-type school in a leather jacket, have redeemed themselves with Dhadak 2. Maybe the answer lies in letting your director — in this case the very promising Shazia Iqbal — just be, without inserting your own upper-caste, upper-class, uber-rich sensibilities into the film. And by being brave — brave enough to not have a 500-word-long disclaimer before a film next time round.
deepika.singh@expressindia.com
