Snehashish Das, Ananya Das
We have cracked it.
Dharma Productions is set to release many more Dhadaks—films unrelated in their plots, but united in their focus on caste, love, and violence. By the time Dhadak 10 arrives, perhaps Karan Johar will rechristen his company to Dhamma Productions, after saturating Bollywood screens with Buddha and Babasaheb iconography.
Karan Johar’s aim is clear: simplify things for the upper-caste audience. Two words—Dhadak and Dharma—and a single click will usher viewers into an endless stream of remakes centered on caste, love, and violence. This is a path designed for those unwilling to engage with regional cinema through subtitles or dubbing. With this, Johar drags forward the caravan started by Gandhi.
All the Gandhians who write on the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship assert that while Ambedkar worked for Dalit self-confidence and self-respect, Gandhi focused on the self-purification of the upper-castes. Karan Johar, following Anubhav Sinha’s lead, has decided to make this process of self-purification more accessible than ever to the privileged. Two words and one click, then why bother with names like Nagraj Manjule, Mari Selvaraj, and Pa Ranjith, when all the resources—and their stories—are at your fingertips?
In an event by Media Rumble News Laundry, moderated by Jyoti Nisha, Anubhav Sinha recounted an experience at the premiere of Article 15. A young woman, teary-eyed, hugged him and asked, “Is it true?” This moment affirms that filmmakers from Sinha to Johar are our contemporary Gandhis, intent on delivering ‘self-purification’ to upper-castes. However, the Bahujan masses, rather than these hypothetical audiences, fill the cinema halls and review columns. Thus, perhaps these efforts turn filmmakers into failed, sad Gandhis.
Even under the Gandhian motto of Dharma Productions, contradictions arise. Recently, director Shazia Iqbal shared on Instagram that her team organized special Dhadak 2 screenings for marginalized students in Mumbai. Actor Aditya asked the children, “Casteism karogey kya?”—to which they resoundingly replied, “Naah…” This begs the question: Has the project’s focus shifted from upper-caste self-purification to the self-purification of the marginalized? Why are recipients of casteism being exhorted not to perpetuate it? Should not a Gandhian ask the same to the youth of Bandra West, Malabar Hills, or Juhu instead? Yet, the questions land squarely on the marginalized students—on Neelesh, the Dalit protagonist of Dhadak 2.
This introduction should make it clear: this is not a glowing film review. There are enough of those online. Initially, no review was planned—as seeing Dhadak 2 garners more attention than films like Pariyerum Perumal, or Vaazhai and Thangalaan (which are recent), we understood that everything gets boiled down to Bollywood, big money, and upper-caste priorities. But the flood of positive reviews demanded a dissenting voice to highlight ignored critiques.
Dhadak 2 is hailed as a ‘true representation’ of caste—a claim even the first Dhadak struggled to justify. Positioned as a translation of Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal (2018), it performs an art of decontextualization. The first question is simple: Why do Hindi remakes always erase regional roots? Why can’t a Bollywood story on caste violence be set in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, or Kerala?
The second question is: What is the backdrop, context, or timeline in which the film is set? Sumeet Samos, in a review piece, writes that,
“The film is situated in a post-1990 urban periphery where Dalits, though still engaged in stigmatised labour such as sanitation work, drumming at weddings, dance performances, and leather trades, are no longer depicted as destitute. These communities, though materially constrained, assert cultural identity through visible markers such as blue flags, portraits of Dr BR Ambedkar, and remnants of Ambedkarite mobilisations dating back to the 1980s Bahujan Samaj Party rise in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh.”
Initially, we are shown a room with portraits of Ambedkar and Buddha in it. Next in scene, our male protagonist, Neelesh, riding a bike with a Jai Bhim poster on it. Even when Sumeet may be right in his observation that it alludes to the cultural, political and intellectual symbols and assertions of Ambedkarites during or after the Mandal and BSP-BAMCEF movements, in other instances this timeline falls short. In the next scene of the movie, we are shown a law university campus in Bhopal being politically charged with anti-caste public intellectuality. From the experiences of many university students in the 90s, we get to hear how that was the time when such a public-political and intellectual culture was seldom; it was only a time marked by either absence, silence, or underground reading circles.
Drawing from the only possible reasoning from the above observations, then such a political culture was impossible, and this leads us to think that perhaps this film is set in a recent time. Neelesh uses a smartphone with triple camera throughout the film, which makes us think technically the film may not have been set before 2018. To confirm this point, we may refer to another scene in the film, where a political debate is taking place and one of the students says, “if something good would have come out of reservation, it would have happened in these 70 years”. 70 years of reservation implementation indicate the post-2020 period, so there remains no question of the film being set earlier than this.
If Dhadak 2 is set in the present, a problem noted by Rajesh Rajamani in a humorous social media post arises: identifying a Dalit solely through Ambedkar’s portrait is a ridiculous identification. He says that, without telling anything about the young man, the way the camera zooms in on Ambedkar and Buddha’s iconographies, he was a little worried that the man might pull a copy of the Indian constitution from under his pillow. This is a necessary worry; the camera’s focus on these iconographies could just as well depict Rahul Gandhi, who holds Babasaheb’s image and Constitution for political palatability, or an upper-caste AISA activist with Ambedkar posters pasted on their walls, regardless of their participation in anti-Mandal agitations.
Further contradictions abound: in this politically charged law campus, we wonder how Dalit students are being publicly ragged with no visible opposition from activists. If the setting is contemporary, such ragging within the boundaries of a law university is almost a laughing stock.
Along with such temporal and spatial contradictions, at times it gestures to caste killings; at yet another moment, it changes its course towards evocations of fellowship rights protest and Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder. Now we question why the film loses its stability in positioning itself while trying to be progressive. The answer is simple. Pariyerum Perumal was crucial for being inseparably bound to its soil: the recurring cycle of caste hatred and caste murders in the name of honour in Tamil Nadu. In contrast, Dhadak 2, set in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, severs itself from this grounding, loses it in translation. Rather than coherence, the audience is left with a patchwork—a khichdi of historical and political references scattered across spaces and timelines, to fit everything about caste in one single story, that diffuses rather than deepens the narrative.
In doing so, while also translating essential parts of the original film, what the creators do is to situate Launda Naach, a folk performance from Bihar, in the cultural and political context of Madhya Pradesh, as an assertion of ‘choice’ employed gender subversion, rather than a simultaneous absence of material conditions for ‘choice’ and embedded precarity – an unavoidable blunder. Essentially, the film falters in establishing a clear backdrop, context, or even timeline.
This slippage loses the gravity the story demands and the depth the character needs. In Pariyerum Perumal, Karate Venkatesan’s character, Thatha, was terrifying not merely because of his silently barbaric and hateful cruelty but because he was at once random and at another a shard in a wider and ongoing pattern of caste killings. The inclusion of the flashes of oppressed, violated, or dead unknown unnamed people with blue painted faces (in the Naan Yaar song) or the snippets of news reporting, protest call posters for such murders (which is absolutely absent from Dhadak 2) confirmed that despite him being a random person, his brutality was not singular but systemic. In Dhadak 2, even with Saurabh Sachdeva, an acclaimed acting teacher, representing a character, Shankar, in direct translation of Karate Venkatesan’s, feels pale as a random singular serial ‘honour killer’, and stripped of the contextual weight that made Karate Venkatesan’s presence so viscerally unsettling.
Even in the technical aspect, Saurbah Sachdeva’s character falls flat. In a scene in Pariyerum Perumal, Thatha murders a young woman, hangs her in a room, locks the door from inside, climbs through the tiled roof to come outside, and presents it as a suicide rather than a murder. The exact scene is translated in Dhadak 2, while we get no information of how Shankar escaped the room with a concrete roof, and no visible open window after the murder; how was the murder translated into a suicide? This lapse in such a big-budget film does not just appear as lazy work, but also diminishes the character’s gravitas, reducing a barbaric murderer, an experienced and terrifying mastermind to mere plot convenience.
Similar missteps mar the portrayal of university principal Haider Ansari (Zakir Hussain), a translation of Poo Ram’s character from Pariyerum Perumal. In both the films, the principal belongs to the oppressed castes; in Selvaraj’s, he is the son of a shoemaker, and in Iqbal’s a Julaha by caste. Both are equally opposed to aggressive student politics and advocate for institutional ascent to positions and respectability to fight caste, while also understanding that to fight is better than dying. But there is a slight difference, which makes a huge political blunder in their portrayal, as it was an inevitable blunder in making up a khichdi.
As we mentioned before, Dhadak 2 also sets its backdrop to pay a tribute to Rohith Vemula, as it is set in a university campus. To set this up it sets a politically vibrant campus (which already stood in contradiction to the ragging culture taken from Pariyerum Permual), with a protest culture, fellowship curtailment, and the creation of a velivada inside the campus premises. Although the protests in Dhadak 2 looked very aesthetic and appealing to the eye, by this, it loses its character as a protest and resembles more of a drama society in a Delhi University campus. Everyone is always wearing well-ironed kurtas with a blue gamcha around their neck, as if every day is Ambedkar Jayanti, and their sloganeering feels theatrical, almost like it took its inspiration of a political protest from Raanjhanaa’s romanticisation of JNU’s politics.
But the blunder was that the principal of the university, Haider Ansari, a Julaha by identity, not paying heed to the fellowship protests of the Dalit students, which ultimately led to the institutional murder of one of the activists. It also evokes many questions. A Julaha character is given to us as the only visible villain in this case, even though not the primary one, as he says that it is the VC who thinks that these people fund their political campaigns using university funds as the justification of fellowship curtailment. But he is not innocent. He is still the principal, in a position of power (as he himself accepts and takes pride in), yet he kills by negligence – his words and behaviour towards the politically active students point to it. This contradiction blurs the lines of accountability. Even though we know that all student movements have pointed towards upper-caste administrations and larger state politics led by upper-caste parliamentarians as the perpetrators of caste based institutional murder, including that of Rohith Vemula, here we get only a Julaha character to blame and to be furious at. Yet, we are not to do that wholly. As the backdrop of the same character is established as someone to be sympathetic and respectable about – an oppressed by caste, who climbed his way through institutional success, is encouraged to fight when necessary. This is a pure contradiction while we think about how to situate ourselves emotionally in this case as spectators, and a pure political blunder as it shifts the blame of caste murder to the oppressed.
This leads us to only one question: why was the Rohith Vemula representation necessary at all in the film? As we watch through the film, we do not find an ending that ties these loose knots, except that of a khichdi film-making that was attempted.
Now, let us examine the two protagonists of the film. Neelesh; lit. the blue god (neither Krishna nor Shiva, but an embodiment of Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite movement), and Vidhi, lit. the preserve, the law, the rule, the predeterminations, the destiny, or, perhaps, in a true sense, the fate that can be rewritten, changed with right efforts; a very metaphorical presence throughout the film. Neelesh’s Ambedkarite screen presence has moved a lot of viewers; in major frames, the film tried to subvert the very idea of victimhood or destitution in the face of oppression, and tried to rewrite certain caste occupations, such as being a musical instrumentalist at marriages, as merit and skill. But as the writer of a critical piece, we again recommend reading it elsewhere.
We are more concerned with the characterisation of Vidhi, a totally different character from Selvaraj’s Jyothi. Not docile, naïve, innocent, but rebel. However, there is a scene where Neelesh confronted Vidhi about the difference in their caste locations by telling her the story of why he studied law in the first place, to which Vidhi says that she used to think caste as a matter of past and of village. Such an ignorance of Vidhi is reminiscent of Selvaraj’s female protagonist, her ignorance and innocence. Here, Vidhi’s character of questioning and rebel felt a misfit to her caste ignorance. We find her doing an absurd game of rapid fire in the scene where her sister’s marriage proposal was taking place. Even if we do not consider it as absurd and take it in the light of her questioning, rebel and progressive characterisation, we were still shocked later, as in this scene the character does not realise caste is a matter of present, and of her town, her immediate family when her sister’s groom’s family tells her that the most important thing for a marriage to them is caste! When they have a serious conversation about their sub-castes as Brahmins, their differential food habits to status etc., relating to their sub-caste which was a significant issue, even though solvable, to proceed with the wedding.
o, is this Vidhi’s innocence, ignorance or progressiveness, who has grown up experiencing caste around her and its privileges and limits, only to deny it when Neelesh confronts it, and why such a characterisation is necessary unless it is a cover-up, an excuse and a justification? We are forced to question why caste ignorance never leaves an upper-caste characterisation, even when it is a rebel one. Through this the understanding of caste becomes an experience of destitution, violence and suffering only, and never an experience of privilege, and manifested in Neelesh’s own words “jinke saath nahi hota hai, unko aise hi lagta hai”, while finding a viable rationale for Vidhi’s ignorance. Interestingly, one of the writers of the film Rahul Badwelkar, in an interview in The Wire, says that this line became a guiding force for their film making – which only makes us assert that the very foundation of the film is ignorance and a Gandhian purification project, not Ambedkarian as many reviewers and popular discourses assert.
But another interesting detail of such an ignorance is to Vidhi’s rapid-fire questions, the groom’s mother answers to what is important in a marriage was caste. Such an answer from a casteist Brahmin woman is more rehearsed, scripted and bookish than real. Considering this happened in real life, most families in such a situation of being ‘questioned’ would usually respond with criteria and pronounce the words like status, class, gotra, pinda, kundali/ jataka, or even in extreme cases ‘aukaat’ instead of a direct pronunciation of caste in a rehearsed way. The discussion of caste or the matching of jaati usually happens before sending a marriage proposal to a certain party, or in cases while it is taking place, but very discreetly, using indicators and markers.
This film did ‘correct’ itself from the Selvaraj’s film, mainly on the part that Vidhi is portrayed as an assertive girlfriend, who knows about what is going on, asserts herself against her family, and stays throughout. But it does not correct itself when it comes to filing an SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 for all the humiliation, violence and attempt to murder that Neelesh goes through. We kept on asking if Vidhi is so assertive in the film, unlike the ignorant, innocent Jyothi, why does she not file an SC/ST (PoA) Act against her own family, considering the rebellious nature shown in the film? Even though we can argue that even Mari Selvaraj’s film also loses this point, and as said in the words of Rajesh Rajamani, it becomes “more Gandhian than Ambedkarite” in doing so; unlike Pariyerum Perumal where they were studying law at some local law college in Tirunelveli, Vidhi and Neelesh were studying law at a national law university in a modern town.
Not only that, towards the end of the film we see that the male protagonist, Neelesh, and his tormentor, Ronnie, share a pen during an examination. On seeing this, we were reminded of another scene from the film, where the pen symbolised Dalits seeking their rights from Kanshiram’s pen symbolism. But in this scene, the very pen that represents the rightful share of Bahujan in India turns into a symbolism for upper castes giving Dalits their rights. The sudden change that came out of Vidhi’s family seems absolutely ridiculous considering that they were the ones who humiliated him and tried to murder him. Is it that the creators of Dhadak 2 can make the woman rebellious as long as she does not go against her own family and see upper castes facing imprisonment for committing caste crimes? Or could the directors not digest the idea of upper-castes going to jail. We don’t even see the casteist uncle who pointed a gun at Neelesh face any accountability. Perhaps that is the line they draw- its’s Project Self-Purification, not Project Justice; It is tickling the guilt of the progressive oppressor castes, not addressing the violence against the oppressed!
Afterr his attempted murder, Neelesh chases Ronnie and delivers a courtroom monologue. There, the camera includes Ronnie’s changing expression, where he feels sympathetic to Neelesh while hearing the pain of a Dalit coming from a village, from destitution and finding casteism in a modern town because of characters such as Ronnie. In such a serious scene, we couldn’t help but bring a disgusted laugh. Ronnie’s sudden transformation, even if it can be argued as an assertion against carceral politics and a portrayal of transformative politics, the way and time it is set is only laughable. We do not want to argue that that the upper-caste persons are not capable of change, but here, Ronnie’s transformation—from would-be killer to remorseful hero— does not even take overnight, but only a minute. In one minute, he was responsible for contracting a caste murder, and in another, just after a monologue of destitution, he becomes a transformed upper-caste hero. No aid, no ideological paradigm, no redistribution of privileges or property, no other material or non-material transformation, but a guilt of a minute – this is what most upper-caste understand as a means of change. When change is only guilt and good behaviour, without transforming into a movement for distribution and reparation, it is nothing but only masked casteism.
The greatest disappointment in this remake lies in how Karuppi’s powerful presence is diminished to Birju. There is a clear parallel between Mari Selvaraj and Jordan Peele, whose genius emerges through the use of animal metaphors and the exploration of human-animal relations across their films—something Dhadak 2 wholly fails to capture. Peele’s deer in Get Out and rabbit in Us, alongside Selvaraj’s pigs in Mamannan, Karuppi (the dog) in Pariyerum Permual and donkey in Karnan, all serve to highlight both the violence and apathy of oppressor communities and state mechanisms, as well as the empathy, care, and intimacy marginalized groups share with animals despite prevailing stigma. Similarly, Peele’s horses in Nope and Selvaraj’s fish in Karnan, cow in Vaazhai, illuminate the nuanced dependence of marginalized communities on animals for livelihood—a relationship that encompasses love but inevitably weaves in violence too. Animals in these filmmakers’ hands possess a conceptual existence that deepens the wider narrative.
Karuppi, for instance, was not simply a marker of violence or death; also, the guide of Pariyerum Perumal in the wilderness of caste. Karuppi was not a pet, but belonged to everybody and everybody belonged to her. The death of Karuppi was not just our hero’s tragedy, but a loss in essence, a loss of community, symbolized by her ceremonial funeral, where women lamented and the community united in dance, giving her shoulders and a final farewell. In translation, Dhadak 2 totally misses the point that community relationships, the dog, or any animal have in Selvaraj’s films, where Birju only appeared as a pet, a haunting dream to Neelesh alone, not as a torment of the community.
A khichdi is a lazy dish—made on lazy days, or when resources are lacking. Though we are not here to imply that khichdi is not essential and nourishing. It is, so, perhaps, is the film. Many reviews have praised it for being so. But we cannot just leave it to that. We cannot leave a Bollywood movie on caste internet to filled glory. Because the only notable things about the ‘good part’ is it is too late; and because it is too late, it doesn’t matter, neither does it deserve the credit for it, and does nothing except expropriate the market around caste.
This khichdi needed more decoding; where did the laziness enter in the making of the film? But this Khichdi is not a bland one; it is a masala one, which is generally missed. And the masala here is the song ‘Bawariya’. We remember when the song Banjara came, the anti-caste community was outraged against the direct translation of a nomadic community called Banjara into a ‘vagabond’, a privileged one’s phase of life. We asserted that every language we use, and their everyday translation, must go through the process of careful thought. But what about Bawariya? A simple google search would tell us about the semi-nomadic tribe called Bawariya in the western parts of India, their history of forced association with criminality or habitual offence, their association with something cruel, mad or foolishness – which essentially the colloquial use of the term Bawariya signifies; mad, crazy, foolish (in love). Our friend from Rajasthan also asserts that the very possible derivation of the word Bawariya as mad or foolish is from the criminalisation of the nomadic tribe. So, on one side the creators are making a progressive film that addresses caste, and on the other, they are also including a song that makes use of a casteist slur in it. And we fail to understand how such a nuance has been amiss from the anti-caste critics which used to be a direct eye catch a few years back! This masala makes the entire dish bitter.
Alas, we want to highlight how most of the inter-caste love stories which are made by Bahujan film-makers are cautionary tales, while Bollywood reframes them as a rebellious tale. We hold no judgement about the same; it is yet to be debated by anti-caste thinkers. Dhadak 2 aims too high and fails to capture even a single story properly. Bringing in everything from everywhere, mixing it all together, it tries to be the absolute anti-caste film that Bollywood has ever made- trying to serve something for everyone, especially to soothe the pain of the oppressor castes against a self-made guilt because of the Bahujan movement that our people have built. But in the end, it fails to deliver neither a realistic story, nor a fantastical one.
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Snehashish Das and Ananya Das are PhD students in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
