DIFF 2025 | Mapping Caste’s Endless Circuit

For decades, the burden of telling stories of caste violence has landed squarely on independent filmmakers who work without the safety nets of capital or industry goodwill. Bollywood has long admired the illusion of the universal cinematic landscape, where romance floated above social reality and “family films” quietly repeated the same upper-caste grammar. Aspiration and tragedy are made to look universally identical across caste differences—an erasure that helps a system masquerade as neutral, while quietly disciplining caste and other intersectional differences. Many a times, any aspiration coming from a marginalised person is quietly turned into a cautionary tale, which robs them systemically and artistically of the right to imagine joy on their own terms.

There have, of course, been exceptions that interrupted this neat façade. Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (2015) and his segment Geeli Pucchi in Ajeeb Daastaans (2021) treated caste as the framework through which the many facets of labour and desire are understood. Pa. Ranjith’s Madras (2014) and Sarpatta Parambarai (2021) reshaped ideas of Dalit masculinity, translating traditional masculinity into a communal and emotional force rather than an egocentric individualistic one. Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry (2013) and Sairat (2016) along with Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2 (2025) served as crucial reminders that romance cannot possibly wish away caste.

If the mainstream is “waking up,” it is only because independent and parallel cinema has carried the baton for decades. A quiet but persistent constellation of Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam indie films has long experimented with form, rhythm, and performance to articulate caste memory. Marathi films such as Vastupurush (2002) and Mukta (1995), alongside Malayalam works like Chithariyavar (2004), as well as Shyam Benegal’s early interventions in Ankur (1974) and Manthan (1976), demonstrate how independent cinema was already articulating the politics of caste decades ago. These films pushed uncomfortable truths into public view, often working against funding barriers, institutional scrutiny, and the unease of audiences and censors who preferred caste to remain unspoken. 

The truth is blunt: as long as caste pride persists, caste discrimination will continue to reproduce itself. Although the burden of caste is carried across generations, one wonders, what is the life cycle of caste violence, and how does it generationally affect the marginalised? The answer somehow appears in three DIFF 2025 premieres: Da’lit Kids (2025), Homebound (2024) and Cuckoo Sings Spring, Unheard (2025). They create a loose cycle: Childhood and schooling, young adulthood or employment and old age or cultural disappearance. Together, they map a life lived inside caste boundaries, where the walls keep shifting but never quite crumble.

Appu Soman’s Da’lit Kids moves from the institutional exterior of a classroom into the terrain adults often declare “innocent”—the child’s imagination. The film insists that children are able to register caste long before adults admit it exists. The animated notebook at the heart of the film belonging to Aravind M. is a brilliant narrative choice. Visual styles flip from Warli to comic-book frames to textbook imagery. These animations become a living archive of everything the child absorbs in the background—jokes about reservation and careless comparisons to “monkeys”, an innocent act of mischief and something as small as eating or sharing a candy with a classmate can become a trigger for disproportionate discipline.

The film’s shifting animation style captures the various enduring facets of caste over time, far more precisely than conventional storytelling ever could. This instability of form also mirrors the disjointedness of a child’s inner world shaped by surveillance and unspoken hierarchies. By refusing the safety of linear realism, the notebook becomes a volatile landscape where memory flickers and distorts. Words like “useless”, “bottom feeder” and “waste of space” spill across the screen. Children learn who can be scolded for existing and who must never be addressed with raised volume.

Homebound, India’s official Oscars’ entry, understands that casteism and religious bigotry prefer to hide in supposedly neutral spaces that merely pretend to have no political ideology at all. Ghaywan's film highlights that existing in any space is political because more often than not, they are constructed by those who never had to justify their belonging. A democratic office like Shoaib’s (Ishaan Khatter) can thus also become a site where hierarchy and who gets to make jokes about whom, is quietly established.

The youth are taught to read the micro-aggressions in the boss, colleague or senior’s voices and understand that some people are already “guilty“ before they attempt anything. When magnified in the face of global crisis and financial adversity, untouchability finds a convenient excuse in a pandemic, on top of the inherent casteism. Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) avoids saying his full name, Chandan Kumar Valmiki, because he knows it immediately reveals his Scheduled Caste identity and shapes how Savarna people see him. Being the only one in his family with a modern education, he is always alert to being singled out for his caste, always trying to outrun it, yet confronted by it everywhere. Even after clearing exams and doing everything asked of him, the opportunities ahead still feel like promises never fully meant for him. Across all these sequences, caste appears as something embedded: in who is convenient to discard, to be humiliated, who is policed, who is mocked, who is silently legitimised, and who is quietly protected. 

If the first two films examine childhood and young adulthood shaped by bias, M.V Srikanth’s Cuckoo Sings Spring, Unheard (2025) asks what remains of those who have carried their identity for decades, through a festering casteist society. Political songs for Dalit and other marginalised communities become manuals for survival. The film follows Suresh, a Dalit percussion artist whose political songs risk fading into indifference. Cultural extinction is a slower violence—nothing spectacular or newsworthy in the mainstream sense, just a steady erasure through neglect. The cultural economy is unforgiving towards these songs that are accumulations of rebellion, pain, memory, and love. Some traditions get repackaged as “classical” and preserved in air-conditioned sabhas, while others vanish because they belong to communities the nation prefers not to see.

The question of lineage becomes sharper when viewed through gender. Suresh speaks warmly about daughters in the film, which also opens up a thoughtful reflection on who gets to inherit and carry forward Dalit cultural memory. Marginalised girls and women often find themselves distanced from these spaces due to longstanding social structures. The most moving thread is his young grandson learning the words to his political songs. It thus becomes an act of inheritance that doubles as preparation which teaches the child a vocabulary the world cannot strip away.

Thinking about caste through silence, erasure, residue, and disappearing sound feels strange and timely. These films suggest a new phase of anti-caste cinema—one that charts how caste moves through emotional and cognitive spaces. The central tension remains that anti-caste cinema today must balance representation, resistance and responsibility, without watering down violence or sensationalising it for entertainment. Films on caste are never allowed the luxury of stumbling: they cannot misfire artistically, they are blamed for performing terribly at the box office, and they are certainly not permitted the representational imperfections that mainstream cinema routinely shrugs off. The scrutiny is relentless, while the resources remain scarce and the applause is begrudging, if it arrives at all.

And when Bollywood finally engages with caste, it often does so because caste now delivers international awards and prestige, while independent filmmakers still hustle for basic distribution. This is precisely why independent Dalit and Bahujan voices require deeper institutional support. Without it, anti-caste cinema is forced to perform an impossible balancing act in an ecosystem engineered to underestimate it. Anti-caste films are not simply stories of oppression anymore but of ambition, desire, dignity, and joy and their slow shift from festival screenings to mainstream releases signals that caste violence is becoming harder to ignore.