Why Indian Cinema Took a Century to Find a Dalit Hero

A Political Theorist Before He Was an Icon

For most of the twentieth century, the image of B.R. Ambedkar circulating in Indian public life was that of a framer of the Constitution — a legal mind, not a revolutionary. Political scientist Harish S. Wankhede, in a wide-ranging conversation on the Nous Podcast, argues that this framing understates how radical Ambedkar's core proposition actually was: that people treated as sub-human by the caste order could become, in his words, "political bargainers" — agents capable of debating and deciding who should govern them. Before Ambedkar, Wankhede notes, concern for the "untouchable" population rarely rose above charity or reform; nobody had proposed that this population should hold political power in its own right.

Wankhede traces Ambedkar's strategy as a deliberate two-track pursuit. On one track, Ambedkar invested heavily in the promise of modernity — constitutional democracy, capitalist development, urbanization — as forces that could pull Dalits out of a degraded social position. On the other, he reached backward into history, arguing that Dalits were the descendants of Buddhists defeated by Brahmanical forces, and that reclaiming a Buddhist identity would give the community a "robust identity from the past" to carry into a liberal future. The two tracks were not contradictory so much as complementary: Ambedkar understood, Wankhede says, that entering modern democratic life with no historical dignity of one's own would leave a community perpetually seen as merely "abject" rather than as full citizens.

This is also why Ambedkar eventually broke from a purely reformist path — temple-entry campaigns, access to village water tanks — toward demanding constitutional safeguards. Wankhede recounts the Kalaram temple movement and the Chavdar Tank satyagraha as the turning points: when Hindu society would not even grant basic civic access, Ambedkar concluded that appeals to conscience were insufficient and that only state-backed political mechanisms could shift the community's condition. His famous closing speech to the Constituent Assembly — warning that India was entering a life of political equality while its social life remained "completely degraded" — crystallized a lifelong argument that political rights without social transformation would not be enough.

Bombay, the City Cinema Forgot to Look At

One of the more striking arguments Wankhede makes is geographic. Ambedkar's political organizing, his newspapers, and his early mobilization of Dalit labor were all centered in Bombay between the 1920s and 1940s — the same years, and the same city, in which the Indian film industry was taking shape. Dalits were integral to Bombay's industrial economy: the textile mills, the dockyards, the informal labor sector. Bombay's cosmopolitan, opportunity-driven character — the same pull that drew Ambedkar's own family from the Konkan region — made it, in Wankhede's phrase, the first city where Dalits organized as an "aspirational class."

And yet, he argues, no film of that period engaged with this reality. Left-leaning, socially conscious filmmakers of the era treated poverty, migration and urban precarity as important subjects — Raj Kapoor's work on migrant labor, or other classics of what is remembered as Hindi cinema's "golden age" from the 1950s through the 1970s — but consistently declined to make caste, specifically, the identity of the poor protagonist on screen. Poverty was rendered as a homogeneous condition rather than something cut through by caste hierarchy, even as the caste politics that would eventually reshape Bombay's own civic life were visibly forming around the filmmakers.

Gandhi's Embrace, Ambedkar's Rupture

Wankhede is careful to distinguish sympathy from politics in describing the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship. Gandhi, he says, had genuine humanitarian concern for the "untouchable" population, but his politics rested on preserving Hindu unity — the idea that Dalits must remain inside the Hindu fold, both for its own sake and because a fractured Hindu community would weaken the anti-colonial movement. Ambedkar read this as a kind of "parenting gaze": Gandhi wanted Dalits treated kindly, but not granted the specific constitutional safeguards — reserved seats, separate representation — that had been extended to Muslims and other minorities.

That disagreement produced the 1932 Poona Pact, which Wankhede frames as a pragmatic compromise rather than a defeat. Ambedkar wanted a separate electorate; he settled for guaranteed legislative representation within the Hindu political structure. Wankhede reads this compromise as characteristic of Ambedkar's political temperament — not a purist but a "gradualist," willing to bank an incomplete gain and build further from it. It is also, he suggests, of a piece with Ambedkar's broader stance toward modernity: hopeful about what democratic and capitalist institutions could deliver, but never under the illusion that Hindu society would transform on its own.

Elite Instrument: Why Cinema Ignored Caste

Wankhede's central claim about Indian cinema is structural rather than accidental. From its earliest days, he argues, cinema in India was never conceived as a tool for the marginalized — it was a capital-intensive, elite-controlled enterprise from the outset. Its pioneers, men like Dadasaheb Phalke, framed the new medium as an instrument of "cultural nationalism," using Hindu mythological narrative to "educate" the masses and stitch together a national culture defined largely in upper-caste terms. Early Muslim filmmakers, Wankhede notes, followed a parallel pattern, dramatizing Mughal grandeur and elite Muslim social life rather than everyday conditions.

There is also a deeper irony he draws out: the performers who had traditionally supplied India's popular entertainment — tamasha artists in Maharashtra, courtesans, folk performers — were disproportionately drawn from lower-caste and socially marginal communities, precisely because "respectable" society considered such performance beneath it. When cinema arrived and reorganized entertainment as a mass, technologically distributed, politically significant art form, it simultaneously acquired prestige — and shut out the very communities that had built India's older performance traditions. "These are not the dignified places," Wankhede says of the pre-cinema entertainment world available to elites, underscoring how thoroughly class and caste shaped who was allowed to make — and appear in — the new medium.

By the time cinema's so-called golden age arrived after independence, Wankhede argues, it was operating in service of what he calls the "grand consensus" — the Nehru-Gandhi vision of secular, socialist nation-building that the political establishment wanted endorsed on screen. Caste, in that frame, was politically inconvenient: acknowledging it meant admitting that Indian society was hierarchical and unequal in ways the nation-building project preferred to leave undiscussed. Even filmmakers sympathetic to the political left, he says, largely analyzed inequality through class rather than caste — missing, in his account, the reality that caste and class in India have always been intertwined rather than separable categories.

Victims, Not Heroes

Where Dalit characters did appear on screen — in films like Sujata, in Satyajit Ray's Sadgati (adapted from a Premchand story about a bonded laborer who dies while denied even a day's rest), or in other parallel-cinema depictions of feudal rural life — Wankhede argues they were confined to a narrow register: powerless, passive, and usually rescued, if at all, by an upper-caste benefactor. He identifies a recurring pattern in which Dalit identity was displaced onto female characters, submissive and eventually protected by an upper-caste male figure, while Dalit men were shown as unable to protect their own families. "He is not able to save her his own woman and children," Wankhede says of this pattern — "it's the upper cast who is the savior."

The crucial distinction he draws is between a protagonist and a hero. A protagonist, in his framing, is simply the character at the center of a story; a hero possesses agency — the capacity to disrupt, to change outcomes, to shape the future rather than simply endure it. "Hero is an agent," he says. "Hero is a revolutionary. Hero is a change maker." By that measure, he argues, Dalit characters were granted screen time for decades — but almost never heroism. Even nominally serious "art house" cinema examining feudal exploitation, he suggests, reproduced this stereotype: it depicted precarity accurately but denied its Dalit characters any independent capacity to resist.

The Panthers' Radical Interruption

The most militant break with Ambedkar's own gradualism, in Wankhede's account, came from the Dalit Panthers of the 1970s — a movement of young writers, poets and activists in Bombay explicitly modeled on the American Black Panther movement, and shaped by global currents of Marxist and feminist thought. Where Ambedkar had ultimately trusted parliamentary democracy and constitutional safeguards, Wankhede says the Panthers regarded that path as too passive; they wanted not simply representation within the state but, in his words, to "smash what they call the Brahminical citadel" through revolutionary mobilization rather than incremental legal recourse.

Figures like the poets Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale gave the movement its literary force, and Wankhede credits the Panthers with generating an entire new current of Dalit literature — poetry, theater, fiction that dealt not only with Buddhism and Ambedkar's biography but with lived experience and radical aspiration. The movement fractured within roughly half a decade, split over ideological questions (a Marxist-revolutionary current versus an Ambedkarite-Buddhist one) and over strategic questions about elections and party formation. But its language and posture, Wankhede argues, outlived its organizational collapse and shaped the more assertive Dalit political mobilization to come.

From Movement to Ballot Box: Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan Idea

Wankhede locates the next major shift in Uttar Pradesh rather than Maharashtra — a geographic pivot he attributes partly to scale (Dalits made up roughly 20 percent of UP's population against 11 to 12 percent in Maharashtra) and partly to political space, since Maharashtra's political sphere was already dominated by Maratha power in ways that left little room for an independent Dalit party. Into that opening stepped Kanshi Ram, whose Bahujan Samaj Party reimagined Ambedkar's politics as electoral "social engineering": a coalition uniting Dalits, OBCs, minorities and Adivasis — numerically a majority, even if none of these groups individually held power.

The literal meaning of "Bahujan," Wankhede points out, is simply "majority" — the innovation was political arithmetic married to a claim of moral leadership, with Dalits positioned as the natural leaders of this broader alliance of the historically oppressed. The BSP's rise culminated in Mayawati becoming Uttar Pradesh's chief minister and, in 2007, winning a outright majority in the state — a remarkable trajectory for a community that, Wankhede stresses, had been almost entirely outside formal political consciousness a few generations earlier. But the party's decline from the early 2010s onward, he argues, owed much to leadership failures — allegations of corruption and self-interest — and to its persistent image as a party dominated by the Jatav sub-caste, which undercut its claim to represent Dalits as a whole, let alone the broader Bahujan coalition.

Subaltern Hindutva: Borrowing the Playbook

Perhaps the conversation's sharpest political observation concerns how the BJP absorbed lessons from Kanshi Ram's model — while inverting its purpose. Where Kanshi Ram sought to unite marginalized groups around shared political and economic interests, Wankhede argues the BJP under its post-2012 leadership pursued what he calls "subaltern Hindutva": mobilizing the same marginalized castes not through promises of jobs or representation, but through cultural and emotional appeals — local deities, folk icons like Suheldev recast as anti-Muslim warrior-heroes, festivals, and a form of "polytheistic" mobilization that multiplies devotional entry points into a broader Hindu identity rather than resting on a single figure like Ram.

This strategy, Wankhede suggests, deliberately targets precisely those Dalit and OBC sub-castes that never fully embraced Ambedkarite consciousness — communities whose cultural life remained more entangled with Brahmanical Hindu practice than, for example, Maharashtra's Buddhist Mahars. The result is a form of tokenism considerably more sophisticated than older Congress-style patronage: installing Dalit and OBC chief ministers, naming a Buddhist as law minister — gestures that acknowledge caste's political permanence without conceding to the redistributive substance of the social justice movement. "There's Ambedkar everywhere," Wankhede observes of this appropriation, "and there's no Ambedkarite thinking."

Cinema Finally Turns — Unevenly

It is only from roughly 2010 onward, in Wankhede's telling, that Indian cinema begins producing anything resembling a Dalit hero, and the shift originates outside Hindi cinema. He points to Marathi filmmaker Nagraj Manjule's Fandry (2014) and the box-office hit Sairat (2016), and to Tamil director Pa. Ranjith's Madras and later Kabali, starring Rajinikanth, as the works that first proved Dalit-centered stories could be both commercially successful and narratively heroic rather than merely sympathetic. Ranjith's cinema, alongside filmmakers like Mari Selvaraj and Vetrimaaran, effectively created what Wankhede calls a distinct "Dalit genre" within Tamil film.

Hindi cinema, he says, followed more cautiously: Masaan, Article 15, and the recent Oscar-submission Homebound represent a "small democratization" in which Dalit characters appear as doctors, activists and aspirational strivers rather than only as victims. Yet Wankhede is careful not to overstate this shift. This new Dalit-centered cinema remains, in his assessment, a niche, "intellectual" cinema — serious, art-house, aimed at limited audiences — while mainstream commercial Hindi cinema has moved in a different direction entirely, elevating dominant, numerically powerful castes such as Marathas and Jats as its new commercial heroes, often within openly communal narratives — he cites Chhaava, built around the Maratha king Sambhaji, as one such recent hit. Dalit heroism, in other words, has found a screen — but not yet the same screen, or the same audience, as the dominant-caste heroism that Hindutva politics is actively cultivating.

A Fragmenting Future

Asked to assess where the Dalit movement stands today, Wankhede offers a notably guarded answer. The movement, he argues, suffers from an absence of new political imagination — little serious thinking, at present, about how Dalits might lead a broader coalition of the oppressed, in the way Kanshi Ram once envisioned. Instead, he sees increasing fragmentation along sub-caste lines: separate political mobilizations among Mahars and Matangs in Maharashtra, Musahars and Nishads in Bihar, each organizing around its own narrower claims rather than a unified Dalit identity. A prospective caste census, he suggests, is unlikely to reverse this trend and may instead formalize the fragmentation, sharpening competition over a fixed pool of reservation benefits rather than building solidarity.

What remains, in Wankhede's accounting, are three thinner but real gains: Ambedkar's own iconography, now genuinely national and claimed even by his political opponents; a persistent intellectual and literary class capable of documenting continuing atrocities and injustice; and the small cinematic opening just described. But he regards all three as fragile — lacking the institutional, economic or organizational base that could make them durable, and vulnerable, he notes, to state pressure of the kind that saw a prominent Dalit intellectual imprisoned on what he called flimsy charges, with comparatively little public mobilization in response. The conversation closes without triumphalism: a history of extraordinary intellectual and political innovation, Wankhede suggests, that has yet to translate into either a unified movement or an Indian cinema willing to let its heroes come from the bottom of the caste order as readily as from the top.