The Protagonist Is Not the Hero

There is a difference, Harish S. Wankhede argues, between a protagonist and a hero. A protagonist is the character a story follows. A hero is the character who acts: who refuses, who challenges, who changes the world around them. Indian cinema has given Dalit characters many roles over its hundred-odd years. It has made them the objects of pity, the victims of atrocity, the gentle women rescued by upper-caste men, the loyal sidekicks of the real lead. What it has almost never done is let a Dalit character be a hero.

In a long conversation with Nous Network, Wankhede, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University who has written extensively on caste and Indian cinema, uses this distinction to open a much larger question. Why did it take the most influential cultural industry in the country so long to see what was happening on its own doorstep? And what does that blindness tell us about Indian democracy, the Ambedkarite project, and the political order that now governs the country?

Watch the full conversation with Dr. Harish S. Wankhede on the Nous Network YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Q0JvD9BCn4M?si=CHtgKmpScBKlTZom

From Outside the Discourse to Inside It

Wankhede begins with location. Within the caste order, Dalits were not merely at the bottom; for most of history they were outside it altogether. Considered untouchable, they sat beyond the reach of public concern, beyond any sense of history, beyond the idea of human entitlement itself. A community that was never even in the gaze of public or political discourse entered that discourse only in the last century and a half.

There were earlier challenges to this order. The Buddha's teaching invited everyone, including those deemed untouchable, into religious and spiritual life, and rejected the idea that human beings could be arranged in a divinely sanctioned hierarchy. The Bhakti poets, among them Ravidas and Chokhamela, carried that challenge forward, as did Guru Nanak. In the modern period, Jyotirao Phule and Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur argued that untouchability was an evil requiring reform.

But reform, Wankhede notes, remained a language of elevation from above. The rupture came with Bhimrao Ambedkar.

Ambedkar's Radical Wager

What made Ambedkar radical was not that he cared about the condition of the untouchables. Others had cared. It was that he imagined them as political beings.

"Such terribly located, dehumanized people can also become political bargainers. They can discuss and deliberate upon who can govern us. This was unimaginable just before Ambedkar's time."

The prevailing approach, including Gandhi's, sought kindness and support: a change of heart among the social elites that would make room for the untouchables within Hindu society. Ambedkar considered this a nominal prescription. He wanted untouchables recognized as citizens capable of deciding their own future, and he wanted that claim heard not only in India but globally, in the language of human rights that had gained currency after the First World War.

His own biography taught him why individual achievement was not enough. With the support of Sayajirao Gaekwad III, the ruler of Baroda, Ambedkar studied at Columbia University in New York, where he earned an MA and later a PhD in economics, and at the London School of Economics, where he completed an MSc and a DSc, while also qualifying as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He was among the most educated people of his generation anywhere. Yet when he returned to serve in Baroda, he could not find lodging, files were reportedly thrown at him rather than handed over, and he was denied access to shared drinking water. He later recorded these humiliations in Waiting for a Visa.

The lesson was structural. No amount of personal distinction could lift a person out of the caste to which society assigned them.

Why the Buddha?

This raises what the conversation's host called a contradiction. Ambedkar was a liberal democrat, the chief architect of a modern constitution, a believer in industrialisation, urbanisation and representative institutions. Why, at the height of his modernist project, did he turn to a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old spiritual tradition?

Wankhede's answer is that Ambedkar understood something many modernists did not: democracy requires dignity, and dignity requires a past.

"Democracy requires a dignified presence of the people."

The untouchable identity was an identity of degradation. It offered no sense of a good life and no aspirational horizon, and both capitalism and democracy require exactly that. If Dalits entered democratic life carrying only that identity, Ambedkar feared, they would always be treated as a disability. So he reconstructed a history in which the untouchables were descendants of Buddhists who had resisted Brahmanical order and been defeated and degraded for it. The Buddhist identity offered a legacy of resistance, a sense of being inheritors of a great tradition rather than the residue of an unclean one.

His conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, weeks before his death, was the culmination of this thinking. Wankhede describes Ambedkar as a pragmatist building a bridge between past and future. He placed genuine hope in modern institutions, parliament, and state-led development, but he also saw that the Hindu social sphere was hostile to their promise. His final speech to the Constituent Assembly in November 1949 made the warning explicit: India was entering a life of political equality while remaining socially unequal, and without a social revolution the political one would not hold. Buddhism, in Wankhede's reading, was meant to supply what Hindu social life lacked: civility, liberty, fraternity.

The Break With Gandhi

Ambedkar began, Wankhede reminds us, as a reformer. He led the Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 to assert the right of untouchables to draw water from a public tank, and the Kalaram temple entry movement in Nashik from 1930. Both met fierce opposition. The lesson was that caste Hindus were not prepared to concede even basic civic entitlements, let alone spiritual equality.

That disillusionment pushed Ambedkar towards a new strategy: political safeguards backed by the state. If untouchables could be recognised as a distinct minority on the basis of their social exclusion and deprivation, they could claim the kind of protections the colonial state was extending to Muslims, including separate electorates.

Gandhi opposed this with everything he had. He saw separate representation for untouchables as a fracture in Hindu unity at the very moment unity was needed against the empire. The nomenclature he offered, Harijan, was designed to keep untouchables within the Hindu civilisational fold. Ambedkar rejected both the name and the framework, and wrote a book-length indictment in 1945, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables.

Wankhede describes Ambedkar's reading of Gandhi as the recognition of a "parental gaze": a philanthropy that wanted Dalits to be looked after, but to stay where they were. Gandhi's fast in 1932 forced the Poona Pact, which replaced separate electorates with reserved seats in joint electorates. Ambedkar accepted it unhappily. It was, Wankhede says, characteristic of his proceduralism: take what can be won now, and build from it.

Bombay: The City Where Everything Happened

This is where the conversation turns to cinema, and the turn is not arbitrary. The Hindi film industry and the Ambedkarite movement grew up in the same city.

Bombay was a young colonial city built on its docks and textile mills. It drew migrants from across western India, including large numbers of Dalits from the Konkan region, where Ambedkar's own family came from. His father settled in a Bombay chawl after retiring from the army. Dalits worked in the mills, on the docks, and in the informal labour economy. They formed their own organisations. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Ambedkar built most of his political and social organisations in Bombay, published his newspapers there, and mobilised there. The first sustained political mobilisation of Dalits in India happened in that city.

And the cinema being made a few miles away did not see any of it.

A Cinema Born to Educate the Elite's Nation

Wankhede's core argument is that Indian cinema, from its inception, was an instrument of powerful elites. It required large capital, it was controlled by educated urban groups, and it was conceived not merely as entertainment but as a political project.

Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra (1913) and the mythologicals that followed were explicitly tied to cultural nationalism: to reintroduce the Hindu epics and Puranas to masses believed to be drifting under Western influence. Phalke spoke of cinema's responsibility to educate. The early studios were run by Parsi, Hindu and Muslim elites, and each tended to put its own social world and imagined glorious past on screen.

There is an irony in this social history. Before cinema, popular entertainment in forms like tamasha and lavani in Maharashtra, folk theatre and courtesan performance was largely performed by lower-caste communities and considered undignified by the elites, who patronised classical forms instead. Cinema was initially seen the same way. No woman would act in Raja Harishchandra, and the heroine Taramati was played by a young man, Anna Salunke. But once cinema was attached to the nationalist cultural project, it acquired respectability. And as it rose into high culture, the traditional performers who had carried popular entertainment for generations were left behind.

"Cinema was never an instrument for the larger empowerment of the marginalised. It was, from the very beginning, an instrument of the powerful elites."

The Golden Age That Forgot Caste

The 1950s and 1960s are remembered as the golden age of Hindi cinema, the era of Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Mehboob Khan and the socialist filmmakers of the Indian People's Theatre Association tradition. It was a cinema of social conscience. Do Bigha Zamin (1953) confronted the dispossession of peasants. Boot Polish (1954) and Jagte Raho (1956) followed the urban poor and the migrant. Mother India (1957) dramatised agrarian crisis and debt bondage.

But Wankhede observes that this cinema aligned itself with what he calls the "grand consensus" of Gandhi and Nehru: secularism, socialism, nation-building. Ambedkar, and the caste question he represented, did not fit that consensus. Caste revealed a society arranged hierarchically and systemically, something that could not be dissolved by development alone, and that picture was politically unwelcome.

So poverty on screen became a homogeneous category. The protagonist was poor, a migrant, a peasant, but almost never marked by caste, even though poverty and caste were deeply entangled in the actual India. Feudalism was shown; its Brahmanical underpinnings were not.

When caste did appear, as in Achhut Kanya (1936) or Bimal Roy's Sujata (1959), it came through a Dalit woman: gentle, beautiful, submissive, and ultimately accepted or rescued by an upper-caste man. The Dalit man, if present at all, was poor and powerless, unable to protect his own family.

"There is always a division between the protagonist and the hero. The hero is an agent, a revolutionary, a change-maker. The protagonist is not necessarily a hero."

The Panthers and Parallel Cinema's Blind Spot

After Ambedkar's death in 1956, the movement lost momentum. Leaders such as Dadasaheb Gaikwad organised mass land satyagrahas, but the Republican Party of India, founded in 1957 to carry Ambedkar's political legacy, fragmented quickly: some factions allied with the Congress, others with the socialists or communists, and others splintered over personal rivalries.

In 1972, a group of young Dalit writers in Bombay, among them Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale and J. V. Pawar, founded the Dalit Panthers, openly inspired by the Black Panther Party in the United States. They were poets and pamphleteers, many of them the first generation to benefit from educational reservation. They saw constitutional democracy as too slow and too bourgeois. Rather than wait for the police to register a complaint, they would respond to atrocities directly, and they believed Dalits could topple the Brahmanical order rather than petition it. They drew on Marxism, anti-colonial writing, feminism and the global civil rights movement, and fused them with the caste question that orthodox Marxism had long ignored.

The Panthers lasted in organised form only a few years before splitting, most famously between Dhale's Ambedkarite-Buddhist line and Dhasal's Marxist one. But they transformed Marathi literature and gave Dalit assertion a new, defiant voice.

Meanwhile, Indian parallel cinema was at its most celebrated. Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974), Govind Nihalani's Aakrosh (1980), Satyajit Ray's Sadgati (1981, adapted from Premchand), Goutam Ghose's Paar (1984) and Prakash Jha's Damul (1985) all put caste oppression on screen. But, Wankhede argues, they did so stereotypically. Dalits appeared as wretched, voiceless bodies, exploited and dying, without agency. The revolutionary Dalit, the Panther writing poetry and organising protests in the same city where these films were financed, did not appear.

"It was called realistic cinema. But it was half real and half false. It represented the interests of the social elites, not the actual conditions of the Dalits."

The exception he names is Benegal's Manthan (1976), in which Naseeruddin Shah's Bhola emerges as something closer to a hero. He also notes that Amitabh Bachchan's Vijay in Deewaar (1975), a boot-polish boy turned dock worker in a blue shirt who will not enter the temple, the son of a trade unionist, carries almost every marker of a Dalit character without the film ever saying so.

The Arrival of the Hero

For Wankhede, the first real rupture was Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994). Phoolan Devi, as the film presents her, is not only a body that is violated. She has no upper-caste saviour. She wages her own violent revolt against the feudal elites who brutalised her. Jagmohan Mundhra's Bawandar (2000), based on the Rajasthani grassroots worker Bhanwari Devi, followed her legal battle for justice after she was gang-raped for trying to stop a child marriage.

A factual clarification matters here, and it sharpens rather than weakens the argument. Neither woman was a Dalit. Phoolan Devi belonged to the Mallah boatman community and Bhanwari Devi to the Kumhar potter caste, both classified today as Other Backward Classes. What these films introduced was the lower-caste woman as agent, and the fact that the breakthrough came through OBC rather than Dalit protagonists only underlines Wankhede's broader point about how late and how narrowly Hindi cinema opened to Dalit heroism itself.

Even into the 2000s, Dalit characters mostly remained sidekicks: Saif Ali Khan's educated Dalit Deepak Kumar in Aarakshan (2011) is subordinate to Amitabh Bachchan's upper-caste principal; Ajay Devgn's Karna-like figure in Rajneeti (2010) is a supporting force in someone else's story. Wankhede also points to the lesser-known Guddu Rangeela (2015) as an early, overlooked attempt to put lower-caste men at the heroic centre.

Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan Imagination

These cinematic openings, Wankhede argues, followed a political one. It came from Uttar Pradesh, and from a man who had learned his politics in Maharashtra.

Kanshi Ram, a Ramdasia Sikh from Punjab working as a government scientist in Pune, discovered Ambedkar's writings there and began organising government employees. He founded BAMCEF in 1978, the DS-4 in 1981, and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. He concluded that Maharashtra, where Dalits were about 12 percent of the population and politics was dominated by Marathas, was fertile ground for cultural assertion but not for electoral power. Uttar Pradesh, where Scheduled Castes were over a fifth of the population and where Ambedkar's Republican Party had once had a base in cities like Agra, offered a different arithmetic.

His innovation was the idea of the Bahujan, the majority: Dalits, Other Backward Classes, Muslims and Adivasis combined against the small social elite that had always led every party. Dalits, as the most oppressed and most politically conscious, would lead this coalition. It was not a demand for kindness or even for safeguards. It was a claim on the state itself.

"Dalits will not just be part of the political churning. They will be agents of political change."

The results were extraordinary. Mayawati became Chief Minister of India's most populous state in 1995, and in 2007 the BSP won an outright majority on its own with about 30 percent of the vote. Similar assertions appeared in Bihar with Ram Vilas Paswan, in Tamil Nadu with the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, and elsewhere.

The decline was just as dramatic. Wankhede lists the reasons found in the scholarship: a leadership that became personalised and was widely seen as corrupt, a failure to bring other groups into leadership, neglect of Muslim concerns, and a growing perception that the BSP served primarily the Jatav community. The party's vote in Uttar Pradesh has since fallen below 10 percent in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Subaltern Hindutva: The Mirror Image

Into this vacuum stepped a transformed BJP. The party of the 1990s was defined by the Babri Masjid campaign and anti-Muslim mobilisation, which gave it influence but not a majority. After 2012, Wankhede argues, it reinvented itself through a new social engineering that scholars call subaltern Hindutva.

It is, in his account, the reverse image of Kanshi Ram's strategy. Where Kanshi Ram united oppressed groups through shared political and social grievance, the new Hindutva united them through culture: local deities, festivals, rituals, and caste-specific heroes. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the eleventh-century king Suheldev has been promoted as a lower-caste warrior who resisted Muslim invaders, turning a caste icon into an instrument of communal mobilisation.

The target, Wankhede notes, was never the most politically conscious Dalit communities: the Mahars in Maharashtra who embraced Buddhism, the Jatavs in Uttar Pradesh, the Paswans in Bihar. It was the many other Dalit and OBC communities who had remained within the Brahmanical cultural sphere and never developed an independent political consciousness. Dalit identity was never homogeneous, and the Ambedkarite influence was never uniform. Hindutva found the seams.

The host adds a historical observation: the absorption of local and indigenous deities into a layered hierarchy of gods is a very old process in the making of Hinduism. Subaltern Hindutva is repeating it as political strategy.

Alongside this came accommodation. The BJP no longer treats caste as an embarrassment; it incorporates it. It made Mohan Yadav, an OBC leader, Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, appointed a Buddhist, Kiren Rijiju, as law minister and then a Dalit, Arjun Ram Meghwal. Wankhede calls this tokenism, but a tokenism that the old BJP was thought incapable of. The same logic extends to Ambedkar himself, whose image is now everywhere, including in the right wing's own iconography, but stripped of his radical thought. And it extends to the caste census, once resisted by the BJP, which the Union Cabinet's political affairs committee chaired by Prime Minister Modi approved on 30 April 2025, with house-listing running between April and September 2026 and population enumeration following in February 2027, against a reference date of 1 March 2027.

Why No Institutions?

The host raises a pointed question. While the RSS spent decades building schools, welfare organisations and outreach networks among Adivasis and Dalits, forming individuals from cradle to grave, why did the emancipatory Dalit movement not build comparable institutions?

Wankhede's answer is blunt: because Dalits remain, overwhelmingly, poor. Reservation was never designed as a poverty-alleviation programme. It was a mechanism for representation, a way to place Dalits inside the circles of power. Economic emancipation would have required other strategies, and those never materialised, while private capital grew outside the reach of any reservation. There is a thin Dalit middle class and a small intellectual class, but no significant capitalist class and no philanthropic base capable of funding a parallel institutional world.

Representation within government itself remains skewed towards the lower rungs. According to the Department of Personnel and Training's 2024-25 annual report, as of 1 January 2024, SCs held 14.2% of Group A posts in Union ministries and departments, against a 15 percent quota, while more than 66% of the Group C sanitation workers employed with the Union government come from SC, ST and OBC communities. The gap widens further in the most senior administrative positions and in faculty appointments at elite institutions, where reserved posts frequently go unfilled on grounds of "none found suitable." What remained to Dalits was politics, and politics alone could not build a social base.

The New Wave, and the Other New Wave

The most hopeful part of the conversation concerns the last decade. Because the political field had become inhospitable, Wankhede argues, Dalit creative energy moved into culture.

In Marathi cinema, Nagraj Manjule's Fandry (2013) and Sairat (2016) changed what was thought possible. Sairat, an inter-caste love story that ends in an honour killing, became the first Marathi film to cross ₹100 crore at the box office. In Tamil cinema, Pa. Ranjith's Madras (2014) mapped caste onto the geography of Chennai, and Kabali (2016) placed Rajinikanth, the biggest star in the industry, in a Dalit hero's role. Mari Selvaraj and Vetrimaaran have extended this into what Wankhede calls a distinct Dalit genre: characters who are not wretched but defiant, sometimes violent, always agents.

In Hindi, Neeraj Ghaywan's Masaan (2015) followed a young man from the Dom community who dreams of escaping the cremation ghats through an engineering degree. Anubhav Sinha's Article 15 (2019) and Subhash Kapoor's Madam Chief Minister (2021), loosely modelled on a Mayawati-like figure, broadened the range. Ghaywan's Homebound, about two friends, one Dalit and one Muslim, chasing a police constable's job, was India's official Oscar submission and was shortlisted for the 98th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category, among 15 titles. Dalit characters now appear as doctors, activists, politicians, aspirants: heterogeneous, as they are in life.

But there is another new wave running alongside. The mainstream spectacle, which Wankhede calls commercial, mediocre and political, has found that populism, violence and polarisation are profitable. Films such as Chhaava (2025) recast figures like Sambhaji as anti-Muslim warriors, while Muslims appear increasingly as gangsters, terrorists and Pakistanis. The heroes of this cinema are no longer only upper-caste; they are increasingly drawn from dominant agrarian castes such as Marathas and Jats. This, too, is subaltern Hindutva on screen: the ownership of Hindutva democratised to the dominant castes, with a common enemy reaffirmed in every frame.

The result is a divided cinema. The dominant-caste hero belongs to the blockbuster. The Dalit hero belongs to the serious, festival-bound, slice-of-life film. Dalit cinema is still seen as intellectual cinema, for a niche audience.

A Passive Future

Asked about the future, Wankhede is candid. He is pessimistic.

The Dalit movement, he argues, has largely stopped thinking about leading all the oppressed. The energy has turned inward, towards narrow rights and, increasingly, towards sub-caste identities. Separate parties now organise Musahars in Bihar and particular communities in Maharashtra. The Supreme Court's 2024 ruling permitting states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes has sharpened contests between groups such as the Mahars and Mangs over the division of reservation benefits. Beyond atrocities and reservation, there is no national question that unites Dalits. The leaders who could build a national federation have never sat together; Mayawati, who had the stature, did not try. Younger figures such as Chandrashekhar Azad hold promise, but the vacuum is large.

There are real gains: the transformation of Ambedkar into a national icon, a critical Dalit intellectual class, a new cinema and literature. But Wankhede calls these nascent and fragile, lacking the social and capital base that would allow them to survive sustained pressure. He points to the scholar Anand Teltumbde, arrested in 2020 in the Bhima Koregaon case and jailed for over two and a half years before being granted bail, and to the relative silence that met his arrest.

"We can see the images here and there: cinema, theatre, literature, intellectual life, Ambedkar's presence. But it can collapse any time."

Coda: The One and the Many

The conversation closes on a philosophical note from the host. The question of identity is also a question of metaphysics: how we see ourselves in the world, and how shared values can be conceived without erasing difference. If difference is flattened into homogeneity, the many become one, as Gandhi's Hindu unity and the Marxists' unified class both attempted. If there is only difference, with no idea of the one, the result is fragmentation, as the Dalit movement's splintering now shows.

Ambedkar's genius was to refuse both. He insisted that Dalits were distinct and would not be absorbed into anyone else's unity, while building a constitutional order meant to hold everyone. Kanshi Ram tried the same with the Bahujan. Indian cinema, for most of its history, chose the first error: it spoke of the poor, the nation, the people, and in doing so made the Dalit invisible.

That it has finally begun, in pockets, to imagine a Dalit hero is a sign of how much has changed. That this hero remains confined to the margins of an industry now eagerly producing a very different kind of hero is a sign of how much has not.