Caste & the Archives in India: Cinematic Representation of a Minority Community Through the Structural Elements of Film

This article examines the roles of caste and class in the context of modern India, with a particular focus on how they affect Catholic communities along the western coast of Maharashtra. The issue of caste exclusion is as pertinent for the archive as it is for the individual. Moreover, the act of remembering or recreating the past is not a straightforward endeavour, especially given the changing politics in India and the dwindling number of Catholics in Bombay. As a filmmaker, I am intrigued by the structural aspects of film—lensing, sound, music, lighting, colour, and movement—and whether these can convey meanings that extend beyond oral history and archiving. Drawing on Michelle Caswell’s theories of ‘symbolic annihilation’ and ‘liberatory practices’ for archives, I argue that the present moment must be met with revolutionary approaches. By using my film, “Islands of Labour: The Church at Jacob Circle”, as a case study I speculate on how cinema’s structural elements can be utilised to frame liberatory practices for marginalized Catholic communities. The film focuses on a public school teacher from Mumbai whose parents were part of India’s first industrial workforce—the cotton mill workers, Hazel grew up in the Bombay Improvement Trust Blocks at Agripada, a distinctive colonial architectural experiment in social housing, as a member of a working-class Catholic family in mid-20th-century Bombay. The article asks, if cinema’s structural elements can serve as a liberatory archive for marginalised catholic communities excluded from India’s dominant archiving traditions?