Dalit New Wave: Camera as the gun, cinema as guerilla cinema

Cinema is central to popular culture in India, where caste functions as a form of apartheid, manifesting through untouchability, discrimination, spatial segregation, manual scavenging, and atrocities such as honour-killings and sexual violence. Representations of caste are therefore intensely political, raising critical questions about who has historically held the power and access to represent caste on screen, how such portrayals are constructed, and whether voices from the margins are allowed to speak for themselves. Through textual-ideological analyses, this article elucidates how Bollywood has long orientalized caste by naturalizing caste stereotypes and Brahminical philanthropy, and how the burgeoning of the Dalit New Wave, an anti-caste cinema movement since 2012, marks a paradigm shift. In dialogue with Third Cinema and Black Cinema, this counter-hegemonic intervention, spearheaded by community filmmakers, foregrounds Dalit self-definition, oppositional gaze, and artistic autonomy. Seeking to decolonize screen spaces from a Brahminical gaze through an Ambedkarite epistemology, it wields cinema as a site of transnational, decolonial storytelling in which historically marginalised communities speak back to centuries of representational violence as sovereign subjects of their own narratives. By tracing this cinematic rupture, the article advances scholarship on decolonial aesthetics, in relation to the politics of screening and viewing caste on screen.