From Thugs to Victims: Dakxin Bajrange Chhara's Cinema of Justice

The documentary films of the Indian filmmaker Dakxin Bajrange Chhara focus not on his own community but on marginalized nomadic communities within his home state of Gujarat. In order to understand these films I draw on Partha Chatterjee's theory of “political society” to argue that Bajrange's portrayal of the social injustices suffered by these other Indian communities serves also to challenge the historical stigma that his own community feels as a result of having been labeled a “Criminal Tribe” by the British more than a century ago. By highlighting the victimhood of India's Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, Bajrange seeks to imbue them with the “moral attributes of a community.”