Our story begins in a calm peaceful village called "Yadavpur" where the entire village was terrorized by the dreaded don of the city "Bhalla" . The honest, educated, hardworking school teacher "Master Bholanath Gurjar" is trying to bring about a revolution in the city by educating the people of their rights. Meanwhile the Business Tycoon of the city "Amit Ahirwar" is planning to set up a steel plant in the village in collusion with "Bhalla" . Meanwhile "Brigadier Arjun Meena" has planned to stay in Yadavpur on his parental farm estate.
The story might have created a slight unease in most of us because the "Surnames" of the characters are not in sync with the popular perception of the castes.
Social stereotypes as it can be seen find their way into movies as well. Although considering the rigidity of the Indian social structure one would not be surprised that they do. I just went through some of the movies' cast to verify this point.
Let us start with the ascendent castes such as Yadav, Kurmi, Ahir, Jat, Gujjar. These are mostlly the castes that have been categorized as OBC and have been engaged mostly in Agriculture and allied activities ( includes Dairying etc. ) . Most of these castes have been associated with muscle power in the villages which was kind of necessary to sustain in their occupations. I googled the list of the most famous villians of Hindi Cinema and as expected most of the villians belonged to these caste. Just to substantiate the point I will put down some examples.
Next I considered the names of heroes and not surprisingly they were from the mainstream castes and to even make them appear more acceptable and '"good" ie to dissociate them from the upper castes that had at some point of time been the agents of exploitation, most of them were given names from the trading communities ie the harmless communities.
I am giving here a list of the famous Shahrukh Khan movies and names the protagonist had in them .
Well it cant be denied that more than anything this sort of a profiling exists in our minds. For example I was wondering that there was this famous dialogue from Kal Ho Na Ho which went like " Aman Mathur ka jadoo Chalne laga tha" now had the name been something else, it would have sounded odd to all of us due to the fact that we have been socialized by a stratified inequalitarian society with stereotypes.
For eg: It would have been uneasy to hear "Aman Singh Ahirwar ka jadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Meena ka jaadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Yadav ka jadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Singh Kushwaha ka jadoo chalne laga tha"
These stereotypes will ofcourse only go when casteism as a whole is vanquisehd from our society. Lets hope it does and some day we will have characters in our movies like a dreaded don named" Bachchu Bhalla" and a school teacher named "Bholanath Gurjar" without sounding odd.
The story might have created a slight unease in most of us because the "Surnames" of the characters are not in sync with the popular perception of the castes.
Social stereotypes as it can be seen find their way into movies as well. Although considering the rigidity of the Indian social structure one would not be surprised that they do. I just went through some of the movies' cast to verify this point.
Let us start with the ascendent castes such as Yadav, Kurmi, Ahir, Jat, Gujjar. These are mostlly the castes that have been categorized as OBC and have been engaged mostly in Agriculture and allied activities ( includes Dairying etc. ) . Most of these castes have been associated with muscle power in the villages which was kind of necessary to sustain in their occupations. I googled the list of the most famous villians of Hindi Cinema and as expected most of the villians belonged to these caste. Just to substantiate the point I will put down some examples.
- Langda Tyagi : Omkara
- Bachchu Yadav : Shool
- Sadhu Yadav: Gangajal
- Rajmani Singh Yadav: Shagird
- Gujjar Singh : Mela
Next I considered the names of heroes and not surprisingly they were from the mainstream castes and to even make them appear more acceptable and '"good" ie to dissociate them from the upper castes that had at some point of time been the agents of exploitation, most of them were given names from the trading communities ie the harmless communities.
I am giving here a list of the famous Shahrukh Khan movies and names the protagonist had in them .
- DDLJ : Raj Malhotra
- Kuch Kuch Hota hai : Rahul Khanna
- Rab Ne Bana di Jodi : Surinder Sahani
- Kal Ho Na Ho : Aman Mathur
- Chalte Chalte : Raj Mathur
- Mohobbatein : Raj Aryan Malhotra
- Chamatkar: Sundar Srivastava
- Raju Ban gaya Gentleman : Raj Mathur
The observations can be furthur extended to other attributes of communitites such as religion. For example for any role with a stint of patriotism or ruling factor mostly a Brahmin or a Rajput name is used .
- BhootNath ( Merchant Navy ) : Aditya Sharma
- Swades : Mohan Bhargava
- Baazigar : Ajay Sharma
- Rowdy Rathore : Vikram Rathore
- Veer Zara : Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh
- Dabangg : Chulbul Pandey
Well it cant be denied that more than anything this sort of a profiling exists in our minds. For example I was wondering that there was this famous dialogue from Kal Ho Na Ho which went like " Aman Mathur ka jadoo Chalne laga tha" now had the name been something else, it would have sounded odd to all of us due to the fact that we have been socialized by a stratified inequalitarian society with stereotypes.
For eg: It would have been uneasy to hear "Aman Singh Ahirwar ka jadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Meena ka jaadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Yadav ka jadoo chalne laga tha" or "Aman Singh Kushwaha ka jadoo chalne laga tha"
These stereotypes will ofcourse only go when casteism as a whole is vanquisehd from our society. Lets hope it does and some day we will have characters in our movies like a dreaded don named" Bachchu Bhalla" and a school teacher named "Bholanath Gurjar" without sounding odd.
Good analysis but Langda Tyagi, being a Tyagi is a brahmin character and the whole Omkara movie was revolving around brahmin characters in Negative shade.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Yadavs as villain- in Bihari politics Yadavs dominate and even in UP too, and why do they show them as criminals, you will get to know very soon, if you get UP cadre.
ReplyDeletevery aptly written, and i totally agree with you. "Keshav hingonia ka jadu chalane laga tha"....haha...of course it sounds funny
ReplyDeletegood insight and corelation...but the movies u mentioned in villain ha background of BIHAR, so the inspiration was then leadership of bihar,evn today buisness community is by and large aloof from gundai...
ReplyDeleteNice observation... Dear Friend.. Yadavs are modern phenomena in Bihar.. people of lower caste has still fear from upper caste in Bihar... there are so many Thakurs in Bihar whose crime rate is higher than any Yadav.. business community to some extent are simply blood suckers.. when i was child i have seen business class was beating, lower caste for some money ... of course there are no dearth of good people in all caste (of course Brahmans being elite have more name to say)
ReplyDeleteI have also noticed that the stereotyping is also typical because of the caste origins of the writers, producers and directors. If you would have noticed, when Punjabis dominated the industry (Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Yash Chopra, B.R.Chopra), the lead actors were mostly Mathur, Khanna. Khurana. When makers of UP and Bihar started gaining some hold, like Anurag Kashyap, Prakash Jha and Vishal Bhardwaj (all Brahmins), the lead actors were predominantly Pande, Pandit, Singh etc. and the villains mostly Yadav.
ReplyDeleteIf you remember the movies of the kisan vs zamindar type, Thakur was always the main villain (and I kept thinking ill about my family name through out my childhood).
It is also true that the film industry even today is not represented by all castes, the majority comes from the higher castes. So do the majority of writers. As and when this changes, kushwahas and hingonia's shall also come in the story.
@CMT ...precisely :)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1e5fwfY4E
ReplyDeleteI think their is 2nd part of the argument.If movies are clearly biased towards caste and class of the directors, How these movies are blockbusters? Why are these accepted in society without any fuss about casteism ? and Why don't Rajdeep Sardeshai, Barakha Dutt or Arnab Goswami make the nation loose it's sleep as they do in case of OBC reservation in central institutions or casteism prevalent in politics? answer is simple 'jo bikta hai wo chalta hai'.(As long as my consumers are happy, I don't give a damn!)
ReplyDeleteCaste in politics is as old as politics in India but our 'intellectuals',movie directors and media persons awaken from their sleep about this 'monster' called Casteism in politics as late as 90's only when 'their' castes were uprooted from citadel of power by 'lower' castes.
It's not always like 'the society' wants such movies but 'their' society wants such movies.I dare Kashyaps, Jha or Bhardwaj to come up a movie in which a north indian beat Marathi Manush to the pulp to save his honour and integrity(if he has any). They can't because they will be kicked out of Mumbai by mumbaikars.Jai Maharastra!!
Rajdeep sardeshai or Arnab Goswami will swear to god to root out this casteism from movies if Amit Yadav started to show their place to Dipu Pundits in movies directed by Chandra Mohan Hudda.
P.S. Although it's like 'suraj ko diya dikhana' to talk about sociology among Amit Arora and CMTs still I wrote what I understood from my experience.