It’s a typically sunny morning in Chennai as I make my way to the gate, wishfully thinking of lesser traffic during my journey to the coast at Besant Nagar although it’s the peak hour. The smell of sandalwood wafts through the otherwise hot and humid 10 a.m. air, refreshing my olfactory senses, perhaps from the ablutions at my neighbour’s in preparation of their sanctimonious morning rituals and prayers, corroborated by loud chants emanating from within their house from a stereo system.

At the outset, I must say that I live in T-Nagar, at the heart of Chennai, within an upper-caste Hindu community that’s – not surprisingly – populated by Brahmins: it’s quite simple to deduce that these seemingly subtle, simplistic acts of piety obsessively connote individualistic and familial purity. It is faux naïf and socio-politically impossible to assume that these acts are restricted to the design of one’s home when it is evident that the processes of “purification” involve spatial effects in common property areas. Rather curious, I think, that the communication of holiness be made from one’s residence to the external environment in a manner far from being consensual, while these inviolate preserves of piety – the upper-caste homes – remain oblivious to the ideas, tenets, and realisation of democracy through participatory democratisation. To the conservative reader who would make a banal beeline for victimhood and accuse me (among countless others) of subjectifying upper-caste Hindus (yet again) in the scrutiny of Indian society: critical analyses are based on informed opinions that are academically coherent, and the historically material basis of society – in the Marxian understanding – is an accessible and factual interpretation of social form, unlike the strategy of using idealist interpretations and incontestable transcendences to justify one’s position in society. Purity, piety, chastity and sanctity have been important concepts in the usage of soulfully salubrious acts developed by the Brahminical order comprised and designed by perspicacious tacticians exploiting subaltern labour – labour that, ceteris paribus, is caste-based and socially normalised using the strategies of Brahminism.

The scene that unfolded was a fitting illustration of this order, as my neighbour’s septic tank near the gate was getting cleaned. Clad in a white dhoti and a white towel that would cover his bare chest, just enough to display his holy thread, he hastily observes the opened tank from a measured distance with a look of disapproval, yet with a cautious keenness for want of cleaner drains with smoother flows that would bring his in-house aesthetic back to normalcy. As I get closer, smells unlike sandalwood make me intrigued: a head pops out of the tank, and a man reveals himself, carrying slurry on a tray. The man, naked but for his underwear, covered with the contents of the tank, makes his way to the surface and walks a short distance to empty the tray. Each step he takes stains the interlocking bricks that form the floor.

Those dark marks – the black imprint of his feet – are the marks of labour that visually highlight the presence of a Dalit in this upper-caste fortress. The contrast is visual: black foot on the concrete floor; dark-skinned man covered with filth situated next to a landlord clad in white fabric; Dalit labouring for Brahmin. Modi’s acche din is nothing but an ensemble of aches and dins: manual scavenging the Dalit burden in the era of a supposedly digital India. This is the social contrast. It is a toxic contrast that is produced and reproduced to generate normalcy: it is normal to associate a Dalit with cleaning and a Brahmin with praying. It is a toxic contrast that resists fluidity because of the hierarchical ordering of labour: it takes revolutionary transgressions that destroy the gaze to ensure fluidity in a Dalit’s profession. A recent article in The Wire notes a four-fold increase in manual scavengers, and highlights the government’s exclusion of septic tank cleaners from the list of manual scavengers as it “can’t be completely done away with”. The privatisation of manual scavenging through contractors only exacerbates the problem. The mere financialisation of service as a justification is delusional and amounts to the commodification of human labour.

At any given time, the casteist gaze of Indian society proffers that a successful Dalit is tantamount to the inexistence of the caste system. Invidious power relations involving upper-caste privilege have recycled and institutionally legitimised a retrograde system that hinders the dignity of labour. Three entanglements could be observed in this regard: i) apologists who are cushioned by caste privilege weave platitudes to refute these arguments by either calling it a vestige of the British Raj, or feign sympathy and live in denial of oppression; ii) conspicuous propagation of Brahminism by the religiously privileged Sangh Parivar and their Hindutva electorate relentlessly appropriates Ambedkar as part of their political project and seeks to socio-politically cement the subaltern in accordance with preposterous divine ascriptions; iii) a delusional mass of the economically privileged exacerbates this problem either with their incoherent idea of being apolitical or by romanticising distress.

While we are still in the Kaala hangover, it’s important to analyse discourse, reflections, and portrayal of the film on social media. That the majority of viewers have lauded Rajinikanth on social media for his screen presence, and not the director Pa. Ranjith, who is an avowed Ambedkarite, for the socio-politically powerful story and character sketches of the female leads, says a lot on the politics of gender and the degree to which the apparently apolitical masses have normalised hyper-masculinity. That the traditional fan base of Rajinikanth – who would approve of his real-life aanmiga arasiyal or “spiritual politics” – celebrate the film with the actor as a subject, and not reflect on the veracious political narratives embedded within it, from Ram vs. Raavan to Dravidian resistance and the subaltern life of labour, reveals a resistance to delve into a conscious involvement to radically change society. Although the film comes at a critical time in India’s political scenario by ideologically resurrecting the (unholy) alliance of Marx, Periyar, and Ambedkar on the screen to narrate the story of Dalit rights in a skewed society, consciousness is key to ensuring an equal society that is devoid of post-truths and alternative facts. No film is “just a film”, as cinema has a critical agency that acts as ideological reflections of the functions, compositions, and processes of society held together by the politics of interests, representations, and relationships. Deviating from the establishment that has bowdlerised our films, it is films like Kaala that show that art is political, art is a reflection of politics, and that art has a political responsibility. But using idolatry – involving subjects from gods to film stars – as a tool for political reason is far from worthwhile in a rational framework. The film communicates Dalit oppression, but a week after its release, the scene that was described in the previous paragraphs highlights the reality of distress within our occupied environments that ooze with the ugly hotchpotch of savarna skullduggery.

Individual consciousness of social actions, due to their entanglement with politics, is essential in societal reform. No one deserves the privilege of being apolitical or apathetic to the pressing issue of Dalit exploitation when the country faces socio-economic inequalities. In a non-discriminatory society of justice, the privileged would be cleaning their own drains without using their place on the social ladder as a means of legitimising exploitation. As I observe the dark imprints of his feet on the floor again, the man gets back into the tank to clean it but momentarily smiles at me. The smile should not be romanticised as a healthy contentment of the individual, for it was the smile of despair and helplessness. Ambedkar’s revolution would need to be reinvigorated and actualised at every grain in the network of society. The “annihilation of caste” is essential to recalibrating our social barometers. Distress is real. Labour deserves dignity.  His footprints are proof of this burden.

Author – Dhruv Gangadharan is an alumnus of the University of Oxford; a geographer who wanders in coastal and pastoral commons, observing human and non-human interactions.

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