A film that critiques the spectacle of Bollywood’s trauma porn and its ingrained casteism through its excruciating quietness.
Chaitanya Tamhane’s “Court” is an Indian movie in which not much happens. To describe the film as a legal “drama” might be a bit disingenuous, but it is this exact quality of the film that emphasizes its adherence to telling the truth. It’s clear from the initial moments of the film, such as the silent, distant, wide shot of poet Narayan Kamble’s arrest during a Dalit rally, that “Court” isn’t interested in dramatizing the oppression of Dalits. Instead, it is committed to representing real Dalit experiences with the law. It’s no coincidence that Naryan Kamble is played by a real-life Dalit activist, Vira Sathidar, cast right before shooting for the film began. Sathidar, who unfortunately passed away due to complications related to COVID-19 in 2021, spoke on the authenticity of Tamhane’s direction: “What he is showing is my life … what surprised me was that he wrote all this without having met me.” The portrait image of the late Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, known as “the Father of the Indian constitution” who wrote provisions to protect Dalit people, watches over Kamble’s arrest, eerily reflecting how his vision of caste equality has not yet been achieved.
In the context of Indian cinema more broadly, but particularly in Bollywood, an industry dominated by upper-caste Hindus, many films address issues of caste through the lens of the privileged. A recent example is the Bollywood crime drama, Article 15 (2019), in which a Brahmin police officer is asked to investigate hate crimes against Dalits in a rural village. These films pose Brahmin, or upper-caste Hindu characters, as saviors of caste injustice and often exploit the trauma of Dalits for financial gain. “Article 15” specifically uses the 2014 Baduan gang rape and 2016 Una flogging incidents as inspiration to selfishly stir an emotional response from an upper-caste audience unfamiliar with Dalit struggle, while subjecting Dalits to reliving the trauma experienced within their communities. This form of activism only works to soothe the guilt of upper-caste people who hope that they can be one of the “good Brahmins” by sympathizing with fictional Dalit characters, thus obscuring how they are complicit in casteism themselves. The favorable representation of the Brahmin cop is especially problematic in that it reinforces an understanding that law enforcement is working to resolve issues of caste. In reality, law enforcement is actively oppressing Dalits, as shown in a recent study by Cambridge University that found officers were “more likely to prefer targeting offenders from caste-class subjugated (CCS) communities … the police are more likely to personally prefer investigating low-caste Dalit offenders than high-caste ones.” “Court” opposes this narrative in mainstream Bollywood of heroic law enforcement officials and demonstrates the complicity of cops, judges, lawyers and politicians alike, arguing that casteism is not simply a bug, but a feature of the Indian legal system.
“Court’s” aversion to sensationally representing caste oppression is shown by its treatment of the character, Vasudev Pawar, a Dalit sewage worker. All that is revealed of him is one photograph, and his death is never shown. While it’s implied that he most likely died due to unsafe working conditions in the sewer, the possibility of suicide is complicated by what is perhaps the most harrowing, soul-crushing moment of the film: the testimony of Pawar’s widow, Sharmila Pawar. She explains that Pawar was an alcoholic who needed to drink to face the unbearable stench of manual scavenging. He was never offered safety equipment, and all the while his family was living in complete destitution.
For those unfamiliar with the horror of manual scavenging, it is the practice of manually cleaning human waste from receptacles like septic tanks, latrines and sewers, largely occurring in rural villages. This role is forced upon Dalits with the threat of expulsion or violence and is often performed without wages or protective gear, subsequently leading to severe health consequences such as skin diseases and carbon monoxide poisoning, as in the case of Vasudev Pawar in “Court”. Manual scavengers are also ostracized within the community and experience discrimination in school, religious settings and in access to various goods and services.
Despite the dialogue of others in the scene of Sharmila’s testimony, the film does not revert to the typical shot-reverse shot technique and opts to keep the frame still on her fraught expression, leaving her in frame for seven minutes straight. She timidly looks around, never making direct eye contact with the camera, isolated in an unfamiliar environment of lawyers, a judge and a police officer, amongst others, and is expected to testify amidst her grieving the loss of her husband. It’s at this moment that the viewer understands that this Dalit woman is one who was robbed of her innocence and subjected to a life of terror. The viewer is left simply begging for the camera to cut away from her face, to relieve them of their guilt as they expect mainstream Bollywood to do, but “Court” expertly refuses to give in. “Court’s” decision to maintain ambiguity around Pawar’s death, whether it was suicide or accident, poses a deeply depressing question to the audience, given the circumstances of Pawar’s life: would death be better than a life like this? Just as is true of many aspects of “Court,” the suggestion of suicide is reflective of the pressing issues Dalits experience, as suicide rates amongst Dalits have been steadily rising from 2015 to 2020, with a staggering 42% of cases being caused by social humiliation.
Because “Court” rejects the tendency of Indian cinema to invoke visceral reactions through drama, this is not a film that would appeal to the mainstream audience, but instead to the film buffs within film festival circuits. “Court’s” subtlety, to put it simply, limits its reach for the sake of authenticity, paradoxically making its message stronger, yet constraining the number of people who access it. Tangentially, given that this film was made to have success within the film world, it should be acknowledged that “Court” is afforded critical recognition that other Indian films are not, based on the pretentious notion that films that do seek to invoke the visceral are not as complex. This Eurocentric bias towards western storytelling not only undercuts the complexity of Indian cinema but also ignores the cultural differences that make the masala style so effective in capturing the hearts of Indian audiences.
“Court” is a movie so concerned with doing everything right that it ironically falls short in its efficacy by refusing to do some things wrong, refusing to embellish and refusing to give what audiences want. The most painful aspect of “Court” is not just the story it tells, but how it falls flat on the ears of those who need to hear it most.
MiC Columnist Vik Rupasinghe can be reached at vrupasin@umich.edu.