Abstract
The Hindi film Guthlee Ladoo strives to address the lacuna in the constitutionally protected Right to Education Act (RTE) by depicting a Dalit boy’s arduous journey to educational rights in a caste-ridden rural setting. Exploring the film’s portrayal of the continuation of caste-based untouchability and the unequal power dynamics among different castes, this critical film review discusses the distinctiveness of the director’s art in attempting to formulate a Dalit cinematic lens with the movie. Additionally, the film demonstrates how the privatization of education becomes a weapon at the hand of the upper castes in debarring the Dalit students from school premises. Finally, it examines how the film’s picturization of manual scavenging instantiates an unprecedented sketch of the Dalit body’s proximity to waste and its concomitant epistemic injustice.
The caste system remains one of the most long-standing discriminatory practices in India, plaguing its democratic fabric since Independence and presently getting enmeshed into the shifting trajectories of globalization. Notwithstanding the advent of a liberal economy and certain constitutional guidelines, caste as a dynamic reality has persisted. The caste system promotes a watertight economic structure in which the upper castes reside at the top of the socio-economic ladder, forcing the Dalit communities to continue their caste-assigned labours like cleaning human excreta, becoming devadasi 1 and disposing of dead animals.
Unlike other caste-related films of recent times, Guthlee Ladoo (2023), directed by Ishrat R. Khan, has moved a step further in the picturization of the lives of manual scavengers in order to unsettle us from our familiar territories of refinement. Despite being a low-budget film, its cinematography makes us realize how the Valmiki community 2 has been forced to live at the lower rung of society because of their traditionally caste-assigned labour of cleaning human excreta. Written by Srinivas Abrol and Ganesh Pandit, the Guthlee Ladoo (Khan, 2023) whips up the callous and nominal implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act or Right to Education Act (RTE), enshrined under Article 21A of the India Constitution, which guarantees free education for all Indian children including children from Dalit communities. Like the violation of other constitutional guidelines that promise to protect the fundamental rights of Dalits, the RTE has fallen short in removing the caste prejudice from the psyche of upper-caste students as well as teachers. The incidents of caste violence inside the school room are some of the routine occurrences in India, ranging from practising untouchability inside the classroom to the brutalization of Dalit students. Furthermore, the generational economic backwardness of Dalits makes it difficult for their children to compete with upper-caste children who are relatively better off with generational wealth and cultural capital. Thus, despite having reserved quotas or seats, a huge chunk of Dalit students are compelled to drop out after elementary education every year (Chowdhury & Keane, 2021).
The film Guthlee Ladoo (Khan, 2023) lays bare these socio-economic problems with its depiction of the arduous journey to educational rights of Guthlee, a young boy from the Valmiki community who resides with his family in a typical Indian village. Portrayed by Dhanay Sheth, Guthlee (meaning kernel or seed), with his friend Ladoo (named after an Indian sweet), plays around the dilapidated structure of a long-abandoned public school, yearning to gain admittance into a private school to learn new things about the universe. Bound by caste-based generational occupation, their fathers continue the perilous and dehumanizing labour of manual scavenging, cleaning sewage and septic tanks to earn a livelihood. On the one hand, Guthlee is a quick learner and often outshines the children belonging to the privileged class, on the other hand, Ladoo accepts his caste-assigned fate and complies with his father’s demand to help in the manual scavenging. When Guthlee repeatedly implores his mother, Rania, to send him to the private school of the village, the cynical mother nonchalantly says, ‘You ought to have been born into a superior caste and not in my womb if you wished to pursue education’. The statement underscores her hopelessness regarding any change in society.
This private school of the village has socio-political imports, as Chaube, the owner of the school, is a staunch Brahman who also oversees a village temple. He does not allow Dalit students to enter his school because doing so will essentially enrage other upper castes and jeopardize his profitable position of looking after a Hindu temple. With his childish ignorance about caste-based demarcation in society, Guthlee, along with his friend Ladoo, often sneaks into Chaube’s school premises only to acquire new knowledge by standing outside the classroom and looking in through the window. When Mangru, Guthlee’s father, meets an empathetic officer from his own caste and realizes the liberating power of education, he becomes determined to fight for Guthlee’s dream of admission into Chaube’s private school. Instilled with a new hope for a better future for his child, Mangru implores Chaube to offer admission to Guthlee in his school. But Chaube not only refuses to help him in this regard but blatantly hurls casteist slurs to drive him away from his house.
The narrative structure of the film can be dissected into two halves. The first part of the film displays the ubiquitous caste discrimination in a typical rural setting where we can see Dalits living on the outskirts of the village, and Guthlee, together with his parents, dreams of admission to Chaube’s school. The latter part delineates Dalits, having cognized of their constitutional rights, starting to challenge the Brahminical hegemony of the monopolization of education. The story moves at a slow pace until the headmaster, played by Sanjay Mishra, becomes sympathetic towards Guthlee and his parents’ unrelenting struggle for his educational rights amidst vicious politics played by Chaube and hatches a plan to give admission to Guthlee in the school by playing with Chaube’s ego.
Persistence of Caste
Despite diverse politico-juridical efforts to annihilate caste, its persistence in modern times evinces how Dalits have been looked on only as vote banks by political leaders. In fact, the recent trajectory of caste suggests a steep rise in caste-based violence against Dalits. The film Guthlee Ladoo questions this persistence of caste inside school premises, illustrating how Dalits have been denied constitutional rights owing to their ostracized status. The film foregrounds how the contractual recruitment of sewage cleaners by the local municipality does not mitigate their plight but constitutes a form of caste-based contractualism where the casteism conflates with the callous nature of the municipality officials, making manual scavengers the dehumanized subjects of an informal economy. The inadequate earnings from this contract-based job force Mangru and Budhiya to look for scattered jobs of cleaning the septic tank of upper-caste houses. The film offers an authentic dramatization of a household septic tank cleaning by Mangru and Budhiya, when both clean the filth with their bare hands. The scene is suggestive as it shows the upper castes have built the septic tank quite close to the Tulsi Mancha (basil plant stand), a place deemed to be holy, and they need to hire sewage workers to perform the most nauseating work of their house. Additionally, it foregrounds the dubious nature of the upper-caste woman of the house who chides Mangru for polluting their ramshackle cycle with his Dalit touch but gleefully accepts the share of Mangru’s wages as a custom.
In India, under the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, it is illegal and chargeable to hurl casteist slurs at Dalits, making not only physical violence an offensive act but also verbal abuse equally culpable. However, in the film, we can see that Guthlee and Mangru have frequently been abused as Bhangi [a derogatory casteist term used for manual scavengers], and the abusers enjoy impunity in the casteist village. The frequency with which the word Bhangi has been used in the film made the Gujarat High Court to issue a notice regarding the hurtful imports of the term for the Valmiki community, ordering the ‘removal of casteist slur from the film’ (‘Gujarat High Court’, 2023). However, the repeated utterance of the word can be seen as a part of the director’s artistic techniques that tried to capture the cultural realities with an authentic usage of rural language. The film portrays the headmaster as a sympathetic teacher who goes against the caste principles; he constantly prefers to use the Gandhian term Harijan [children of God] to address Dalits instead of the derogatory word Bhangi. The film, however, fails to scrutinize the semantic problems associated with the word Harijan. Notably, many Dalit scholars, including B. R. Ambedkar, objected to using this word, as it obscures the ground realities faced by manual scavengers and becomes a tool for Hindu consolidation.
The film Guthlee Ladoo (Khan, 2023) probes into the intentional underrepresentation of Dalit students in Chaube’s school. When he gets an inkling about the looming inspection of the school by higher authorities, Chaube cunningly decides to change the surnames of upper-caste students into Dalit surnames with an aim to hoodwink the inspection committee. Reservation remains the only antithetical institution to the Brahminical hegemony, espousing affirmative action or special provision for the advancement of marginalized communities. However, with the privatization of education, public schools face a drastic decline in the enrolment of students as middle-class parents prefer private schools with better facilities. The dwindling of students has compelled the states to shut down public schools. Even though the RTE applies to unaided private schools, the exorbitant fee structure makes it difficult for the economically backward class to gain admission to these schools (Saraswati, 2020). In the film, it is precisely the privatization of education that gives licence to Chaube to preach and practice his caste ideology inside the school premises. Apart from Chaube’s flouting of the reservation guidelines, Mangru’s financial constraint remains one of the major obstacles in his fight for Guthlee’s education.
Epistemic Injustice of Caste
Coined by Miranda Fricker (2007), epistemic injustice refers to different tactics employed by the privileged class to silence the voices of marginalized sections as a result of unequal power dynamics. Issues such as one’s voice being misheard and one’s attempt at meaning-making being nullified through misrepresentation come under the spectrum of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). Apart from producing socio-economic disparity, caste functions as a form of epistemic injustice where the voices of Dalits have been pushed to inaudible terrains, and they have been denied access to knowledge through the Brahminic monopolization of education. Similarly, the Swach Bharat Abhiyan or Clean India Mission initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invisibilized the omnipresence of sanitation workers in every public and private sector by rendering the party politics a sort of hyper-visibility.
In the present scenario, media systems, alongside schools and other socio-cultural spaces, have been used as propaganda machines to espouse dominant ideology. With its ability to manipulate and distort meaning-making, movies remain a powerful tool in cloaking the social hierarchy. It functions as an institutionalized system, which is pivotal in filtering the discourses of different sects and, therefore, facilitates the invisibilization of the disposable population. While the Indian mainstream cinema has stereotyped Dalits as helpless downtrodden who are in dire need of an upper-caste saviour, Guthlee Ladoo (Khan, 2023) breaks this tradition by the narrativization of the lives of manual scavengers and its unambiguous criticism of rural casteism. Guthlee’s presence has an effect of disgust and repugnance on upper-caste school functionaries. According to Sundar Sarukkai (2009), this disgust stems from manual scavengers’ proximity to dirt and waste, providing the upper castes with epistemic tools in the form of ancient Hindu texts to practice untouchability and delimit the resources to Dalits.
A powerful scene depicts Guthlee, fed up with constant machination from Chaube, going to clean the clogged latrine of the school. The disturbing scene shows Guthlee walking in tattered clothes with a broom and a plastic bag in his hand while the school students, dressed up in bright uniforms, rejoice in the school playground. It highlights how the experiences of Dalit students are distinct from middle-class students. Chaube’s blatant disregard for reservation rule adds to this epistemic injustice of caste, where he can silence and mispresent the Dalit children’s educational rights because caste epistemology has demarcated these children untouchable for their ancestral profession of cleansing waste.
Conclusion
The director employs a wealth of symbolism in the film to relay his message to the audience. In the film’s title, the name Guthlee refers to the young boy’s tremendous potential to become successful in the future. On the other hand, Ladoo, who dies after falling inside a gutter, symbolizes the premature death of numerous children who succumb to the hazardous conditions of sewage cleaning. From being verbally and physically abused by upper castes to displaying tremendous zeal for Guthlee’s educational rights, Mangru’s character evokes hardship, perseverance and a fighting spirit. In the film’s climax, the headmaster, having been impressed with Guthlee’s persistence in his odyssey for education, decides to manipulate the situation where Guthlee can overcome Chaube’s gatekeeping if he wins a sprint competition. But competition becomes biased when Guthlee is given oversized shoes and pushed a few steps back from the starting line. The cinematic drone view of Guthlee starting the race a few steps behind other middle-class students mirrors the socio-economic impediments faced by Dalit students in the real-life race for social advancement. Thus, the film remains a scathing critique of rural casteism and the lacuna of constitutional guidelines, ushering in a message for social change.
Besides, the director’s use of cinematic language in Guthlee Ladoo is deeply rooted in realism, with the shots, camera angles, sound effects and mise-en-scene of the film made to portray an unromanticized picture of rural India. It is important to note that the director employs different kinds of shots—like wide shots, close-up shots and tracking shots—to galvanize the emotions of the audience. While wide shots of the rural landscape evince the spatial discrimination that relegates the Dalit communities to the village’s periphery, the close-up shots of Guthlee and other characters’ faces convey the emotional intensity during poignant moments. For example, when Guthlee looks longingly at privileged class children inside the school, his face is framed tightly and the school in the background is blurred to highlight the distance between his dream and reality. Similarly, the film contains a couple of beautiful tracking shots that follow Guthlee from behind, his small figure sneaking through the imposing gates of the school, symbolizing his unyielding determination to overcome the caste barriers. Interestingly, the director utilizes two kinds of camera angles to effectively portray the power imbalance within a casteist society. High-angle shots are used to make Guthlee appear diminutive and insignificant before social institutions like the school. Conversely, low-angle shots are reserved for Chaube to visually amplify his powerful position. Furthermore, the sound design skilfully complements the visual language to enhance the film’s impact. While the natural ambient sounds of the village—rustling leaves, distant animal calls and chirping crickets—enrich the authenticity of the film, the strategic use of silences adds to the emotional tensions, particularly when Guthlee faces blatant discrimination or personal challenges. Likewise, the everyday diegetic sounds, like the village chatter, school bell and chattering students, often coming from places Guthlee is not allowed, serve to emphasize the social hierarchy of the village. Lastly, the director masterfully employs mise-en-scene to amplify the representation of the socio-economic disparities in rural India. Props, such as objects associated with manual scavenging, underscores the director’s intention to portray the working conditions of sanitation workers, while the worn-out clothes of Guthlee contrast sharply with the neat and clean dress of school children, emphasizing the impoverished condition of Dalit communities. Similarly, the natural lighting enhances the realism of the film, whereas the usage of dim and shadow lighting underlines moments of despair.
With its larger part being controlled by upper-caste Brahmins, the Indian film industry has espoused their ritualistic beliefs and customs. Besides, the decades-long portrayal of Brahmins as central figures in Indian films has mobilized the desires of audiences who hardly enjoy movies that question the caste system and its concomitant caste-based violence. As a result of this, no Indian film with criticism of the caste system in its content has achieved any significant box-office success. Though Guthlee Ladoo (Khan, 2023) received scant commercial success, it can be seen as a product of the rising Dalit perspectives in cinema that challenge the Brahminic monopoly. In the film, Khan reinvigorates the notions of Periyar and Ambedkar in his assertion of education as a liberatory tool for the advancement of the depressed class. Therefore, it can be argued that Khan’s Dalit cinematic lens has the potential to become a theoretical entrée into communication and media studies.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.