In Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman play Suresh Sinha and Shanti. Yusuf Khan went by Dilip Kumar, for example). In the iconic films of the 1940s and 50s, for example, there are no caste markers-for example, in Andaz (1949), Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Nargis play Dilip, Rajan and Neena, respectively (as an aside, popular heroes of the time also had fairly neutral names. Our films never told you where the hero came from, what kind of a household he grew up in, or which caste he belonged to-none of these things are ever seen," he adds. If you look at early Indian films, it is very rare that caste was even a subject in the film. “Indian cinema came up during this time, so it also reflected the popular feeling. It wasn’t even recognizing that there were backward castes though, internally, the caste system was playing out in society," says filmmaker Shyam Benegal. “What India’s nationalist movement brought to the forefront was that Indians should be seen as Indians. Subsequently, such outings were rare and Bimal Roy’s Sujata (1959) based on a similar premise is a rare caste tale of its time. This turn of events is surprising because as early as 1936, Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani’s Bombay Talkies had produced Achhut Kanya, the love story of a Brahman boy and an untouchable girl, with Rani in the lead.
“They are very conscious of the fact that they have taken on this mantle of being the national cinema of India. “Hindi filmmakers generally shy away from confronting caste," says Uma Vangal, filmmaker and professor at the L.V.
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This is at odds with India’s non-Hindi movie culture, which does churn out heart-breaking and powerful tales centered on caste at least once in a while. But despite that, mainstream Bollywood films have, for the most part, circumvented the question of caste-almost never acknowledging the issue as a daily Indian reality. And that accusation of the audience’s culpability is borne out of the endemic and enduring nature of caste in the country’s social milieu. The director of Article 15, Anubhav Sinha, had previously described the film as “an investigative drama where the audience too is an accused party".
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