sai thakur

Mainstream Indian cinema has rarely depicted the complexities of caste and its associated social problems. With Fandry (2014) and Sairat (2016), Nagraj Manjule brought caste and gender to the centre stage of film-aking.
However, his recent Hindi film Jhund fails to carry forward this legacy and adopts a time-tested Bollywood style—an upper-caste-male-saviour trope.

This article is a response to Jaya Goyal and D P Singh's "Academic Performance of OBC Students in Universities: Findings from Three States" (EPW, 1 February 2014). It challenges the claim that the Other Backward Classes are not under-represented in education and also the attempt to redefi ne representation as understood within the context of reservation policies. The author was also a part of the study on which Goyal and Singh based their article.

Historical events that hold symbolic value are important in constructing an alternative identity for the subaltern. The Brahminical upper caste feels threatened by such assertions of the subaltern and thus, tries to marginalise them. The violence at Bhima Koregaon is a refl ection of this tension between divisive Hindutva nationalism and resilient subaltern politics that seeks justice.