International Journal of Social Science Research (IJSSR)

Caste on Screen: Analysis of Dalit Women’s Representation in Hindi Cinema (2021–2025)

This paper will involve a close textual and critical analysis of the presentation of the Dalit women protagonists in six Hindi films released between 2021 and 2025: Homebound, Kathal: A Jackfruit Mystery (2023), Vedaa (2024), Madam Chief Minister, 200 Halla Ho, and Phule. Based on the framework of Brahmanical patriarchy, the study explores how contemporary Hindi cinema has swerved - and where it continues to fail - in its portrayal of the Dalit women as agents of resistance, as political subjects and as protagonists with inner lives. The paper traces a historically significant, but structurally incomplete, transition: decades of victimhood, silence, and symbolic containment to more complex, agentive representations. The paper also locates recent films within a longer history of the cinematic representation of Dalit women, both in the lineage of the much-vaunted reformist savarna gaze, of Achhut Kanya (1936) and Sujata (1959) and in the controversial history of the so-called bandit queen, of Bandit Queen (1994) and Bandit Queen (2000). The study concludes that a significant representational breakthrough has been made by post-2021 Hindi cinema through purposeful formal and narrative decisions, but that these decisions remain limited by narrative resolutions that undercut structural critique, the lack of Dalit women in authorial roles and the commercial pressures of the OTT economy.