Author Yogesh Maitreya Speaks Out On Cinema and Identity

Yogesh Maitreya is a writer, poet, translator and publisher. He is the founder and editor of Panther’s Paw Publications, which is dedicated to publishing literature by Dalit-Bahujan writers (in English and as translations from other Indian languages). He is the author of Flowers on the Grave of Caste (2019), a collection of short stories; Singing Thinking Anti-Caste (2021), a book of essays on music and memories; and Ambedkar 2021, a book of prose poetry.

Following is an excerpt from Yogesh Maitreya’s Cinema: Dignity, Identity and Beautiful (2025), published by Panther’s Paw Publications, a collection of essays and interviews conducted by Maitreya on Dalit cinema. In the essays, Maitreya deploys an anti-caste perspective on Dalit movies, from Fandry (2013) to Pariyerum Perumal (2018) to Kaala (2018) to Jhund (2022). This excerpt is from a conversation between Maitreya and James Michael. Michael, an independent cinema researcher based in Mumbai, is responding to Maitreya’s question on whether OTT platforms are changing the game.

K Sivathamby, in the context of Tamil cinema, had argued that the cinema hall was the first performance centre in which all Tamils sat under the same roof, in a sense dissolving the barriers created by caste through the purchasing power of capitalism. By the early 20th century, the lower castes, in relatively larger numbers, had had a taste of “wage labour” and were getting paid in that abstract, modern “equaliser” called money. DMK also used this new “public common” for propaganda purposes. But as you yourself have mentioned, due to the increasing cartelisation of cinematic venues by theatre chains, the “commons” character of cinema has been fast disappearing, allowing for only certain people with higher purchasing power to visit these venues, making theatres increasingly representative of savarna values.

I believe OTTs such as Netflix have inflicted a body blow to these cartelisation tendencies. Also, as opposed to the erstwhile angry young men of Indian cinema, who were never even Yadavs, as Kuffir [Nalgundwar] has argued, we can see that OTT series are choc-a-bloc with Yadav and other such Bahujan characters. Consider, for instance, Kusum Yadav of Sacred Games, Jatil Yadav of Raat Akeli Hai, Sunny Mondal of Jamtara, Radha Yadav and Kajal Yadav of Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare or Ayyan Mani of Serious Men, who is a Tamil Dalit and assertive Ambedkarite living in Mumbai. Similarly, Kajal Yadav also at some point asserts her backward caste identity in Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, which we don’t get to often see in a Bollywood movie.

In this context, I argue that untethered of cartelisation and star power, OTT plots are free to explore the other side of India, which lends itself to the “Noir” character of many of these series and movies. Noir crime thrillers elevate ordinary objects by imbuing them with symbolic values—no object is outside the purview of a crime series. A kerchief or a leaflet promoting computer classes could prove to be crucial pieces of evidence in Noir thrillers that often end in cliffhangers to ensure audience stickiness.

In addition, due to historical reasons, the genre’s provenance in Hollywood and its subsequent internationalisation across Europe, Noir lends itself to localisation, vernacularisation and globalisation at the same time. If in the middle-class movies of the 1970s, Bengalis and other language participants were hard pressed to speak Hindi in the movies that they produced (think of Basu Chatterjee or Hrishikesh Mukherjee), in Sacred Games, we can finally get to hear the characters speaking in Marathi, the local language of Mumbai. It should be noted that the series also got released in 191 countries at the same time!

Your reference to theatres as “commons” also has another dimension to it. The cinema hall, in a sense, exemplifies one of the fundamental characteristics of liberal democracy, namely the tension between communitarian and individual ethos. We get to watch a movie together, but the darkness that enshrouds us ensures that each spectator is on his own. This could, in a sense, be mapped onto individual and communal, or communitarian, rights as well. State intervention is necessary to ensure that welfare is distributed according to the principles of liberal democracy, i.e., ensure inalienable rights such as roti, kapda aur makan (bread, cloth, and house) and of course equitable access to public commons such as cinema halls (right to equality), while the intervention should be circumscribed to make sure that individual liberal rights, including to free speech (inalienable), ability to amass money (free market) etc., are also protected (right to liberty). The balance between these two values is always tenuous, and when communal rights are sacrificed in the name of individual rights, the powerful always tend to win. This has resulted in theatres losing their public “commons” character overtime.

It should be remembered that in relation to the earliest movie screenings, we had governments issuing anxious circulars around potential risks associated with the spread of contagions, which in retrospect offer interesting parallels to the current anxieties around the COVID-19 pandemic. You may remember that when Vigathakumaran (1928) was released in Thiruvananthapuram, Rosy, the Dalit female lead of the movie, was denied entry to the movie theatre where the movie was released. The so-called common space inside a movie theatre has continued to remain a festering wound, always temporarily sutured by the promise of a covenant, which goes by the name of the Constitution.

In 1991, eight Dalits were massacred by upper caste Reddys in Tsunduru, Andhra Pradesh. The seeds of the grotesque violence were sown when a young Dalit graduate’s foot allegedly touched a Reddy woman in a movie theatre. In 2014, the Andhra Pradesh High Court acquitted all the accused in the case. Probably these are among the reasons why the government wants us to know that, even if it would indefinitely hold off the other important fundamental rights of its ‘citizens’, when it comes to nationalism it sees no caste or class and wouldn’t mind distributing it in disproportionate abundance.

In 2014, Salman Mohammed, a philosophy student from Kerala was arrested for not standing up when the National Anthem was being played in a state-owned movie theatre in Thiruvananthapuram and was charged with sedition. It should also be remembered that it was a small film society from Kerala that had moved the apex court against the 2016 ruling that made playing the National Anthem mandatory in cinema theatres. As a result of this, the National Anthem is no longer obligatory in theatres.

All’s not gloom and doom though. Technology is getting cheaper by the day and more accessible to most of the people in the country thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and cheap data programs—OTT services are going to stay and we should use this opportunity to further democratise cinematic practices in our country. I do not, for a moment, think OTT in itself is inherently democratic, but we have a foothold there now and should make sure that our presence counts and matters.

This excerpt has been carried with permission from the author and Panther’s Paw Publications.

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