Human Rights and the Vulnerability of Caste in Recent Indian Films

Recent Indian films depicting atrocities against Dalit women are frequently centered around human rights violations. These films depict struggles to assert rights, set against dehumanizing tales. These films highlight the construction of the Dalit figure, perceived as marginal, demonic, violent, showing the construction to be a vehicle for the justification of their obliteration. The plots of Article 15 (2019), Asuran (2019) , Karnan (2021) , and Jai Bhim (2021) follow this dehumanization-demonization-annihilation pattern to depict crimes against Dalits. In these films, the human rights discourse applies not only as a legal framework but also as a cinematic discourse to convey the depth of caste atrocities. The profilmic texts where human rights are used as cultural discourses to depict atrocities and rights violations are referred to as Human Rights Literature (HRL) by P.K. Nayar (2016) . In this chapter, Navin Sharma and Priyanka Tripathi examine these films with the theme of caste-based atrocities as HRL to demonstrate how these texts employ legal principles of human rights as counter-discourses against hegemonic caste narratives.