Empowering Voices at the Margins: A Thematic Analysis of Caste, Gender and Democratic Accountability in Writing With Fire (2021)

Writing With Fire (2021) is a historic documentary in Indian non-fiction, which records the rise of the Dalit women journalists, confront caste hierarchies, the patriarchal system and political intimidation using grass-root digital journalism. This paper presents a qualitative film review based on Braun and Clarke (2006) thematic analysis to the documentary, thus developing socio-political realities of caste discrimination, gendered marginality, governmental failures and a media-influenced democratic action. The representation of the film in the Social Justice Media Framework the media activity of Khabar Lahariya collective, which reveals the inequalities in the institutions and also serves as the tool of community empowerment and democratic accountability. The sources of information in this research study are documentary scenes, interviews, narrative sequences, visual metaphors and secondary sources about caste, digital media and political communication. Results indicate that there are structural inequality, grassroots resistance and digital transformation themes and political participation that appear across the board, proving that the journalism of Dalit women challenges the status quo and redefines the public arena.