If a largely casteist India is able to project itself as discrimination-blind, then much of it has to do with ‘manufacturing consent’. It’s a propaganda model that was the subject and title of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s 1988 book. Throughout India’s political and social history, this act of manufacturing consent has been the default position of the country’s mainstream media—both by choice and design. Choice, because there’s hardly ever been any attempt to disrupt the status quo; design, because control is in the hands of a dominant few.

It’s the reason India’s freedom movement has a Gandhian gaze all over it; it’s why the Hindi film industry’s leading characters are seldom not Hindu ‘upper’ caste; and it is this manufacturing of consent that has reduced caste atrocities against Dalits to an annual counting exercise by the National Crime Records Bureau.

This question forms the basis of writer and filmmaker Jyoti Nisha’s documentary BR Ambedkar: Now and Then (stylised as B.R.A.N.T.), which had its world premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival last month and will be next screened in Bengaluru on 16 December.

“If things went on the way they were supposed to for Ambedkar, I wouldn’t have been telling this story because I would have found my representation,” Nisha says in the film, always looking straight into the camera, at us.

She decided to ‘represent’ herself and tell the story of a population whose cultures have either been appropriated or distorted by the Hindu upper castes, who could only find a ‘victim’ identity for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and the converted minorities.

By applying the five filters—of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flack, and a common enemy—from Chomsky and Herman’s book on the Indian media, Nisha takes a piercing look at the upper caste-dominated structure that decides and determines whether a Bahujan story is being told, and if yes, how.

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Today’s movements resonate with Ambedkar’s 

BR Ambedkar: Now and Then makes it clear that the ‘popular’ story of India is not necessarily the real story of India. At the very least, it’s an incomplete story of India. The stories that are ignored, perhaps even deliberately hidden, are the many Bahujan movements that continue to shape the politics in many parts of the country.

Nisha touches upon several challenges that rarely become mainstream debate—the “insensitive” government attitude toward ‘eradicating’ manual scavenging, the unspoken and unacknowledged continuation of untouchability, and the negligible attempt at curbing crimes against Dalits. We see the scale at which each of these issues affect the depressed classes of the country. But the documentary devotes a considerable part to an issue that could arguably be one of the primary culprits thwarting Dalit emancipation: the “institutional murders” of Bahujan students in India’s premier educational institutes. And the link connecting these “murders” with caste was University of Hyderabad scholar Rohith Vemula.

While delving painstakingly into Vemula’s “caste killing”, Nisha finds a similarity with the 1918 Baroda Parsi Inn attack on Babasaheb—as well as with the fate of Eklavya in the Indian epic Mahabharata.

The other, similar resonances between now and then are found in Ambedkar’s Mahad Satyagraha, Jignesh Mevani’s Dalit Asmita Yatra in Gujarat, and Chandrashekhar Azad’s Bhim Army in Saharanpur. These symbolic connections lead the filmmaker to ask: “Why (has) the popular culture excluded Ambedkar and us?”

The answer, according to Nisha, lies in the fact that the Ati-Shudras and Shudras “largely adopted an anti-Brahminism ideology”. Not only did they lay claim to being the “original inhabitants of India” but they also galvanised into social and political forces—Dalit Panthers, BAMCEF, Bahujan Samaj Party, Bhim Army—that have continued to pursue Ambedkar’s resolve to annihilate caste.

Mevani goes a step further and counters the popular narrative with a straightforward demand: “Gaaye ki poonch aap rakho, hamein hamari zameen do (You keep your cow’s tail; give us our land).”

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Indian feminism has a similar problem

The central idea of Ambedkar: Now and Then remains the question of liberation and the quest for representation. This challenge, however, is greater for Bahujan women because India’s feminist movement also excludes them.

The documentary doesn’t make it hard to locate the source of the problem: Brahminical patriarchy. It refers to the 2017 targeting of law student Raya Sarkar for releasing a crowd-sourced List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA); and the 2018 controversy over then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey getting photographed holding an anti-caste poster that read ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’.

In both instances, caste played a central role. Sarkar faced a barrage of attacks on social media, including by Savarna feminists, who called LoSHA a “witch-hunt”. It wasn’t a surprise then that when the second wave of the #MeToo movement started in India, many Bahujan women “never felt connected” to it because it was led by a Brahmin Dwija woman.

And how does one locate the source of origin of patriarchy in ‘Brahminism’? One of Nisha’s interviewees refers to Austrian-American historian Gerda Lerner’s 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy, explaining that for any country, patriarchy’s origin lies in its “oldest codified or mythological text”. In India’s case, that text is Manusmriti.

But the fight against ‘Brahminical patriarchy’ in India is one of a missed journey, given what Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bill sought to achieve in the 1950s itself. “We would have covered 50 years of journey by now…and we would have built further from there,” she tells the filmmaker. Even here, Ambedkar’s contributions remain unacknowledged. “The rights of women for equal pay, to work, maternity leaves—all that has been fought and established by one person. (But) when we debate on these issues, Babasaheb is not talked about. They think these ideas emerge to them from thin air.”

Beyond covering Bahujan movements and struggles, BR Ambedkar: Now and Then serves as a journey of the filmmaker’s own liberation of sorts. “Today, I know more of my history and my culture. This has been a journey of inculcating a scientific temperament to see truth, be kind and compassionate. This philosophy liberated me as a woman and a thinker,” Nisha says.

Rich in production with great illustrations by Sunil Abhiman Awachar and animation by Harikrishnan Sasindran, the documentary is a compulsory viewing — not least because it shows us “what it means to be an Ambedkarite in a casteist Hindu India”.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)