A history of exclusion: Rewatching Jabbar Patel's 'Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar'

The controversy over 'Phule', the recent biopic of Jyotirao and Savitribhai Phule, raises concerns over film censorship in India

When Dr B R Ambedkar arrives in Baroda to take up a job in the administration of the then princely state, he spends an entire day roaming around the city in a tonga, looking for accommodation. Dr Ambedkar was given a scholarship by the Baroda state to pursue higher studies, but it also required him to serve in its administration for 10 years. In Baroda, however, he finds it impossible to get accommodation. Wherever he goes to rent a room, people ask him: “What is your caste?” When he reveals that he is a Mahar, one of the several Dalit castes in Maharashtra, he is promptly turned away. His high education, including a Ph.D from Columbia University, and a government job provide him no special privilege. 

 

Dr Ambedkar described his trouble in finding accommodation in Baroda (now Vadodara) in his autobiographical booklet 'Waiting for a Visa' (1990): “My five years of stay in Europe and America had completely wiped out of my mind any consciousness that I was untouchable and that an untouchable whenever he went in India was a problem to himself and others.” Finding no other accommodation, he eventually takes shelter in a Parsi dharamshala (inn). But after staying there for a few days, he is driven out because he is not a Parsi. At the accounts office, where he works, his colleagues constantly misbehave with him, even refusing to allow him to drink from the common water container. After several days of humiliation, Dr Ambedkar decides to return to Bombay (now Mumbai). 

  These events are dramatised in the 2000 Hindi-English biopic, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Directed by Jabbar Patel, the film stars Mammootty in the lead role, with Sonali Kulkarni as his wife Ramabai Ambedkar and Mohan Gokhale as Mahatma Gandhi. Funded jointly by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and the Government of Maharashtra, the film was aimed to be mounted on a scale as grand as the Richard Attenborough-directed Gandhi (1982). Its budget was nearly Rs 9 crore, a significantly high figure for a non-commercial film in the 1990s. Artist Bhanu Athaiya, who won an Oscar for designing costumes in Gandhi, also headed the costumes department in this film. Another notable crew member was the writer Daya Pawar, one of the original members of the militant anti-caste movement Dalit Panthers. He co-wrote the script. 

The film uses the experience of Dr Ambedkar’s humiliation as a turning point in his character from an erudite individual to a combative mass leader. A little later in the film, when Dr Ambedkar joins Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai as a professor of political economy, he makes it a point to drink water from the container in the faculty restroom. When a casteist colleague protests, Dr Ambedkar tells him: “If you learned professors have a problem with me drinking water, my suggestion is that you should get water from home.” It is a symbolic precursor to the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927, also depicted in the film, during which Dr Ambedkar led a large number of Dalits to drink from the Chavadar lake, in the Raigad district of Maharashtra, defying customs of untouchability.

 

Censorship — official and others

 

Though the film won several national awards, including the Best English Feature Film and Best Actor for Mammootty, it was criticised at the time of its release for its length (more than three hours) and cursory attention to incidents like Dr Ambedkar’s campaign for the Hindu Code Bill in independent India. Political economist Sukhadeo K. Thorat, in a lengthy review of the film for the Economic and Political Weekly, described it as “a lost opportunity”. “The film does not seriously consider his contribution as a labour leader, an influential scholar and above all as a political leader of the Dalits and the poor,” wrote Thorat. More recently, scholar Ananya Vajpeyi described the film, in a 2023 essay, as “partly fictional and partly factual”. 

At the time of the film’s release, while interviewing its director, Patel, writer and filmmaker (late) Pritish Nandy asked him: “Did the censors give you grief over your interpretation of Gandhi and the scenes that showed the conflict between Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar?” Patel responded: “We had to present all our research to the censors. Asha Parekh, who heads the Censor Board, was of great help.... Pages and pages of facts helped me restore every cut that was proposed. Finally, the film was cleared as it is.” Patel claimed to have spent three years researching his film. 

A quarter century later, another film on other Dalit icons, 19th-century social reformers Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule, has been delayed from release by accusations of defaming Brahmins and several cuts demanded by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). Ananth Mahadevan, the director of the film Phule, recently told The Wire that he did not agree with the cuts suggested by the CBFC, though he also made a point to highlight that his film had not targeted any community. The film stars Pratik Gandhi and Patralekha in the titular roles. Initially scheduled to be released on April 11, it will now be released on April 25. This month is celebrated as Dalit History Month, in homage to Dr Ambedkar, who was born on 14 April 1891. 

Film scholar Someshwar Bhowmick, in his landmark book 'Cinema and Censorship: The Politics of Control in India' (2009), shows how film censorship in the country was inherited from the machinery put in place by the British. The primary focus of the British censors was on cinema that challenged the political hegemony of the colonial government. The first Indian film to be censored was the 1921 silent feature 'Bhakta Vidur', directed by Kanjibhai Rathod. Adapted from different episodes of the 'Mahabharata', the film’s central character Vidura (Dwarkadas Sampat), seemed to the colonial censors to be very similar to Gandhi. 

But even after independence, the censorship of films was not relaxed. Bhowmick mentions the First Amendment to the Constitution of 1951 and the 14th Amendment of 1963, which put constraints on freedom of expression through “reasonable restrictions”, providing the legal framework for censorship of films. In her 2011 book, 'Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema', film scholar Monika Mehta identifies representations of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, as another node of film censorship in India. Mehta argues that state control over the representations of the female body was a process of state-making through gender politics.     

Official censorship is not the only mode of film censorship in India. As we see in the case of 'Phule', non-state actors can also often campaign to prevent the release or circulation of films. For instance, the 1996 film 'Fire', directed by Deepa Mehta, which was arguably the first Indian film to celebrate a lesbian relationship, found itself at the centre of a major — and often violent — protest by various Hindu right groups. The protestors argued that homosexuality was an affront to Indian culture. Media scholar Shohini Ghosh shows in her 2011 book, 'Fire: A Queer Film Classic', how the hullaballoo around the film gave a fillip to the queer rights movement in India.        

 

A triple layer

 

There are no studies, to the best of my knowledge, of caste discrimination being censored in Indian cinema. However, scholars have argued that the Indian film industry has been a hegemonic space, excluding Dalit voices and stories. Suraj Yengde, in his 2018 essay ‘Dalit Cinema’, claims: “Cinema, as a cultural product, form of expression and mass entertainment, appears to dutifully genuflect to an Indian Brahminical order.” He argues that in recent years, films by Dalit filmmakers, such as Nagraj Manjule, are creating Dalit cinema as “an act of defiance leading to a sustained cinematic struggle.” Film scholar Vishal Chauhan also points out, in a 2019 essay, how the mockery of Dalits has been central to Indian culture, and cinema is no exception. 

As scholars have shown, exclusion can also be a form of censorship, especially when it is directed towards historically marginalised communities. It can, thus, be argued that Dalit cinema in India faces a triple layer of censorship — first, through (exclusion; second, through the official machinery of film censorship; and finally, through the activism of interest groups.

Dr Ambedkar had also identified the exclusion of Dalits from India’s film industries and the deification of non-Bahujan figures in its products, writes film scholar Mohimarnab Biswas in a 2024 article. The article also mentions the deeply emotional effect that the 1954 Marathi biopic 'Mahatma Phule', directed by Prahlad Keshav Atre, had on Dr Ambedkar. It is not hard to imagine that Dr Ambedkar would have been a passionate defender of any film, including the recent Phule, that empathetically represents the Dalit struggle against discrimination and humiliation. 

(Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist)

 

(Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)