- HOMEGROWN WORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
“In a fool’s market, stones are currency.”
Spoken by a Dalit activist in the 2011 documentary 'Jai Bhim Comrade', the line upends the altar of religion, the idols we worship, and their hold over India’s social imagination. As he denounces the gods that have sanctioned and sustained caste in India for centuries, many in the crowd get up and leave. And those who stay begin to really question if it's time to abandon the gods.
Filmed over 14 years, Anand Patwardhan’s Jai Bhim Comrade is an epic social and political investigation into the machinery of caste violence, the failure of justice, and the resilience of culture as resistance. It begins with a massacre: on July 11, 1997, when the police opened fire on Dalit protestors in Mumbai’s Ramabai Colony after a statue of Ambedkar was desecrated with a garland of slippers. Ten people were killed in this shooting. And in the days that followed, Vilas Ghogre, a Dalit poet and singer, took his own life, after his chalk-scrawled final words echoed Ambedkar’s dream of unity and rage against injustice.
Through the broken dreams of this poet, that weighed too heavily on him, is how the documentary tells its this story. Pillared by the voices of other poets, singers, street performers, and public intellectuals whose medium of protest is not violence, but music, the revolutionary power of art is central to the film. Vilas, through his songs, spoke directly to the inner lives of the poor. And after his death, a new generation carried his torch — including the cultural troupe Kabir Kala Manch, whose members combined radical poetry and Ambedkarite ideology to awaken people across Maharashtra’s villages.
Another poet in the film notes how sound is the first to reach the mind. In that sense, the song becomes a weapon. And for Dalits, it is often the only one available. Through qawwalis, folk songs, and biting satire, performers take aim at Brahminical authority, Hindu ritual, casteist politicians, and the betrayal of democratic ideals. It is a counterculture built from centuries of exclusion.
Parallelly, Anand's film closely tracks the legal farce that followed the Ramabai firing. The officer responsible was briefly suspended and then reinstated. Though convicted 10 years later, he remained free on bail. The state went out of its way to shelter him: from planting fake evidence to suggest that the protesters set alight an oil tanker to charging witnesses of the massacre with murder 7 years later. Meanwhile, the families of the slain lived on in the same slums, denied both compensation and closure. The film shines a light on how the criminal justice system systematically fails Dalits — not through mere oversight, but by design, and even malice.
The documentary also brings its focus on the ideological fracture within India's political Left. Vilas Ghogre was once expelled from a Marxist group for singing at Dalit party events, exposing the unease between class-based movements and caste-based realities. Anand does not allow any faction a moral escape in this film. He lays bare how even well-meaning ideologies falter when they fail to centre caste, and how the Left’s discomfort with Ambedkarite assertion has historically led to missed alliances.
Over time, in the film, we watch the spark of revolution be slowly co-opted and commodified — used by politicians to secure votes. Ambedkar's image and his words become an electoral strategy, emptied of substance, turning a radical movement into a numbers game. When the group of people responsible for enforcing casteist ideals preach about rights to persuade, voters, it's a painfully ironic erasure and trivialisation of Dalit pain.
The film’s scale is vast, but its lens remains impeccably human: families in mourning, children growing up learning to recite protest songs, survivors recounting trauma in voices that do not crack, and a playful, almost defiantly joyous Dalit spirit in the midst of unspeakable violence. Running through it all is a deeper philosophical current is the juxtaposition between believers and thinkers. The film dissects how caste endures insidiously through the belief of the people who accept hierarchy as divine order, and word of God. Against this, are the thinkers — those who question and dissent. Mostly happen to be from the Dalit communities because only they have borne the brunt of these ‘divine’ truths.
Archival footage, folk songs, and testimonials become the mirror through which 'Jai Bhim Comrade' critiques caste oppression, Dalit resilience, Brahminical bigotry, bourgeois denial, liberal apathy, and Leftist complacency. On one hand, we see case after case of bone-chilling Dalit violence that doesn't slow down with time and never makes it to the police station. On the other, interviews with upper-caste residents dismissing reservations reveal the arrogant forgetting that's built into urban India’s conscience. Together, these parallel realities form a confronting portrait of a nation split in two — one side burning, the other, either setting the fire or blind to it all.
Jai Bhim Comrade beckons an awakening for both the oppressed and the oppressors. There’s something jarring about watching a film that forces you to reckon with the fact that the very religion you were raised to see as pure and spiritual has also been used, so persistently and violently, to dehumanise entire communities. I keep coming back to a line from one of the most condemned folk songs that goes “I was born a Hindu, but I won’t die a Hindu.”
Faith, at its core, is a deeply human impulse — a way to find meaning in uncertainty, solace in suffering, and connection in isolation. But when that same faith becomes a justification for cruelty, and a blindfold for people to be oblivious to that cruelty, it betrays its own purpose. Depending on faith for healing, comfort, or even community is all well and good, but it cannot come at the cost of someone else’s safety and dignity.
Follow Anand Patwardhan here and watch the documentary below:
