Panchsheel Gaikwad’s Film Shows Us What Caste Steals From Love, Intimacy, & Selfhood

“Growing up, I came to understand that my mother had been estranged from her family,” shares documentary filmmaker and artist Panchsheel Gaikwad, “but these aren’t things you fully understand as a child.” Originally from Pune, now based in London, the filmmaker is speaking about his short film, ‘I Am Mine, and I Am Yours Too,’  in which he searches for a language of love within casteist social structures through conversations with his mother about her intercaste marriage, and a direct address to Dr B. R. Ambedkar, the Indian freedom fighter and caste abolitionist whose ideas continue to resonate across generations. 

In the film, Panchsheel captures how deeply-rooted caste hierarchies are in Indian society through the story of his mother’s family, who stopped speaking to her after she decided to marry his father. “I don’t think I have fully reconciled with it, to be honest,” the filmmaker tells me. “I also don’t want to speak for her, or say whether she holds anger or not. But I do. I am still angry about it. I don’t understand why any family would treat their child in that way.”

The only thing Panchsheel knows is that while he holds this anger, he doesn’t want to simply remain angry. He notes that caste is not just one family’s cruelty, that it’s a system that has existed long before us, long before our parents, and it continues to shape what/who people are allowed to love, choose, become, or imagine for themselves. “So the question for me became: what do I do with this anger? How do I use it? How do I move the conversation forward, even slightly?” he muses. “In that sense, I think anger has become a kind of creative reservoir for me. It informs my work. It makes me think about how these systems rob people of agency, freedom, intimacy and even a sense of self. The film comes from that place.”

For the artist, an archive became central to trying to find those answers — his parents’ letters, old family photos, Babasaheb’s writings, his student file at LSE, and his house in London. He kept asking himself what his responsibility was towards them, and what it meant to engage with them in the context that we live in now. 

Because the film was made in London, Panchsheel also had the audience in mind, and the possibility that many of them may have little or no context for Babasaheb Ambedkar or the caste system itself. For him and his community, however, Babasaheb is not a distant historical figure but someone deeply present in their homes, politics, ideas of dignity and education, and in his family’s life as well. One of the biggest challenges, then, was finding a form that could carry all of that context without turning the film into an explanation. He did not want the film to feel didactic, but instead wanted audiences unfamiliar with caste to encounter its realities through the story of his parents. That eventually led him towards the form of letters as the emotional and narrative language of the film.

Ambedkarite folk music was another strong inspiration, especially the work of Lokshahir Sambhaji Bhagat, whose performances often break away from conventional structure in order to disturb rather than entertain — an idea that stayed with Panchsheel while making the film. Much of it is through personal and reflective moments before suddenly being interrupted by images of attacks on Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statues and reports of inter-caste couples murdered for love. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of “speaking nearby” also informed the writing of the film. Panchsheel did not want to explain caste sociologically or statistically, but instead wanted audiences to encounter it as something lived, inherited, and constantly present. 

However, he was also addressing a serious social evil that has had a long history of violence in our culture and is still egregiously prevalent today. And the filmmaker kept returning to a question the film itself asks: Is it enough only to tell stories? He does not yet have a definitive answer, but for him, the work does not end with making the film. The next step is making sure it reaches different audiences and creates spaces for honest conversation, especially through community screenings and diaspora spaces where people can sit with the work together and speak openly about what it brings up.

The most moving part of the screenings for Panchsheel has been watching audiences from very different backgrounds encounter Babasaheb Ambedkar for the first time. People from the Caribbean diaspora, Black British audiences, English audiences, and others unfamiliar with his work have come up to him after screenings asking, “Who is this revolutionary who has been kept away from us?” The film’s refusal to over-explain caste or Babasaheb himself seems to have opened a door for people to begin researching on their own.

As for Panchsheel, there is a dilemma he grapples with in the film — whether to stay away from home or go back. Moving abroad for education as an Indian student has a lot of emotional and political undertones. We leave in search of a bigger dream and a brighter future, away from our families, but also navigate our identities as they are reflected back to us against a Westernised, often colonial mirror. In the midst of it all, we try to find who we really are, which is something the filmmaker had to go through as well. 

(‘Begumpura,’ meaning ‘the city without sorrow is the visionary utopia imagined by the 15th-century Bhakti poet and social reformer, Sant Ravidas. It represents his concept of an ideal, sorrowless society where every human being lives with dignity, free from the constraints of caste, class, tax, fear, and oppression)

Film, for Panchsheel, has become a means of investigation. “I don’t usually begin with answers. I begin with questions I don’t know how to resolve,” he says.  His love for storytelling came from many places at once: a childhood spent immersed in fantasy and adventure books like the Inkheart trilogy and Percy Jackson, a vivid visual imagination, and even early experiences with YouTube, which made filmmaking feel personality-led, accessible, and part of everyday life. He experimented with videos and podcasts for a while, gradually realising that the work people connected with most was often the most honest and vulnerable. After studying film at Symbiosis International University, he spent around seven years working in advertising and social media content before feeling the need to move towards more personal forms of storytelling.

His work today draws from filmmakers like Suneil Sanzgiri, Milisuthando Bongela, RaMell Ross, Pa. Ranjith, and Mari Selvaraj, alongside writers like Ocean Vuong and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as Babasaheb Ambedkar’s own writing. Even ‘Doctor Who’ remains an important influence for its belief that kinder and better futures can still be imagined in the middle of grief, violence, and fear. “I think of myself as a romantic too, so love is always present in the work. I’m interested in love not only as romance, but as a political and ethical force,” he shares. “With this film, I kept thinking about what caste does to love, what it steals from people, and what forms of love survive despite it.”

Follow Panchsheel here.

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