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JPS 16.2 294
through the voice of Lal Dil, but also supported by Bilga. Yet the shrine culture
demonstrates a site of creative appropriation and resistance without articulating it
in that way. At a more subtle level, the centrality of caste even punctuates the
analysis given in terms of social justice. The struggle that Lal Singh has with the
naxalbari movement and the left, though not explicated in the film, is certainly
present. The endemic nature of caste stratification is illustrated in the contrasting
ways in which Bilga and Dil talk about Chamars. Bilga stands as a Marxist when
he is critical of the Indian state or the way that the left get marginilised in certain
sections of the film, Yet, when it comes to talking of Dalits, he centres himself as
the mainstream and them as the „other‟. This is not an unsympathetic position but
is in marked contrast to Dil, speaking as a Chamar. An unnecessary debate about
those who face oppression and those who fight against it from a position of caste
advantage is not made in the film, nor is that my intention now. Rather, it is to
highlight the existence of this tussle within the left that partly made Dil turn
towards Islam as a way of dealing with caste oppression. But even this
conversion did not lead him away from his caste identity as, at the time of his
death, he was not buried but cremated in the Dalit cremation grounds of his
village.
In opening this review as an obituary, it is important to end it with the
optimism that pervades the film in the face of increasingly rigid religious
boundary marking in the subcontinent. In the world of Dalit spirituality and
shrines, the opposition and resistance that Lal Singh Dil bemoans as lacking in
other social spheres, such as the economic and political, seems alive and well.
Paying no heed to the requirements of formal religious markers, the sites the film
explores are such that all who wish to come and pray are welcome, in whatever
form. In the face of changing structures of caste inequality in contemporary
Punjab, and the emergence of a proud Dalit/Chamar identity, Kitte Mille Ve
Mahi provides the cultural background and a clue to the resources mobilized in
this new found self-assertion.
Virinder S. Kalra
University of Manchester