| Summary: | This article intends to analyze the intermingled relationship between caste and gender and its intertwining impact in the case of the subjugation of the Dalit women’s section in India. Reema Kagti’s Dahaad (2023) is a web series that depicts how caste, as a societal marker, class, as an economic marker, and gender positioning make the Dalit women doubly oppressed compared to their Dalit male counterparts. Interestingly, for a prolonged time, the Hindi film industry’s approach to Dalit women’s representation has been relegated to the periphery, and most of the time, their representation sticks to a stereotypical style in which they are portrayed as poor, mute, hapless victims with no sense of agency or assertion of their own. This is the point from which Dahaad shifts substantially. From being unassertive, silent victims, the characters on screen now adopt an assertive stance to defend their community and assert their identity. Centering the discussion on Dahaad, this article explores the suffering of Dalit women, who are often targeted on the pretext of their caste-gender intersectional identity, and how contemporary filmmakers challenge the established trajectory of representation associated with Dalit women characters that perpetuates subjugation, discrimination, and exclusion. Through close textual analysis of the series, we discuss how the perspectives of Dalit women were sidelined and neglected in Bollywood for a substantial period. This topic needs to be addressed to understand postcolonial cinematic discourses.
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