Visualising Untouchability: Representations of Caste Violence and Social Injustice in Satyajit Ray s Sadgati (1981)

Satyajit Ray’s 1981 film Sadgati is about Dukhi, a Dalit worker who suffers from the abuse of his upper-caste employer. The film is set in North India and is adapted from a short story by Munshi Premchand. Sadgati uses a starkly realistic approach to present the way that the caste system and class oppression impact individuals in India. The focus of this thesis is to investigate how Satyajit Ray uses Sadgati to depict the connections between caste oppression and social classism that are a part of the system of Dalit and/or marginalized people and how caste is a continuing concern for the socio-economic conditions of India, with the hope of raising awareness of this concern for the socio-economic conditions of the country after many decades of social reform following independence from colonialism. In addition, this research intends to analyse how both untouchability and caste repression are portrayed in Sadgati and to compare this to a larger idea of Indian social realism and Dalit studies. A qualitative methodology was employed in this research through a detailed textual and visual analysis of the film Sadgati, along with historical context and previous scholarly literature on caste, society, reform, and cinematic realism. The integration of sociological and film theory perspectives in the study of Sadgati demonstrates that the film Sadgati not only represents systemic inequality but also critiques the social complicity of the caste system that creates and sustains imbalances. This study will illustrate how the film fulfills an ethical obligation by calling attention to systemic injustice and how Satyajit Ray engaged in socially aware storytelling by using the medium of cinema to raise public consciousness about the need for reform

Keywords:
Salvation, Satyajit Ray, caste system, untouchability, subaltern studies, Marxism, Indian cinema