Origin: this outstanding portrayal of India’s caste system is hugely important to Dalit people like me

By Neeraj Bunkar, Nottingham Trent University

Origin, the latest film from acclaimed director Ava DuVernay (Selma, When They See Us), depicts marginalisation as a thread that connects race, class, caste and gender. It is inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

In the film, Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) sets out on a global journey to explore the concept of “caste” as she writes her book and grapples with personal loss. She visits three countries as part of her research.

First, she explores the elements that give rise to discrimination in her home country, America. Next she goes to Germany, where she connects the racial segregation of people during the Nazi era to America. Finally, she travels to India, where she connects the plight of Dalit people in a caste-based, divided society to that of black people in America and Jewish people in Germany. What she creates is a book that fundamentally exposes the insidious and global nature of caste systems.

Caste is a system of classifying society in a hierarchical order in which some people are kept inferior and others superior. In India, Dalit people have been placed at the lowest rung on this social ladder, in America, black people and in Germany, Jewish people.

It’s the way DuVernay weaves these stories together that makes the film so outstanding. In doing so, she highlights how inhuman, unethical and unjust discriminatory practices happen irrespective of geographical location, local cultures and social norms.

Dalit stories in Hollywood

I come from a Dalit background and I research Dalit representation in film. So I know first hand Origin’s importance to people like me.

In the film, Wilkerson visits the Dr Ambedkar National Memorial in Delhi to learn about the lawyer and social activist’s life and work. This is the first time that Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s fight for the rights of India’s Dalits and other deprived classes has been portrayed in a Hollywood film.

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