Ideology, Cinema, and Institutional Violence in Indian Legal Narratives: Theoretical and Empirical Context

Abstract

Popular Indian cinema increasingly critiques the persistence of caste discrimination within a constitutionally egalitarian republic. Addressing the lack of comparative analyses across regional industries, this paper examines Hindi film Article 15 (2019, directed by Anubhav Sinha) and Tamil film Jai Bhim (2021, directed by T. J. Gnanavel) to interrogate the ideological mechanism of caste-based policing. The objective is to analyse how both films represent the differential treatment of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) victims and accused within the law enforcement machinery. Employing a qualitative close-textual methodology, the study evaluates narrative structure, character arcs, and cinematographic elements like framing, mise-en-scène, sound, and symbolism, anchored in documented incidents of caste violence and secondary scholarship. Theoretically, the paper applies Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism and Louis Althusser’s concepts of Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses (ISA/RSA) and interpellation to unpack how state institutions reproduce caste hierarchy through consent and coercion. Comparative findings reveal that while both films depict police as sites where colonial-era caste prejudice is interpellated into contemporary institutional practice, their narrative resolutions diverge sharply: Article 15 explores an upper-caste saviour navigating his own institutional interpellation, whereas Jai Bhim foregrounds Dalit and Adivasi agency mediated through Ambedkarite legal advocacy. Ultimately, this paper contributes to comparative Indian film studies by demonstrating how Althusserian and cultural-materialist frameworks illuminate the cinematic construction of caste injustice across linguistic contexts, while highlighting the ideological limitations of savarna-authored narratives of Dalit liberation.