Jai Bhim Comrade
India
•
2h 48m
Directed by Anand Patwardhan • Documentary • 2012 • 168 minutes
For thousands of years India’s Dalits were abhorred as “untouchables,” denied education and treated as bonded labour. By 1923 Bhimrao Ambedkar broke the taboo, won doctorates abroad and fought for the emancipation of his people. He drafted India’s Constitution, led his followers to discard Hinduism for Buddhism. His legend still spreads through poetry and song. In 1997 a statue of Dr. Ambedkar in a Dalit colony in Mumbai was desecrated with footwear. As angry residents gathered, police opened fire killing 10. Vilas Ghogre, a leftist poet, hung himself in protest. Jai Bhim Comrade shot over 14 years, follows the poetry and music of people like Vilas and marks a subaltern tradition of reason that, from the days of the Buddha, has fought superstition and religious bigotry.
Up Next in India
-
Meru
Directed by Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi • Documentary • With Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, Renan Ozturk, Jon Krakauer • 2015 • 90 minutes
In the high-stakes pursuit of big-wall climbing, the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru may be the ultimate prize. Sitting 21,000 feet above the sacred Ganges Ri...
-
A Narmada Diary
Directed by Anand Patwardhan, Simantini Dhuru • Documentary • 1995 • 57 minutes
The Sardar Sarover Dam in western India, lynch-pin of a mammoth development project on the river Narmada’s banks, has been criticized as uneconomical and unjust. It will benefit urban India at a cost borne by the rur...
-
Occupation Mill Worker
Directed by Anand Patwardhan • Documentary • 1996 • 22 minutes
Textile mills were once the backbone of Bombay’s economy and provided the city its working class culture. Today, foreign investment and rising real-estate prices have made selling mill lands more profitable than running mills. Mill ‘...
