Caste Makes Waste

I have a friend who pronounces "caste" that rhymes with "waste", so this blog entry would rhyme. Even so, it should rhyme with past, mast, last, etc.

Many Bollywood films would have you think that love marriages are the norm. While they have become more common, arranged marriages are still far more common than not. Bollywood films have an opportunity to tackle some tough topics, but many fans see these films as escapism and aren't prepared, except for the more literate crowd, to see something more politicized.

I was reading the following article about an inter-caste marriage, one between a Rajput and a Dalit. Dalits are the names given to the untouchable caste, still the lowest caste in Indian society. They are meant to handle cleaning of toilers, the handling of the dead, and so forth. They are considered unclean.

Arranged marriages have generally been more about status, according to the article. You marry some person that is appropriate to the family. Lest you think this is completely unheard of in the US, it wasn't so long ago that wealthy families would expect their children to marry other children of wealthy families. You didn't simply marry someone, you marry their family.

So I imagine a Bollywood film that starts off like any other traditional film of boy meets girl. Everything is good, song and dance, but it is eventually revealed, say, that the woman is a Dalit, and then slowly his family becomes horrified and wants nothing to do with her. They try to get someone more caste-friendly, but the son is uninterested, and eventually, despite pleading from the son, they feel that it is necessary to kill her, and there's a stoning scene.

Anyway, it would get pretty intense towards the end, so that the viewer is made to face these issues. Perhaps, with the prodigious Bollywood film output, a movie like this has been made, though I would imagine it would be difficult.

Just a thought.