Dhadak 2 has sparked a conversation in popular discourse and culture, especially in Bollywood, about caste discrimination, representation, agency, and having a protagonist from a lowered-caste background. But while attempting an adaptation of a searing Tamil film such as Pariyerum Perumal by Mari Selvaraj, I fear Dhadak 2 may set a precedent for how Bahujans are seen — and that truly would not be a good thing.
Directed by Shazia Iqbal, Dhadak 2 tells the story of a romance between Vidhi, a dominant-caste woman, and Nilesh, a Dalit man.
Dhadak 2 has got some things right. One strong point is Nilesh’s mother, a strong character played stunningly well by Anubha Fatehpuria, and their teacher, played by Manjari Pupala. Another is the normalisation of casteist behaviour by Vidhi’s sister and aunt, which offers a realistic representation of a casteist ideology.
Yet I had to watch the film twice to be sure I had fully understood the world it was building and what it was trying to say.
Take, for example, where Nilesh lives. The slum design and colours are clearly a derivative of Nagraj Manjule’s Jhund milieu. Even Nilesh's friends seem lifted straight out of that world.
Remember when Nilesh is invited to Vidhi’s sister’s wedding? He has no suitable clothes, and his friends bring him the tackiest ones. I was transported to Jhund. In that film, led by the legendary Amitabh Bachchan as coach and guide, the Gaddi Godam team of slum kids played football for the first time against a convent school team. They turned up in their best — bright clothes, dyed hair, and goggles — tacky to the privileged gaze. But it worked because the film never lost sight of the context of their lives and struggles.
In Dhadak 2, Nilesh chooses the superstar Shah Rukh Khan style instead. Dressed in his best, he reaches Vidhi’s sister’s wedding and dances with her to Bawaria, in front of her family. The power dynamics are obvious — again, a derivative of Manjule’s legendary ‘Zingaat’ from Sairat. Unfortunately, the film often feels like a work of creative scavenging.
Dhadak 2’s Shekhar (Priyank Tiwari) is based on Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar at Hyderabad Central University (HCU), whose institutional murder in 2016 sparked nationwide protests.
All Shekhar does is protest, wear a blue dupatta, sign petitions, and write revolutionary poetry sitting behind the college auditorium. He never attends any classes. Then his fellowship is withdrawn, apparently because of his protests. He is shown pleading with the Muslim principal, played effortlessly by Zakir Hussain. Someone ridicules his protests by throwing loose change at him.
The principal in Dhadak 2 is from the Julaha weaving community. His characterisation mirrors the principal in Pariyerum Perumal, the son of a shoemaker. Both characters inspire Pariyan and Nilesh, respectively, to focus on education as a means of escaping structural caste violence.
This is a real lived experience for Dalits. Education is the tool that gives them power and respect. But a Muslim person’s lived experience differs from that of a Dalit person. In the hierarchy of caste and power, Dalits are penalised in almost every aspect of life. Unlike Pasmanda Muslims, other Muslim communities often have education, power, money, land, or all of them.
In Pariyerum Perumal, when a professor asks the principal why he’s trying to inspire Pariyan, the principal retorts that it is better for Pariyan to fight than take his own life. Mari clearly addresses the structural nature of institutional casteism.
In contrast, Dhadak 2’s Shekhar is Rohith Vemula as imagined through the dominant-caste gaze.
Akash Kumar, a member of the Ambedkar Student Association (ASA) at HCU said, “While we were pleasantly surprised to see Rohith’s story narrated in a mainstream movie — and many of us were moved by that — Shekhar’s narrative completely strips away the defining context of Rohith's murder. If the film hadn’t replicated the setting of Rohith’s death, we would not have recognised the reference at all.”
Adding that Rohith's death resonated with people across the nation, Akash said ASA cannot control how Rohith's story is told by others. “However, it made us uneasy to see Shekhar turned into a helpless and apologetic victim towards the end.”
He also pointed out, “Rohith was assertive throughout his ordeal and fought for himself until the very end. Dhadak 2 minimised the role of the institution in his death. Certain narrative and visual choices made his death appear to be the result of individual failure.”
Rohith’s institutional murder traumatised an entire generation. Dalit students continue to be systematically harassed and murdered. It hurts that director Shazia Iqbal and Rahul Badwelkar wrote a script that ignores the social boycott Rohith faced from the HCU administration, who favoured Hindu fundamentalists.
Both the writer and director didn’t mention a line about the Rohith Vemula Bill, which is a fundamental issue.
I explored an alternative narrative to Rohith’s story in my film Dr BR Ambedkar: Now & Then. The film explores the ‘who, what, when, where, why, and how’ of the social boycott. To know his full story, I interviewed Rohith’s family, professors, friends, and ASA members. My film set an oppositional Bahujan narrative based on the non-Brahmanical and Ambedkarite ideology that Rohith fought for.
Dhadak 2 upturns Rohith’s story to make it more palatable and marketable.
Dharma Productions, which bankrolled Dhadak 2, has spoken of the importance of authenticity and reflecting contemporary social realities, implying a research-driven approach. But the film cannot qualify as authentic simply by including images of Dr BR Ambedkar, the Buddha, and Jyotirao Phule, sprinkling in ‘Jai Bhim’ slogans, or using the colour blue. These choices feel like box-ticking, with little understanding of our lives or culture.
True understanding comes from lived experience, which gives a story freshness and the raw edge unique to our culture.
As director Sahil Gada said, Dhadak 2 reduces blue to a surface-level visual gimmick. “The makers lack the understanding of the colour and its Ambedkarite history, aesthetics, and politics. If the filmmakers understood lived experience, their cinematic expression would differ.”
While the film places a Dalit man’s suffering at its core, it is hard to ignore that actor Siddhant appears in brownface to indicate Nilesh’s caste location.
Are all dark-skinned actors — including Vijay Sethupathi, Bipasha Basu, Smita Patil, or Naomi Campbell — Dalits?
Pariyerum Perumal ends when the dominant caste heroine Jo’s father (G Marimuthu) is forced to sit down and converse with the film’s eponymous hero. Dhadak 2 replaces this sequence with Vidhi screaming while Nilesh hides behind her. The scene is voyeuristic.
Vidhi has more agency than Jo (Anandhi) and bears a strong resemblance to Fatin (Sana Pathan) from Shazia’s 2019 short film Bebaak. Yet Vidhi remains clueless about caste realities, despite being a law student.
Pariyerum Perumal also underscored the pervasiveness of caste violence. “Early in the film, an unnamed old man (Karate Venkatesan) orchestrates the death of a young Dalit man, making the crime appear accidental. The character is terrifying not only for his silent barbarity, but also because the seemingly random accident is one among an ongoing pattern of caste killings,” said Snehashish Das, a PhD scholar from JNU.
The old man reappears throughout the film, repeatedly masking caste killings as accidents or suicides. The song ‘Naan Yaar’ and news flashes about caste killings further emphasise this.
Dalits are often expected to be appreciative when a dominant-caste protagonist — irrespective of their gender, class, or sexuality — has more power to save us than we have to save ourselves.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Pucchi (2021) portrayed different forms of agency for Priya Sharma (Aditi Rao) and Bharti Mondol (Konkona Sen). The differences reflect their class, caste location, and lived experience. As the director’s assistant, I employed the theory of Bahujan spectatorship and an oppositional Bahujan gaze to ensure authenticity.
Like Dhadak 2, Geeli Pucchi was made under the Dharma Productions banner. But having two people from the Dalit communities in the Direction department gave it the necessary context for understanding caste.
Our pain, culture, iconography, and movements for self-respect and social justice are not meant to be appropriated for casual pickings within a capitalist system.
Shazia gave fierce autonomy to a Muslim woman in Bebaak, but missed the point of what Rohith Vemula stands for. She failed to grasp that caste is structural, not just evil.
Vidhi is given agency, but she is also a victim of patriarchy. At the same time, she suffers from a saviour complex. It remains to be seen if she can inspire real-life dominant caste women.
But do you think it’s saving that we need, or a seat at the table — a table where dialogue can happen and boundaries can be broken?
Dhadak 2 treats caste as a prop rather than a core issue. It mistakes representation for gimmickry. At best, it is the Indian version of a white-saviour movie. It can be called a Brahmanical patriarchal saviour film.
Hollywood films such as The Help (2011), The Blind Side (2009), Hidden Figures (2016), Green Book (2018), Django Unchained (2012), The Last Samurai (2003), and the Avatar franchise (2009–2025) have all been criticised for their white-saviour complexes.
By contrast, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), George C Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), and Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014) and When They See Us (2019) are stories of Black people, made by Black directors. These works not only created great cinema but also embodied love, authenticity, and fraternity.
Full disclosure: I had approached Shazia at some point, but the production of the film was already finished. Soon after, a Dharma executive asked me to view the film during post-production, to consider its gaze and give feedback — without remuneration.
So this is that feedback.
While I fear you may judge and dislike me for it, I still appreciate the courage of Dharma Productions, whose films are some of my most cherished memories, for daring to make this film in such a politically charged time. I am grateful, but I cannot agree with their choices in how the film unfolded.
It is worth recalling that Dhadak, directed by Shashank Khaitan, was a remake of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat. It failed to contextualise caste, instead telling the story through the lens of class. But you heard our criticism.
Dhadak 2 names the beast of caste.
The question remains, why could the Hindi retelling of Pariyerum Perumal not have been made by a director from a Dalit community — someone who could have given us more authentic and diverse cinema?
I will end with a quote from African American playwright August Wilson: “Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will make your angels sing.” I really do hope your angels sing.
Jyoti Nisha is a multi disciplinary professional — an academic, writer, screenwriter, and filmmaker with a focus on cinema, gaze, caste, gender, and media. Her feature length documentary film Dr BR Ambedkar: Now & Then, which she is co-producing with Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Productions, is streaming on Mubi India and the Indian Subcontinent.
Views expressed are the author’s own.