Guthlee Ladoo: A Testimony of Persistence of Caste and Epistemic Injustice: A Critical Film Review

The Hindi film Guthlee Ladoo strives to address the lacuna in the constitutionally protected Right to Education Act (RTE) by depicting a Dalit boy’s arduous journey to educational rights in a caste-ridden rural setting. Exploring the film’s portrayal of the continuation of caste-based untouchability and the unequal power dynamics among different castes, this critical film review discusses the distinctiveness of the director’s art in attempting to formulate a Dalit cinematic lens with the movie. Additionally, the film demonstrates how the privatization of education becomes a weapon at the hand of the upper castes in debarring the Dalit students from school premises. Finally, it examines how the film’s picturization of manual scavenging instantiates an unprecedented sketch of the Dalit body’s proximity to waste and its concomitant epistemic injustice.