Published Online:March 2026
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES030326
DOI:10.71329/IUPJAF/2026.21.1.32-41
Author Name:Girish D Pawar
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:32-41
Nagraj Manjule’s film Fandry (2013) has been widely recognized as a symbolic work in the field of Dalit and Bahujan cinema, specifically due to its critical examination of caste oppression, marginality of children, and resistance modes. While the existing scholarship has productively engaged with the issues of identity, representation, and subaltern assertion in the film, the re-positioning of spectatorship as the problem has received relatively little attention. This paper argues that this film is not simply about marginalization but a representation that challenges the viewer directly and breaks the comfort of sympathetic and distanced viewers. Manjule creates shame as a social and cinematic effect through scenes of collective watching, forced visibility and humiliation in the public. Climactic throwing of stone targets the screen directly and thus turns the viewer into a morally involved subject. Based on the theories of spectatorship, affect and visual ethics, the present paper seeks to show how the film Fandry goes beyond the politics of pity to the politics of address, compelling a re-evaluation of the role of the viewer in perpetuating the structures of exclusion. In so doing, the film redefines resistance not as a narrative material but as a cinematic technique which refuses innocent looking.
The film Fandry (2013) by Nagraj Manjule takes a central spot in what has come to be referred to as New Marathi Cinema, a film canon that began in the post-2000 era and is a stark departure from what was previously known as middle-income realism and theater melodrama.