Asian Education on Film, Episode 8

Asian Education on Film, Episode Eight

Aarakshan: India vs. India (Prakash Jha, India, 2011)

India’s immense diversity was given a positive spin (no pun intended) in the cricketing film we looked at last time, Lagaan. But that romantic fantasy only scratched the surface of the explosively controversial issue of caste. Lagaan, as you may remember, features a spin bowler with a crippled arm who is initially shunned by the other villagers because he is a casteless untouchable. Untouchables, or ‘Dalits’, along with so-called ‘Scheduled Tribes’, were granted reserved places in government jobs and higher education institutions soon after Indian independence. This was enshrined in India’s 1950 Constitution, whose main author, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, was himself from a Dalit family.

But the inequities of the caste system affect far more of India’s population than Dalits alone. Patterns of caste hierarchy vary across India’s regions, but the ‘lower’ castes include many millions who sit just above the casteless Dalits. For decades after independence, there were calls for these groups to benefit from the sort of reservations or quotas afforded to Dalits.

Those calls were eventually considered by the Mandal Commission, established by the Janata Party Government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai in 1979. The left-leaning Janata Party had won the elections of 1977, held after the lifting of Mrs Gandhi’s State of Emergency; this was the first time in India’s post-independence history that Congress had lost a national election. In 1980, the Commission delivered its report, recommending a 27% reservation for ‘other backward castes’ (OBCs) in government jobs and higher education institutions. But by that time, the Congress had returned to power, and for ten years nothing was done to implement the report’s recommendations.

The recommendations were finally implemented in 1990 by the government of V.P. Singh, which was a coalition of the Janata Dal, the BJP, the Communist Party and several smaller parties. The principle of reservations in centrally-funded educational institutions was extended in 2006 by a Central Education Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act introduced by the then Congress-led government. This sparked protests amongst upper caste groups, and a legal challenge that went all the way to India’s Supreme Court.

In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld the 2006 Act, although it capped reservations at 50% of total admissions. It also stipulated that the concept of ‘backwardness’ should encompass measures of wealth, not just caste identity. As a result, richer members of OBCs, a so-called ‘creamy layer’, are excluded from reservations.

The expansion of reservations and the Supreme Court’s clarification of the criteria defining ‘backwardness’ have spurred campaigns by various groups for OBC recognition. This in turn has contributed to inter-caste rivalries that have been exploited by politicians. The Hindu nationalist BJP, in power at the centre since 2014, has been quite effective in expanding its appeal especially amongst poorer OBCs who tend to gain less from the reservations policy. These groups are often more receptive to identity-based messaging that blames out-groups for their disadvantage. The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has done some interesting analysis of the BJP’s use of caste rivalries to build its electoral base.

The film Aarakshan gives the Bollywood treatment to the dispute over caste-based reservations in Indian higher education. It stars Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood superstar who also provided the narration for the film Lagaan. Aarakshan is set at the time of the Supreme Court ruling of 2008, and depicts the related social tensions.

Watching the film: I’m unable to find a free-to-stream version of the film with subtitles. However, the film seems to be available on Amazon Prime and Netflix.

Further reading:

Barrington Moore, Jr. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Christophe Jaffrelot. 2021. Modi’s India. Princeton University Press.

Kaur, S., Dutt, M. 2025. ‘Education during the COVID-19 pandemic: Experiences of urban poor children in Chandigarh city’, International Review of Education. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-025-10147-4