FROM STIGMA TO RESISTANCE: A PSYCHOSOCIAL ANALYSIS OF CASTE, RECOGNITION, AND NARRATIVE AGENCY IN INDIAN CINEMA

Caste is sustained not only through formal hierarchy and unequal control of resources, but also through everyday classifications of bodies, occupations, spaces, emotions, and credibility. Indian cinema participates in this psychosocial order by shaping who appears fully human, whose pain is intelligible, who is believed, and who is permitted to act. This article offers a critical psychosocial analysis of seven films spanning six decades and four language-industrial contexts: Sujata (1959), Ankur (1974), Sadgati (1981), Fandry (2013), Article 15 (2019), Asuran (2019), and Jai Bhim (2021). Using reflexive thematic analysis, the films were examined across narrative focalization, dialogue, bodily and spatial codes, labour, affect, institutional encounters, and forms of resistance. Ambedkar’s account of graded inequality is integrated with theories of stigma, social identity, symbolic power, humiliation, intersectionality, and epistemic injustice. Five themes organize the findings: conditional recognition; embodied and occupational stigma; public humiliation and identity threat; institutional production of disbelief; and the movement from sympathy to dignity, anger, and resistance. The comparison identifies a historical shift from reformist narratives, in which marginalized characters become worthy through sacrifice or dominant-caste recognition, toward anti-caste narratives that foreground situated knowledge and oppositional agency. Yet this shift is uneven. Mainstream films may expose caste violence while retaining a saviour-centred gaze, and legal narratives may translate subaltern experience through institutionally authorized intermediaries. The article proposes a psychosocial circuit of caste representation linking social classification, stigma, affect, narrative authority, and collective action. It argues that ethically consequential representation requires more than visibility: it requires narrative credibility, interiority, agency, and structural explanation.