For many Indians — and it is a common experience for most college students — a conversation about caste is often a conversation only about reservations. Why reservation in education and jobs for people from historically backward castes is wrong? Or why is it right? Writer-director Akshay Parvatkar, 30, has had that experience all his life, and it became the fuel for his impassioned story in ‘Hanging by a Thread’, a film that ends with a rousing Dalit poem entreating and evoking the end of caste by Goa’s poet-politician Vishnu Surya Wag. “I got admission into college through reservation, but caste was never a big factor for me growing up. My father, a teacher, and mother, who had a government job, kept me shielded from the idea that society may see me differently because of my caste. But in my adult life, I have come across so many people who see caste only as that which allows for reservation. After hearing so much about caste from that lens, I also began to see my life differently. But the point is, there is caste everywhere in India,” Parvatkar, who now works as a writer and director in Mumbai, says.

Caste has been unpalatable to Mumbai’s film producers and cinema lovers, which perhaps explains why there are so few Bollywood films about caste. Nagraj Manjula’s blockbuster Marathi film ‘Sairat’ (2016), which steered an inter-caste love story with a winning combination of realism and........

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