‘Dhadak 2’: Bollywood Finally Sees Caste
The film might look like a romance. But it’s actually mainstream Hindi cinema’s most clear-eyed reckoning.
This is how star-crossed romances usually go: boy meets girl, hearts collide, the world relents, and they ride into forever. But not in Dhadak 2, the Hindi remake of Mari Selvaraj’s searing Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018). Here, love doesn’t float above the ground but sinks deep into the soil of caste identity. The film’s lovers, Neelesh (a standout Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Vidisha (Triptii Dimri), are young and idealistic. But society sees their surname before it sees their hearts. He is Neelesh Ahirwar, a first-generation Dalit student who lives in a slum. She is Vidisha Bharadwaj, an upper-caste classmate who falls for him. In debutante director Shazia Iqbal’s hands, Dhadak 2 proves that, in India, love isn’t blind — it sees caste in sharp, unforgiving focus.
That it comes from Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions — the same banner behind Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) and Dhadak (2018), the glossy remake of Nagraj Manjule’s Marathi film Sairat (2016) that invisibilized caste — makes it all the more striking, even a course correction of sorts. In an industry that has long peddled love stories scrubbed of social reality, Dhadak 2’s caste consciousness signals a new direction for mainstream Hindi cinema. That clarity, however, came at a cost: Dhadak 2 faced a delayed release after India’s censor board demanded 16 cuts — many which softened the very caste truths Dhadak once erased.