Ava DuVernay’s Origin explores how the caste system enables racism against Blacks in the US, enabled Nazi Germany to perpetrate the Holocaust, and continues rampant in India
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Ava Duvernay’s significant film Origin finally dropped on Netflix in India last week, after playing at the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals in 2023.
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DuVernay is a powerful director, producer, writer and distributor, who empowers BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) and non-binary women filmmakers. Her solid body of about 23 works, including features, documentaries, shorts and series, including Middle of Nowhere (Best Director, Sundance Film Festival, 2012), Selma (on Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s 1965 campaign for equal voting rights), 13th (on the racial inequality of the American prison system; Oscar nomination, Best Documentary Feature); A Wrinkle in Time (Disney, sci-fi); When They See Us (a series exposing racism in the US); and Queen Sugar (a series on a family drama around the inheritance of a huge sugarcane farm in Louisiana, 2016-2022). With this series, she created a radical sisterhood revolution in Hollywood: on realizing that women filmmakers are not taken seriously till they have directed TV/series, she created and executive produced—along with Oprah Winfrey—this TV drama series. She hired 42 diverse BIPOC and non-binary women to direct its 88 episodes, including Maryam Keshavarz, Indian-American Pratibha Parmar, So Yong Kim and Stacey Muhammad. She also started Array, a distribution company, to distribute the work of BIPOC and women of all kinds; including Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy, Agam Darshi’s Donkeyhead and Sujata Day’s Definition Please.
Origin, a creative dramatisation of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, stars a superb Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author herself, with Jon Bernthal playing her partner. She researches the common links of the caste system—that creates a hierarchy of human beings that enables discrimination against those at the bottom, and even extermination—underlying the systemic racism against Blacks in the US, enabling Nazi Germany to perpetrate the Holocaust, exterminating Jews in Europe, and continuing rampant in India.
DuVernay makes these academic concepts in the book accessible by exploring them through the viewpoint of Wilkerson herself, a Black author married to a White man, and her personal challenges, as she navigates sending her mother to a senior citizens’ home, and later, the deaths of both her husband and mother. There are also re-enactments of historical incidents, including crammed 18th century slave ships, taking African slaves to America; Nazi Germany, and the American South, with a voiceover. The editing, with flashbacks, frames the film with the case of Trayvon Martin, a Black 17-year-old, who was simply walking home in Florida, but was seen as “suspicious” by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer, who shot him dead in 2012.
We learn that Nazi Germany was inspired by American enslavement and discrimination against Blacks. In India, Wilkerson meets Dalit spokespersons, including Dr Suraj Yengde, leading Dalit scholar, post-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School (and now WEB Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University), who tells her about the violent discrimination against Dalits, about Dr BR Ambedkar, who drafted India’s Constitution, and why a public Ambedkar statue is “caged”—to protect it from casteist vandals. She also shows us the degrading practice of manual scavenging—common in India, but mainly practiced by “low” castes—where a man lowers himself fully into a pool of shit, to clear the drain by hand.
The film raises thorny issues. In exposing India’s continuing horrific and endemic caste discrimination,and relating it to systemic discrimination in other societies such as the US and Nazi Germany, it highlights what mainly “upper” castes in India and overseas NRIs have long tried to suppress, claiming that caste discrimination is purely imaginary, an attempt to besmirch the name of Shining India.
In fact, a law banning caste discrimination was passed in the US, in Seattle city, in February 2023; although the California state legislature passed a bill banning caste discrimination in September 2023, it was vetoed by the governor. This suggests that wherever Indians and South Asians exist, caste discrimination often follows. Clearly, international travel, higher education and better work opportunities have changed nothing in the determination to maintain the status quo of caste discrimination by its mainly “upper” caste beneficiaries, sometimes out of genuine or wilful ignorance. A must-see film.
Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com
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