Nagraj Manjule is a Wadar. Till a generation ago, the only job available to this marginalized community was stone crushing; pig herding was often thrown in as a must-do. 'Fandry' or pig was an insult Manjule heard often on the streets of Jeur village in Solapur; even in college, in Pune his name would evoke titters. Manjule recalls ducking classes to escape the slurs. Now in his late 30s, he is calling on those mortifying memories to craft exceptionally hard-hitting Marathi films.

He started with Pistulya, a National Award-winning short film, and followed it with the celebrated Fandry on a Dalit child's dreams for a big life. Currently, he is the most celebrated name on the Marathi film circuit with Sairat (wild), the movie he directed and wrote, raking in Rs 55 crore at the box office and becoming the highest grossing Marathi film of all time. The film, on a doomed inter-caste romance, is also set for other regional remakes. Could it be that caste, often left on the margins of Indian cinema, is finally taking centrestage?

Manjule is clear that he doesn't want to ignore or hide the ugly truth called caste. “If you have to find a cure for an epidemic, it has to be brought out into the open. I grew up with a strange sense of fear and a realization that I was born into an under-privileged life. I was made aware of my limits since my childhood,“ writes Manjule in Maharashtra Times of his inspiration.

Sairat's story is simple. A talented, smart, lower caste boy falls in love with a spirited Patil girl and all is sunlit slow motion till the couple is hit by the fury of family and society. The inexorable truth is that neither education nor prosperity can beat back casteism, says the filmmaker. So convincing is the storytelling that it has enraged some Maratha outfits who are objecting to upper caste villainy. “Sairat is a clever critique of caste. It takes all the typical filmi tropes like songs, dance and romance and smartly turns them on their head. The characters are completely believable because Manjule is talking of his own reality and that of his community,“ says Arati Wani, scholar and author of Fantasy of Modernity: Romantic Love in Bombay Cinema of the 1950s.

For something that is all-pervasive in Indian life, caste is remarkably absent from most mainstream Indian cinema. This is especially true of Bollywood where Rahul and before him Mr Rajesh - blithely go through love, family life, marriage and jobs without once running into discrimination. Class tussle yes, even communal pangs once in a while, but Hindi films would have you believe that we live in a remarkably caste-free society. Love surmounts all, but it is rarely caste. This despite the fact that honour killings have been happening with alarming regularity across India from Kolhapur to Madurai to Haryana's Hissar.

A statistical analysis last year by The Hindu showed that in the approximately 300 Bollywood films made between 2013 and 2014, only six lead characters were shown to belong to backward castes. Regional cinema, however, is less craven about tackling caste, and that includes commercial films. Tamil cinema particularly has often put caste at the centre of plots; in fact, it is often accused of reinforcing community stereotypes and glorifying them, warts and all. Films like Thevar Magan, Thilagar, Kadhal, Chinna Gounder, Thevar Magan, Thevar Veettu Ponnu and Kunguma Pottu Gounder are accused of having fuelled the rise of the aggressive middle castes.

“Tamil cinema over the last 10 years has been discussing caste explicitly,“ says SV Srinivas, senior fellow at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru.“Even Telugu films have not shied away - Chiranjeevi played a cobbler aspiring for a better life in Swayamkrushi (1987).“ Progressive Kannada films of the '70s freely critiqued Brahmanical ritualism in Samskara and Ghatashraddha. “Caste has been openly spoken about in Marathi cinema but not as a political statement even in the '50s and '60s. For instance, the villain in the classic Sangte Aika (1959) was a powerful Patil who harasses a tamasha performer,“ points out Wani.

This could also be held generally true of Bollywood cinema - caste was hinted at but not talked about. “Caste tends to be 'absent present' in Bollywood. You will see clear signifiers typically associated with caste - a darker, lower class hero who is either unemployed or in a lowly occupation as, say, Govinda was cast in many films. It is never clarified but you could make a connection between class and caste,“ he says.

One of the earliest films to deal with caste was Achhut Kanya (1936) starring Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani. This was followed by some landmark films (see box below) but the numbers are abysmal for an industry that produces over 1,600 films a year. You could assume that a number of films where fathers scream about khandaan ki izzat are talking about caste. The only film that captured the terrifying horror or honour killing was Dibakar Bannerjee's Love Sex aur Dhokha (there is no mention of caste though - the Censor Board asked that all such references be axed).

Usha and Vilas Wagh, seasoned Ambedkarites who run an off-beat marriage bureau in Pune for progressive youngsters who abjure caste, say it is more important now than ever to discuss the issue at popular platforms. “The heightened fear for women's security has made it easy for our society to be even more patriarchical and casteist. We are seeing increased opposition to inter-caste relationships and marriage,“ says Wagh.