Recast(e)ing sports on screen: A critical study of popular postmillennial sports films in India

This article envisages an alternative Dalit sporting imaginary that challenges the normative structure of popular Indian sports cinema. The study begins with the historical examination of sports and physical culture in India, and its long-standing caste rigidity in sports, inviting the structurally interwoven interrogation—Can Dalit play? Can there be a Dalit Sporting imaginary? As the genuine representation of Dalit agency in sports cinema still remains a fairly untapped genre, the emergence of new-wave Dalit cinema possibly deconstructs the prevalent narratives that exclude Dalit bodies from the mainstream sports cinema. Examining selected films like Skater Girl (2021) and Jhund (2022), this article re-imagines and strategizes an anti-caste sporting aesthetics. The films depict how the distinct Dalit body at play not only critiques the notion of hegemonic masculinity but also reclaims space through the spatial praxis and subcultural sporting codes. The contest and resistance in the sporting field project varies popular-playful ways and means of affirming Dalit identity.