Top & Bottom: Indian Servants and Masters on Screen. Part I

Abstract

Four films, three Indian and one American adaptation of an Indian novel, are sources for the authors’ analysis of the cinematographic presentation of domestic servants, traditionally ‘invisible’ but vitally important members of almost every, even modest, Indian household. Cinematic art, to be sure, reflects not just social phenomena as such, but their perception by public opinion determining what should and what should not be. In Indian cinema plots, usually, domestic servants play episodic roles, glimpsed like shadows. However, the films chosen for analysis are significant as the servants, their work and relations with their employees appear on the forefront as a basic clue of the story and the author` s concepts. Differing by genre (a vaudeville comedy, a social drama, a ‘motivational’ movie, and a thriller) as well as by the creators’ talent, those films, each in its own way, reconstruct mutually attracting and repelling worlds of servants and masters, keeping silence on the core problem of those relations, caste hierarchy.