Dhadak 2: What happens when a Tamil film about caste discrimination gets the Bollywood treatment

Indian Express

6 days ago

Some love stories are meant to deal with resistance — resistance to the idea that love should exist freely, resistance to people loving across differences, resistance from a society that never understands. The recently released Dhadak 2 is one such story.
Adapted from Mari Selvaraj's 2018 Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018), Dhadak 2 (directed by Shazia Iqbal) is a well-done remake. It does lose some things in translation, but manages to retain the essence of the original. If one watches Iqbal's Bebaak (2018), one can easily anticipate how she might adapt Pariyerum Perumal. She brings in a gaze that wasn't present in the original, a gaze that gives more agency to the women characters and brings more sensitivity to the narrative.
Dhadak 2, which Iqbal calls the spiritual sequel to Shashank Khaitan's Dhadak (2018), is one of the best works to come out of Bollywood this year. It is a story rooted in caste prejudice, yet it goes beyond that. Vidhi Bharadwaj (played by Tripti Dimri) falls in love with a Dalit man named Neelesh Ahirwar (played by Siddhant Chaturvedi), and the story revolves around their relationship and how caste, privilege, and prejudice come in the way. But the striking thing is that the story isn't just about them getting together; it's also about what Neelesh has to endure because he's a Dalit man — the kind of struggle that upper-caste people rarely understand because, as Vidhi herself says in the film, 'Mujhe lagta tha yeh saalon pehle hota tha, gaon mein.' (I thought this was a practice that used to happen years ago, in villages). To her, caste prejudice is a thing of the past. But as Neelesh rightly points out, 'Jinke saath nahi hota, unko aisa hi lagta hai' (Those who aren't subject to this discrimination are the ones who think it doesn't exist). For those who face it, caste discrimination isn't history; it's as present and real as life itself.
Neelesh, a student at the National University of Law, is hesitant to utter his surname in class, even as everyone around him does. They're all upper-caste Hindus, completely comfortable and confident in their identities that have brought them privileges, not the centuries-old baggage of prejudice. Neelesh's lived trauma and past experiences, on the other hand, have taught him that revealing his caste doesn't just invite prejudice, it also changes the way people look at him. It leads him to use BA LLB as his surname, as if trying to reclaim space in an institution that might otherwise cast him as an outsider.
Neelesh gets his courage from his mother. Unlike in Selvaraj's story, where the protagonist's grandfather played that role, Iqbal's version gives agency to the mother. That shift makes the narrative more layered and interesting, reorienting the centre of strength from a male figure to a woman who becomes the source of resilience. Her dialogues are written so impeccably that they echo the resistance that Dalits have long voiced against prejudice. Speaking about her people's condition, she says, 'Girte girte itna gir gaye ki uthna bhool gaye,' (We kept falling so much that we forgot how to rise), a line that captures the weight of historical exhaustion. And when it comes down to 'maarun ya maroon' (Do I kill, or do I die?), she urges Neelesh to fight. This isn't just maternal instinct; it's political. She shapes Neelesh's political and community consciousness.
The film also gives agency to the female lead, which wasn't the case in Selvaraj's story. Here, the female protagonist Vidhi is more socially aware and acknowledges the privilege she holds as an upper-caste woman. But some of her dialogues, particularly the ones challenging patriarchy and using terms like 'toxic masculinity' feel like lazy writing, as if the writer just decided to sprinkle them in without bothering with nuance or context.
Similarly, the film is unable to entirely avoid mainstream Bollywood tropes, and the sprinkle of Bollywoodisation is hard to ignore. The extravagant introduction scene, where Neelesh sees Vidhi for the first time while his gang plays dhol at a wedding, never gets revisited and feels rather forced. In these moments, the film is simply a 'Dharmafication' of Pariyerum Perumal, where much is lost in translation. The Tamil original is imbued with the essence of Dalit life: A sense of community, shots of people outside the protagonist's family, which grounds the film in its Dalit roots. But that raw, documentary-like feel is missing in Iqbal's story, probably because it is set in an urban environment or because Iqbal gave more importance to Bollywoodisation than to authentic representation of the community.
However, we cannot overlook how smartly Iqbal uses certain Bollywood tropes without letting them affect her storytelling. For instance, in the wedding song, while everyone is shown dancing, Neelesh still hesitates, never really feeling comfortable dancing freely in that space. In most Bollywood films, the male lead would've jumped in to join the heroine center-stage. But here, in a crowd full of upper-caste people dancing on the floor, it's easy to sense that Neelesh is the odd one out, the outsider. And that speaks volumes about how Iqbal approached the story.
Similarly, the story of Shekhar (played by Priyank Tiwari) is one of the most powerful additions Iqbal makes to Selvaraj's story. Spoiler alert: What happens to Shekhar unmistakably echoes the institutional cruelty that led to Rohith Vemula's death. By including this subplot, Iqbal draws on political memory, broadening the film's scope and showing how institutions participate in caste oppression. The suspension and eventual discontinuation of Shekhar's fellowship, his protest on campus, and the prolonged uncertainty about his fate — all of it reminded me of Vemula and others whose critical voices institutions have tried to silence. Iqbal leaves the audience with a lot to take from this subplot, and it stands out as one of the film's strongest aspects, something that was not there in Selvaraj's original.
In the cinema hall where I watched Dhadak 2, also present were two men, presumably upper-caste, who kept talking about how caste oppression doesn't exist and that the film was misleading. Their discomfort could be heard in their voices. That's exactly why this remake matters: To make the comfortable uncomfortable and to bring Selvaraj's story to a wider audience by making it more accessible.
The writer is a researcher on an ICSSR research project at Bodoland University