Warning: spoilers
The second season of the critically acclaimed Amazon series ‘Made In Heaven’ came back on screen after a four year break, exploring darker topics like domestic violence, colorism, and transphobia. However, the show has been accused of plagiarising content. Social media users are demanding that show runners Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti give credit to a Dalit author.
The episode ‘The Heart Skips A Beat’ received critical acclaim for featuring a Dalit woman getting married in to a Buddhist man in an inter-caste ceremony. However, many who watched the episode observed the close resemblance between the female protagonist, Pallavi Menke, a Dalit author who writes a book ‘Coming Out’ narrating her experiences as a Dalit- to the real life author Yashica Dutt, who had written the same book. Dutt has taken to Instagram to address the controversy.
On her Instagram post, Yashica shared a picture of the Dalit wedding, calling the depiction a triumph, but also demanded that show creators stop stealing the works of minority communities and to formally give her credit for her work.
“Before I came out as Dalit in 2016, there was no vocabulary to identify the process of revealing your Dalitness after hiding it for years and owning it with pride either. Today, in 2023, there is both. Dalit directors like Neeraj Ghaywan have revolutionised our cinematic language by showcasing unapologetic Dalits in Bollywood, a tradition that has an even longer history in Southern cinema,” wrote the author.
“;The Heart Skipped a Beat’, the fifth episode of Prime Video’s Made in Heaven is no less than a cinematic triumph, when it comes to showcasing what it truly looks like for a Dalit woman to take her power back in this casteist society.”
Addressing the issue, Dutt wrote it was empowering to witness a woman on the popular series speak about how her grandmother used to scrub toilets, and asserts her self before her partner. But she did not see the director giving her credit.
“The scene where the Dalit author, who is from Columbia, has written a book about ‘coming out’ and talks about her grandmother ‘manually cleaning toilets’, asserts her selfhood with her life partner-to-be, gave me chills. It was surreal to see a version of my life on screen that was not, but yet was still me. But soon the heartbreak set in. They were my words, but my name was nowhere… The ideas I cultivated, that are my life’s work, that I continue to receive immense hate for just speaking, were taken without permission or credit.”
“Dalit’s have a long history of being taken from, erased, ignored, obliterated from our own stories. Dalit women in particular are the easiest to take from , what’s the worth in their labor they’ve created anyway. It’s for everybody to claim.
Except this time, I’m reclaiming my work, my worth and my contribution to the discourse and history, defying the order of what’s expected of me as a woman who is supposed to fine tune the ‘register of her rage’.”
