On Tuesday, Dalit author Yashica Dutt took to her official X handle to point out that the makers of Made in Heaven took up her story but neither took her permission nor gave her credit for the particular episode.
Episode 5 of the second season of the series, titled 'The Heart Skipped A Beat', revolves around a Dalit Buddhist wedding of Radhika Apte, who plays a Dalit author in the episode. The story of the episode seems almost completely similar to the book authored by Yashica Dutt, titled Coming Out as a Dalit. In fact, the book in the episode is also titled Coming Out in the particular episode.
Pointing out the same, Yashica wrote, "The scene where the Dalit author who is from Columbia, has written a book about 'Coming Out', and talks about how her grandmother 'manually cleaned toilets' (while wearing all blue as a homage to Ambedkar), 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 wasn't but yet was still me. But soon the heartbreak set in. They were my words but my name was nowhere. What could have been a celebration of our collective ideas was now tinged with sadness. The ideas I cultivated, that are my life's work, that I continue to receive immense hate still for just speaking, were taken without permission or credit."
She commended a filmmaker like Neeraj Ghaywan for bringing out stories about Dalit people onscreen and to a world like Bollywood. But at the same time, she explained how Dalits have always had a long story of being taken from, erased, ignored, and obliterated, from their own stories. She wrote, "Dalit women, in particular, are the easiest to take from, what's the worth in the labour 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 always supposed to fine-tune the 'register of her rage'."
Made in Heaven stars Sobitha Dhulipala, Arjun Mathur, Jim Sarbh, Kalki Koechlin, Vijay Raaz, Shashank Raghuvanshi and Shashank Arora in lead roles. Alankrita Shrivastava, Neeraj Ghaywan, Nitya Mehra, Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar are the directors of the series.
