From everyday forms of salutation, whether namaste, pranam, vanakkam, namaskaram, hello, or hi, to Jai Bhim, the shift in modes of address among Ambedkarites and their allies is not merely linguistic. It signals a change in how individuals locate themselves within social relations and histories of inequality. What may appear as a simple greeting carries a different weight when it enters a context grounded in caste(ism), memory, and assertion.

Bhima Koregaon occupies a distinctive place in contemporary Dalit public life, not because it offers a settled historical consensus, but because it allows Dalits to gather, remember, and assert themselves in public without mediation. Each year on 1 January, large numbers of Dalits travel to the village near Pune to commemorate the 1818 battle and to mark what has come to be known as Shaurya Diwas.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is a film that insists we look carefully at how inequality works in ordinary life. It does not rely on spectacle or loud melodrama. Instead, it pays attention to small conversations, casual insults, administrative procedures, family decisions and quiet forms of care. Through the friendship of a Dalit man and a Muslim man, and through three Dalit women placed at different points in the family structure, the film asks what it means to survive and to hope in an India that