Duncan Green recommends Santosh, a film that anyone interested in India or social justice should not miss, which demonstrates the power of fiction in bringing about change. In a first, stunning venture into fiction, director Sandhya Suri interweaves and explores modern India’s faultlines of caste, gender and religion.

If you get the chance, please go and see the new film Santosh. It’s an extraordinarily rich picture of modern India, managing to interweave and explore its faultlines of caste, gender and religion without being hectoring or preachy. It’s also a great film, with complex characters (especially the lead women, who are amazing) interacting in ways that continually surprise, plus some great casting of local residents from the film sites in some quite significant roles.

I went to a preview and Q&A last week with Sandhya Suri, the director. She’s an old friend from Oxfam who once made a great promo film for my first book there, but has since gone on to greater things. The film took her 10 years to bring to the screen, 44 days to film and (astonishingly) is her first venture into fiction. A five star review in yesterday’s Observer is not bad for a debut.

I’ve long been struck by the power of fiction in activism. It can deal with the complexities of real life, whether other activist narratives can often over-simplify, reducing everything to black and white. And, unlike – say – much of academia, that pursuit of nuance does not make the subject matter hard to grasp – the characters in Santosh are fascinating and surprising, and their humanity keeps you engaged and thinking hard about how the intersecting inequalities of Indian life themselves interact with the personal qualities of character.

Fiction also, of course, can reach a much wider audience than your average NGO campaign, let alone academic journal paper. It’s pretty clear that writers like JRR Tolkien, Malorie Blackman or Margaret Atwood (the list goes on) have played a huge role in forming and shifting underlying generational attitudes and social norms. On the screen, recent series like Mr Bates v The Post Office (in the UK) or Adolescence (more broadly) have had massive impact on, respectively, a specific scandal and the broader issue of toxic masculinity among teenage boys.

The only unfortunate thing about the film is that, predictably, the Indian censors are all over it, demanding so many cuts that nothing is left, so it won’t be showing in cinemas there.

The question I did not get to ask her in the Q&A is – does she think this film could have been made by a born and raised Indian? Sandhya is second generation Brit, raised in Darlington, which I think allows her to do an amazing job of bridging between the nuance of India, and what outside audiences can take in. In Q&A she described the film as two tier, with lots of references only Indians will understand, but a clear story line for others (a bit like Disney’s brilliance at having two tiers for adults and kids, I guess). I’ve seen the same phenomenon in great development books by insider-outsiders like Yuen Yuen Ang and Naomi Hossain.

Here’s an interview with Sandhya on Channel 4 news.

Please go and see it, and tell your friends. If you’re reading this on Monday, she has a Q&A at the Curzon in Bloomsbury, London this evening

Here’s the trailer

And here’s an absolutely brilliant review in The Hindu, which crystallized a load of the half-acknowledged thoughts I had about the film.