New Delhi, Aug. 1 -- Flush with pride from having joined law school, Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi), the first in his Dalit family to attend college, brings home a problem from class. He opens it up for neighbourhood discussion-a group of stranded people eat each other in a desperate bid for survival: what would the law say? The residents of Bhim Nagar are aghast. But one man examines it differently. "We'd be fine," he says. "They wouldn't eat us." A woman chimes in: "They definitely won't eat adivasis."

Shazia Iqbal's Dhadak 2, a Hindi remake of Pariyerum Perumal, takes a great deal from Mari Selvaraj's superb 2018 Tamil film. I don't remember this scene, though. It's a throwaway joke, but a telling one. Unlike most Hindi films about cas...