There are so many amazing things about the film Kaala, but most significant is that it is a film about social injustice which simply refuses to be tragedy, offering instead a vital, pleasurable, liberatory politics. Every traditional filmic moment of social tragedy is overturned through joyful affirmation. When a woman says, "the builders are trying to kill us slowly, we may as well die in one go" Kaala responds: why should we die? Life is bigger than death. We will live.

Kaala is about how caste works at every level — material, emotional, philosophical — told through the relationship of Dharavi, a thriving but neglected, Dalit settlement and a Bombay, traditionally a city of transactions and accommodations, wanting to recast itself in a new 'swaccha' avatar. In one face-off, Nana Patekar's developer-character says to Rajanikanth's: Kaala — the name, the colour, so ugly, it hurts the eye. Kaala simply says: What a pathetic mindset. If you saw our world with better eyes, what seems dirty to you, will reveal itself as vibrant, manicoloured. A moment where social humiliation would be filmically replayed is transformed into an analysis of a gaze. And Kaala, in content and form simply refuses to accept any gaze but its own, a Dalit point of view on a Dalit life-world and history, and thus, asks you to change the way you see.