The bustling metropolis of Minneapolis and the dusty Maharashtra village of Kasegaon in Sangli have almost nothing in common. One is a major American industrial hub, a scenic city that sits on the edge of lakes and functions as a nerve centre of the US Midwest. The other is a lush village 15,000 km away with barely any industry and verdant cropfields ringfencing it. One sits 11 hours and 30 minutes ahead of the other.
Yet, there is one common thread tying these two disparate sites – American sociologist Gail Omvedt, considered among the world’s leading scholars of caste. Omvedt grew up in Minneapolis in a Scandinavian immigrant household where her father worked as a lawyer. She taught African-American children in her neighbourhood and was swept up in the ferment of student activism against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement's thunder.
Then she left Minneapolis and never returned.
Omvedt first stepped onto Indian soil in 1963 on a Fulbright Fellowship, she carried with her the ideological fire of Berkeley's radical campus and the American civil rights struggle. What she encountered in India's villages — the systematic dehumanisation embedded in caste — resonated with the oppression she witnessed back home. Something fundamental shifted within her during that first visit. She would go on to make India her home and site of work, marrying activist Bharat Patankar in 1976, and getting citizenship in 1983, settling down in Kasegaon.
Between these two places — the one of her birth and the one she died in 2021 — lies the journey captured in Gail and Bharat, director Somnath Waghmare's documentary. The documentary took around eight years to complete and has just been released. It chronicles the relationship between the American scholar and the anti-caste activist, against the backdrop of the metamorphosis of a woman who traded Minneapolis for Maharashtra, academic prestige for grassroots action, and observation for immersion.
“Her position is of immense importance because in the post-Ambedkar era, she was a major vehicle for taking the traditions of anti-caste writing to global levels,” said Waghmare.
After her initial foray in 1963, by the time Omvedt returned to India in 1970 to research her doctoral dissertation, she was already learning Marathi and combing through primary historical documents with forensic precision. Her PhD thesis, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873-1930 documented the early 20th-century anti-caste movement as a cultural and ideological challenge to caste dominance.
At the time, Maharashtra was in churn – trade unions, linguistic movements, new Left formations and anti-caste groups such as Dalit Panthers were changing the social fabric of the state. She met Bharat Patankar, the son of communist freedom fighter Babuji Patankar and activist Indumati Patankar, both veterans of the Prati Sarkar parallel government that challenged British rule in western Maharashtra. The couple married and settled down in Kasegaon.
Over the next few decades, Omvedt produced a rich body of work on caste, class and gender, including – We Will Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle, which highlighted the compounded oppression of marginalised caste women, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India, which examined two centuries of anti-caste struggle, and Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anti-Caste Intellectuals, which introduces readers to figures crucial to anti-caste movements across India — from Ravidas to Kabir to Periyar.
Initially drawn to Marxism during her student days in the US, Omvedt immersed herself in the Indian countryside, where her research focussed on caste as a primary axis of oppression – a revolutionary position at a time when many theorists elided the importance of caste segregation in Indian life.
Waghmare, who grew up just 15 km from Kasegaon, had long idolised Omvedt and Patankar, attending their public meetings during his student years. When he began filming in October 2017, he intended to capture their lifelong activism. What he ultimately documented was something more tender and devastating: the scholar’s final years, when ageing and limited mobility had begun to erode her brilliant mind.
“My hometown was also in Sangli and just 15 km away from Kasegaon. I met her in public meetings in my graduation days when I had just started participating in the anti-caste movement as a student in 2010- 2011,” Waghmare said.
The 80-minute film opens with a quiet morning scene — Omvedt and Patankar lying side by side, singing a song together. Waghmare captures the vagaries of their life in old age: the way he tends to his ailing partner, recalls how she once gave him night-blooming jasmine flowers during their early courtship, the devotion that persists even as memory fractures.
“End-2017, after my documentary on Bhima Koregaon, I started to shoot Gail and Bharat. It took almost eight years to complete this project. Funding was a major problem. And following Gail in her old age, and making her vast writing into one story was a challenge,” said Waghmare.
The film was screened at universities and film festivals across Europe and the United States, before running in Indian campuses this month. It captures the radical ordinariness of a revolutionary life – of someone who rejected both left and right-wing understandings of India and instead offered a vision drawn from Jyotiba Phule's social equality, BR Ambedkar's constitutional morality and Ravidas's casteless utopia of Begumpura.
“See there is little video documentation on Dalit scholars , activists or leaders. So this project is also a kind of video archive for the next generation,” Waghmare said. “I got a good reception not only in the UK, Germany or Netherlands but also in Kolhapur where Gail’s first book was published. I think people want to see this story, understand her life.”
Curated by Aisha Patel
