Chhara In America

What does it mean to be stigmatized? What does it mean to be a second class citizen of your own country? How does it feel to live under a repressive government? This film explores these questions from my perspective as a graduate student from the Chhara community of India encountering new but very familiar experiences of marginalization as a person of color in the United States of 2020. As I join fellow artists and activists in the Movement for Black Lives in the summer of 2020 and reach back to learn the history of discrimination, police violence, second-class citizen status in the US, I draw lines of connection to my own DNT peoples’ history of being labeled “Born Criminals” by the British colonial government and how that same colonialism gave birth to slavery and how and in which forms this colonialism still exists in modern world.