Made in Heaven 2 comes under fire for using author Yashica Dutt’s work without consent, credit: ‘Dalit women are the easiest to take from’

Made in Heaven Season 2 has been in the news for a lot of reasons. But the show’s episode 5, titled The Heart Skipped a Beat, which stars Radhika Apte, is being particularly hailed by the audience for its portrayal of a Dalit wedding. Even BR Ambedkar’s grandson Prakash Ambedkar took to X (formerly Twitter) to praise the show’s writers and the episode’s director Neeraj Ghaywan for bringing forth ‘the assertion, defiance and resistance of a Dalit woman’s character’ in the episode. The show’s makers, however, are receiving flak from Yashica Dutt, a Columbia University alum and author of the book ‘Coming Out As Dalit.’

In a long post, Yashica expressed how the makers of the show based Radhika’s character on her life without her permission and failed to credit her. An excerpt of her Twitter post read as, “The scene where the Dalit author who is from Columbia, has written a book about ‘Coming Out’, and talks about how her grandmother ‘manually cleaned toilets’ (while wearing all blue as an homage to Ambedkar), asserts her selfhood with her life partner to-be, gave me chills. It was surreal to see a version of my life on screen that wasn’t but yet was still me. But soon the heartbreak set in. They were my words but my name was nowhere. What could have been a celebration of our collective ideas was now tinged with sadness. The ideas I cultivated, that are my life’s work, that I continue to receive immense hate still for just speaking, were taken without permission or credit.”

She added, “Dalits have a long history of being taken from, erased, ignored, obliterated from our own stories. Dalit women in particular are the easiest to take from, what’s the worth in the labor they’ve created anyway. It’s for everybody to claim. Except this time. I’m reclaiming my work, my worth and my contribution to the discourse and history, defying the order of what’s expected of me as a woman who is always supposed to fine tune the ‘register of her rage’. The Made in Heaven episode is stunning in its portrayal of a Dalit woman and her Buddhist inter-caste wedding. It also unfortunately erases my contribution to my own ideas.”

While Yashica’s name appeared among the list of contributors mentioned by director Neeraj Ghaywan in his Instagram post, she asserts that Neeraj acknowledged her only after numerous people questioned her missing credits. She also called out Hindi films and television for having a “notorious and historic pattern of taking anything from everywhere to create its narrative.”

She ended her post by requesting Made In Heaven’s creators Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti to acknowledge her life’s work. She wrote, “I request Neeraj Ghaywan, and the show creators Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti to formally acknowledge my life’s work and ideas that contributed to this episode, which is among the most talked in the entire series, beyond a post on social media and within the show’s credits. So that the millions of its viewers know one its central ideas was not created out of ether, but out of the blood, sweat and a lifetime of tears of a Dalit woman that the world had decided to cast aside.”