COLOURS OF DISSENT
Young artists are putting issues of caste discrimination and identity on the canvas and challenging the status quo
Artists put caste and identity on the canvas to challenge the status quo
These instructions, extracted from Dalit autobiographies, are part of the recipe ‘Collecting Wheat’ by Rajyashri Goody, a young artist based in Pune. The act of eating, she says, is political. Goody is one of the few artists from the Dalit community who are challenging the hegemony of what they call the ‘metanarratives of modernity’ and believe in promoting an ethos of rationality and liberation through depictions of oppression based on their experiences or the collective memory of discrimination. Their art occupies the space between the personal and the political. If gender and sexuality were the pivots of an earlier generation of identity politics, regionalism, race and ethnicity are the fulcrum of the paradigm.
Perhaps the depiction of Manu as the devil’s incarnation by
artist Savi Savarkar is one of the most challenging manifestations of art from an oppressed community. Born into the Mahar caste in 1962, Savarkar is one of India’s most prominent artists. He has exhibited in international galleries and his work is a critique of the caste system. While the pitches for art festivals and exhibitions are going for the deeply ethical appeal that lies in the “inclusive representational landscape”, these have mostly been cosmetic claims.
Since 1929, Dalit activists have been burning copies of the Manusmriti as part their protest against caste laws. In her exhibition ‘Eat with Great Delight’ at Mumbai’s Clark House Initiative in July this year, Goody presented paper laddoos made out of the Manusmriti to show that this text, which has brought so much horror and discrimination to people for thousands of years, was ultimately just paper. The exhibition also showcased photographs of her family celebrating with food as well as extracts from Dalit literature about the experience of accessing food, which Goody turned into recipes navigating the politics of food and caste.
Goody’s work also explores the deep biases relating to beef prevalent in the country. ‘Dalit cuisine’ derives its identity from economic necessity, and a 2015 survey by the National Sample Survey Office found that caste-wise, over 70 per cent of beef-eaters belonged to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), while 21 per cent were from other backward classes and only 7 per cent were from the forward castes.
Dalit communities have a very complex relationship with food because of access issues. Goody says her cookbooks are an ode to Dalit autobiographies that capture this everyday struggle and are a reminder of how something seemingly as simple as food is caught in the web of caste. She says if her art can make people uncomfort-
“Alternative spaces are growing in India. A new language is in the offing” Prabhakar Pachpute
able and nudge them into questioning caste inequalities, she would consider her job done. “Cookbooks are seen as very basic, simple, accessible literature, but I wanted to problematise them by asking questions, such as why are the food habits of Dalit communities not included in writings about ‘Indian food’. Cookbook recipes also reveal privileges, such as the ability to read and write, having a fully stocked kitchen, as well as the assumption that you can replicate anybody’s food experience,” says Goody.
This Dalit assertion through art, she believes, is compelling exhibition houses to wake up and take note. “It’s the age of calling out and galleries and curators have no option but to take note of this new vocabulary,” says Goody. “More and more artists are speaking about the Dalit experience with pride and resilience. As much as art institutions and galleries would like to turn a blind eye (because it would mean reckoning with their own caste privileges), it’s getting harder and harder for them to do so.” Vadodara-based critic and curator Divakar Venkataraman, who has curated shows on marginalised identities, says that while innumerable artists have worked all through history towards the assertion of identity, a new breed of young artists in India is consciously looking up the history of resistance, which is outside the binaries established by the art world and power structures. “For them, everything is a possibility,” says Venkataraman. “The privileged will always desire to talk about everybody in the most radical terms, but cannot accept if the oppressed speak for themselves. They want to represent the oppressed, but are never ever ready to share space or share life.”
There has also been the emergence of alternative spaces in the country where such art is being showcased, such as the Clark House Initiative. Premjish Achari, a Delhi-based curator, writer and translator and co-curator of the first edition of the Bhubaneswar Art Trail, says the art world in general revolves around three power structures—artists, collectors and galleries. “The way galleries function is that they want to sell the works. We can’t bring in radical works that talk about the caste system or social, religious and political structures,” he explains. “The art history of India is very Brahminical and nationalist and, for me, it’s all about the art discourse and who is included.”
Perhaps one only has to look at the monochromatic frames of Sudharak Olwe to come face to face with oppression. In 2016, Olwe was awarded the Padma Shri for his work documenting the plight of Mumbai municipality’s conservancy workers. A powerful portrait of oppression from Olwe’s documentation of caste atrocities in 2017 is the black and white photo of a young man hanging from a tree—a noose around his neck. In 2016, a minor Maratha girl was raped and murdered in Kopardi in western Maharashtra. The suspects were Dalit and the incident triggered tension and
violence between the two communities. Dalit homes were torched, prompting Olwe to begin documenting cases where Dalits had been denied justice for crimes against them.
In Olwe’s world, there is no distraction of colour. He says black has been associated for the longest time with the darkest of things, ideas like impurity; it is also a colour for dissent. For him, photography is a medium to communicate ideas that give an impetus to social change among the marginalised communities. “In mainstream art, which includes festivals and international group shows, there is hardly any representation of Dalit art or, for that matter, issues of concern to the common people,” he says. “Discrimination is deeply rooted in India as a society. So it is there in art, too. Dr B.R. Ambedkar defines caste as not only a division of labour, but also of labourers.”
Dr Y.S. Alone, professor in visual studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, says laying claim to identity politics is wrong. “One has to see the ways in which some people are practising their art as throwing challenges at normative practices. Practising caste is normative in India. The art world is equally casteist,” he says.
While human labour has always been expressed in contemporary Indian art by the likes of Sudhir Patwardhan, the question is whether the observations in the depictions of labour or poverty are cosmetic or grounded in reality. Olwe is excited about artists from marginalised communities who are challenging the status quo. Among them is Birender Yadav, 28, who grew up in the coalfields of Jharia in Jharkhand. Yadav is questioning the access to welfare schemes with his investigation into the lives of people working in brick kilns. A series titled ‘Angootha Chaap’ by Yadav documents the lives of the uneducated working men, women and children. Using thumbprint impressions of these workers, mostly migrants, Yadav tries to examine their political and social engagement. The welfare schemes announced for the poor are based on the idea of identification—represented by the thumb impression. “I was struck by the choices we must make in order to live, the choices children make when their parents leave to find work in cities, the coal dust of the mines, the lives of the poor,” says Yadav.
The son of a blacksmith, Yadav recalls his parents cautioning him that he would end up illiterate like them if he did not study. Graduating in 2015 from the Delhi College of Art, he has been part of group exhibitions and has done a solo show as well. Now he is set to showcase his works in Mexico and Switzerland. He says that rather than please people, he wants his art to highlight the invisibility of people let down by the state. “My work is a comment on the Brahminical fascist propaganda, which continues unchecked. The brick kiln workers belong to different communities, which the Brahminical fascist powers pitch as the enemies and the ‘other’,” he says.
In his 2017 solo show, ‘A Dark Place in the Sun’, at Vadodara’s Knots arts space, Jithinlal N.R. claimed
“Caste is a systemic problem. Why should I shoulder the burden?” Navin Chahande
ownership of his Dalit identity. He, however, adds that artists want to be accepted as humans and not be seen in the framework of identity politics. “Everyone can claim their past,” he says. “It took almost five years, after passing out from the academy, to make this bold move. To declare and say with pride that I am a Dalit, taking ownership of my life.”
Jithinlal is the recipient of the inaugural Artists for Artists grant by the Khoj International Artists’ Association this year. His work with the grant will culminate into an exhibition for Khoj in May 2019. His is a gaze from the bottom, he explains. A gaze from the intersections, from the peripheries of the power centres. A gaze about freedom. He finds the Indian art scene completely Brahminical and surviving mainly on the capital of buyers. “I don’t think there is anything such as Dalit art. But there are artists and art from Dalit [resistance]. I work in the framework of Dalit consciousness.”
Born in a Dalit colony in Kochi, most of Jithinlal’s works are almost autobiographical. On moving to Palakkad, where his father had a government job, he says he was faced with a void when it came to his past, and it was through the stories told by his grandmother and uncles that he could understand it better. “Most of my works attempt to address the issue of identity, that another life is possible,” he says.
Mumbai-based Navin Chahande’s art deals with the subject of caste and Ambedkar-ism. Chahande, who grew up in Barse Nagar in Nagpur’s Panchpaoli, says a Buddhist monastery and a library near his house fuelled his creative imagina-
tion in the early years. After moving to Mumbai in 1997 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the JJ School of Arts, he dabbled in the symbolism of everyday things. For his solo show ‘I am the One Who Drew the Head on the Lion Pillar’, in collaboration with Clark House and Knots this year, he used lines from the poem ‘Approaching the Organised Harem of the Octopus’ by Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal. It talks about the battle between Brahminism and Buddhism. Chahande recreates the Lion Pillar as a supreme symbol of Ambedkarite assertion.
In 2012, Chahande was selected for the Young South Asian Artist Award by the World Bank. His work ‘Culture and Symbol’ was picked up by the bank for its permanent collections at Washington DC. “My practice is based on my life experiences and the ideas on culture and politics. Throughout my life, I have been exposed to anti-caste imageries and a certain politics,” he says. “But why should it be my burden to address the problem of caste? Caste is a systemic problem. Why should I be given the burden of shouldering it?” At Anand Warehouse in Kochi’s Mattancherry, a neighbourhood known for its diverse community and erstwhile spice market, an artist is drawing on the walls. Prabhakar Pachpute is one of the participants at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, being curated by Anita Dube. The curatorial vision promises
to bring out voices from the margins. Pachpute, who hails from the mining belt of Chandrapur in Maharashtra, says the curatorial note mentions “love” and how we can come together. “For the Kochi exhibition, I am trying to document the stories of farmers and their protests across the country. Throughout the protests, farmers have been using their bodies in very performative gestures,” he notes. “There is an immense disconnect in society when thinking of human values and our priorities. This divergence in our social structure creates tension and anxiety, and it also makes one feel helpless.”
Pachpute’s father was a farmer and his grandfather a miner. His elder brother works in the open pit coal mines, which form the landscape of Pachpute’s work. After completing his art education from Khairagarh in Chhattisgarh, Pachpute went to the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda for his master’s. The catalyst came in 2010 when he turned his gaze towards his community and the issues related to abandoned mines.
Pachpute’s solo work in 2012, titled ‘Canary in a Coalmine’, was shaped by stories of mining mishaps. “I started listening to stories and seeing how farmers were selling their land and getting into mining. Farming became the initial content, then mining. The protests have been my concern since the beginning,” says Pachpute.
In 2016, he held another solo show, titled ‘No, it Wasn’t the Locust Cloud’, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, examining the effects of mining on humans and the natural landscape. “There are a lot of alternative spaces growing in India. Places where you can express yourself. A new language is in the offing,” he says.
“Dalit art and public concerns get hardly any representation in mainstream art” Sudharak Olwe