Objects of Defiance

OVER THE PAST decade, Indian cinema has radiated a growing awareness of Dalit consciousness, with the likes of Pa Ranjith, Nagraj Manjule, Leena Manimekalai, Mari Selvaraj and Vetrimaaran setting the big screen ablaze with their anti-caste films in trademark Ambedkar blue. Now, Dalit voices in visual art are having their own moment. The last few years have witnessed the rise of a new generation of Dalit artists who are, in the words of well-known Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde, “establishing their presence as equals.” Through their subversive works, these young artists are challenging the status quo and holding a mirror to the brutality of India’s caste system.

Jithinlal NR is one such artist who believes that there’s more to art than just beauty and aesthetic appeal. Hailing from Kerala’s Pulayar caste, Jithinlal is known for spotlighting the stories and struggles of his community, often using his art as a vehicle for social justice. His work probes the historical injustices faced by the Pulayar community, particularly focussing on the fraught legacy of slavery under the exploitative feudal system. Jithinlal’s Nose Snatcher and Other Curious Tales is a playful, yet provocative work that draws on the folktales, oral histories and local traditions of his childhood. The eponymous painting in this series recounts the tale of a nose snatcher, who is born with a deformed nose and desperately wants to get married. One day, he kidnaps an upper-caste woman and drags her away in a sack. But in a comic book twist, when he reaches his village and finally opens the sack, he finds that his beautiful bride-to-be has been replaced by a dog, which bites off his nose in retribution. Perhaps, a much more trenchant offering from this series depicts a broken image of Lord Buddha. For Jithinlal, both Buddha and Babasaheb Ambedkar who publicly adopted Buddhism along with his followers, serve as a source of inspiration. Explaining the symbolism behind the ‘broken Buddha’, the artist says, “This painting was inspired by a Buddha statue in Alappuzha called Karumadikuttan. It refers to the idea of Ambedkar choosing Buddhism as a religion (he reconstituted it as ‘Navayana Buddhism’) and the word ‘Dalit’ which contains an element of the broken.”

Jithinlal (35) was raised in a railway colony in Palakkad where his father worked as an engineer. The discrimination he faced was more psychological than literal. “Fight for confidence or for an understanding of where you fit in,” he says. Luckily, there was an uncle in his family who was an artist. “His favourite subjects were bare-bodied figures who wore white ‘thorthu’ and laboured in the fields in dream-like landscapes, often surrounded by strange creatures and animals. My uncle’s art was a commentary on Kerala’s history of chattel slavery where slaves were sold with the land and made to suffer on the fields for the rest of their lives. The land around us was actually a witness to the slave history of the subalterns,” says Jithinlal.

Since embarking on his artistic career in 2017, Jithinlal has discovered a kindred spirit in African American Black literature and art. His works that capture the anarchic wit that one finds in illustrations and cartoons has been exhibited at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai in 2019 and Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022.

Despite being handcuffed by a difficult history and shaped by complex social and political forces, Dalit artists — long underrepresented in the art world — are pushing their creativity in starkly different ways. For one, contemporary Dalit art appears to be evolving beyond the narratives of ‘reclaiming of roots’ and ‘assertion of identity’. Today, many artists are expressing resistance through everyday motifs like food, and ritualistic materials like gold and tar which were once markers of their heritage and background while others are turning the oppression and stigma historically associated with their family profession into stories of creativity and empowerment, with dignity, courage and at times, a touch of humour.

Like Jithinlal NR, Rajyashri Goody (34) also confronts historical marginalisation and caste-based violence against Dalits, but she uses her incisive work to draw attention towards the food politics of her community. Food as a motif has always been present in her work. Goody says, “My focus is not necessarily on what constitutes Dalit ‘cuisine’ and I am not here to offer you food on a plate. I am more interested in how literature, writing, poetry and recipes have the possibility to carry emotions and memories of people who have historically been denied access to their basic right to education, food and even water,” she says.

Goody has created a number of what she calls ‘recipe booklets,’ in which she extracts references to food items from Dalit literature (for example, autobiographies of Dalit writers like Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Laxman Gaikwad’s Uchalya) and reframes them into second-person narratives. She also cites Shahu Patole’s Anna He Apurnabrahma and the academic paper ‘Isn’t This Plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food’ by the Gender Studies Class of 2009 at Pune University for shaping her worldview — or rather, her foodview.

BORN INTO A half-Dalit, half-English family in Pune, Goody is largely self-trained and combines materials like ceramics, paper pulp, text, drawing, sculpture and performance art to explore her Ambedkarite roots. One of her works saw her transform the Manusmriti text into a palimpsest made of paper pulp, both defying its authority and erasing the traces of the original writing. The act was a nod to Ambedkar’s public burning of the Manusmriti in 1927 as a symbol of protest against untouchability. At Galleryske in New Delhi in 2022, she installed 10,000 stupas as part of a work titled Is the Water Chavdar? Chavdar in Marathi means tasty and this installation paid homage to the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927, a landmark event in which thousands of Dalits, emboldened by their leader Babasaheb Ambedkar, challenged centuries of injustices by making their way to the Chavdar lake and drinking water from it. “If you turn the stupa upside down you will see it that resembles a bowl — is it a bowl for food, is it a begging bowl? You can interpret it the way you want. For me, it is a recognition and rejection of the past, and an embrace of a casteless future,” says Goody, echoing Ambedkar’s utopia for an enlightened India — or ‘Prabuddha Bharat,’ as the architect of Indian Constitution had called it.

If Goody employs food to trace Dalit history and her own place in it, the Hyderabad-based Madhukar Mucharla (28) works primarily with leather because of its connection to his caste identity and cultural history. Belonging to the Madiga caste, traditionally associated with leatherwork, he says, “I grew up observing the craft’s process — making footwear, drums, and other items.” Leather has been historically linked with impurity and untouchability in India and by opting for this material, Mucharla wants to address themes such as labour, resilience, human rights and the social implications of professions like tanning, drum-making, shoe-making and other forms of leatherwork that the Madiga caste was subjected to. He’s also interested in showcasing leather’s inherent beauty and potential for resistance. “In my work, leather becomes a voice for Dalit identity, history, and mythology, embodying the often-neglected stories of land, labour and survival,” he declares.

Unlike Rajyashri Goody and Jithinlal NR, the Delhi-born, Sydney-based artist Kirtika Kain remembers facing social discrimination in Australia from other Indians in the diaspora. “When we first moved to Australia, we did our best to hide our caste identity. After other Indians found out, their behaviour towards us changed completely as if we were no longer worth associating with. For a long time, I thought it was normal to hide one’s caste identity, I didn’t recognise the toll it takes. I think my art is where I make sense of such experiences and the more that I learn from others. How else would I process the horror, sadness and grief that comes from learning about caste?” she says, over email. Like an alchemist, Kain (34) uses unconventional materials such as sindoor, human hair, charcoal, gold and tar, to underscore the caste-related, ritualistic significance of these items. For example, Kain’s monumental work The Illusion of Your History (2023), recently showcased at the 24th Biennale of Sydney, was created using gold pigments among other materials to spark a dialogue between heritage, memory and identity. “My materials are very elemental. Gold is so valuable, it has been embedded in the earth for centuries and never changes, it is resilient and precious. It is like the Dalit body, like our stories and history. I also select materials that are considered sacred, those considered pure and impure, what sort of rituals and materials we have historically had access to and what has been denied. For instance, tar has been used in ceremony, ritual or punishment throughout human history,” says Kain.

CLEARLY, A CHANGE is slowly underway, with galleries and art institutions championing politically charged works created by Dalit artists. For example, Anant Art from Noida recently hosted an exhibition celebrating Vikrant Bhise’s disruptive body of work. Bhise’s Sense and Sensibilities: A Reflective Realisation was a mainstream example where an artist from the much-ostracised Mahar community was offered a major solo show to display his potent works.

Speaking to the young Dalit artists, one can’t help but ask, “Has the art world grown more receptive to your art?” “The art world didn’t make us,” Jithinlal demurs. Kirtika Kain, on the other hand, hopes that more Dalit artists will come forward and amp up the momentum. “I think the more we create, the more we shine light on how many multitudes and voices and traditions there are, the richer this space will be. That being Dalit means so many things, there is not one singular way.” She also insists that it’s about time the world celebrates Dalit accomplishments rather than perpetuating the old bogey of victimhood. “I wish that Dalit artists have the luxury of not only making work about being Dalit one day,” she says. “That it’s not something that defines us, that the onus is on others to educate themselves, to create structures and safety for us to exhibit so we don’t have to answer and explain caste. That we don’t have to relive it constantly.”

art and cultureArtistic creationsMadhukar MucharlapaintingsRajyashri GoodyWeb Exclusive