Ananya Sikand: Today we’re joined by aqui Thami, whose talk will reflect on building cultural and community infrastructures from the margins through Sister Library, Bombay Underground, Bombay Zine Fest, Dharavi Art Room, and her wider artistic practice. Speaking from her position as an adivasi person,¹ aqui traces how art becomes a site of healing, memory, and collective survival amid the ongoing realities of caste violence, racism, displacement, and erasure. Moving between personal narrative, grassroots organizing, publishing, pedagogy, and studio practice, she considers what it means to create space outside institutional permission and what communities teach us about care, authorship, and belonging. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, her presentation is an invitation to think together about culture as something lived, shared, and continually rebuilt through relationships. 

aqui Thami: I want to start with this image of our kids with parallel universe (2023), a work we made for Chemould Prescott Road, one of the oldest private art galleries in India (fig. 1). It was a big shift for us—from the street into a gallery. It was wonderful that they made space for us to explore what a parallel practice and universe look like.

I also want to say sewa to you all. This is how we, in Thangmi Kham, the language of my people, say “I see you.” I want to acknowledge my ancestors, elders, and spirit guides; the sky above me, the land below me, and the air and water surrounding me; and you, for bringing us together to witness each other even though we are in faraway continents. 

I am aqui; Thami is my people. Here are images of the lands that I come from and that made me (figs. 2a–b). These lands are governed by caste, specifically the Nepali-speaking caste Hindu community. The hierarchy of caste ensures that Indigenous peoples are cast outside of it. A marker of our community is our language, which stems from other Indigenous languages rather than from Indo-Aryan ones. According to Hindu scripture, Indigenous peoples are without souls; therefore, we are outside the philosophy of karma whereby we can be reborn into a higher caste order in our next life depending on the karma of this life. Thus, we are completely absolved of the possibility of being reborn—manifested in the way that we’ve been treated for many decades—subject to genocidal and ongoing violence. We are among the world’s most endangered communities, consisting of approximately 30,000 people with 10,000 speakers of our language. 

My mountains are also consumed by tea plantations. The British started the one I am from. My great-grandparents were sold into the plantation as slaves, and my family is still there—they’re survivors of plantation and militarized violence. Because my parents are land defenders, I was able to leave my home, land, and community at age 15. I grew up in the mainland and had to parent myself at a precarious age, as a young teenager, especially because native children are among the most trafficked communities in South Asia. If you go to any red-light district, for example, Kamathipura in Bombay, you will see Indigenous and Dalit girls and women—our bodies are treated with disgust in the mainland. Having survived all of this, it makes sense why I wanted to create safer spaces.

People come to Bombay because it is the so-called city of dreams. But there’s also a huge gap between how we experience our city and how the city is outside of us. As artists, we are allowed to be in a space where we are outsiders and to live in the city of outsiders. Bombay Underground began as a refusal of and resistance to this separation. Because we were made to feel like we shouldn’t exist in certain spaces, we started creating others where we could gather, think, talk, be together, and collectively care for each other as well as the city. 

Bombay Underground is a space of collaboration with grassroots movements, such as Indigenous resistance movements, which often have no funding so there’s no communication of what’s really happening in the Northeast or in other regions—or even in other parts of Bombay. We collaborate to make posters and zines, to collect funds, and we take to the streets. We work alongside bookwallas, the booksellers of Bombay, because as the city has shifted and changed, it’s become more pristine and untouched by people like us. Bombay fed me culturally; it gave me the possibility to dream, to read and learn, and this happened in the street with the bookwallas, who recommended books to me. Though they may not have formal educations, they know their books. They used to say, “If you liked bell hooks, then you’ll also like Patricia Hill Collins.” That is how I learned. To see these booksellers thrown off the streets and replaced by big fancy bookshops is very sad. So we bought books from them to create neighborhood reading spaces, and this is how Sister Library came to be. 

Through Bombay Underground, we started Bombay Zine Fest (fig. 4), now in its 10th year. Zine Fest is completely independent, without external funding or advertisement. Everything is from the ground up and via word of mouth. We’ve been very blessed to have thousands of people coming to Zine Fest and we [my collaborator Himanshu S and I] always find places to host us. Himanshu and I have built a lot of things together because we come from precarious backgrounds and don’t have the same relationship to art practice, fame, and wealth that others we know do. 

Here’s a picture taken outside the Dharavi Art Room, where kids document lived experiences and histories of migration of women in Dharavi (fig. 5). Storytelling about family typically happens from the male perspective, but women live very different lives. So far, we’ve worked with over 10,000 children, and the Art Room is a space that is loved by the community. Early on, we used to move from one space to another, from the Maharashtra Nature Park to the bus stop, but as our kids got older, we noticed that the girls were uncomfortable in such public spaces. Our current space, where we’ve been for the past 10–12 years, was offered to us by one of the parents. It’s just above their house. Over the years, we’ve seen our kids growing from little babies, whose elder siblings would carry them to the Art Room, to finishing university—we’ve been with them throughout. 

Being in Dharavi, and coming from precarious backgrounds ourselves, we understand what it means when people from outside come to spaces like this, and how uncomfortable it can be. We specifically created the Art Room for the women and children of the community, because they lack spaces where they can go and do whatever they want. The Art Room is a safe space—the kids know they won’t be abused here. We have a library and art classes, but more importantly, it’s a space of possibility where they can transcend and dream beyond whatever they’re facing. We go on field trips to museums, etc., to show the kids that Bombay is also their city. Something you notice in Dharavi is that locals never leave—or if they do, it’s only to go to their villages.

Over the years, the Art Room has become an artist-run center and community archive. Because Dharavi is in the center of the city, it’s prized real estate, and there’s a lot of changing hands in who the owner or so-called owner of the land is. People are always living in insecurity or being displaced. Our community in Dharavi, our kids, are told that they “live like cockroaches so it’s better to move far away.” These are the kinds of things they are told as their houses are being demolished. When they grow up and can return to Dharavi, they can look back at the images they were working on, at the exhibitions they made in the space, and remember what it meant to them and what Dharavi looked like to them, as opposed to what they are told it is. The Art Room has also become a space where people with differing ideologies and religious beliefs can come together to see each other as collaborators and friends rather than blindly participating in acting out against each other. 

Here’s an image of women with whom we did a photography project (fig. 6). They wanted to hold cameras and explore their neighborhood, which resulted in a series of exhibitions and a publication. It was the first time they came together in a space that many of them had never had access to—they hadn’t been to school and/or they were married off at a young age. The Art Room gave them a space where they could sit together and understand what it means to exist in community—which they’ve never had the luxury to do before. B-Town Kids was another program we initiated that looked at storytelling as a means of reclaiming history from the ground up (fig. 7). It was a photographic exchange project for kids age nine and under in Basel [Switzerland] and Bombay. As an artist, I’ve always had the possibility to really understand others and break oppressive structures using the tactic of togetherness, and that’s central to the work we do. 

Turning back to the bookwallas and the discrepancy I was seeing between knowledge to be shared versus knowledge for specific groups of people, I realized that the containing of knowledge is by design. Sister Library (figs. 8a–c) started with a practice of reading women exclusively, and later expanded into a full-fledged library. It was not easy to build Sister Library—I experienced resistance from feminists, communists, Marxists, and leftists as well as the expected resistance from the right. Sister Library allows for the breaking down of hierarchies, borders, and other palpable lines of difference. Many women like me live their lives in Bombay as completely invisible. It’s almost like we don’t exist. But in Sister Library, we sit with each other, listen to each other’s voices, and always make space for those who don’t usually get to talk about their experiences. 

Sister Library also has a press—we are the only risograph press in South Asia—and we make zines and newspapers.² At the moment, these are on hold because of funding. Our money goes to whatever needs the most attention, and presently, that’s the Walking with Savitri Mai Fellowship, which supports young girls pursuing education. This Fellowship honors India’s first female teacher, Savitri Mai, who started the first school for girls. Savitri Mai walked from her house to her school every day, carrying a spare sari, because people would pelt her with stones and rubbish. When she was asked how she felt about this, she said, “I feel like they’re throwing flowers at my feet, because I know what my goal is.” In celebration of her work, our Fellowship supports young girls from school through university. We’ve now had five girls finish university, and it gives me great pleasure to share this because I used to be one of them, someone who came from a family in which nobody had ever gone to university before.

We also have other Library events, such as our annual feminist school, Sister Residency, which we began last year and through which we’ve hosted two Indigenous women artists, and Sister Radio, etc. We also offer crisis support—often, because of militarized violence or the climate crisis, the people who suffer the most are Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous women—so we send support immediately. Sister Library is not just a place where we sit together and read; we center pedagogy and community.

From here on, I’ll share works I’ve made and projects I’ve been involved in outside of Bombay Underground, Dharavi Art Room, and Sister Library. Recently, I co-curated a museum exhibition on zines and comics.³ It was the first time that this museum had allowed art objects to be held and touched. We had over 1,000 zines, and this particular section had zines, posters, and films made by women (fig. 9a). It was a celebration of the underground. I also made Chapa Ghar (2023, 2025; fig. 9b), in homage to a form of the press—to the xerox shops that you see all over Bombay, where I learned printing and printmaking. It is so freeing to be allowed to use a machine to make that I wanted everyone to experience it. But it also makes you rethink what making is, because when you look at self-publishing and zine-making in the Subcontinent, the practice is very different from in the West. In South Asia, you have to collaborate with the man, usually Dalit or Indigenous, who works in a xerox shop and who might be a collaborator in solidarity with the movement because he’s making space for such work.

For the last two years, I’ve been working outside India because of some violence that I suffered that made it impossible for me to work in Bombay. Pā āsha (“to knit” or mending a broken stitch in Thangmi Kham, 2023; fig. 10a), is a ceremony that I did in Berlin about how all of us are woven into each other’s lives, and how if one stitch comes undone, everything unravels. Ceremony to bear witness (2020; fig. 10b) is from a ceremony that I did for a gallery in Delhi, where I was a witness—recalling, remembering, and honoring people who were killed by the military every single day for a period of three months.

Mountain Girls (2023; fig. 10c) is a shrine to Heidi. When I was working in Switzerland, I saw Heidi—the book and character—everywhere; she is like a mascot. I related to her because I was also a girl taken away from my mountains, so I created this work as there’s much curiosity about shamanism, and I invited people to make their own altars.

In Breathing with my baje (2024; fig. 10d), I was thinking about the violence of not being allowed to feel fear as expressed in the militarism of the Gorkha Regiment—in which my grandfather was enlisted and from which he never returned. Each prayer flag was a screen print of a Gorkha Certificate, which is necessary to enlist in the military. These government certificates are only issued to the Kirati peoples as it is thought that Kirati men feel no fear. I immersed the prayer flags in a mix of hormones that our bodies produce when we feel fear, and then I put them up so that when the wind touched them, that fear was dispersed. Usually these flags disperse prayers, but I wanted to bring out the fears of so many young men whose lives were lost in wars designed by the West. Early on, I looked through archival images in museums to find pictures of my grandfather, but all I found were war images. I wanted to take away the affects of war from these photographs, so I replaced weapons with everyday objects (fig. 10e) so that all of the images felt like I was looking at my grandfather. I just wanted to allow these men normalcy for a brief moment.

i see you (2024; fig. 11) is a body of work that I did with a camera from the 1940s. Indigenous women, especially those from plantations, are among the most photographed people in the world. My grandmothers were photographed a lot because it was thought that we would become extinct, so I wanted to explore these archives and play with the idea of what it means to be frozen in the past, because there’s always the expectation that we are exactly as we have been archived to be. 

AS: As you’ve been speaking, your words “If you’re not working with the community, and you’re not sharing resources, then what are you doing?” have been ringing in my head. Thinking through these words, your presentation, Burning Tite-Pati,⁴ and Esther Syiem’s words—specifically, “There was always a sense of something that had to be done for the community in terms of retrieval, recordings, anything that would make these stories come alive”⁵—has made me wonder about your relationship with orality. Can you reflect on this?

aT: Orality is very important to me. I didn’t realize how much I longed for it until I could create it. I’ve always felt the way education and learning are designed outside of Indigenous cultures is not working because one learns in isolation—with a book in a library where you have to be quiet and can’t speak to anyone or express what you’re learning. Whereas, for us, we come together, learn together, tell stories, and learn through song and ceremony. I did both, because I was always both in my community and outside of it, and it was difficult to just be by myself.

At Sister Library, we have a reading circle, which is an exercise in listening and in reading. So, as part of it, someone holds a text and reads it as much as they want and then they pass it along to somebody else, who carries on the reading. And this is important because it allows us to make space within ourselves to hold other people’s voices, and every time someone is speaking or reading, you can feel how a certain thing is being conveyed by their intonation and by how they hold each word in their mouth. And it’s such a special feeling; it’s truly a gift to experience that. You can see how their bodies change and soften, and how their faces change and shift while they are understanding a certain thing, while they are reading. And as you witness this, something also happens to you, and that kind of learning is so intimate and valuable, yet it is typically not allowed. Somewhere along the way, I think the non-Indigenous world gets disconnected. When you’re kids, you do connect, but as you grow up, you become more isolated. It’s been a gift for me to be able to bring this practice back into my life and my community. It also makes you want to do better without being forced to do so. You sit together, think together, and when you’re not able to think and process a certain thing, you bring it to the community, and everyone helps you think it through. I think that’s beautiful. 

This is also how Sister Radio was born. It began during COVID as a practice of care calls between Indigenous sisters everywhere, because we were so isolated; and though we were consuming a lot of media, we were not seeing ourselves in it as Indigenous peoples—especially as, for example, those from my community don’t necessarily believe in medical institutions. It was a time of fear for us, not just fearing for our lives, but a different kind of fear. And so, it started as care calls, and then it became a space where we’d share so much. I thought that it was important for the rest of the world to listen to these conversations. Because I feel like we have a sense of responsibility to share what we’ve not been allowed to share. So, I hold orality in very high regard.⁶

AS: I’m thinking about a word that you’ve used—“tactic”—and of orality as a tactic; your pink posters that you posted across Bombay as another tactic; and do-it-yourself (DIY), doing-it-together (DDT), and don’t-do-it (DDI) as still other tactics in your practice. Could you speak on this?

aT: These are philosophies and life practices that have sustained me not just in art, because for me, art and life are intermingled. It’s a very Indigenous way of doing, where things can’t be separated from one another. A lot of my work is just me doing it myself and learning while doing. But there is something to be said about DDT, which I practice a lot. And then there’s the practice of DDI, and so of being very mindful of not participating in certain things. I get a lot of criticism for it at times, but I’m also flexible, I allow myself to understand things, and I’m always open to conversation. DIY, DIT and DDI are practices that I live with and by, and they’ve held me.

Lucy Gallun: Could you talk more about the works from your own art practice that exist more as individual pieces and how you have created space to weave that practice into the work that you’re doing in Bombay and with community in a particular location?

aT: I love making work in Bombay because everything is so instant, and everything is made there, and I know everyone. It’s been my home outside of my lands, and I basically grew up there, but it’s also a city that expels people. It’s like a whirlwind, and you have to be inside of it and move at its pace or you get thrown out of it. And being an outsider, an Indigenous person from the Northeast, a person of the borderlands—therefore not Indian—there’s a lot of tension there. 

I don’t get any art grants from India, and everything that I have gotten to practice my work, or to be able to think and learn different things, was allowed by going outside. I was well received outside, and I had the space to speak freely and was not canceled or threatened. There was space [for me]. I think the world at large is now asking questions and seeking answers. They’re looking at Indigenous ways of living and practicing, and so there’s a lot of pressure being put on Indigenous peoples, Indigenous thinkers, Indigenous culture workers. But at the same time, it’s also, for the first time in many years, that we’ve had the space to look at each other, collaborate with each other, reflect with each other. So, I’ve had the privilege of working with Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island, from the Sami, and from the Arctic as well as with Indigenous peoples in Australia and Africa. It’s an exciting time for me, even if art institutions have no space or very limited space for us. 

There is an alternate space, an underground even. Things are happening. And those sparks are important not just for us, but also for the larger art ecosystem, because it’s not just what happens within bigger museums and institutions that is culture, it’s also what’s happening outside of them, which is more exciting to me. It has to be both. And this is not to say that it’s not hard. It’s immensely hard for me to navigate white Western spaces, because I don’t have any blood memory of these realities or of the community in such spaces, where disposability is valued, where you move from one thing to another in a very fast-paced way. Or rather, I am part of a community of a different kind, one in which we hold on to everything and rebuild every broken thing so that we don’t have to dispose of it. So, these are challenges that I’m now navigating by myself in the Western world, which is difficult, but here we are.

LG: Another aspect is the work you’re doing as a founder and organizer of various initiatives and spaces, and the ongoing community activities that are part of them. How have you balanced or given space to your own work alongside these efforts—or how do you think about the relationship between your art practice and your work?

aT: All of these things are a different kind of learning for me, because I used to be very involved. I’d go to Dharavi every day, but now I have some distance, and I think it’s because now I can see that a lot of children have grown up, and some have graduated from the J. J. School of Art and now are teachers at different schools. And I also want to see how it organically shapes into being what is required in the city. And it’s interesting for me because it’s a space that came out of my heart because I desired a space like this and then we built it together; but it’s also a space of the city that the city has embraced, and it flows and is shaped into what the city requires. I talk to the kids every day. We have a lot of video calls, but it’s also about shared responsibility, and we function using a very organic model that comes from love and responsibility, because we don’t have any paid staff. Everyone does the work because they really love the space and they want the space to exist and function.

Elena Pérez-Ardá López: I want to know more about the relationship between you and the big, powerful institutions with which you’ve worked. How was the dialogue and process of working with them? What was the reception?

aT: It’s always a challenge working with institutions. Typically when I work with institutions in India, it is through people that I trust like Nancy Adajania, who for many years has supported my practice.⁷Whereas with the please touch gently exhibition in Delhi, which is not my city, I didn’t really know anyone. When they approached me three years ago, I told them that if I work on a show on zines, then I’m not going to do it without Himanshu, and they made space for that. We also had another friend, Bharath Murthy, a comic maker who runs an indie comic fest, come on board. But it was really hard to put up the show. We wanted people to touch and feel the zines. We didn’t want them behind vitrines. We wanted the zines to be zines rather than art objects. So that was a big challenge. But a lot of people were introduced to zine-making and able to use the copier. People were able to read the words of Dalit activists and Indigenous artists and watch videos, and so it paid off. 

AS: Could you talk a little bit more about funding and how you make all these incredible things happen for the communities with whom you’re building these spaces?

aT: Funding is always a problem for us because I don’t come from money—and I don’t know anyone who comes from money. My community is from Dharavi, so you can imagine when we need money, we’re just like, oh, what do we do now? I’m not very good at going to parties and networking, so I work really hard and put everything that I make back into the community, because where else will I spend my money? All of my travels are only possible because someone else is buying me a ticket to work on an exhibition or to participate in a residency, etc. Friends also support us. For example, someone says it’s my birthday, and I want to give x amount, and that might take care of the rent for the library, etc. 

Recently we held the exhibition fundraiser called Are You My Sister?, and wonderful artist giants like Dayanita Singh and Gauri Gill gave us their works. Up-and-coming artists—contemporaries of mine such as Rajyashri Goody—also gave us work, and we sold some of it. We’re looking at hosting another edition because it was both a provocation and an invitation—because, yes, you are making feminist work, but are you my sister? All the money from such initiatives goes back to the community because nobody is paid and everyone is a volunteer; and after we subtract the monies required for framing, printing, and other exhibition-related costs, the remaining amount goes back into running and sustaining our spaces. 

We always have food and drink, sanitary products in the toilets, because a lot of women facing different precarities come to these spaces, and we don’t want them to have to voice what they might need. We never know if someone has not had a meal in many days, and we want the space to be as welcoming as possible for as many people as possible. We’re also always looking for funding for the school and college program, because as you can imagine, sending kids to college is hard. Our kids go to school and university in the morning, and then they come to the library and use it as a buffer space before they go back to Dharavi. The library is the middle space between their neighborhood and the world outside. So they’re usually chilling in the library—they read, they watch a film, there’s a reading circle or a potluck. We have all sorts of events happening in the library. And then when other people come to the library and talk to them, and they can tell that they are Dalit or oppressed people, they don’t expect them to say, oh yeah, I go to Sophia College [for Women] or SNDT [Women’s University] or Wilson [College]. They’re always taken aback, which gives me so much joy. 

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024–2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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Ananya Sikand: Today we’re joined by Rajyashri Goody, who will present her artistic practice and long-term research on the interweaving of Dalit food culture and Dalit literature adapting recipes from autobiographies. These recipes serve as the backbone of her work across ceramics, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance.

Food is an important site of memory, resistance, resilience as well as a form of embodied politics, because among the many reasons that the Hindu caste system has such deep roots is that rules related to adhering to caste have been applied to basic activities necessary for survival such as eating and drinking, which are bound up in casteist notions of purity and pollution. Dalit people have been treated as untouchable and impure for thousands of years, and many are still denied basic rights to food, water, land, and literacy. Rajyashri’s work highlights how Dalit identity is being reclaimed and reinvented through acts of everyday resistance, especially relevant in the present moment given the rise of Hindu nationalism, which promotes the upholding of casteist values, vigilantism, and violence against minority communities in the name of religion.

Rajyashri’s work is presently part of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, a program developed by the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale.

Rajyashri Goody: I want to begin with the recipes (fig. 1) that I work on, an ongoing practice since 2017. I started my research in 2016, when many parts of India were seeing a lot of lynchings based on the suspicion of eating or transporting beef. At the time, Muslim and Dalit people were targeted, accused of eating beef, and then publicly attacked. Simultaneously, there were many protests. One, in particular, led by lower-caste people in a village called Una in Gujarat centered on their refusal to pick up dead animals, a job forced on this community because of their lower-caste and “untouchable” status. Across India, Dalit people are forced to take on the role of sanitation workers, which includes disposing of carcasses of dead animals. Dead cows have been a major source of food for the community because, historically, Dalit people haven’t been allowed to own land, much less grow their own crops, etc. Today, many Dalit people are resisting these jobs, but it’s very difficult because no other caste wants to undertake them. Dalit people, even if they’re going to school, etc., are forced by the system to take on such labor. I read, about 10 years ago, that all the sanitation workers in India are Dalit and that no other communities are involved in this work. As all of this was happening in 2016, I started thinking about my own food practices—given my mother belongs to this community—and asked myself: What do we eat as Dalit people?

My family doesn’t eat beef because we became Buddhist in the 1950s, like a lot of Dalit people. In embracing Buddhism, we gave up eating meat in general—and especially beef because of its connection with sanitation work. But I asked myself, What if I’m eating vegetarian food? Does that then become Dalit? What about if I share food with an upper-caste person? What about the food makes it upper-caste or makes it polluted—as is thought to happen if a Dalit person shares food with an upper-caste person. 

I’ll read a recipe from my writing called “Well Water”

Although the well
belongs to the Patils,
the spades and the shovels, 
the sweat,
the explosives 
of the Mahars 
were used to dig and build it.
You are the reason 
for water in the well.

But now you are not allowed 
to draw water from it.
If you are walking by
feeling tired and thirsty
go down the well 
to drink water
while your friends keep watch.
Make sure no one sees you.
Otherwise you might be badly beaten.

Quench your thirst 
furtively.

Touch the water.
Gather it in your cupped palms.
Ripples might form on the surface.
The water inside the earth might shake.

This writing is adapted from Dalit literature—“Well Water” from Sharankumar Limbale’s writing and “Chaanya” (fig. 2) from Daya Pawar’s. Whenever I read a Dalit autobiography, I mark where the writer mentions food or water. Then I switch it from the first person to the second to make it read like a recipe—but often one that’s impossible to actually follow. I started this exercise for a number of reasons, including the fact that I couldn’t find any Dalit cookbooks—other than Shahu Patole’s Anna He Apoorna Brahme, which had just come out in Marathi.¹ And there haven’t been any other Dalit cookbooks since people from the community haven’t been allowed to read and write. So how does one write a cookbook in the first place? A cookbook assumes many things, including access to a functioning kitchen, utensils, and ingredients, all of which is related to socioeconomic status. But there’s also an assumption of pride in one’s food, which with Dalit people is difficult because many of our food practices stem from being forced to eat leftovers, to beg, to make do with nothing—but not as a form of resistance. It’s not something that parents want to pass on to their kids. So how does one remember and gather these recipes, and should one even bother? That’s when I realized that it’s not necessary to have a Dalit cookbook in a conventional sense. But Dalit literature, a massive genre given it’s only 50–60 years old, is filled with writing about food and water. Dalit oppression is deeply connected to the stomach, so this exercise has allowed me to understand the similarities in Dalit food across India, but also the differences—and how time works in strange ways. For example, I’d be reading something written 40 years ago and something else written five years ago, and it could be the exact same story. This continues, and I’ve made 23 cookbooks so far. 

These recipes allowed me to build on other works, such as those shown in the exhibition Eat with Great Delight (2018) at the Clark House Initiative (fig. 3).² This series came from my family photos, specifically from examining them as records of where traces of food existed. My family has had access to a camera since the late 1980s, when my mother married my father, a white man who came to India to do social work, and he had a camera. Not only did he take photographs, but also other family members began to use the camera. It was interesting to see the differences between the photos that he took for work and our own family photographs of celebrations. I showed 18 family photos as they were, alongside eight recipe books. Photography, just like writing, is a tool for access. What do you do with a camera? What do you photograph? What do you do with a pen? What do you write about?

I also started working with ceramics in 2017, which came about because I didn’t want to actually cook the food—because it’s not about that. I’m not interested in making a Dalit dish, and people were approaching me and saying, “Can you cook something?” They didn’t get it. But I did want to make something with my hands. Because the reading and writing were getting to be too much, I felt like I needed to process it in a different medium. I started with bhakris (fig. 4a), rotis made out of millet, because some Dalit writers write beautifully about it, comparing it to the sun and moon, to the mother and father, to heaven and hell. I wanted to create the bhakri in a material that would last. Then I went on to make larger installations that reimagine many of the recipes (fig. 4b)—especially if they center foraging or hunting or stealing food—and processed these stories while making the ceramics. Some pieces look like food items, but there are many that don’t. Some look rotten; some look like fungus. Unlike food, or perhaps like Dalit food, they are inedible. 

Then I made Is the water chavdar? between 2020 and 2022. It’s an installation of 10,000 stupas, which look like inverted bowls, about the Chavdar water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra. In 1927, our leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar walked to this tank with 10,000 people to drink water from it. They were in Mahad for a conference on Dalit rights, and even though the government had made it legal for Dalit people to access public water bodies, they were still carrying their own water. So they drank from this tank to make a point. It’s one of the most important Dalit events in history, and yet, it’s forgotten by mainstream upper-caste India. It’s not really mentioned in history textbooks, but Dalit people grow up learning about it and going to Mahad. I wanted to make a memorial or homage to the people who went there. Also, this event was not photographed. Even though cameras were accessible in 1927, it was not considered important enough to record.

I made 10,000 stupas and arranged them to look like a square water tank (fig. 5). I surrounded them with prints of images I sourced from Google Maps. Even though images of the 1927 event don’t exist in any formal archives, Google Maps has thousands of images of Dalit people visiting the location since then. I chose 27 and printed them on transparent sheets and then pressed them into printmaking paper, which gives them a wet-looking quality (figs. 6a–c). This process allowed me to protect the identity of the people in the pictures, but at the same time, they stand in for people from the past or the future. I wanted their faces in the prints because I think people taking photographs of themselves at the water tank is special. It also allowed me to speak about the water without displaying any actual water. These images surround the installation, and then in the middle of it, a beam in the center of the space is covered with paper pulp I made from the Manusmriti, which Ambedkar burned in Mahad about six months after the original event. He burned the book, saying that it must be destroyed, but at the same time, he knew that it was more important for the ghost of Manu, which still lives on in people’s minds, to be burned and defeated.³

In Deeksha (figs. 7a–b), I printed photographs that I had taken of my family celebrating the anniversary of our conversion to Buddhism. In 1956, about six months before Ambedkar died, he converted to Buddhism. He said, “I may have been born a Hindu, but I won’t die one,” and along with him, many Dalit people converted. Our form of Buddhism is quite different as there’s no god, no worshipping of any Hindu deities, no superstition. Gods have controlled Dalit people for thousands of years. It is said that you’re born in this community because you were bad in your past life, so there’s no mobility outside of it unless your god decides differently. With Buddhism, you’re taught to learn to build dignity from within yourself. Now there’s a big resurgence of Buddhism, but if I tell people I’m Buddhist, they’ll know I’m Dalit. I don’t know how much of a difference it makes to others, but at least for us, for our own dignity, it does matter.

For Did you open the door, or did you find it open for you? (2023), I built a stupa with paper pulp from newsprint (figs. 8a–b). Ambedkar started many newspapers in his lifetime, so I was thinking about literacy, access to it, and the possibilities of it. The stupa has become quite an important architectural form. Whereas within Hinduism, we wouldn’t be allowed inside a temple, this conversion has allowed us to access and embrace ancient Buddhist sites that have been in the vicinity for thousands of years as a way of reconnecting—or connecting in the first place—with our new religion. We’re also building new stupas that are hollow inside to serve as meeting places. In Bombay and Pune, you often see white domed structures that are Dalit Buddhists spaces, and they’re occupying more and more parts of India. I built this stupa thinking about the past and the future. 

I started Give up your old habits in 2023 based on the image of Ambedkar (figs. 9a–b), and now I’m building a larger body of work around it. Ambedkar’s image is everywhere, across India—a man in a suit, tie, and glasses, often holding a book—and it’s an interesting relationship that we’ve built with it, because it’s one of pride. Yet it’s also a marker of where Dalit people live, which allows others to make judgments and assessments. In this body of work, I’m printing the same image of Ambedkar on porcelain, but as a silkscreen print, so when it’s on the wet clay, it becomes something else. Each one looks quite different but they all have hints of Ambedkar in them. I’m repeating them in the hundreds and thousands, so let’s see what happens with that.

I’ve also been doing quite a few performances over the past years. Turn Your Bowl into a Stupa (figs. 10a–d) was in Bukhara. Essentially, it was 1,000 bowls that we turned upside down. I feel like this is a strong metaphor for Dalit Buddhism. There is a Tibetan story about when the Buddha was dying . . . His disciples asked him, “What do we do with your body when you die?” And he took his begging bowl and turned it upside down. Though nobody knows if it’s historically true and given Dalit people’s association with begging, with this embrace of a new religion—we’ve also taken the begging bowl and turned it upside down and said no to the past and rejected many things. The performance began with me reading out the recipes followed by turning the bowls upside down with three collaborators. I was very excited to perform this work in Bukhara because the name “Bukhara” stems from the word vihara, which means “Buddhist monastery” or “temple.”

Everything is quiet now was a small performance that I did in Canada (fig. 11). It included four people and four bowls, which we slowly turned upside down. It started with a poem I had written about the Khairlanji massacre, a caste-based atrocity that took place 19 years ago, in which a whole family was brutally killed—and they still haven’t gotten justice. I was using the turning of the bowl as a way to slow down time and to think about this family. I’ve also been working with press photographs that were taken at the sites of this atrocity—at the hut that the Bhotmange family lived in, at the canal where their bodies were dumped. As horrible as it sounds, these photographs and even more violent ones have played a huge role in rallying the Dalit community to push for justice. It was also—as a 16-year-old—my first real encounter with what a Dalit atrocity looks like and with seeing the whole community come together in response to these photos. Though this is a strange way of spending time with them—they’re ink-jet prints, so I use a paintbrush and water to erase them, but they’re still there though certain bits are washed out. 

AS: As a way of beginning our conversation within the context of this group, which is focused on the city and the theme of infrastructures, I was thinking about Pune and Maharashtra as larger infrastructures in your practice—from the neighborhoods where you’ve fabricated different elements of your practice to your involvement with the secular art movement started by Prabhakar Kamble, Clark House, histories of Dalit activism in the region, etc. Could you speak about this? 

RG: It’s all connected. Because my parents are involved in social work, it’s not really been a choice to involve myself in these things. I think even if I wasn’t making art, they would still be an important part of my life. It has been quite special to be involved with the secular art movement, which is the art wing of a political movement in Maharashtra. And it was in spaces like Clark House, the Ajanta caves, and The Middle Way Retreat Centre in Kondanpur where these conversations were had and still continue. The last time we did a secular art movement workshop, we just wanted to get together and see each other’s practices—because we don’t often have opportunities or time or spaces for that—and to look at each other’s work, to listen to each other. Though there’s room for so much more. For example, it’s still very difficult to critique each other because if we’re seen critiquing each other even slightly publicly, then upper-caste artists or people in the art world will use that against us. They try to involve themselves in it and pit us one against the other. It’s quite exhausting. Unfortunately, we’re still seen as just Dalit artists by savarna people. I don’t think I’ll ever make work that’s not about caste, but there has to be space beyond that category. Also, if somebody doesn’t want to recognize the persistence of caste, they simply won’t. Labeling us this way makes it convenient for them to stereotype our practices, tick a box, and look away as fast as possible. 

Lucy Gallun: Thinking about this idea of space-making and how it has come through in your practice across different approaches, media, techniques, etc. . . . You talked about writing being a place, and of literacy and disseminating writing being a history that you’re taking up in your work, but also, about the building of a stupa—of creating something that’s visible in communities—especially in Maharashtra. Could you speak about this idea of a practice of space-making and what it means to you?

RG: Many upper-caste dialogues center on the fact that there’s not enough information, or that people don’t see caste, or that they didn’t grow up practicing caste, etc. Even when I was looking for Dalit cookbooks, I couldn’t find them. But then I realized that it’s just a matter of shifting my perspective; perhaps they don’t exist in a conventional form, but they do exist nonetheless, and then I discovered there’s so much in Dalit literature. I think this is the case with space-making as well, and that my large-scale installations are a way for me to spend time in the spaces themselves, but also, to really think about the significance of these spaces. Whether it’s an ancient site or the Chavdar water tank, which in photographs looks like any other water tank, is important to me. They are both big and small omnipresent sites, and Dalit people recognize and remember them. Even though the white stupas are everywhere, it’s easy for upper-caste people not to pay attention to them in their day-to-day landscapes. For instance, I’m in Goa now, and while Goa is the neighboring state to Maharashtra, and Maharashtra has always had a visible Dalit presence—there are blue Buddhist flags and white stupas everywhere—Goa has considerably less of one. But I tell myself that I have to find out what and how this looks in Goa. I’m trying to train myself to look differently. 

Ksenia Nouril: I’m struck by the materiality of your work—the breaking down, disintegrating, and bringing back together of paper pulp, your painting of photographs to dissolve them, etc. Could you talk about materiality in your practice?

RG: The materiality of my work is very important, if not the most important. Materiality, such as the texture of the paper, for example, allows me to move away from words, from writing, from that sort of language, and allows for a certain kind of infrastructure of invisible presence. The paper disintegrates, and while you can no longer read what is on it, it’s still there. I’m trying to figure out what that means and what to do with it. There’s a lot of hope with Dalit narratives, but there’s also one step forward, three steps back. A lot of the work that people are doing gets invisibilized. With materiality, it allows for that hesitation. While I can be more hopeful when I’m speaking, the materiality of the work allows for a sadness, a haziness, a blankness that paper or ceramic or the blurred photograph can communicate to the viewer better than I can.

Lanka Tattersall: Since Ananya mentioned you’re exhibiting in Venice, could you speak about what you’ll be up to there?

RG: Essentially, it was a grant to produce work that could be shared digitally and that would involve what my community means to me. There’s a Dalit girls’ hostel in Pune—close to where I live—and my parents have been involved with it for decades. I’ve also been visiting it since I was little. Most of the girls there come from villages around Maharashtra, and they’re there because their schools are extremely far from their homes—sometimes 20 kilometers away. Having to walk these distances to get to school would be incredibly difficult. I held workshops—on writing about food, about school, and on drawing their journeys to school, drawing what their schools looks like—and produced a booklet of 15 recipes and stories about finding food, stealing food, etc. The girls who participated were 13–14-year-olds, so their stories are more joyful than the ones I typically read, and I merged them with recipes that I created from female Dalit Maharashtrian writing—so they read as narratives from young girls, and time is again warped. Alongside it, the stories are also presented on video, where the girls read them out in Marathi and English.

LG: I was thinking about how you read us some of your recipes in English, and about the girls reading in Marathi and English, and to a previous session on the little magazine movement in Maharashtra that thought through the different ways that information is shared and what communities share through language, and I’m curious about how that has come up in your practice. 

RG: Until last year I was quite adamant that everything I write had to be in English, even though I can read Marathi and Hindi and I’ve accessed many autobiographies via English translations from Tamil and Telugu. I don’t see English as a non-Indian language, and historically, we weren’t allowed to study pure Marathi or Sanskrit, so an English-language education was the way out and necessary for upward social mobility. English has been an important language of access. There’s no real nostalgia for Marathi, but at the same time, there is something to be said about things that are untranslatable. When I’m reading a Dalit autobiography in Marathi, it’s different from what it is in English. I don’t want to romanticize it, so I keep it in English, because if my audience can read English, then I don’t want to create a barrier to the work. But what I realized from the girls reading in Marathi and English is that even if the audience can’t understand Marathi, there is a generative pause in listening to another language. Again, the girls are studying English; they’re not fluent, but they wanted to read in English as much as they wanted to read in Marathi. If I had robbed them of reading in English, I would have made them feel like they weren’t good enough or that they shouldn’t have been studying English in the first place, so to have their voices in both languages was important.

AS: I have a question about reading as a practice in your looking at memoirs, autobiographies, and memory texts. These writers would have been among the first generation in their families to be educated. Could you speak about these primary sources and about the format of the recipe—what drew you to it, how you adapted some of the larger concerns of the texts into recipes, etc. 

RG: I started with Maharashtrian Dalit writers because they were in my house. The Maharashtrian Dalit community also has an advantage, because Ambedkar was from this community, and it has been the force of his direct influence that has and continues to encourage the community to leave behind caste-based manual work, move to cities, and send their kids to school. A lot of the writers in this genre are male—though there are many female writers as well. But, if one was going to send their children to school for the very first time, it was often the sons who were sent. The realization that one could also send their daughters came later. 

But with the recipes . . . they’re a ploy to get the audience to read the original book. I keep things simple and, in each booklet, I’ll only include six recipes—some short, some slightly longer—and then at the back of the booklet, it says that this has been adapted from “x” autobiography to invite the audience to read this literature. I wish it was not about that, but coming from this space of people not knowing where to start, I provide them with options. Also, as much as my family is involved in this work, it’s still difficult to have one-on-one conversations because there is a lot of shame involved. There are things that people just don’t want to talk about, and I respect that. Dalit writers have written down everything that they needed to, so I decided to see what they’ve written about and to bring it out in whatever way I can. It’s almost like preliminary research for having actual conversations with my own family and others in the future.

AS: It’s also a ploy for people who claim caste doesn’t exist . . .

RG: Yes. The act of opening a book and reading for oneself has allowed me to have more interesting conversations around caste, especially compared to my earlier works which were a little more on the nose, and elicited anger and questions such as why I’m showing work on caste if caste doesn’t exist. So sometimes opening a book, reading it, and trying to figure it out for oneself allows the audience to take it in differently.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024–2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

The post Dreaming of Food, Air, and Water: In Conversation with Rajyashri Goody  appeared first on post.

Ananya Sikand: Vrishchik, which means “scorpion,” was a little magazine that you founded and edited with Bhupen Khakhar in Baroda. Published monthly or bimonthly from 1969 to 1973, it featured an array of content including poems, stories, critical essays, and folios of printed artworks.

In her 2001 article “Signatures of Dissent,” Geeta Kapur notes that Vrishchik “spoke in the many voices of those artists, critics, [and] poets” that it spotlighted, serving as an active forum for contemporary artistic and literary expressions as well as a catalyst for artists’ views on their field, on art institutions, and on social concerns.¹ Sheikh Sir, as you’ve noted in the past, Vrishchik was the need of the day, as there were hardly any communication channels through which artists could speak and raise issues at the time. To get started, could you speak about the story behind the name of the publication and about its form and materiality.

Gulammohammed Sheikh: You have rightly noted that there was a dire need for a communication channel among the artists of India, since there was only one journal—Lalit Kala Contemporary—which was very irregular. There was no other channel through which we could communicate with one another. This was an issue that bothered many of us.

I was with friends at our home in the Residency Bungalow in Baroda. About six or seven people had come for a party, and we were discussing this, and we all agreed we should do something about it. One thought was to bring out a journal, and everybody agreed wholeheartedly—but then asked, “How do we do it?”

Let me give you some background. When I was in England, I had become aware of small magazines published across the world. I used to go to bookshops and find publications by small presses, including collections of poems—such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. These were not well-known publishers; sometimes they were just individuals publishing their own work.

In India, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who lived in Bombay in those days, had started a small journal called Damn You—a radical literary journal with a critical take on what was going on. Then J. Swaminathan, another artist and friend, brought out a journal called Contra from Delhi. He raised a number of concerns in Contra—mainly about the National Art Academy, the Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA), and its functioning. The LKA was a government-sponsored organization whose members were nominated by the government, and we all felt there was insufficient representation of artists from across India. Vrishchik took up this subject at a later stage.

But let me start with how we began. The first issue was printed at a press in Baroda called Miraj Printery, where I once had a catalogue printed. We asked them if they could print directly from a linoleum block, which they were unfamiliar with but agreed to do. In those days, printing blocks were made of zinc, fixed on a wooden block, and then printed on a letterpress with movable type. Each letter of every word had to be set by hand before the page could be run through the press with a roller. 

We chose brown packing paper because it was cheap and because we loved the color. Printing on tinted paper was far more interesting than printing on white. I had previous experience using lino blocks while working on a Gujarati literary journal called Kshitij (1959–67), which was edited by my literary mentor Suresh Joshi. For a journal of limited resources, I devised a method of producing original prints by taking linoleum to Baroda-based artists—K. G. Subramanyan, my teacher, and Jyoti Bhatt, my senior—and having them hand-cut the block. I would then mount it on a wooden block of the same gauge as a letterpress block so that the hand-cut lino could be printed on the letterpress. This meant that 500 copies could be printed at once, and the lino block remained undamaged. The advantage was that it was an original linocut print that could be made available to 500 people simultaneously. I used to go to the press and sit there while each issue was being printed, checking every copy to see whether the print came out well, whether the ink showed through on the back of the page—which sometimes happened with poor printing in those days. You had to learn to work with the printers to bring out the best result. This is the approach we brought to Vrishchik. 

As we were discussing possible names for the journal, somebody asked, “What is your rashi—your zodiac sign?” It turned out that four people in our larger group were Scorpios, including my wife, Nilima. We thought it was a good idea to call it “Scorpion” because it could have its own life—and a little sting. So Vrishchik emerged, and we put a linocut of a scorpion designed by my friend Vinod Ray Patel on the cover (fig. 1).

The purpose of Vrishchik was to reach out not only to visual artists but also to artists of all denominations. We made a list of filmmakers, writers, painters, etc., of about 250 people, and thought we’d just send it out.

The first issue had six pages. Bhupen [Khakhar], my coeditor, produced a little gem of notes on the visual scene, mocking and relishing popular taste—he called them “visual notes.” Geeta Kapur contributed a poem. Would you believe it? Arvind [Krishna Mehrotra] shared a poem from a series about his wife called “Bacchi Chakra.” After that, poems appeared in several issues. On the last page, I wrote a short editorial about current events. As you know, 1969 was a period of great upheaval because of the communal riots that were raging in Ahmedabad and Baroda and causing great turbulence across Gujarat. I began my first write-up by reflecting on the situation that prevailed at that time—a rumination called “Afternoon.”

Suresh Joshi had written [an essay] on the poet Rajvi Patel—one of the finest Gujarati poets of my generation—which had originally been commissioned by the journal Books Abroad. We reprinted it in the second issue. For the third issue, Vinod Ray designed another cover—this one featuring a hippie-like man and woman with their hair down; both had bodies of scorpions (fig. 2). That issue included writings on cinema, including a delightful riposte by Bhupen in Gujarati on Bollywood films (this was the only non-English write-up in Vrishchik) as well as drawings by an artist friend of my generation, Nagji Patel.

Lucy Gallun: Could you point out some of the contributors to the early issues of the magazine—the types of things they were wanting to circulate among the community and what you chose to include, as you have already started to do. 

GMS: I ran a little office from my home, writing letters to poet friends, writer friends, painter friends, telling them about Vrishchik. Those who received my letters became interested in contributing. Initially, only artists and writers based in Baroda contributed. But later on, I met, for example, a visiting Greek writer who had written about the coup in Athens. I asked to read her piece and found it worthy of publication. She agreed but wanted her identity concealed and chose the pseudonym Erato—the piece was called “A Greek Story.” Vinod Ray made an illustration to accompany it.

Then Bhupen and I were up to some mischief. We decided to buy a popular landscape poster—the kind sold on footpaths—roughly double the size of Vrishchik. We bought 200 or 300 copies and, on the blank reverse side, concocted a dialogue between an artist and an art critic. We came down rather heavily on absurd stories circulating among artists about their role and that of art critics and criticism. It was part gossip, part serious critique, and as expected, it angered many people. We thought it was a way of communicating with our community with no holds barred. We received a number of letters in response; some enjoyed the tongue in cheek humor, but others found it hard to stomach.

The subsequent issue reproduced letters from GIs in Vietnam. It was followed by an issue featuring a dialogue on the state of contemporary printmaking between Jagmohan Chopra, who started Group 8 in Delhi, Bishamber Khanna, Zarina, Jyoti Bhatt, and me. This issue carried ten prints by the aforementioned artists and by K. G. Subramanyan, Jeram Patel, Bhupen, and Anupam Sud—all well-known artists of the day. 

After that, Arvind sent a long poem “Song of the Rolling Earth,” which we published. Adil Jussawalla, another well-known poet, submitted a poem called “Dog.” I wrote “Miniature Purana”—a critical view of how art history in India was being written at the time. 

In issues that followed, we focused on saint poetry. I came across translations by Arun Kolatkar—a bilingual poet who translated Muktabai, Janabai, and Namdev—and was deeply moved by them. My favorite poem, by Janabai, goes:

I eat God 
I drink God 
I sleep on God 
I buy God 
I count God 
I deal with God 
God is here
God is there
Void is not devoid of God 
God is within
God is without
And moreover, there is God to spare.

Arvind had also begun translating the great 15th- and 16th-century poet Kabir. One of his best poems, in Arvind’s translation, reads:

The kings shall go, so will their pretty queens
Courtiers and all proud ones shall go
Pandits chanting the Vedas shall go and go with those who listen to them
Masochist yogis and bright intellectuals shall go
Go the moon and the sun and the water and wind
Thus, only those can remain whose minds are tied to the rocks.

My friend Gieve Patel—the painter, poet, and playwright—had visited Baroda in the early 1960s and met Suresh Joshi, who had written on the Gujarati medieval poet called Vasto. Gieve sat with Joshi, took extensive notes about translating Vasto, and from these notes, produced three poems, which we also published.

The next issues raised the question of the impending Triennale—the international exhibition planned by the LKA (fig. 3). Many issues were devoted to artists’ letters questioning the relevance of the Triennale. Artists from all over the country wrote in with their views on the impending event—K. G. Subramanyan from Baroda; Pranab Ranjan Ray from Calcutta; Krishen Khanna, Swaminathan, and Roshan Alkazi from Delhi; K. K. Hebbar from Karnataka; and Akbar Padamsee from Bombay. Eventually the Triennale did take place—along with protests and controversy. Vrishchik became a forum for protests against the LKA and its reform. Most of us boycotted the Triennale and the LKA, and so the government was obliged to appoint a commission of inquiry headed by Justice Khosla. After traveling around the country to consult artists, [Khosla’s] suggestion was that the LKA implement a process by which artists themselves elect representatives to serve on its general council.

These issues also raised other questions—such as the implications of internationalism. Geeta wrote on this subject, and Vivan Sundaram, her partner at a later stage, wrote a rejoinder. We published both. So, these conversations on the Triennale and on what kind of internationalism India should have eventually led to the reformation of the LKA.

Our main interest was to arouse awareness of issues within the artist community. We were dealing with multiple generations of artists who were active in those days—K. K. Hebbar and Krishen Khanna belonged to the first generation, Swaminathan and I to the next, and then there were younger artists. The basic purpose of Vrishchik was to create that kind of awareness across generations. 

Lanka Tattersall: Could you tell us a little more about the state of printmaking in Baroda, which you mentioned was the focus of one of the issues?

GMS: In Baroda, printmaking was an important part of the syllabus right from the beginning—from the 1950s onward. Students of painting took printmaking as a subsidiary subject. I learned printmaking in the graphic arts department of the Faculty [of Fine Arts]. The Smithsonian Institution hosted a printmaking workshop in Delhi in 1970, inviting 100 artists from across India and providing facilities to work on the best papers and zinc plates. Over a month, we learned etching and aquatint under Paul Lingren. On returning to Baroda, I bought an etching press, set it up in my home, and worked on a series. Jyoti Bhatt took to printmaking intensively, and it eventually turned out to be his principal métier. Others who took to printmaking and produced exceptional works were Laxma Goud, Devraj Dakoji, D. L. N. Reddy, and Purushottam and Rini Dhumal—all of whom worked at the Faculty under the guidance of N. B. Joglekar, who headed the graphic arts department.

AS: As additional context, each handcrafted issue of Vrishchik was supplemented by a free original artwork—modest in scale—whether a linocut, woodcut, or lithograph. Sheikh Sir, could you speak further on the artworks that accompanied each issue?

GMS: I had seen four issues of Contra that printed artworks using machine-made blocks. This made me think that Vrishchik could introduce linocuts, woodcuts, and other printmaking mediums. So, while we printed an artwork on the cover, we also included a loose copy of it inside Vrishchik—so that those who wanted could mount and preserve it or put it on display.

As for how Vrishchik was produced: as I said earlier, I was running a little office from my own home, writing letters, keeping correspondence in big files, and sometimes getting my students to help. We had 500 copies per issue, and 250 to 300 had to be sent out, which meant writing addresses, stuffing printed copies in envelopes, and posting them all—which was conducted entirely from the Residency Bungalow. I enjoyed it. I asked Bhupen to handle the accounts, which he did—he was a chartered accountant.

The press we used from the third issue onward, 3-A Associates, was run by N. B. Joglekar and he was amenable to any kind of experiment we wanted to try. First, we gave him linocuts to print. Then I said, “Mr. Joglekar, you also have an offset press.” Offset is like lithography but on a plate—you draw directly on the plate. So, Bhupen and I and others made drawings right there, which were then transferred and printed. Bhupen made a drawing of a tailor, among others (fig. 4).

LG: You’ve discussed your office at the bungalow, working with Bhupen Khakhar, the head of the graphics department, who served as printer, and your students helping with the mailing. Could you say more about the setting at MSU Baroda—and at the same time, your relationship to other artists in other cities, particularly Bombay, given our group has been discussing the art scene there at length?

GMS: As you know, the artist community in India is like an extended family—we all knew each other. I used to travel to Bombay, meet friends there, see their exhibitions, and the same applied to Delhi. I had also been to Santiniketan, to Calcutta, and to several other places. I had personal friendships with many artists, so I asked them for contributions for Vrishchik, and they offered willingly.

LG: Was there something specific about Baroda that enabled this kind of journal to happen in a particular way?

GMS: Baroda was very special among art schools in India at that time. It was one of the most liberal institutions, which allowed all kinds of activities, and we had students from all walks of life and sections of society.

The pioneers of the Faculty had Gandhian ideals—of building something they could handle without hankering after what was beyond their means. The institution was built on basics: painting, which needed a good studio; sculpture, which needed casting facilities; printmaking, which needed an etching press, a litho press etc.; and art history, [which was] taught to every student regardless of department. The Story of Art—a history of world art—which I taught for almost eighteen years was key to every student’s education. I had very young and bright students; they included Vivan, who came from the elite Doon School, while others came from small towns and tribal hinterlands. I taught the Story of Art in English for degree students and in Hindi for diploma students. At some stage, students who knew I was Gujarati asked why I didn’t teach it in Gujarati, so then I taught three classes on the same subject. In the first, Vivan would bring up Jackson Pollock; in the second, students only knew what was happening in their part of India; and in the third, some had not even heard of the Mona Lisa. That was the big challenge—how to teach all of them. It opened my eyes to the diversity of the world of artists coming to the Faculty.

But I will also go back to my background. I grew up in a small town called Surendranagar in Gujarat, where I started writing poetry, drawing, and painting. In those days it was customary for good schools to have a hand-painted, handwritten annual journal. One of my teachers—a poet who led me to write in Gujarati—decided to make such a journal to be placed in the public library every week. He decided that we would produce it together. We went to the Khadi Bhandar—khadi is the hand-spun cloth associated with Gandhi—which produced a very rough handmade paper that I enjoyed working on. Today, all artists love such papers because they are resilient and receptive to paint. On them, I would paint the cover, draw the titles of articles, and illustrate a picture story for children, while my teacher wrote short stories, a thought of the day, and poems. This ran for a year when I was about fifteen. I still have some copies—I showed them recently in an exhibition of my printmaking.

Jay Levenson: You mentioned Vrishchik was addressed primarily to artists. Were there also collectors who were involved?

GMS: No. Our list included visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers—about 200 people, many of whom we knew personally. I think there were hardly any collectors in those days. Those who may have collected works by [M. F.] Husain or Krishen Khanna were not accessible to us.

In those days, if we wanted to exhibit, we did it ourselves. No gallery would pick up our work. We took our paintings to Bombay or Delhi, mounted the exhibition ourselves, printed our own catalogues, and tried to sell the work by sitting in the gallery. I remember my first exhibition in Bombay: I had learned from my seniors that canvases had to be rolled up, so all our canvases were rolled. We took our stretchers, bound everything up, and booked a first-class train for the occasion. In Bombay, we couldn’t afford taxis, so we used horse carriages to transport everything to Jehangir Art Gallery, a public gallery that only opened around 11 o’clock. We’d arrive at six in the morning, wait for hours, then unpack our things, put the frames back on the canvases, and mount the show. A carpenter helped, if we could afford one; otherwise we did it ourselves.

As for collectors, I remember that Air India was a major buyer in those days. There was a gentleman called Jal Cowasji who made the rounds of galleries—and everybody would trail him, because he was the main person acquiring work for the airline. By 1969, the situation had improved with a few more galleries, but private galleries were still very few.

Rattanamol Singh Johal: Could you reflect on the relationship between Vrishchik during that very productive period from 1969 to 1973 and your painting practice at the same time. Reading the editorial from the first issue— “Afternoon”—I was struck by how much it resonates with paintings like Returning Home After Long Absence (1969–73; fig. 5) and Speechless City (1975; fig. 6). Could you speak to the threads that connect your poetry, your narrative writing, and your painting?

GMS: All of it—my writing on communalism, on silence, on isolation; my painting; my publishing of Vrishchik—were connected. 

When I returned from England in 1966, I took a long, nearly three-month journey, traveling by road from London to Bombay via Europe—buses, trains, walking, everything. That journey allowed me to discover India, and I began to look at everything with fresh eyes. I remember being on a bus near Jhansi, watching the landscape change as the bus moved so fast that distant trees appeared to rush toward me and mountains shrank. Experiences like this were accumulating. It was also when I felt I should write my memoir. I was on a train heading home to Surendranagar, and on whatever scraps of paper I had, I started scribbling notes on returning home. That memoir in Gujarati is now published, and hopefully an English edition will appear soon.

At the same time, I began the painting Returning Home After Long Absence. My memoir and my painting went hand in hand, opening pages of each other. In the painting, I brought in my mother, images of the town I grew up in, an Islamic backdrop with an image of the Prophet, a big wall—I wrote an entire chapter in my memoir on a wall—and trees, particularly the peepal tree, the Ficus religiosa, which was a beautiful tree that I could see from my window at the Faculty. All these things combined during those years.

By 1973, I was painting both from within myself and from what I saw around me—I painted two works called Man I and Man II (figs. 7, 8). Man I is a metaphorical work in which a man is seated, with his head on his lap. In Man II, a man holds another man [who is tied up] as an object of public display. That was when my eyes opened to the politics of India—which eventually led to Speechless City, painted while the Emergency was in effect. The roots of many paintings that came later were sown during that same period, while I was also publishing Vrishchik and writing poetry. 

AS: I’d like to close by asking about your commitment to multilingualism across your writing, poetry, teaching and publishing practices. 

GMS: I do not really know how to explain it—all three languages come to me naturally. I knew Gujarati because it is my mother tongue, and so if I want to write poetry or creative prose, like my memoir, I choose Gujarati. I learned Hindi on my own—and everyone in India knows some Hindi because of Hindi cinema. And English, I learned in school and college.

Vrishchik was, in part, a kind of lesson for me: It allowed me to polish my English. I did not know English very well at the start, but those four years helped me learn it properly. I was communicating with a large number of people, writing and receiving letters, editing contributions, proofreading—and when Adil or Gieve wrote in perfect English, I had to ensure that every word was printed exactly as they had written it.

All of this was part of my life, [as was] living within a family with my children and Nilima. I cannot really describe myself. I can only say that all of this is part of me—not something I took on as a challenge or as a duty, but something that came naturally. It was all part of my makeup.

Every Indian speaks two or three languages: the local language, Hindi, English or another language. We are plural by nature, multilingual. We think in multiple languages simultaneously. That is the makeup of the average mind, and thus, I am not so different. By writing in multiple languages, I have learned that I have to find myself in each of them.

The C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Group would like to express its sincere thanks to Gulammohammed Sheikh and to the team at the Asia Art Archive in India for making Vrishchik available to us. The magazine’s various issues can be accessed via the following link.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here. 

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Among the topics that were discussed were assemblies of the human and other-than-human as collectives, assemblies of materials into collections, and assemblies of spaces and places into shared worlds. The speakers drew from their engagement with exhibitions, films, public programs, and cultural institutions to map how these forms of assemblies realized the poetic potential of coming together through difference. Assemblies in Uncertain Times offered an opportunity to imagine other futures together, complicating established linearities and teleologies.

The 2025 C-MAP Seminar took place on June 11–12, 2025 and was conceived by Diana Iturralde, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow; Beya Othmani, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Carlos Quijon Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow; and Ananya Sikand, C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow with support from the International Program: Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator; Jay Levenson, Director; Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director; and Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Program Coordinator. The C-MAP Seminar is organized in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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