Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: I think we need to think a little more carefully about what we call “our inheritance.” What you think is yours may not actually be yours in the way you imagine. I am not saying you do not have a right to access it, but you have to think about how and why and where you are using it. The culture I want to be part of, the culture I want to help create, is shaped by artists from oppressed castes, from Adivasi and Indigenous lineages.¹ But being an artist from an oppressed caste in South Asia is not new. These are communities that have produced culture and developed visual traditions for centuries. Traditionally, we were the artists. We were the ones creating looms and weaves and pottery.

What the Western world now calls “craft” and what it sometimes demeans as “craft”—all of it was developed by those who belonged to oppressed castes, not by those from oppressor castes. So when I see people casually referencing certain patterns or weaves—as if it is simply, “I’m South Asian, I’m Indian, this exists in my work”—that is not how that works. That is not how those loom and weaving codes came to be. Those codes were developed in very specific political, social, and historical contexts.

So we have to think about what that canon really is. And we have to think about it very intentionally. I am not the first person saying this. Many artists, like me, talk about how the entire cultural, political, and visual culture of South Asia comes from communities that belong to oppressed castes. Yet in the larger art world, South Asian art is often represented only by those from oppressor castes. And that is deeply warped. It smells a bit of appropriation to be honest.

MV: This way of very intentionally thinking about inheritance has shaped how you work with material history, especially your Dalit Panthers Archive. You’ve often described yourself as an “accidental archivist.” Can you explain what the Dalit Panthers Archive is and what it meant to take on that work? 

SNS: The Dalit Panthers Archive grew out of very practical circumstances. A few friends and I were researching a documentary on the Dalit Panthers, and we kept running into the same problem: There simply wasn’t enough accessible material.² There were very few photographs, very little visual documentation, and that made it difficult to work on the project as nonfiction. As we continued researching, we realized that much of the Panthers’ history was being held privately. People had posters, pamphlets, and publications in their homes, but they were often in very fragile condition. We began scanning and recording these materials initially as part of the research process, but it quickly became clear that this work needed to be done more deliberately.

One thing that’s important to understand about the Dalit Panthers is that they were not visual artists or performers. They were writers and poets deeply involved in radical literary movements in Maharashtra at the time. The movement existed largely through poetry, writing, and publication. So we focused very specifically on that print culture: manifestos (fig. 1), book covers, little magazine publications, and writing by or featuring Panther poets and writers.³

After that, I spent months editing hundreds of images one by one, cleaning them up, and assembling them into readable PDFs. But almost all of this material was in Marathi, and I was extremely dissatisfied with displaying or circulating it without translation—especially outside of Maharashtra. When people can’t read the text, engagement stops. It becomes a visual reference rather than an encounter with the writing itself or the image and text in tandem.

That’s when translation became central to the archive. I applied for funding through the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation so that the work could be translated, edited, and interpreted. Because this writing is rooted in a very specific time and place, translation required more than just linguistic accuracy. It meant understanding slang, cultural references, and historical context that doesn’t immediately carry across generations. In that sense, translation became part of the archival labor itself.

MV: As you were working through this material, was there a particular publication or person that you found yourself returning to?

SNS: Through this process, I ended up getting extremely close to Raja Dhale’s work.⁴ Not in the sense of speaking to him, unfortunately, because he passed away around the same time I was working on the translations. We had spoken earlier, during the documentary interviews, but not during the translation phase of the research—as I really wish we had.

Because once I started reading everything he had written—slowly, carefully—I understood him very differently. What became clear to me was how urgent his relationship to language was. He was thinking constantly about how we speak, how we write, how we publish, because he was deeply concerned with being misunderstood. He wanted language to be sharp, so that what was being said could not be easily distorted. I relate to that very strongly.

One publication that stayed with me was Chakravarty, a literary daily he published for fourteen days straight (fig. 2). That in itself is kind of insane! It was not about current affairs; it was only literature, only radical writing. And he did everything himself. What struck me about the text was that it was not dry or heavy. It was funny. It had a real sense of humor. There were fake obituaries, satire, moments of play. That combination of rigor and humor felt very important.

Working with Chakravarty also raised questions for me about form. I spoke to one of the artists whose work appeared in the publication, and he told me that the images often had nothing to do with the text. Dhale would simply say he liked the work and include it. The image did not illustrate the writing, and that separation was interesting to me. The publication itself became the work. And spending time with that material made me think much more seriously about skill, rigor, and intention in political practice. It challenged the idea that it is enough to just have something to say. The Panthers, and Dhale especially, were extremely precise about how they said it.

MV: What I find especially compelling in your work is how you move between very specific materials, like Dhale’s Chakravarty, and much wider cultural inheritances in India. How do you understand the Panthers’ place within older lineages, particularly Buddhist histories in Maharashtra?

SNS: When I think about my own lineages, the Panthers are a very direct influence, but they are only one part of a much larger anti-caste movement. And that movement comes from Buddhist cultures as well. Growing up in Bombay, a huge part of my childhood was having access to the Kanheri Caves (fig. 4). My mother used to take us every year during the monsoon. We would trek up and spend time in these over-2,000-year-old caves with extraordinary carvings and sculptures. These were not just monuments, but also Buddhist learning centers, places where people lived, studied, and created. Being in those spaces makes you think about what Mumbai once was—green, swampy islands where philosophers, artists, and writers lived. That is a very real cultural lineage for me.

At the same time, you become very aware of how quickly these histories get absorbed into Brahminical narratives. These sites are constantly being reinterpreted as something else, often as places where the Pandavas rested, when they were clearly Buddhist spaces of learning.⁵

More recently, I was at the Elephanta Caves, and I was struck by how aggressively Buddhist history is being suppressed.⁶ The site has a layered history, but what is happening now is not about complexity. On the plaques, they avoid even using the word Buddhist. Things are described as stylistically Buddhist, not as what they actually are. There is a very clear erasure of Buddhist and Jain traditions happening. Parts of the caves that are visibly Buddhist are left to crumble and remain closed, while other narratives are foregrounded. 

MV: What does witnessing that erasure demand of you as an artist working with history?

SNS: I think about this a lot in relation to my position as an “accidental archivist.” I am not a historian or an archaeologist, but rather an artist working with history, I know that symbols matter. It becomes important to use them deliberately and clearly. This is not only about Buddhism as a religion of liberation for my community. It is also about recognizing traditions in South Asia that existed in opposition to Vedic culture. For me, engaging these older inheritances is part of the same work as engaging the Panthers. It is about insisting on histories that are foundational but repeatedly pushed aside.

MV: When you work within these older inheritances and the Panthers’ print culture, you are encountering symbols that already carry enormous political weight. I’m thinking of the panther in particular, a symbol shaped by a long history of Black civil rights struggles in the United States. How does this image surface in your work?

Being a Panther was something that people took on very passionately and very immediately. We adopted it because the panther is such a powerful-looking animal. It’s strong; it’s striking. Even now, I have a panther tattoo. That image resonated very deeply with people. I think it also stood in opposition to other symbols at the time, like the Shiv Sena tiger.⁷

I was thinking through this symbol while working on an illustration based on the 2022 film Jhund (fig. 5).⁸ I represented one of the characters with a whole world operating around her, and from those details you can tell so much about her life. At the same time, she’s still the focus: She carries a sense of ambition and aspiration, and she’s also holding something of the “learned culture” that comes from expressing yourself through fashion or hair. We never see her like this in the film, but this is the version of her that has existed in my mind.

She is wearing a leopard print in the illustration, which is very intentional. It could easily look like a Western fashion reference, but for me it comes from somewhere very local. It’s inspired by Namdeo Dhasal, a leader and poet in the Dalit Panthers. He was known for his flamboyance, for wearing wild, printed kurtas. I’m not saying the girl is a “panther” or that the Panthers are the main point of the image. It’s more that their presence exists as a backdrop that she can stand confidently against. So even when a pattern or an emblem looks global, the reference is very local, very specific. It’s Dhasal. It’s the Panthers. And this is true across my portraits right now.

In one of my portraits in [the series] Educate, for example, I made a self-portrait about my early education at home (fig. 6). In almost every childhood photo of me, there’s a book—or I’m scribbling on the wall. Those scribbles aren’t imagined. My parents let me practice writing the alphabet directly on the walls. They encouraged that kind of learning. That portrait is about education in the home and how formative it was. From it, I made a ceramic chalk box with a panther on top as a companion object (fig. 7). When I started looking up references, I realized there’s a very popular Indian brand called Panther Chalks. It’s completely ordinary, mass-produced. So, I thought, I’m going to use it. I’m going to take this panther and make it mine.

MV: In works like Panther Chalks, you’re clearly engaging the panther as a symbol, but not by reproducing the Black Panther image directly. Instead, you draw from the Indian leopard. Where does that image enter your thinking?

SNS: Yes. The specific panther I’m referencing was made by Subash Awachat, for a cover of Manohar Magazine (fig. 8). It wasn’t published by the Panthers themselves. It comes from a lineage of progressive print culture in Pune. The artist was representing the Indian panther, the leopard. I really loved that, because that’s also how I like to approach the Panthers. I don’t use the Black Panther panther in my work. I don’t think I ever have. That is not the panther I’m speaking through. It has its own legacy and its own history, and there was a reason the Dalit Panthers used that symbol in the 1970s. But now, from this moment and place, I use the Indian leopard. And even within the movement at the time, people were trying to visualize an Indian connection.

MV: It’s interesting because you’re creating new connections and lineages for this symbol. Now that you’re also working in the United States around the other lineage of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement, has the panther taken on new meaning for you?

SNS: I’ll be honest: I don’t force myself to go looking for it. If something comes up naturally, I follow it. I had an opportunity in Chicago—a print workshop paired with a talk on the Dalit Panther Archive—at an event called “From Panther to Panther.”⁹ People who had engaged with both movements were there, and I met some former Black Panthers. That experience felt like being at home. But I don’t want to seek things out in a way that feels imposed on me. I also don’t want to exoticize Black history or Black political struggle by chasing after parallels. I do seek connections, but only when they’re organic. And there hasn’t been enough time for me here to explore that [connection] deeply. I also don’t want to replicate the dynamic of some white visitors in India who arrive and say, “Tell us everything.” I don’t want to replicate that here by demanding access to Black histories. If I was a tourist, I might spend all day in museums and archives. But when you live somewhere, you need to find your place in the culture instead of declaring, “I’m here now; love me.”

It would be a disservice to both communities and both political movements to place them side by side as if they’re the same. The contexts are entirely different, including [with regard to] the role of women in each movement. And while I feel deep solidarity with African American, Caribbean, and Indigenous communities here, I don’t want to impose that solidarity. It’s like any relationship: It has to be reciprocal. You can’t force it. It has to have time and space to emerge. That’s why I haven’t rushed to draw strict parallels. But when genuine connection happens—when I tell someone here about the Dalit Panthers, and they feel an immediate kinship—it’s beautiful. It feels like meeting someone from home, even though they belong to a different history.

MV: That’s why I find the leopard illustration so compelling. It’s not about superimposing one history onto another; it’s about finding forms of solidarity that grow from where you’re rooted.

SNS: The main reason that the leopard resonates so much with me is its relationship to Bombay. Its life inside that city, with its shrinking habitat and environmental pressures—that context matters. When the Black Panthers chose the black panther, there was intention: The animal’s sleekness, its quiet strategy, its defensive intelligence. If you look at the Indian leopard through the lens of Bombay, its survival carries a different meaning: Its connection to the land, to Indigenous communities, to environmental neglect, to the fact that leopards are often sighted near the Kanheri Caves—all of that is present. So when I use the leopard, I’m thinking very specifically about the leopard of Bombay, the context of the Dalit Panthers, and what it means that we come from the same place as this animal. That authenticity, that rootedness, is at the core of how a culture becomes deep enough that it can’t be erased. The Dalit Panthers as an organization didn’t last long, but the culture [that its members] generated runs deep. The same is true of the Black Panthers. The culture they built endures through the imagination of Black women, community programs, healthcare initiatives, the Free Breakfast for Children Program, etc. These are the things that sustain a movement, and they’re also what sustains culture.

It’s the same with art. The same energies that sustain political movements sustain visual culture. So the work has to keep reactivating itself. As an artist, I have to stay tuned to that. I don’t want the work or the culture we’re building together to be something that can easily disappear. There are always people ready to erase it the second they get a chance. I don’t want that chance to exist, and I want my art to offer a mutual sustaining, a feeding of each other.

The post “It’s not about superimposing one history onto another; it’s about finding forms of solidarity that grow from where you’re rooted.”: Maya Varma in Conversation with Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar; Part II appeared first on post.

Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: For me, Mumbai has always been a working-class city. That’s its defining character. Any city that grows because people come there to work develops certain things: functional public transport, cheap food, spaces you can access without feeling excluded. Rent is expensive, of course, but life around you feels reachable. That accessibility shaped my childhood. I was constantly out—taking buses and trains on my own by age eight or nine. That kind of mobility gives you agency that stays with you, especially for a girl in India (fig. 1).

I also grew up in a very political home. My parents are Ambedkarite, Marxist, anti-caste people who fought hard for their education, and their politics shaped everything in our house. My family has been in Mumbai for a couple of generations, so our relationship to the city is deep. Even with the gentrification happening now, it is still hard for me to be angry at Mumbai. There was a time when the city felt like it was truly ours. We could sit by the sea, go to the aquarium, the museum, the planetarium. My parents took me everywhere, and that exposure shaped me into someone who is always thinking and asking questions.

Mumbai also gave me a visual language. It did not come from galleries, because there were not many accessible ones then. It came from the trains, the sea, the political culture of Maharashtra, the literary tradition of essays, theater, poetry, and also from the vibrance of the music we grew up with. There was a kind of freedom in those moments, even if it was never fully available to Dalit girls in the same way. That tension between what we desire and what we can access has shaped how I look at the world.

MV: You were also growing up during an intense political moment in the city, with violence unfolding around you while the country projected a very different public narrative. As your political commitments deepened, how did this dissonance shape your sense of responsibility as an artist? 

SNS: I was born in 1992, so all the politics of that time were simply the atmosphere of my childhood. Babri happened shortly after I was born, the Bombay riots happened right after, and the 1990s and early 2000s were ripe with bomb blasts and communal tension.¹ It became normal for us. You would be waiting for a train or a bus, hear that a blast happened somewhere else in the city, and then you would just go home. Everyone who grew up in Mumbai in the ’90s lived with that kind of violence.

At the same time, mainstream media kept presenting a very liberal idea of unity and diversity. Those were the images painted everywhere, even though the reality around us was completely different. When I think about it now, it feels absurd that this is what we accepted as normal. But that environment shaped how I thought about culture and what it means to make something that cannot be twisted or misunderstood later. 

As someone from a marginalized community, I’m never only an artist. I’m always thinking about the past that shaped my family, the present I’m trying to make sense of, and the future I want to help build. My work has to hold all of that. That’s why I don’t respond immediately to events around me. My practice needs time to research, to understand what already exists, and to be intentional about how I represent myself and my community.

I also know now that I am someone who needs to be liberated. I’m part of the community I’m speaking from. For me to work honestly, I have to understand what my own body carries: my grandmother’s experiences, my sisters’ experiences, my friends’ experiences. All of that moves through me, and processing it takes time. I’m always thinking about posterity. I don’t want a future where culture looks back at us and gets it wrong. I can’t control how the present sees us, but by making the work I make, I’m putting something into the present that I hope the future will understand clearly. There should be no mistake.

MV: I’d like to turn to the portraits in your new series Educate, which takes these questions around representation into the lives and lineages of Dalit women. How did that project begin, and what does “educate” mean for you in this context?

SNS: Educate is the first part of a three-part series I began about a year and a half ago. The title comes from the first word in [the slogan] Shika, sanghatit vha ani sangharsh kara—which is usually translated as “educate, agitate, organize.”² But shika is often misunderstood, and it actually means “learn.” “Educate” in English can sound like teaching others, but I’m thinking about learning in a much broader sense: the knowledge systems Dalit communities have built, the violence students have endured, and the determination with which they continue to pursue education. I’m not trying to glorify that struggle; I’m trying to understand what this pursuit of knowledge has meant over a very long time.

For us, learning has always been taken seriously as a way out of poverty and caste oppression. Even if literacy rates are lower than the national average, the numbers themselves are remarkable given what people have been put through. Culturally, there is a very specific emphasis on education. At our events, there are always books, pamphlets, translations. At Chaityabhoomi on December 6, people spend their hard-earned money on literature and art.³ These are things supposedly meant for the elite, yet everyone wants to learn something—or at least to hold onto that aspiration.

All of this brought me to Mukta Salve (fig. 3). In 1855, when she was only 14, she wrote “About the Grief of the Mahars and Mangs” in the Marathi journal Dnyanodaya. It’s one of the earliest published anti-caste texts by a Dalit girl. The essay is painful, but it’s also full of a sharp awareness that education is the only way out of enslavement. Ambedkar repeated her points about half a century later. So for me, Educate has to begin with Mukta Salve.

MV: Instead of depicting Salve directly, you’ve chosen to paint her “descendants,” the people in her intellectual and political lineage. How did that idea take shape for you?

SNS: When I looked at the few visuals that exist of Mukta Salve, there’s really just this one image that circulates. And it doesn’t sit right with me. Beautiful as it is, it feels like it’s coming directly from the lineage of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)—those soft, “divine” upper-caste aesthetics rooted in colonial art pedagogy. Ravi Varma painted women from oppressor-caste households into these ethereal, gentle embodiments of “sacredness,” and those images went on to define what an “ideal Indian woman” or “goddess” looked like (fig. 4). That visual language wasn’t built from our lives; it was built from theirs.

So when I look at that image of Mukta Salve, it doesn’t feel connected to who she might have been, or what she wrote, or the conditions she was writing from. It’s an aesthetic that isn’t ours. I did think for a moment, “Should I try to paint her?” But what would be the point of that? For me to sit here and imagine her face… I don’t know what that activity does or what it gives to the work, or to us as a culture.

I instead began thinking about Dalit women and girls who are pursuing education now—the people who are carrying her legacy forward. And I wanted the portraits to be a space of release for them, not a re-creation of a historical figure we can’t accurately imagine. That’s how I started painting my friend Divya, who is doing her PhD in New York (fig. 5). The titles themselves will hold that connection between her and Salve, something like Divya in lieu of Mukta Salve, or Mukta Salve’s Divya. The two women are tied together in the work—not visually but conceptually. Divya becomes a way of thinking about what Mukta Salve made possible and what it means for Dalit women to pursue knowledge today.

MV: In the portrait of Divya, the pose of rest feels central. Rest has a very specific lineage in Western portraiture, often idealized through the bourgeoisie. How were you thinking about rest in this context?

SNS: Divya wasn’t posing at all. I spent the day with her, waiting to see when she would finally stop moving. And, at one point, she just sat down. If you look closely, there’s a scowl on her face. It’s not rest. It’s a five-minute break in a full day of labor. That moment is important because portraiture usually puts something on a pedestal: dignity, beauty, power. Here, I wanted to put that tiny, vulnerable pause on a pedestal. That’s the release I’m talking about.

The patterns in the painting do specific work too. The couch pattern comes from the crops grown on Divya’s family’s land. They are literally what she rests on, generationally and materially. The blanket is the exact sari her mother wears in a photo Divya showed me. Divya doesn’t like keeping direct references to her home because the distance becomes too painful, so I brought her mother in indirectly, through pattern. Because her mother is central to Divya’s rest.

And the vulnerability of her pose exists only because of my relationship with her. This is based on a photograph, not a sitting. If she were sitting for me, the softness would disappear, and it would become labor again. That’s why it matters that she wasn’t performing. She was simply tired. And my work is to take that moment and magnify it.

MV: When I visited your studio, you were also working on a portrait of a woman in a bathtub. It felt like a very different kind of scene—still intimate, but coming from another set of questions. Could you talk about what you’re exploring there?

SNS: Yes. That portrait is still very unresolved. It’s of my friend Hrithik, who’s doing her PhD in Minneapolis (fig. 6). She had just moved to the US, and we were talking about how suddenly you have bathtubs everywhere. In India, you don’t. A bathtub is such an aspiration— a marker of “you’ve made it.” And then we started talking about bubble baths—how much guilt there is because of the water, and how strange it feels to allow yourself that kind of pleasure. And from there, we were talking about what we allow ourselves as Dalit women, and what we don’t.

She’s very young. And right now, she’s in this moment of “I’ll do whatever I want. I’m going to have fun. I don’t care what anyone says.” And that takes a long time to arrive at. It might look like normal “young person behavior,” but for her it’s new. She has become young now. That also happened to me—I came into my youth when I was older. When I was younger, I wasn’t young. So for her, this portrait is about exercising agency, claiming the right to live her life as a young person, on her own terms. And for me, it’s also the first time I’m painting someone in this context.

MV: That question of agency feels connected to what you were saying earlier about the series as a whole. Not just rest, but how Dalit women navigate their own representational constraints. How does that come through in this portrait? 

SNS: All of these portraits are not only about repose. They’re also about morality and respectability politics, and how those things get imposed on Dalit women’s bodies. Shailaja Paik writes about this: the way Dalit womanhood, through the anti-caste movement, starts to carry an imposed masculinity.⁴ We become bodies that are supposed to represent endurance, sacrifice, honor. You never want your body to trigger the tabooed memories of the kinds of labor Dalit women were historically forced into. And that’s a huge burden, because that same body also has desires, sexuality, pleasure. But you cannot express that. You cannot be playful. That’s what we mean when we say, “I didn’t get to be young when I was younger.” Within the anti-caste movement, there is so much respectability politics. Someone will always say: “This is not how someone from our community behaves. You represent serious things, so you must always be serious.” There is no space to be fully human.

And you know, it’s uncomfortable for me too. There are moments when I’m painting and I think, “What am I doing?” These women are simply feeling something, and it doesn’t look overtly political. It doesn’t look radical. But there is a radical edge to it. While I paint, my body has to stay aware of that tension—not only the need to challenge Brahminical patriarchy and Brahminical supremacy, but also the need to challenge ourselves. Art cannot just make us feel represented. It can’t only give us images of Dalit women that confirm what we already know. It also has to push us to ask, “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”

As someone shaped by the anti-caste movement, I have to ask whether I am ready to tolerate women from my community enjoying themselves. Because the moment Dalit women experience pleasure or softness, it’s dismissed as frivolous or unserious. And that dismissal sits on top of generations of emotional, physical, and intellectual labor carried disproportionately by Dalit women. They have carried entire communities, yet are not afforded their own humanity. That’s the challenge this series is trying to hold. If you had told me four months ago that I would be painting someone in a bubble bath as part of Educate, I wouldn’t have believed you. It feels wild. Because the histories around education for Dalit communities are full of violence—the use of water against us, the violence in schools and universities, the experiences of Dalit students navigating institutions designed not to include them. Those histories shape what we imagine “education” is supposed to look like, and you wouldn’t expect these portraits from that imagination. 

MV: Especially when you place them in the lineage of Salve’s writing.

SNS: Exactly. To then say Mukta Salve’s Hrithik—that is an immense claim. And yet while the rest of us are tense, she is there, having the bubble bath she deserves. She is in bliss. 

MV: Which was the point of Salve’s writing—to carve out the right to live differently.

SNS: This is what I mean when I say my work is about creating the moments we want in the future, in the present. If the goal is equity—that all of us get to enjoy our lives—then shouldn’t we say that we deserve that enjoyment now? That’s the dialogue happening in my head while I make this portrait. 

MV: Alongside these portraits, you’re also making an installation for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that comes out of Educate and its focus on water, violence, and learning. How did that work grow out of the same questions?

SNS: Last spring, as I was thinking about different aspects of Educate, I started thinking about how water has been used as a weapon and a tool of segregation against Dalit students (fig. 7). Shailaja Paik also writes about this in her work on Dalit women’s education—how, when the British tried to include oppressed castes in schooling, caste Hindus were furious. Their main argument was that if their children studied with us and drank water in the same spaces, their children would be polluted. Water became the most contested site.⁵

And it continues. There was a case recently of a boy who drank from his principal’s bottle and was beaten. There was Indra Meghwal, a little child in Rajasthan who drank from the common source in school and was beaten to death by his teacher.⁶ I was thinking about the violence that water holds, of water as an archive. I was also thinking about Ambedkar’s experiences in school—No peon, no water—where he could only drink if a school official (peon) poured water for him from a height, and if that person didn’t come, he had no water. Water is the site of humiliation and the site of resistance. After Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s legendary Mahad Satyagraha in March 1927 at Chavdar Tank, the local caste Hindus were infuriated and decided to “purify” the water using panchgavya (a mixture of cow urine, cow dung, milk, ghee, and curd). Polluting the water in this way was preferred to the mere thought of human beings from a different caste touching it.⁷ An infuriated Dr. Ambedkar decided to burn the Manusmriti shortly after, on December 25, 1927, at Mahad.⁸

Inspired by this, I wanted to use that same material, water, to destroy the Manusmriti. I started working with unfired clay tiles, roughly A4 or letter size, so they read as “documents.” I went through the Manusmriti and picked verses that specifically talk about education and what should happen if someone from an oppressed caste dares to study, what punishments are prescribed. It was a very painful process to read and select those texts.

I developed these slabs and began printing the verses on them with henna, using a screen-printing process on the wet clay so the text would be very clean and legible. Then I built an installation where water slowly drips onto the tiles (fig. 8). As it keeps dripping, the text dissolves, the clay collapses, and it literally turns to mud.

I also made the tiles as a walkway (fig. 9). You have to step on them to enter the space. It feels like stepping on dry leaves—there’s this very soothing, ASMR-like cracking sound. It’s calming. You hear the water dripping, you feel this relief in your body. And then you look down and read what you’re stepping on, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s the experience I wanted: the calm and the violence arriving together, in your body.

Over time, as people keep stepping, the text becomes less legible. I’m completely okay with that. In fact, I think some of these texts should never be archived. They should not exist. I don’t need to give you evidence of the atrocity; the fact that I had to create them just to destroy them should tell you enough. And this is coming from someone who cares deeply about archives, who loves holding on to pieces of history. The work at Kochi via Conflictorium displays only the walkway tiles on a 6 by 10-foot floor space.

MV: You’ve talked about wanting people to encounter this installation alongside the portraits from Educate. How do you imagine that relationship between stepping on the tiles and then seeing these images of Divya and Hrithik?

SNS: I’ve been thinking about the tiles and the portraits as two different but connected bodies of work. Any time someone wants to access the work in Educate and the portraits of rest, bliss, and release, I want them to do this act of stepping on the Manusmriti first. You shouldn’t be able to just walk in and enjoy the leisure of Dalit women without confronting what has been done to us. The tiles become a threshold, and you have to embody that act of destruction at least once. We have done this kind of work—a thousand times over, in a hundred different ways—before we allow ourselves a moment of rest. So as a viewer, at the very least, you have to do this much. 

And, as an artist, I also have to be careful not to reproduce that violence endlessly. The water only needs to be poured once. I don’t want to spend my life making and remaking these tiles so that they can be destroyed over and over. As much as it gives me pleasure to destroy the Manusmriti, I also have to liberate myself. 

The post “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”: Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar in Conversation with Maya Varma; Part I appeared first on post.