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Ambedkar out of the Frame ● ● ● G R A P H I C B O O K ● his is a graphic book kind of animistic excess and fluidity based on Ambedkar ’s of morphing forms tells us something autobiographical notes, about the nature of imagination in culled from the section Ambedkar out of Gondi artwork, in contrast to the titled “Waiting for a Visa”. void-fixated imagination-defying The Foreword by John Vedic cosmos. Berger describes the book But despite the fluidity and the in terms of “a conference interconnectedness, this is not merely of corporeal experiences across the frame a mytho-epic universe where the Tgenerations, full of pain and empathy, ugly and the beautiful, violence and and nurtured by a complicity and civility seamlessly flow into an epic endurance that can outlive the sublime. On the contrary, violence market”. It also talks about the lack takes on forms that make it hard for of rectangular framing and unilinear us to preserve an aesthetic wholeness. time as heroic modes. S. Anand’s After the Mahad satyagraha, the upper Epilogue at the end details how he caste villagers are graphically shown carried volumes of graphic novels by defecating into the tank in order to avant-garde artists Art Spiegelman, make it toxic. A supine and fattish Joe Sacco, Will Eisner, Osama Tezuka, Gandhi is shown resting with a saw, Marjani Satrapi and Shaun Tan for a metaphor for his insidious sabotage his first session with the Vyams, of the separate electorate for the the Pardhan Gond artists chosen to depressed classes. The venomous visually interpret Ambedkar’s life. speech of the upper caste characters While the publishers shy away from is depicted through speech bubbles calling it a graphic novel, and stick to shaped as scorpion stings and the the more universal category ‘graphic various upper caste characters are book’, the overarching frame in which shown to grow tails between their legs. it is slotted, marketed, and reviewed The casteist station master has a limp is that of the graphic novel. The penis painted on his trouser front. blurb, for instance, says: “Defying The Parsi mob which comes to attack conventional grammar, they infuse Ambedkar has sticks for bodies. The fresh energy into the graphic idiom.” vocabulary of counter-abuse is both It is necessary here to identify the sophisticated and effective. need to reference the graphic novel More pertinent is the general and also the need to turn against ambience of dismemberment—people it. Graphic novels, a fairly recent are randomly represented by a scatter niche category of the publishing Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability of legs, feet, arms, hands, and heads. industry, can be said to cater to the The profusion of hands, feet and combined power of urban youth and Incidents in the Life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar fingers is mostly an invocation of pop art culture as opposed to the incessant labour and toil. But the more degraded comic. The integration Art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam; Story by Srividya fingers are also accusatory. The Dalit between art and pop art effected under Natarajan and S. Anand characters are often encased within late capitalism/postmodernism revels imaginary vehicles even when they are in what Jameson identifies as the Navayana, New Delhi, 2011, 108 pp., Rs 995 (HB) walking, and these vehicles are in the pastiche or kitsch mode, a layering ISBN 9788189059170 form of different animals. Could this which is premised on the logic of be meant as a protective gesture—that a circular self-referentiality, where even when the odds against them are the sign can only point inwards, and so severe, nature is looking out for externality, history or the outside NANDINI CHANDRA them? This importation of a tribal reality is shorn of any significant ecology of subsistence and communal meaning. Given this orientation to life blending into a Dalit psychosphere capital’s larger (un)truth, the political might provide a healing touch, since or oppositional content of most the tribal is (theoretically at least) graphic novels becomes increasingly totally removed from the Hindu suspect. In what ways does the comic anxiety of pollution and purity. In fact, Bhimayana plugged as an anti-genre the popular stereotype of the tribal as a retain its oppositionality? How is denizen of hills and forests is a person the folk idiom of the Pardhan Gonds with martial dignity and independence. here not just another commodified The Dalit on the contrary ekes out a appropriation of tribal art, pervasive bare living in the grubby shadow under the sign of an ethnic Indo- and gutters of Brahminical society. chic? But while the transplantation works The artwork is extremely beautiful. aesthetically, is it not doing violence Its beauty stems not from an ornamental to the specific historicity of each excess or prettiness, but from being category, especially considering that comfortable in one’s own artistic skin Ambedkar had categorically rejected and oeuvre. The Vyams refused to be the Dravidian origin theory of the influenced by the suffocating boxed Untouchable, preferring instead a art of the graphic novels that Anand political explanation of untouchability had brought along. They needed their to the racial one? According to him, characters to breathe in khula open Untouchables are those Buddhists space and so they devised undulating who refused to abandon their religion digna patterns for marking panels. after the Brahmins took over. Train journeys and conversations What has necessitated this bringing on the road take on the serpentine together of the very distinct life worlds pattern, moving in coiled loops, the of the tribal and the Dalit? While in-between spaces interspersed with Dalits might consider themselves trees, grass, animals grazing, birds superior to the tribal on the basis flying, but all of them interpolated of their ambivalent status in the as listeners to the narrative. Some of caste hierarchy (casting the tribal as the animals are shown really twisting a mere savage), the tribal is able to around as if straining to hear the flaunt an alternate holistic structure. fading conversation. It’s like a katha, In this book at least, what we have a story telling session. The multiple is the overarching superiority of the eyes shining like stars seem to suggest Gondi frame, stretching above and a watching-over, or a silent witness. beyond the modernist Ambedkarite The skies are not just empty space, one steeped in a blueprint for social but shaped like animals, containing democracy! How does the tribal the other species in their fold. This ecology facilitate Ambedkar’s B I B L I O : M A R C H - A P R I L 2 0 1 1 22 constitutional and developmental Ambedkar had warned his followers against making capital, to “outlive the market”. That vision of social democracy? is why residual cultural forms (which In fact, in a weird twisted logic, a personality cult out of his name and was deeply derive their oppositional value from the tribal democratic communal contemptuous of the subservient political culture rife being part of a different economy, ethos provides a more habitable but are fully active and dynamic in the space for imagining the annihilation among Congress Party workers, especially vis-à-vis present, rather than mere survivals) of caste than the realist modernist the cult of Gandhi. The irreverent style of Pardhan are being mined to imagine and ethic, in which political struggle is produce a truly political content. The articulated in the language of colonial Gondi art helps facilitate this de-iconising, by drawing Gond Pardhans are modern subjects masters. For instance, Ambedkar Ambedkar’s individuality as inseparable from the facing the onslaught of capital and had warned his followers against collective destiny of his caste people responding to it as much as the Dalits. making a personality cult out of his But their performative art uses forms name and was deeply contemptuous ● and techniques that cannot be made of the subservient political culture sense of in terms of bourgeois values rife among Congress Party workers, world naturally rejects the realism of of the dominant art, demonising, alone. There is no subservience here, especially vis-à-vis the cult of Gandhi. different physiognomies, or the need reducing and exoticising them. no paying homage to the comic The irreverent style of Pardhan Gondi to differentiate between Brahmin and The second style—marked by an masters. art helps facilitate this de-iconising, by Dalit on the basis of skin colour, skull empirical conception of the world While it is encouraging that the drawing Ambedkar’s individuality as size, relative flatness of the nose, and based on proof—is rendered through work of Durgabai and Subhash is being inseparable from the collective destiny so on. The Gondi interpretation of a multiplication of horror narratives, adapted to political use, one must be of his caste people. He is always shown Ambedkar’s autobiographical notes a horror that is endemic to knowledge alert to the fact that reification and to be with his brothers or colleagues. restores perspective by enacting an about caste violence that stares out of incorporation work also through In contrast, the Amar Chitra Katha embodied horror through such things the pages of our morning newspapers. acknowledgement and appreciation, comic on Ambedkar drawn by Mahar as scattered body parts, a telling This horror-induced politics generally ways to reconcile marginal and artist Dilip Kadam is about his iconic comment on a Hindu moral economy has its origins in bourgeois self- marginalised communities to the individual stature. In Bhimayana, his that is hierarchised on the basis of consciousness. Why did the comic status quo. Too much emphasis on the humanity prevents him from being anatomical splitting—head, shoulders, feel the need to retain this kind formal aspects of their art—texture, cited as the great man.
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