India’s independence from England in 1947 was heralded as a momentous step—the creation of the world’s most populous democracy. However, adjacent to Haiti and other colonized regions and peoples, the ripples of independence have been fraught. Despite the relentless work of social reformers like Babasaheb B. R. Ambedkar, the process has failed the majority of India’s populace, namely those shackled for milenia by caste hegemony. Within this context, post-colonial modernity ‘needs to be reinvestigated as a systemic tool for maintaining the power relationship that operates within the caste hierarchy’, writes professor Y. S. Alone.
Further imagining unbound futures beyond the stagnant faculty of Brahminical modernity, the resistive gathering is strengthened through text, drawing, and moving image works by Priyageetha Dia, Mahishaa (Neelavarana ನೀ ಲಾವರಣ), Rahee Punyashloka, and Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, each delving into the contemporaneity of caste within overlapping spheres of the social fabric.
While most oppressive to Dalit communities and their diaspora, caste is an omniscient burden on each body in South Asia. Priyageetha Dia’s offering LAMENT H.E.A.T visualizes this dispersion through her familial history as indentured labourers were transported to the Malay peninsula. Composed of computer-generated images, the video follows ghostly presences in a burning plantation zooming in and panning from above, a commentary on the confinement intrinsic to hierarchies of labour. Linking connected struggles and tackling the erasure of archives, the auto-narrative video Laitïam by Lapdiang Artimai Syiem from the Indigenous Khasi people of Meghalaya enlivens oral cosmology of a stag who is shot down while looking for a medicinal herb, a mourning for lost lands and rooted ways of being.
The whole histories of the world.
Not a single letter is seen
On my people.
—Poykayil Appachan, ‘No Not a Single Letter is Seen’
Grounded in the memory culture elucidated by Malayali activist, social reformer, poet, and son of the enslaved Poykayil Appachan’s lament, this gathering brings to HKW the impetus to resuscitate Dalit and Adivasi histories through the expressions of those with direct experiences, renouncing reductive Brahminical ethnographic approaches in favour of complex sustained subversions.
