Exploring the visual turn, Sandria Freitag remarks that the visual is ‘almost always, material in nature’, and that images ‘involve vision and the gaze’, ‘the handling’ of objects and subjects and ‘interactions of bodies’, which rest on ‘processes of learning and knowing’. And looking at photographs of African-Americans particularly, Leigh Reiford argues:
“Occupying an awkward place on the edge of history’s archives, photography as historical resource is at once neutral and partisan, transparent and elusive, ideological, authentic yet unreliable. It is precisely in these interstices that photography has presented itself not only as a means of critiquing racial logics, but also as a technology of memory that attempts to speak back to formal history.”
The book under review is a phenomenal attempt at creating and presenting a vast expanse of visual archive, or rather a counter-archive, of layers of Dalit experiences in modern Nepal. Covering the last six decades, it utilises documentary photography not only for political, social and cultural recognition, but also for a different visual vocabulary of Dalit lives.
Dalit: A Quest for Dignity
Diwas Raja K.C.
Nepal Picture Library
At the same time, as the editor Diwas Raja K.C. points out, while photographs capture the moment and the immediate, they are insufficient to explain the contexts and the causes. The book thus supplements the photographs through texts, including prose and poetry, poignant pieces, and also through silences. Interweaving textual-literary expressions and visual images, the book concurrently unpacks the intricate lexicons of Dalit lived lives. The dual language of the text, English and Nepali, combined with a very readable content and a creative presentation, gives the book a much wider reach and appeal.
The book begins with fragments of a poem, which are at one and the same time languages of pain and protest. Confronting religious hypocrisy, the first narrates: ‘The smell of my forge is in your temple idol’; the second attacks purity-pollution divides by talking of the dwelling; the third defies humiliated histories through reflections on music; and the fourth grounds itself in the earth. Together they challenge the oppressors – the ‘pious’, the ‘clean’, the ‘conscious’, the ‘glutted’ – to have the nerve to meet the eyes of the Dalit. This is followed by an evocative and moving introduction by Diwas Raja, which elaborates on the cultural politics of representing Dalits.
The visual tool of photography
More than words however, the book utilises the visual tool of photography to make its voice heard. Exploring imaginative possibilities through languages of representation, photographs are the main protagonists here. Based on travel and photo journalism, the book relies on documentary photography. As Diwas Raja states, “Documentary photographers work by staging a confrontation with unfamiliar or neglected social conditions – typically of the poor, the dispossessed, and the victimized – and hope the veracity of their cameras will shake viewers into action.” (p. 6). Depicting different dimensions of reality, and giving histories and voices to Nepali Dalits, the ethnographic photographs here are testaments to the weaves and warps of Dalit lives.
However, like various forms of representation, photographic lenses too have often offered perspectives from above, articulating grand narratives of the dominant and the hegemonic, and buttressing the facades of objectivity. The visual archive offers a vast collage of Brahmanical imagery, which repeatedly excludes, silences, obscures and marginalises Dalit landscapes.
Also Read: ‘They Like Our Music, Not Us’: Nepali Dalits Unite to Fight Prejudice
While positing reservations about photography’s contribution to voices from below, the book nonetheless underlines that they can provide an optic for the glaring injustices and exclusions in our society, and ‘can have a mnemonic force’. Making visible the invisible, they can fracture and challenge normative, dominant and official readings, and question regimes of writing, visualising, thinking and learning. Recovering lost voices, these images also become, if only partially, a medium of protest, an expression of emancipation, and a hope for dignity. They compel us to ‘revise the ethics of looking at Dalit lives’ (p. 8). They also force us to look beyond the frames, where the very recognition and marking of suffering also becomes a form of dissent.
Representing a diverse section
As per the 2011 Census of Nepal, the region has approximately 3.6 Dalits, or 13.6% of the total population. Representing this diverse section through photographs is not easy. Dalit: A Quest for Dignity divides itself into three main sections – ‘The Toilers of the Land’, ‘The Sound of the People’, and ‘The Artisans of Freedom’. While divided into these broad rubrics, the photographs do not have a linear, monolithic narrative. And yet, the images have to be thought relationally, and sequencing them creates a sense of the narrative. They are thus presented in the form of a repository, by which it is suggested that ‘we look to find connections between the images, as well as between people in them, and between the people and the artefacts around them’ (p. 10).
‘The Toilers of the Land’, has the largest number of photographs, and according to me, is the most impressive. It largely has images of Dalit women and men working with their hands and doing physical labour. There are tailors, sweepers, butchers, farmers, sex workers, blacksmiths, cobblers, weavers and construction workers, who are stitching, ploughing, harvesting, skinning carcasses and working with their tools.
Capturing Dalit lived private and public lives, the images here are also about their physical spaces – dwellings, fields, homes, streets and work places. In binaries between animals and humans, the mainstream imagines Dalits as part of the world of dogs and vultures, filth and poverty. We are confronted with faces and bodies of Chyame women working in municipalities, a sweeper inhabiting his caste marked body and carrying the broom, Badi women singing and dancing, Kami women outside their cramped homes, Dalit boys scrounging for food, Dalits bound by chains of bonded labour. Alongside, their tools of production and crafts acquire a dynamic force and a life of their own.
Also Read: On Gender and Social Inclusion, Nepal’s Politics Has a Long Way to Go
Intimate images of Dalit faces, eyes and bodies are central here, because as Diwas Raja states, ‘the daily universe of the caste system is premised on the denial of the Dalit face’ (p. 36). While underscoring how stigmas of untouchability are inscribed on Dalit bodies, and the intricate connections between caste hierarchies, occupations, hands and labour, the visuals here are not about cataclysmic events, rallies or dharnas of the enslaved and the ostracised. Rather, they are about the everyday, the mundane, the anecdotal and the quotidian meanings of inhabiting Dalit bodies. The photographs struggle with the ethics of baring the pain of maimed and crushed bodies; and yet they succeed in presenting the basic dignity and stubborn beauty of subjects covered in sweat, dirt, and blood.
The cultural world
The second section, ‘The Sound of the People’, enters the Dalit cultural world, providing new meanings to ‘untouchable’ cultural inheritances and battles over cultural meanings and symbolic practices. Shifting from the macro to the micro, music, stories, myths, songs, dances and arts not only have an inherent autonomy in these images, they also exemplify counter-hegemonies through cultural idioms. In these spaces of entertainment and sources of creative imagination, knowledge is based on direct sensual experience. Images of bands of musicians, singers and instruments especially underline that Dalits have been at the heart of Nepali public music tradition before the advent of mass media. Not only their music has been very popular, it has also played an important role in Dalit pride and self-esteem.
A group of naumati-baja musicians in Kalimpong. Credit: Anuradha Sharma
The section extends to images and tussles over water – how to lay water pipes, where to install public water taps, and how to access sources of water. It moves to snapshots around temple entry movements, inter-dining, religious conversions, inter-caste marriages and transgressions. The images often intermingle, mix and flow into different arenas. This section, while having some captivating photos, takes on too much, and perhaps would have been better if it was further divided into subsections.
Finally, the last section, ‘The Artisans of Freedom’, deploys images as languages of collective political protest, activism, Nepali Dalit movement and public critiques of caste system. Moving from the religious to the secular, from the cultural to the political, the idioms here are about civic rights, organisations and petitions. The lens of the camera records Dalit political articulations in Nepal in the recent decades and the photographs archive radical Dalit leaders, writers and ministers like T.R. Bishwakarma, Saharsa Nath Kapali, Hiralal Bishwakarma, Padam Sundas and also Ambedkar.
The last two sections simultaneously trace the multiple strategies of Dalits – cultural, religious and political – to counter stigmatisation and oppression. Embedded in a dense world, the photographs in the book capture and interpret work, aesthetics and politics of the Dalit world, leading us through the myriad lanes and by-lanes of everyday back breaking work, cultural expressions, social practices and political protests. They offer varied forms of subject-hoods, as they simultaneously and ambivalently play on different tracks – underlining oppression, stigmatisation and poverty that mark Dalit lives, their cultural and social spaces, and their transgressions and protests – which together are quests for dignity.
Photography here is an active and vibrant figure in the landscape of Dalits, both as document as well as practice. Yet, as I was going through the images, I was searching for the pen, the page and the book – of Dalits making education, reading, printing and writing a critical tool for claiming dignity – images of which are scant in the book.
Missing out on depth
Paradoxically, sometimes one gets lost in the material density of images, as the book tries to do too much and cover too many issues at one and the same time. Horizontally thus, the book has a wide scope but vertically, it sometimes lacks depth, as the larger Dalit histories, and shifts over time and space are somewhat lost. In a sense, the photos are more of an anthropological, rather than a historical, account.
More importantly, most of the photographs have been taken by non-Dalits. It would therefore be interesting to explore the perceptions, negotiations and jostling that goes around in the process of photography, especially by those who are being photographed and represented, and the tensions generated thereby. Dialectical engagements that place the Dalits both as subject and commodity in visual constellations are significant. When dominant hegemonic groups decide the nature of aesthetic canons, they have to question their own self and their own social position more critically, especially when the book in question is also heavily and generously funded.
The fractured nature of these photos thus needs to be addressed more explicitly. A significant book on Dalit visual imagery in India, while bringing forth Dalit representations, focuses on the works by Dalit artists, photographers and painters. There have been art festivals of, for and by Dalits, which have celebrated the creative democratisation and ‘Dalitisation’ of art and their claims to public spaces. Through their personal experiences of caste, and their visualisations of the self, Dalits repudiate, ridicule and critique Brahmanical hegemony in their art works, including in photography. Dalit art arises as an insistent necessity, which is potentially subversive. Some such photos, art works or images of Dalits by Dalits would have enriched the book further.
Also Read: Dalit Film Festival Discusses the Role of Caste in Setting Cultural Sensibilities
Having said this, the book leaves one with various glimpses of a world dominated by power, prejudice and poverty. It compels us to recognise starkly that casteism is a central and open dynamic of Nepali society. The grammar of nationhood takes a backseat here. Instead, the book interweaves subjection and struggle, fetters and freedom, oppression and dignity, in the poetics and politics of Dalit lives. The contradictory impulses of representing Dalit bodies as marked and coded gives way to alternative symphony of voices that honour Dalit legacies and voices.
Charu Gupta teaches at the department of history, University of Delhi.