Art of Politics

The story of Ambedkar and discrimination told through Gond artwork.

Dont ask us to put people in boxes. Pardhan-Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam rebelled against the first tenet of graphic books while doing the artwork for Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability: the rectangular comic panels.

Instead,the traditional motif of Gond art,digna,repeated many times,divides a page into fluid panels,and carries the story forward: the borders are like wavy fences in a field,or rivulets crisscrossing grass. That they stepped out of the box is why this graphic book on Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar is a visual treat.

It is a landscape teeming with life,despite the story of discrimination that it tells. A train charging through the land is not a clanging beast,all metal and smoke,it is a snake uncoiling across pages. Every page is visually inventive and invites you to linger on it. The best graphic art cannot be speed-read.

Story continues below this ad

Ten-year-old Bhim,a Dalit boy in a classroom in Satara,stands up to ask his teacher for the water he is not allowed to get himself lest he pollutes the tap with his touch. The image of his thirst is the fish that wells up within him.

The story of this thirst is one that must be told,and has not been told like this. When his fathers peon forgets to receive them at a railway station,young Bhim and his brother hurtle from hostile cart-pullers to angry inn-owners,and spend a fearful night travelling with strangers and parched for water. An experience,he would later recall,that drove home the sting of caste.

As a young graduate from Columbia University,he finds a job in Vadodara but not a single hotel or friend willing to put him up: Vadodara,named for the kindly banyan tree/ In all your crowded streets there is no place for me.

Bhimayana also makes the point,through terse news clippings strewn across it of rape,murder,Khairlanji killings that even today,that is the angry lament of millions of Dalit men and women.