— ✍️ Interview by Alok Rajput

Azad Samaj Party MP Chandrashekhar Azad staged a peaceful overnight sit-in protest beneath Dr. B.R. Ambedkar statue in the Parliament complex on 20 July. His protest was a response against the brutal police lathi-charge and assault on students, during the Chalo Sansad march, where youth mobilised by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), had gathered demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged NEET paper leaks. The visuals of Azad putting together a tarpaulin canopy at the foot of the Ambedkar statue amidst the heavy downpour were striking.

This was however not the first time an Ambedkar statue had become a symbol, galvanising many at its altar. During the entire protests, visuals of Dr. Ambedkar flooded the gathering. Usually Ambedkar statues figure in the news after they have been desecrated. However their effects go towards broader questions of resource allocation, land disputes, increasing authoritarianism, and social justice. The method of agitating around a Babasaheb statue is an everyday reality in villages and many towns. In this sense, Babasaheb Ambedkar statues continue to ignite passionate debates through their sheer existence. Often scorned yet deeply loved by the grassroot Dalit community– the public space, aesthetic sensibility, and emotional affinity generated by a Babasaheb statue, even if desecrated, remains a strong and unique mode of cultural assertion of the anti-caste community.

To understand further, The Mooknayak spoke with Aatika Singh. In addition to being an artist, Aatika is the first Dalit woman conducting research in art history in the United States. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Stanford University. 

Alok: Aatika, you are a visual artist by profession. What does a visual artist actually do at the ground level? And as a Dalit woman, can you share your experiences of being in this profession?

Aatika: Artists work in the field of culture and aesthetics, and engage critically with paintings, sculptures, and many other aspects of practice and theory. But the truth is, I want to move away from this definition typically used to describe visual artists of a certain kind with social access. The issue is that in India, the world of art often focuses on studying ‘art’ while the real ‘artist’ and the artisan remain invisible in that entire discourse. I am glad to see more work these days by various anti-caste artists on themes of identity, labour and community that bridges this divide. Conversations are also evolving in the field around caste and the multiplicity of Dalit lifeworld. Through my doctoral research on Babasaheb statues, I want to understand how artisanal Dalit communities have come to be rendered overtime as precarious wage labourers, and secondly how does the same community still create and evolve their artistic practice by constructing vernacular forms of Babasaheb statuary, against all odds, at a daily basis. My broader interest in anti-caste aesthetics has also helped in further understanding how most matters of taste and beauty are given a Brahmanical veneer. 

Alok: Would you like to share more details about your research in light of the recent sit-in by Chandrashekhar Azad beneath an Ambedkar statue in solidarity with the protesting students at Jantar Mantar?

Aatika: I was born in Shahdara in Delhi. In my childhood I used to go with my grandmother to collect clay from the Yamuna River, and from that clay, we used to craft statues of  Babasaheb. I remember that my grandmother, like many other Dalit women of our neighbourhood, had deep knowledge about the different types of clay found along the Yamuna riverbed and the various techniques of crafting statues and figurines. The Dalit 'artisan' is the one who truly understands the most essential aspects of 'art', although my grandmother was a sanitation worker, she was also an artist. Everyday after work she would craft something from clay, tan leather, stitch garments, and so on. However, we could never do a public celebration and claim access to a road or a park.

Unfortunately we could never preserve any of her work either. However I know this is not a single story, many Dalit communities and artists have lived the same reality. Their labour is never seen as aesthetic, nor is their sensibility understood to be cultural. Today we see a rampant memorialisation and appropriation of Ambedkar’s iconography along with a massive rise in punitive demolitions of community built statues. Babasaheb statues continue to animate local as well as global politics and hence Chandrashekhar Azad’s choice to begin a sit-in beneath an Ambedkar statue is highly symbolic and revealing of the cultural claims of the Dalit community. 

Alok: Has there been research done on this subject so far, either in India or elsewhere in the world?

Aatika: If you look at the existing work on Babasaheb’s statues—such as that by filmmaker Nicolas Jaoul or Professor Kajri Jain—it primarily focuses on the statues that are installed by the government. My work is centered on those Ambedkar statues that the Dalit community  designs and builds with their own hands in North India. These statues might be considered crude or unsophisticated when compared to the statue of Dr. Ambedkar that was recently installed in the Supreme Court. However, there hasn’t been much conversation on various aspects of the former whether it is their iconography, placement or the ruination and the caging. The astronomical numbers of daily desecration and commemoration at the same time show us artistic adaptability and a quest for a dignified future made through claims of cultural, emotional and spatial participation and equality. The scholarship on these nuances is definitely growing in various disciplines, including translations of regional writings into English, that remain a key conceptual source. However the role of Babasaheb statuary deserves a well-written historical account of its own. 

Alok: Don’t you think that a statue is just a statue—whether it is installed by the government or by the people themselves? 

Aatika: This statement could be true in the case of Gandhi or Nehru’s statues, but it is not wholly true when it comes to the statues of Babasaheb. When a laborer—who builds cities out of cement and gravel—returns to his village in Uttar Pradesh and builds a statue of Babasaheb there, the political consciousness attached to that statue is sharply distinct from the political propaganda spread through a government-installed Ambedkar statue. The two are also treated and interacted with very differently by the public. Land disputes remain very much at the heart of the community-built statues, additionally. During my fieldwork, I observed that in many Dalit neighbourhoods, the small statues of Babasaheb often have bright red lips with a benevolent smile. Can we look at any Dr. Ambedkar statue installed by the government and find the same sartorial and subversive gesture? Crafting an ambedkar statue out of imagination and as a matter of passion and pride, with your bare hands, shows how the artisans self define themselves by asserting community identity through statue making. The government can certainly keep spending money to commission grand statues of Dr. Ambedkar—but in those official statues we don’t see the labour of love of the Dalit community. 

Alok: The way you interpreted the gesture of the Ambedkar statues in villages, to understand Dalit perspectives on culture —it seems that perhaps the social and political life of Dalits can be understood deeply through a cultural lens. What do you think?

Aatika: The journey of Dr. Ambedkar from being a political figure to becoming a pan-Indian cultural icon is a key testament to an aesthetic transition. What this means is that if we want to understand the land disputes, local economics, or political intricacies, we might need to understand the granular role played by Ambedkarite iconography. It is thus critical to understand why dominant and intermediate castes desecrate these statues in such large numbers on a daily basis. The real politics of our time is not defined by the construction of the Statue of Unity in Gujarat, but rather by the virulent vandalism of Babasaheb statues, across India. The act of desecration of a Babasaheb statue reflects, on one hand, the ongoing oppression and exclusion of Dalits—but the anger that arises among Dalits in response to such acts is also a powerful expression of their sharp political consciousness and cultural agency.