Artist Savi Sawarkar brings alive the past, present and future of Dalits.

Like most Dalits, artist savi sawarkar, 47, has a strong memory. It stretches back to the beginnings of Manuvaad when his kind, the Dalits were thrown to the bottom of the caste pyramid and made to stay there. “I remember going to school where my teachers beat me just because of who I was,” he says.

Considered India’s only Dalit painter working entirely on Dalit subjects, Sawarkar held his second major solo show in Delhi recently. The exhibition, titled Eyes Re-cast, was the product of 12 years of ruminations on the caste and gender perspectives of exploitation. His canvases are lashed in red and black, his strokes are bold, even defiant—it is the anger of generations finding vent in ways that led YS Alone of the Jawaharlal Nehru University to argue that the artist’s deconstruction of Manu and the Brahmanical hegemony paralleled in Indian art what BR Ambedkar had achieved in the intellectual and political spheres.

Growing up amid financial constraints in Nagpur, Sawarkar faced the bitterness of the caste system very early and very often. “Once, my sister was very excited because the next day’s lesson was on Ambedkar. She spent the evening preparing for it and was ready to outshine her class-mates. In school, however, her teacher skipped the chapter saying it wasn’t important. My sister protested and was beaten up. She cried her heart out and, from that day, lost interest in studies.”

Sawarkar’s first exhibition was in 1996—even as Mayawati pitchforked Dalit politics into national consciousness—and was considered extremely provocative. It had 100 large canvases showing Dalits as they had never been perceived before—Dalits walking tall with lanterns in their hands, Dalits demanding their rights, Dalit women breaking the shackles. The colour pattern was just as frontal. “The crimson washes mean we want our own sun. And black is the colour of Dalit history,” he says.

In Eyes Re-cast, Sawarkar’s anger is muted with layers of aesthetics so that it becomes a thing of beauty, though the artist still jolts urban sensibility. A drawing called Untouchability, for instance, shows Dalit men with the marks of their caste—a broom tied to their backs and an earthen urn to their necks. “These signs were the Dalit counterparts of the Brahmanical holy thread and tilak during the Peshwa rule in Maharashtra and parts of Gujarat. The matka was for Dalits to spit into because they were forbidden to dirty the soil, and the broom swept the ground on which they walked,” says Sawarkar.

Sawarkar is obsessed with single figures, largely because he himself is a loner. “I keep people at a distance. Even at Nagpur University and later at MS University, Baroda, where I studied art, I was careful never to draw attention to myself. Art colleges are elite places and the other students were in a different league; they spoke fluent English and were more self-assured. I never felt as if I belonged there,” he says.

Though finances were a problem in college (he part-timed as an illustrator to pay his fees), painting came so naturally that it is hard to believe Sawarkar entered art college only because his Class X results couldn’t get him admission elsewhere.

In college, however, he applied himself diligently and soon found his individual voice as a painter of Dalit issues. “I grew up listening to my grandparents tell me stories about the menials of society. Though they were illiterate, both my grandparents were politically aware. They had converted to Buddhism under Ambedkar in 1956 and I still use Buddhist aesthetics in my works,” he says.

He travelled extensively in south India and bits of the west and Bengal to study the social structure. Among the “other” that caught his eye wherever he went were the devdasis. In Mumbai’s Grand Road, at the Yellema temple in Karnataka, in the Mangeshi temple of Goa, he came to a shocking conclusion that most of these girls belonged to the Dalit community.

The sexual availability of socially downtrodden women, and the mysterious rites that are still performed in many parts of India to introduce underprivileged girls into the devdasi cult, occupied his imagination as the painter sought to equate his own marginalisation with theirs. “The dynamics of oppression always chooses the woman as a worst victim. And the oppression of a woman translates into the oppression of the child and so the saga continues,” he explains.

Eyes Re-Cast may find echoes in other voices soon. Several Dalit art students who visited the exhibition confided in Sawarkar that they hesitated from touching the subject because it would be controversial and wouldn’t sell. “I hope they are now more confident about their identity,” says Sawarkar, a faculty member at Delhi University’s College of Art. His paintings can be found in a large number of private collections in the US and Germany (“which have their own history of ethnic exploitation”), as well as other parts of Europe. Eyes Re-Cast is set to travel to Paris and China, after a show in Mumbai later this year.

Meanwhile, Sawarkar continues with his furious drawings and his travels into “sensitive areas of India: Godhra during the riots and Nandigram during the heat of politics.” “My next exhibition will show how communal politics as well as globalisation are still victimising Dalits. I do not paint portraits of a Gandhi, an Ambedkar or a Mayawati; I paint what they stand for,” he says. As far as he is concerned, in the past lie images of the future. ©

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