Project Description

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The objective of this artistic-anthropological project is to challenge casteism, discrimination based on caste, and hereby address potentials for increased epistemic and social justice. Dalit bodies are in focus, as archives of structural violence as well as of long-term counteractions with the aim to eradicate caste. 

 

The social system of caste has been legitimized by Brahminical readings of the Hindu scriptures, reproduced by ritual design and practice, and enforced by British interventions and racialization during the colonial era. Today, the UK government, along with EU legislators and the US Congress, are debating how domestic casteism (i.e., caste-based discrimination within the diaspora) can be prohibited by law. Simultaneously, people of the lowest caste groups, self-identifying as Dalits, disown earlier representations of victimhood and atrocities, as they demand attention to their long-term struggle for social justice. The social system is analogous to a bodily order where the high castes have ranked Dalits as lowest, connected with feet and considered ritually impure. The current visual focus on Dalit feet aims to transgress and reverse this order.

 

Caste is silenced in mainstream discourses, except during marriage arrangements, and this has strengthened the use of photography as the main method of inquiry. Participation and collaboration have been central, aligning with current debates at the intersection of art and anthropology where ethics is emphasized in relation to aesthetics, epistemology, and the artist’s self-interest (Laine 2018). This approach further connects with the idea that to sit at someone's feet, is to learn from that person. My engagement in casteism developed as a necessity, during fieldwork among Tamils, in south India since 2004, and in the Tamil diaspora since 2011. 

 

The #1 phase of the project has been exhibited at 5th Base Gallery in East London, presented at the RAI conference Art, Materiality and Representation at the British Museum, and published in Visual Anthropology Review 2020 https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/var.12198

Based largely on the exhibition response, where the stereotype of Dalits as poor people of rural India unfortunately was reiterated among some of the viewers, I extended the project with new photographic collaborations during 2019 in order to visualise a larger variety of Dalit lives. The method has thus expanded into curating and exhibition interactions. 

 

The continued work has been performed at the tension between Dalit aims of presenting their hardships as oppressed while at the same time visualising the possibility of upward class-based mobility and the aim to eradicate caste. The collage included in this presentation is a statement of this tension, where the woman in the centre, who has made this upward journey, wanted her position to be visualised as an unusual exception into this particular form. The #2 series of photographs was presented for the first time as part of the SIEF2021 congress.