The Heart Of Our Ugliness

Relentlessly political, Dalit artist Savi Sawarkar challenges urban audiences. His broken bodies force viewers out of their comfort zones, says APOORVANAND

Tightly coiled Sawarkar in front of two paintings

SHRINKING BODIES, bloating bodies, stretching bodies, crouching bodies, agonising bodies, labouring bodies, wasting bodies. Taking in the huge exhibition of Savinder ‘Savi’ Sawarkar’s art at Rabindra Bhawan in New Delhi, you are struck by the repetitive image of pain inflicted on bodies. The pain seems to originate “from the guts of the body itself, from the misfortunes of being physical,’’ to borrow John Berger’s description of painter Francis Bacon.

The only difference is that Sawarkar’s figures do not suffer from their physicality, but from the fact of their being a Mahar or a Jogta or a Devadasi. The pain, therefore, is not just physical but it also has a “caste” and a gender, a fact repeatedly emphasised here.

It is not that caste has never been drawn or painted by an Indian artist before. The curator of the exhibition, Parul Dave Mukharji points to painters like BC Sanyal who “painted themes such as the Harijan Girl or Harijan Woman”. But their work was essentially part of modernist art practice. It was not imbued with the kind of cultural politics that is represented by a painter like Sawarkar.

Savi Sawarkar, born in 1961 in Maharashtra, is India’s most prominent Dalit painter. Currently a professor of fine arts at Delhi University, his work is given over to making caste visible. It questions the broad universality of terms such as “work”or “labour” in a society that is still largely defined by caste and patriarchy. He seems most interested in the life experiences of those who have been treated as untouchable because of their work. One of his drawings shows a community of untouchables carrying dead animals on their back. It seems to raise questions about whether this work would form the experience of labour or not. Similarly, the Devadasi theme is close to Sawarkar’s heart. A Devadasi performs sex as as religious act. Sex, for her, becomes a form of public work, not very different from the menial work of those charged with removing pollutants from streets or homes. Sawarkar also addresses the community of Jogtas, males from the depressed castes who are castrated for the purpose of serving the Hindu religion. These workers, both male and female, who have served the religion thus, have shaped his own artistic experience.

However, caste is not made visible in Sawarkar’s work solely through the narratives of Dalits and their suffering. There is an image of an angry Brahmin looming over the city of Varanasi, while another Brahmin is shown as being unable to bear the thought of being treated by a Shudra doctor. Such works make the Brahminical dominance of the Hindu cultural space appear concrete.

Sawarkar, of course, seeks to upend this dominance. He believes in the power of personal narratives and uses them in abundance. The sheer variety of stories on display cast the artist in the mould of a tireless traveller, capturing cultural practices in all their colour and detail. That, however, does not reduce his work to an ethnographic document. What makes it exciting is his ability to question the finality of bodies, opening up the imagination to fresh possibilities.

S. Santosh, who contributes an essay to the catalogue, writes, “These paintings counter-pose the mutable body, the passing of one form into another, reflecting the everincomplete character of being.” In Sawarkar’s paintings, bodies seem to be melting or evolving or emerging from nature. Figures with heads and legs and no bodies indicate that the realities of caste have erased the bodies of a huge mass of people altogether. This collective experience of an absent, lost body is another recurring theme.

A repeated use of red, blue, yellow and black is a striking feature of Sawarkar’s work. Colour activates the surface of the piece, as if there was a fierce struggle between the figure and the surface grounding it. To borrow a phrase from Mikhail Bakhtin, you might even call Sawarkar’s art a “carnival of the grotesque”. He keeps returning to the fact that what we often recognise as normal — whether it is the human body or human ways of thinking — must take into account the grotesquerie that is an everyday experience for many people.

With deft use of colour and line, Sawarkar saves his figures from being subsumed by the “folk” category. His colours aren’t just bright; they’re loud. Instead of appearing playful, they seem severe or anguished. Yet they don’t scream. There overall atmosphere is one of muteness, which gets heavier and more oppressive from one work to the next.

This exhibition of Sawarkar’s paintings, drawing and graphics has been put together with a definite political purpose. It is aimed at forcing urban gallery visitors to confront realities they are often unaware of. You might hear someone exclaiming when he finds himself before one of the Devadasi paintings: “I thought it was over!” Visitors will see spittoons hanging around the necks of Shudras, and brooms hanging from their backs that will be used to clear the path they have just tread. They might even find it difficult to grasp the true meaning of such work. Quite aptly, the exhibition is titled “Eyes Re-cast” for it questions the very nature of knowledge.

Sawarkar had asked his classmate Parul Dave Mukharji (now a professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University) who is, by her own admission, an “upper caste woman” to curate this exhibition. As a result, she brings to the show her own struggle to come to terms with the realities Sawarkar captures. In relating to the Dalit agony of forced segregation, she was treading in advance the path that she wished the viewers to walk. Dave’s curatorial note is a brilliant exposition of a new cultural-political alliance that may help in the evolution of a language of universal liberty, rooted in our everyday experiences.

The exhibition spills off the walls as well. There is Lokesh Jain performing “Akkarmashi” (an autobiographical text by Sharan Kumar Limbale), Jaya Ayyer narrating the story of bharatanatyam, entwining it with the stories of the Devadasis, and Diepriye Kuku- Siemons performing an African dance. The exhibition space turned into an arena of dialogue between different art forms, each trying to find a language of freedom. It is a revitalising experience and the viewer returns repeatedly to this space where Sawarkar’s figures interact with live human bodies. Life is ugly, you “re-cognise” that. But it is also a struggle and one is reminded of Andrei Platonov as quoted by John Berger: “Out of our ugliness will grow the world’s heart”.