A title drawn from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s essay is a special project of Ambedkarite photographers for the Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography, 13th Edition.
First published in 1945 , this essay by Dr. BR Ambedkar discusses the complicity between the Indian National Congress and the Press in India. The complicity often drowned voices and views of alternate parties and communities interested in the liberation of India. Ambedkar here appeals to the foreigner , this could be the departing colonial but also activists interested in the decolonisation of India. Asking them to look beyond the Indian National Congress so as to see how a free nation that has not reconciled its divisions and indigenous forms of repression allows inhumanities such as caste in the Indian context.
”As for freedom, the foreigner does not stop to make a distinction between the freedom of a country and the freedom of the people in the country. He takes it for granted that the freedom of a country is the same as the freedom of the people in the country and once the freedom of the country is secured the freedom of the people is also thereby assured.” – BR Ambedkar , ‘Please to the Foreigner,’ 1946 .
The quality of freedom a people enjoy is inherently linked to their representation. If the world turns a blind eye or blinds their representation by promoting the idea of a wretched image , we ascertain their conditions as an identity. When Bonaventure invited me to curate a section of Dalit artists within the 13th Bamako Encounters African Biennale Of Photography , I spent a week determining what should constitute a showing of such sorts.
Ambedkar never allowed himself to be photographed wearing Indian clothes , just when he converted to Buddhism , he wore robes to befit the symbolic act. Had he been seen like Gandhi in a loincloth , he would have been restituted to the margins of India’s caste based society , where appearance and costume is an essential marker of hierarchy. Ambedkar was aware of these visual cues and the relationship of visual culture to the establishment of reform and societal change. He met the reformer King Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur through the artist and portaiturist Dattoba Dalvi. The Ambedkarite movement today is iconised through the portraits of Ambedkar. Ambedkar himself decided to learn how to paint and draw .
Press photography and travel photography often exploits Dalits as visual fodder to compose exotic images of India. Even today exoticism and the bizarre form part of the oeuvre of many known photographers who have worked in India. The press is only concerned with images of Dalits and the marginalised when violence is inflicted upon them, such as lynching , migrations during covid and riots . Positive imagery of their quotidien lives remains non-existent. Despite the Dalit community having role models who arise to positions in every field the gaze of the camera fails to capture their achievements. They deny respectability and the strategic visual statements made by thinkers such as Amebdkar .
We are in a time where the need to archive and preserve is essential and urgent, thus commissioning photographers and a collective with the role to imagine a new visuality in photography , a gaze that looks across from the interiority of everyday lives that also has happiness strung into them is important for an exhibition.
In an international exhibition the right put forth once visual opinion is often censored by looking at a larger picture , but the picture often enacts a counterrevolution on the aspirational movements of affirmative action and the principles of the Ambedkarite movement while stressing on culpability of identity and its correlation to the practice expected of the artist. Like Ambedkar’s ‘ Plea to the Foreigner’ , we intend to question exhibition practices , their lists and positions through which they effect change. The essay by Ambedkar contests Gandhi’s charitable and condescending views on Dalits, whilst denying them equity and humanity , akin to his views on Blacks in South Africa. This exhibition constructs a similar argument especially within a biennale of solidarities in a continent , Africa – to which Dalits have looked across the Indian Ocean for resonances of resistance against annihilation.
– Prabhakar Kamble
These sets of photos are about a love marriage that happened in the brick kiln factory. Both the bride and groom were labourers in the same kiln, fell in love and were married off by the people in the kiln. Amidst all the troubles and challenges of everyday work, love and life goes on. The dark imagination of the privileged that these labourers are victims who don’t enjoy life and paint a broody image of them is shattered with such events. Even under the highest level of oppression and suffering the oppressed love, live and enjoy.
