How long will we be falsely proud of something we haven’t achieved through our own efforts, but rather something we’ve gotten by accident and forced unwillingly by birth, and most importantly, something that is against humanity? In, Understanding Caste: From Buddha to Ambedkar and Beyond, Gail Omvedt writes that the sentence imposed on you for no crime is caste, and how long people will serve the sentence imposed is undefined.¹ Today, we Indians celebrate 75 years of the Indian Constitution. Back on the 25th of November 1949, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of said Constitution, made a statement that highlighted a contradiction in the Indian context. Ambedkar said,  

On the 26th of January 1950, we will enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality, but in social and economic life, we will have inequality. In politics, we will recognise the principle of one man one value, but in our social and economic life, we will continue to deny it due to our social and economic structure.²

In our current world, we persist in adding to this contradiction rather than destroying it. I’m referring to the existence of thousands of castes in India, which have existed for thousands of years and destroyed the very fabric of humanity.  

The concept of a humanitarian society was first proposed by anti-caste thinkers in India. Their progressive values diverged from those of contemporary nationalists. The ideologues of the erstwhile untouchables advocated for equality and unity within the idea of nationalism, urging the reconstruction of a prosperous Indian society after independence.  

Unfortunately, while writing this article, I received heart-wrenching news in my state. A Dalit boy was murdered for loving an upper-caste girl. Tragically, the girl even married his dead body at his funeral after he was killed over an inter-caste relationship. We often overlook the poetry, songs written and sung by social reformers, writers, poets, and artists who have fought for humanity’s liberation and the betterment of society for thousands of years. Their songs have consistently advocated for social change, yet we fail to see our minds changing. Will our minds be moved by the cries of a murdered lover due to an inter-caste relationship? Will our minds be moved by the mother of that murdered child? If people are being killed by others without fault but due to their caste, then it is undeniable that we must protect humans from humans themselves. 

The idea of negating oneself is exactly what Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's movement aimed to annihilate. The concept of caste is a concept that annihilates individuality. No friendship,  solidarity  or human ethics can be built on a premise of self-negation.  For example, across India until a few week ago and for many years the act of a Dalit groom sitting on a horse leads to people attacking the wedding party, lynching the groom and shooting the horse. Why does a horse, a symbol of purity, once rid by a Dalit groom have to be slaughtered to save pride? These acts of violence appear subtly in art criticism, layered under the veneer of ignorance and blatantly when orchestrated through physical violence. And my sculptures are mere props of the performative behaviours that society uses to decorate the violence of caste. The exuberance of colour and form acts like a painting and layered under them is a hidden reality demonstrated by the four-tiered varnashrama dharma.   

In India we perform an active dissonance with our own aesthetically accepted forms and colours. A learned format of discourse and technicality informs our ideas around aesthetics. One encounters the aesthetic formats at art school through the use of ochre, dull colours, landscapes and portraits. Objects, colours and forms that arrive from our popular culture of image-making are rejected or attributed to a distant source.   

The dismantling of the caste hierarchy and the annihilation of caste is a cultural aspiration which can only succeed if a cultural revolution brings about a change in the attitudes of people in the subcontinent.   

Prof. John Dewey, Ambedkar's guide at Columbia University stated, 

Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse. … As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to conserve and transmit the whole of its existing achievements, but only to make for a better future society.³ 

In fact, it is our responsibility to the anathemas that plague our society in the same generation; it is important to Dr. Ambedkar, as Prof. John Dewey said. The atrocious traditions also become more and more powerful when passing from one generation to another. As the river moves forward, it extends. Similar traditions that are in each generation, become more and more powerful and society becomes more and more weak. Therefore, every generation should dismantle the atrocious traditions of their time for their future generations.  

I received an invitation from the 36th Biennale of São Paulo to curate an exhibition as the Dalit artists’ collective. However, we rejected the idea of a Dalit artists' collective and instead proposed a new concept that dismantles asymmetries and advocates for equality with equity and social justice between the sixteen artists in the group named Metta Pracrutti.⁴ This biennale brought us to Brazil to imagine our own folk songs, poems and stories that have kept us going during centuries of exploitation as couplets of celebration. The people who were ostracised as Dalits were the artisans, poets, singers, musicians and dancers of our society. When Dr. Ambedkar began the social reform movement to eradicate caste he employed folk poets to take his message across village communities that were disconnected from cities and illiterate. These poets called 'Lok Shahirs', or people's poets, carried his message in the form of spoken prose and sung poetry. Ambedkar said that the impact of a poem written by him on many pages could not have the same effect of a poem that would be sung by the poet Lok Shahir Vaman Dada Kardak. Our proposal to the Biennale was an echo from Brothers and Sisters on the other side of the seven seas to whom we sing, paint and dance many solidarities.  

Metta Pracrutti  

Annihilating caste, erasing a protected ignorance. Metta Pracrutti has a demeanour of friendliness, togetherness, kindness and empathy drawn from the way mangroves interweave their roots to stand together in storms, become hatcheries for fish, shrimps and crab, and clean water polluted by men. As a collective metaphor, our quest for social justice was not to erase the individual artist but to annihilate caste. The Buddha advises us on 'Metta' or 'friendship' and 'Pracrutti' or 'Nature'—and we seek to build on the inferences of these subjects. This nomenclature foregrounds coexistence, the erasure of a protected ignorance towards caste, ethical interventions in culture, religion and society and kinship beyond identity.  

We draw our project referring to the book ‘Monção’ or ‘Monsoon’—a collection of short stories from Portuguese Goa published in 1963 by the Goan writer Vimala Devi two years after Goa became a part of independent India. In the book she critiques a society defined by ‘colonial culture, feudalism and caste discrimination’.⁵  

Monsoon (2025), refers to the seasonal winds that blow during the rainy and dry periods in tropical and subtropical regions. It serves as a powerful metaphor for the intense but interconnected changes that affect these realities. During the late summers the monsoon provides relief, as nature showers respite from the heat. In the rain-fed lands of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala the monsoon is a promise of renewal and folk stories set in this season tell tales of courage against societal injustices. As artists we tell stories from these places that are encased by bays, estuaries, mangroves, creeks, beaches and the oceans of poetic resilience inspired by the Buddhist Jātaka tales.  

The Jātaka tales, or birth stories, propagate the Buddhist principles of humanity, empathy, wisdom and kindness through the lives of animals that were the previous births of the Buddha. This affinity of embracing nature has echoes with Candomblé. We draw an aesthetic reference to the frescoes of the Ajanta Caves in Central India that were drawn in 480 CE illustrating the Jātakas on the walls of rock-cut caves.⁶ Dr BR Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitutional revolution against caste advocated a cultural resistance to the structural architecture of the caste system.  

Responding to the curatorial note of the 36th Biennale of São Paulo proposed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, we are inspired by our African brothers and sisters who escaped the travesty of slavery and established a society of solidarity on the banks of the mangroves of San Salvador creek. Our own Lusitano heritage takes into account a violent Portuguese inquisition but also conversely decides our cuisine today with the introduction of chilli, onions, tomatoes and ways of cooking, semantics and naming conventions etc.  

In this project Metta Pracrutti investigated the presence of African histories, our own silent erasure of the history of our involvement in the Global Slave trade by remembering the lives of the ‘Kappiris’ —African slaves brought by the Portuguese to Cochin (Kochi) from Mozambique who came to live amongst us in Kerala and became our folk deities. This is why we seek the wisdom of Vimala Devi who was originally baptised às Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida—a revolutionary Goan author who was not only critical of the Portuguese in India in her book but also satirised the syncretism of a colonial society with the discriminatory traditions of the upper caste elites. We seek forms from Rubem Valentim’s return to Africa to participate in the Biennale of Dakar rediscovering a visual vocabulary of his African roots in 1966. Issa Samb just thereafter wrote a new vocabulary of art attempting to gather the people of Africa, South America and India through performance and a conscious materiality. In our individual practices we explore imagery and materiality through these references but also draw deeply from our contexts—a collective consciousness that is often unseen. 

Vichitra Natak

By the time this article gets published, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale will have opened, marking my second consecutive biennale this year. Witnessing the caste question in the international art world and becoming a part of global discussions offers hope to anti-caste cultural activists and artists like me. 

At the 2025 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, I staged Vichitra Natak (Theatre of the Absurd). Inspired by a talim or wrestlers ring, this arena temporarily suspends caste through the ethics of skill and friendship. 

My hometown, Kolhapur, boasts rich, fertile black soil that has nurtured not only sugar and cotton but also social movements against caste and superstitions. Bordered by forests and situated on the Deccan plateau, its volcanic granite has been used to build monuments of Buddhist and Jain antiquity. 

Agrarian life in Kolhapur is marked by festivals that draw towards a material reverie. Farmers decorate bulls that plough their fields with cowrie shells, cow bells, ghungroos, ropes, collars, bronze jewellery, payals, bracelets, and stirrups. 

This Theatre of the Absurd is what I call a contemporary 'Arte Povera of the subcontinent’, where art is sourced not from found detritus but from the precarious afterlives of craft, survival, and faith. The installation demands that the viewer grapple with the absurdity of caste itself, a performance without script, sustained only by belief.