Book review: Ambedkari's story, told like never before
Published: Sunday, Feb 6, 2011, 4:11 IST
By R Krishna | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA
Book: Bhimayana: Experiences Of Untouchability
Story: Srividya Natarajan &
S Anand
Art: Durgabai Vyam & Subhash Vyam
Navayana
105 pages
Rs395r
On the face of it, Bhimayana is a graphic biography of Bhimrao
Ambedkar. It portrays the incidents that shaped Ambedkar's worldview.
The authors, however, make the narrative current by including recent
news stories of Dalits being beaten, murdered and raped.
The book opens with the incident where young Bhim is denied water at
school because he is an untouchable. A few pages later, you have two
news stories from 2008: 'Dalit killed for digging own well' and 'Water
wars: Dalit woman torched'. As the narrative progresses, the point is
driven home: more than a hundred years after Ambedkar was denied water
in school, the ugly reality of atrocities against Dalits persists in
21st century India, and is either ignored or consigned to the inside
pages of newspapers.
But what makes this book extraordinary is the artwork. Durgabai Vyam
and Subhash Vyam are Pardhan Gond artists from Madhya Pradesh. The
first thing you note about their illustrations are the missing frames.
This can be disorienting at first, but the reader will soon come to
appreciate the advantages of such an approach. The drawings flow
freely on the page, and hence are more expressive, and in unexpected
ways.
There are frames on some of the pages. But these, as the artists
explain at the end of the book, are inspired by fences of farms in
villages which are rarely straight. Then there are times when the
object itself is the frame. For instance, in a scene where Ambedkar is
on his way to Baroda, the train in which he is traveling itself
becomes the frame.
On another page, Ambedkar, who is left without shelter in Baroda, is
sitting in a park and thinking. In this scene, his face becomes the
frame for the illustration and the garden with children playing is
within it. Even the speech bubbles have character. There is a
bird-shaped 'bubble' which appears "only for characters whose speech
is soft, the lovable characters, the victims of caste — men and women
who speak like birds." The 'thought bubble' has eyes since "thinking
happens with the mind's eye." Then there are bubbles which carry "a
sting" — so it's only natural that they should look like a scorpion's
tail.
But there's more to the art than mere aesthetics. In the world created
by the Vyams, there are eyes everywhere: on rail tracks, clocks, in
water, and, of course, on speech bubbles. Creatures other than humans
— snakes, cows, birds, fishes — are present in almost every frame. At
times, the animate and inanimate — a bus with the face of a human, a
fort that's depicted as a lion — meld together. The result is a
colourful graphic narrative where the art carries a subtle message
even as the words tell the story. For example, are the eyes a mute
witness to a centuries-old inhuman practice that mainstream society
sweeps under the rug?
Bhimayana fills a gap indiscussions of so-called modern Indian
society. Perhaps the distance — physical and mental — between urban
and rural India is far too wide today. But atrocities against Dalits
do not seem to shock the urban middle classes any more. The Khairlanji
murders were a symptom of a malaise that's been around for far too
long. When such incidents are back lit, as it were, by the struggle a
man waged hundred years ago, it sends out a powerful message.
Bhimayana leaves the reader with a question: if Dalits continue to
face discrimination as Ambedkar did, what will it take to produce a
leader of his stature today?
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