Book review: Ambedkar’s story, told like never before
In this graphic biography of BR Ambedkar, Pardhan Gond artists, Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam use their own distinctive artistic tradition to contextualise the life and struggles of the great man in the light of continuing atrocities against Dalits in 21st century India
Book: Bhimayana: Experiences Of UntouchabilityStory: Srividya Natarajan & S AnandArt: Durgabai Vyam & Subhash VyamNavayana105 pagesRs395r
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 in discussions 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?