Commemorating a Revolution yet to come,

The project proposes to explore and reflect upon both the persistance of, and resistance to, the caste system in India through artistic practice. In doing so it attempts to find a cinematic form which resonates with visions of a casteless society. An integral part of the Hindu social structure, the caste system codifies supposedly eternal hierarchies within the social structure. One is supposed to be born into ones caste, with no possibility of a change. In this social setup, people doing whats considered to be menial or dirty jobs like cleaning the gutters, removing animal carcasses and so on, are considered unholy and deemed as untouchable. This group, now usually referred to by the politically-charged term Dalit (literally, the downtrodden), has been oppressed, segregated and discriminated against.

Over the years, the caste system has transformed itself, colluding with forces of modernity, and caste based discrimination continues to define day-to-day lives in the contemporary. Despite the strides made by the Anti-Caste movement over the decades, the ideal of a casteless society remains elusive. A small town in Maharashtra (Western India), Mahad holds a very special iconic place in the imaginary of the Dalit Anti-Caste movement in India. This is the town where the towering Dalit leader who has in many ways defined the contemporary Dalit movement, Dr. Ambedkar, took out his first protest rally in 1927.

The intention of the project would be to go beyond the binarity of celebration or rejection, and rather to be with Mahad with it in all its complexity, its flaws, its achievements, its critiques. The project has had – and will have – multiple iterations and outputs. It has functioned as an anti-caste reading group, as a platform for developing co-authored articles, as a space for creating lecture-performances, as a series of experiments with forms – of cinema, of soundscapes, of textual practice. Finally, the project will take life as a series of exhibitions, including in Mahad and in Vienna.

The question for us is: by approaching it like this, would it be possible to find artistic forms which truly commemorate this revolution, a revolution yet to come? Will such a commemoration bring us closer to the ideal of a casteless society?