With Y. S. Alone, Gajendran Ayyathurai, Priyageetha Dia, Mahishaa (Neelavarana ನೀ ಲಾವರಣ), Nrithya Pillai, Rahee Punyashloka, and Lapdiang Artimai Syiem

Disrupting Protected Ignorance is a programme, part of Bwa Kayiman—Tout Moun se Moun, that brings together discourse, performance, textual installation, and moving image to subvert the caste hegemony that lies at the core of South Asian knowledge production by collectively imagining futures of justice and reciprocity.

India’s independence from England in 1947 was heralded as a momentous step—the creation of the world’s most populous democracy. However, adjacent to Haiti and other colonized regions and peoples, the ripples of independence have been fraught. Despite the relentless work of social reformers like Babasaheb B. R. Ambedkar, the process has failed the majority of India’s populace, namely those shackled for milenia by caste hegemony. Within this context, post-colonial modernity ‘needs to be reinvestigated as a systemic tool for maintaining the power relationship that operates within the caste hierarchy’, writes professor Y. S. Alone.

Alone’s incisive perspective into the casteist nature of knowledge production in South Asia and the diaspora forms the discursive foundation for this assembly, HKW’s second annual Bwa Kayiman commemoration. Locating the roots of dominance within knowledge production, Alone writes, ‘If the objective of rationality is to kill ignorance then it becomes righteous rationality, and if the objective of rationality is not to kill ignorance then it becomes unrighteous rationality—which becomes “protected ignorance”.’ Alone expands on his framework of ‘protected ignorance’ in a keynote lecture on 3 August 2024, foregrounding the work of Dalit and Ambedkarian-thinking artists who envision worlds beyond this narrow hegemony. Gajendran Ayyathurai, the initiator of the academic subfield Critical Caste Studies, responds to Alone’s presentation.

The fangs of this power structure often operate in ways that are invisible to outsiders, leading to claims that caste is a matter of the past. Nrithya Pillai claims the stage in her lecture-performance that exposes the violence of appropriating Bharatanatyam, a classical dance form stolen from her ancestors. Her performance redirects attention to the histories and accomplishments of her communal lineage of Sudra hereditary courtesans and musicians, foregrounding audio archives from her grandfather’s repertoire. She speaks particularly to the lack of access and acknowledgment for women from her caste and region, sharing the loss of receiving this innate dance form only through mediated pasts.

Further imagining unbound futures beyond the stagnant faculty of Brahminical modernity, the resistive gathering is strengthened through text, drawing, and moving image works by Priyageetha Dia, Mahishaa (Neelavarana ನೀ ಲಾವರಣ), Rahee Punyashloka, and Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, each delving into the contemporaneity of caste within overlapping spheres of the social fabric.

Spatial segregation and disavowal of land is a cornerstone of caste structures, not only in villages but also across every metropolis. In his video 131, Mahishaa (Neelavarana ನೀ ಲಾವರಣ) maps urban assertions of belonging through the recurrence of Ambedkar’s iconography in Bangalore, reinstating the revolutionary leader’s importance in uniting Dalit communities under his demand for the annihilation of caste. Education was one of the primary paths advocated by Ambedkar. However, despite the constitutional provisions for reservations in educational institutions, Indigenous Dalit and Adivasi students continue to face discrimination from teachers, peers, and school administrations. Rahee Punyashloka’s texts and drawings on fabric pay poignant homage to Rohith Vermula, whose struggle for justice and subsequent institutional murder in 2016 shook the nation into a renewed uprising.

While most oppressive to Dalit communities and their diaspora, caste is an omniscient burden on each body in South Asia. Priyageetha Dia’s offering LAMENT H.E.A.T visualizes this dispersion through her familial history as indentured labourers were transported to the Malay peninsula. Composed of computer-generated images, the video follows ghostly presences in a burning plantation zooming in and panning from above, a commentary on the confinement intrinsic to hierarchies of labour. Linking connected struggles and tackling the erasure of archives, the auto-narrative video Laitïam by Lapdiang Artimai Syiem from the Indigenous Khasi people of Meghalaya enlivens oral cosmology of a stag who is shot down while looking for a medicinal herb, a mourning for lost lands and rooted ways of being.

The whole histories of the world.

Not a single letter is seen

On my people.

—Poykayil Appachan, ‘No Not a Single Letter is Seen’

Grounded in the memory culture elucidated by Malayali activist, social reformer, poet, and son of the enslaved Poykayil Appachan’s lament, this gathering brings to HKW the impetus to resuscitate Dalit and Adivasi histories through the expressions of those with direct experiences, renouncing reductive Brahminical ethnographic approaches in favour of complex sustained subversions.

Sat., 3.8.2024
16:30, Safi Faye Hall

Mediated Pasts: Caste and Non-Brahmin Selfhood in Bharatanatyam Dance
Performance by Nrithya Pillai
In English with German translation

17:30

Dismantling Cosmetic Metanarratives: Ambedkarian Aesthetics and Articulating Contradictions
Keynote by Y. S. Alone, followed by a conversation with Gajendran Ayyathurai
In English with German translation

Fri., Sat., and Sun., 2–4.8.2024
On loop, Gunta Stölzl Foyer

Mahishaa (Neelavarana ನೀಲಾವರಣ), 131—Babasaheb in Bengaluru (2024), video, 1' 31"

Priyageetha Dia, LAMENT H.E.A.T (2023), video, 14' 15", English, Tamil with English subtitles

Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, Laitïam (2023), video, 15', English

Rahee Punyashloka, I Lazarus, For Rohith (2024), text and drawing on hanging fabric, English

On loop, Bessie Head Foyer:

Rahee Punyashloka, selected works (various years), projection