Paper short abstract

​​The paper conceptualises the urgent need to critically examine the rampant desecration of Dr. Ambedkar's statuary as a form of art historical methodology that mediates memory and materiality in a polarised India.

Paper long abstract

This paper foregrounds the desecration of Dr. Ambedkar’s statuary as a method to critically think about anti-caste aesthetic history and the discipline's broader understanding of memory and materiality. Drawing from my research on the widespread presence of various forms of anti-caste iconography in India, I posit desecration as not just a legal crime but as a mimetic everyday practice wherein the anticipation of active destruction activates a political-temporal relay. The various iterations of desecration self-defeatingly underscore how anti-caste sculpturalism is not about the recreation of a statue but rather about the recreation of its ruins. Community built statues in this sense evidence the long and granular history of caste contestation across the breadth of the nation since the 1980s. These artisanal and subversive statues embody a unique style, insurgent design and gestural sensibility that is unorthodox and vernacular. A majority of these sartorial statues are often consciously crafted with an iron cage due to the omnipresent fear of the rampant and punitive desecration/s. This sensory-spatial dialectic of materiality and memorialisation captures land disputes, juridical battles, artistic claims, all at once in an increasingly polarised right wing nation. The desecrating practice is also about the heterogeneous, efficacious and isomorphic visual formations of Ambedkar. There currently exists no systematic reportage or archive on the virulent, quotidian and multivalent forms of desecration. The paper hence asks what new theoretical possibilities of anti-caste art history emerge when weaponised absence, ephemeral ruination, precarious narratives and minoritarian sentiments together mobilise cultural politics.