Art for all: TISS offers its stage to Bahujan artistes

First Bahujan Art Festival at TISS to promote marginalised communities, Odisha-based Dalit rapper Sumeet Samos and poet Dhiren Borisa among participants from 10 states

The stage was awash with blue light as young rap artist Sumeet Samos belted out the lines, “All you know is five words/Dalit, merit, caste, Ambedkar, reservations.” The 26-year-old Odisha-based Dalit rapper, purportedly the first one from a marginalised community to rap in English, wrote the lines in response to caste discourses on campuses getting confined to these five words. Sumeet was among the 30 Bahujan artistes from 10 states who had gathered at TISS on Sunday for the first Bahujan Art Festival. They represented communities such as the SC, ST, OBC, VJNT and minorities “The festival aims to promote and amplify voices from the marginalised communities. It was important to host this festival on the campus. This is because, you get space for elections and movements at educational institutions, but not for art and artistic discourses and access to artistes,” Aroh Akunth, cultural secretary of TISS Students’ Union, told Mirror. The TISS quadrangle and main campus was abuzz with filmmakers, writers, singers, poets, painters who consciously create art from an anti-caste perspective. “Today, we clearly identify our politics and don’t want to narrate the victim’s story. We have content which is global, which upper caste filmmakers do not have. We will tell our own stories,” said documentary filmmaker and TISS student Somnath Waghmare, whose documentary ‘Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey’, was made much before the January violence. Filmmakers at the fest also underscored the challenges that came with a lack of access to resources and supportive community networks. “We are telling stories that have never been told before. Narratives have always been with the upper castes,” documentary filmmaker Jyoti Nisha said. Poet Dhiren Borisa recited his verses that placed experiences of love and gender within the frame of anti-caste politics. According to him, bahujans, through their art, had “weaponised their fears and memories”. Kadubai Kharat, an Aurangabad-based singer who croons songs of Ambedkar and has become an Internet sensation of sorts among bahujan netizens, also took the campus by storm with her robust contralto notes sung to the ‘dotara’ (a string instrument). Well-known names such as Marathi writer Urmila Pawar and poet Usha Ambore were also a part of the festival. An assortment of paintings by Warli artists and other painters, photographs chronicling occupational inheritance, books and an array of merchandise were the other draw.

Source: Mumbai Mirror, 17/12/2018