Visualizing the Dalit-Modern: Ambedkar and the Economy of Images

This paper explores the enhanced politicization (and everyday salience) of Dalit iconography—from the circulation of Ambedkar images, to struggles over public representation of non-Brahmin and Dalit pasts, contemporary political figures, and of poetic and literary depictions of Dalit life—as these have inflected Dalits’ claims to public space, and for inclusion within the representational economy of ‘the nation.’ The paper thus explores the importance of narrative-construction processes embedded within symbolic politics, and of visual and material artefacts of Dalit presence, more generally, for constituting an archive of Dalit life. The specific focus of the paper will be on late colonial and postcolonial Bombay, and on the manner in which urbanity is implicated in the production of Dalit iconography.