10 - Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar Statues and the ‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India

Summary

Indian newspapers periodically report the desecration of statues of Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the man who drafted the constitution of India. Ambedkar, born in the middle-Indian state of Maharashtra, acquired a PhD and a DSc in Economics from Columbia and the London School of Economics, besides being invited to the bar at Grey's Inn (London). He returned to India from the USA and UK in the 1920s and started practising in the Bombay High Court. Increasingly involved with India's freedom struggle, Ambedkar foregrounded the special requirements of the ‘oppressed classes’ as the ‘untouchable’ castes were called. By the late 1920s, Ambedkar had launched campaigns for the education of these communities, their political rights and against the social ostracisation and exploitation they experienced. Writing, speaking and campaigning tirelessly, often in the face of truculent upper-caste animosity – including the antagonism from Mahatma Gandhi – Ambedkar entered the legislature as a member, successfully arguing the case for these communities. He also wrote seminal tracts – of which Annihilation of Caste (1936) is the best known – on the ‘untouchable’ castes, Indian polity and social reform. After Independence, Ambedkar was a member of the Indian Parliament, the country's first Law Minister and Chairman of the Drafting Committee for the new Constitution. B. R. Ambedkar was responsible for political rights being made available to the historically oppressed castes, the so-called ‘untouchables’ in post-Independence India, and is generally now treated as the single most important figure in modern India in the campaign for emancipation of the oppressed classes. His statues now dot the Indian landscape, even as he serves as the icon of ‘Dalit’ (the term now used to describe the historically oppressed communities) consciousness, political campaigns and assertion. Ambedkar is now, therefore, a significant constituent of the visual culture of India's new modernity (Freitag 2001). Within this visual culture, contemporary representations of Ambedkar depict him as a statesman, a boddhisatva (one who is ready to acquire nirvana), a figure of authority, and is now clearly in the pantheon of Indian leaders (Beltz 2015) even approximating to a ‘mythicisation’ by the Dalits (Ganguly 2002).