Vikrant Bhise

Access to water in the city of Mumbai is limited, and the lines of potable water are always contaminated with sewage from seepages in the pipes when it reaches the slums. Vikrant Bhise depicts women and men marching towards and ultimately merging into a large pipe that appears to engulf this stream of humanity. The image is ambiguous; set in contemporary times, it recalls another famous march to a water tank.

“Untouchability,” which was part of the caste system in India, dehumanized a person based on a spectrum of purity. A person considered “untouchable” could not access public property such as roads, markets, and thoroughfares as well as religious shrines and temples. They could not participate in weddings and feasts or dine communally with other villagers. They were denied access to water and food sources and could not drink from public wells and water tanks.

On March 20, 1927, B. R. Ambedkar— a social reformer and future architect of the Indian Constitution of 1950, which included the abolition of “untouchability”—led a group of “untouchables” along with others from the so-called upper castes to a water tank in Mahad where they proceeded to drink together from the public tank, breaking religious tenets. This march was called a “Satyagraha,” which means firmly holding onto the truth. The term was first used in 1906, during Mahatma Gandhi’s experiments with civil disobedience while organizing Indians against apartheid in South Africa.

Bhise’s family members were part of the Dalit Panthers, a movement against caste discrimination. As a child, he witnessed police shooting at protestors from his community just outside the entrance of their slum. The impressive scale of his work and the gathering of human bodies venerates the idea of pacifist civil disobedience, while recalling the first march to annihilate caste.

Text: Sumesh Sharma