The Aesthetics and Politics of the Abstract Line in Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability

Introduction

When Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, a graphic biography of the life of B.R. Ambedkar, was first published in 2011, it was welcomed and celebrated chiefly on two counts. First, its bold and non-traditional means of production and publication was considered a significant milestone in the history of the emergence of a modern Dalit political consciousness, a consolidation of caste identity via the affirmation of a shared history of oppression. Second, admittedly a bit removed from the former, it was hailed as a drastically inventive and uniquely Indian counterpart to the Western sequential art of comics; Bhimayana drew upon the Gond tribal art traditions in order to free the graphic narrative from its reliance on frames and panels, its adherence to time on the space of the page as well as its subservience to the various mimetic functions of representation.

Reviews of Bhimayana in newspapers and academic journals alike may be categorized into one of the above two modes of reception, often an uncertain amalgam of both. I say ‘uncertain’ because most of these reviews bear testimony to the enduring immiscibility of aesthetics and politics as methodology. Curiously, this is despite the timeless popular belief that literature and art in general can and even should be political in one way or the other, that it wields some political capacity (see reviews of Bhimayana by Stoll, 2012 and Desai, 2012, to name a few). The exact anatomy of this happy symbiosis is seldom explicated. Yet another review, however, contains an otherwise throwaway phrase which I find emblematic of this schism: ‘but there is more to the art than mere aesthetics’ (Krishna, 2011, para. 6) says the reviewer before proceeding to interpret the style of the images as yet another way or a repetition of the story of oppression, albeit in a different sensory register.

Scholars such as T. J. Gajarawala and D. R. Nagaraj have argued that Dalit literature is invested in refashioning realism because realism, imbued as it is with power hierarchies, can never be the medium of expression for Dalitness and Gajrawala, for example, also wonders out loud whether other forms of realism are possible at all in a reconstructive sense Gajrawala (2013). Contested as this claim is, owing to the sheer number of Dalit literature in the realist mode, we may nevertheless conclude that texts like Bhimayana do entertain ambitions of such a refashioning. And it is precisely the process of this refashioning that must be laid bare when we talk about the link between aesthetics and politics. However, it is difficult (and perhaps even unnecessary) to discuss form in a text like Bhimayana without taking recourse in the language of identity, whether it is the identity of the Dalit characters in the various stories and newspaper excerpts found in the text or the identity of the artists belonging to the Pardhan Gond tribe (see review by Chandra, 2011).

Shweta Khilnani’s ‘The Case of Bhimayana and the Search for a New Dalit Aesthetic’, appearing as late as in 2015, is still caught in a symptomatic limbo of sorts despite trying repeatedly to get to the political via the aesthetic without resorting to a one-on-one illustrative relationship. Khilnani ends on a desirous note: ‘One has to admit that Bhimayana hints towards the possibility of the creation of an alternate dynamic form of Dalit realism’ (Khilnani, 2015, p. 124). While Khilnani maps Bhimayana onto the academic debates about realism, such an argument is also heavily burdened by this very reliance on the category of ‘realism’ which take centre-stage; Bhimayana can then necessarily only be approached as a purposeful deviation from realism, an other realism, a Dalit realism, reduced to a mere qualifier than an art object in its own right. This means that our search, a rather desperate one at that, is for some kind of ultimate reference-less point of entry into the question of the Dalit aesthetic.

Most scholarship following the line of inquiry exemplified above, in particular the theoretical search for a reference-less (rather than a strictly anti-Brahminical approach) to aesthetic form, is located within the broader framework established by Dalit writers such as Omprakash Valmiki, Namdeo Dhasal and Baburao Bagul who sought to interrogate notions of beauty in art as well as to subvert the expectations of the reader by countering ‘beauty’ in art with shocking and disturbing words and images. When Omprakash Valmiki talks about the progressive evolution of a Dalit chetna (consciousness) in Dalit Sâhitya ka Saundaryashâstra (Aesthetics of Dalit Literature), it is a term that encompasses a version of social revolution that is inseparable from an aesthetic revolution as well. What is meant by this is not only the outright inversion of aesthetic beauty as we find in the poetry of Namdeo Dhasal (i.e., replacing the norm with its opposite) but also the interrogation and reconstruction of the very idea of aesthetics—in other words, a work of art which speaks theoretically to the caste-inflected idea of art itself.

My argument is therefore threefold. First, a close reading of Bhimayana reveals that the narrative emphasis is not so much on caste as identity as it is a critique of the processes involved in that very identity. Second, the visual style of Bhimayana does not merely mirror the political concerns of the text; the images are an aesthetic response to the political concerns about identity enunciated in the linear narrative. Third, in order to identify how exactly the images form such a response, we need to arm ourselves with an alternative methodology. The question is therefore how to read, how to look—what is the ideal spectatorial position for the pages of Bhimayana such that it usefully intersects with the question of identity? By the term spectatorial position we are not, at this point, talking about the popular reception of the book in the metropole or its recognizable cultural grammar within a community; rather, to follow the distinction drawn by Iser between the reader and the reader-in-the-text, the spectatorial position that corresponds to Bhimayana’s style can emerge only when ‘we perform the role assigned to us by placing ourselves at the disposal of someone else’s thoughts, thereby relegating our own beliefs, norms, and values to the background’ (Iser et al., 1980, p. 63). A deformation of the reader’s comfort zone is expected in this process.

To understand the visual register of Bhimayana, the first important methodological move involves recuperating any analysis of form in Bhimayana from the tyranny of what often goes by the loosely employed term ‘style’. There is nothing quite as detrimental to an attempt to study artistic intensities as a way of being political, than the unexamined use of ‘style’ to describe (read dismiss) entire books, oeuvres, repertoires, even eras. This oft-overlooked sterility can be exemplified in the following unhelpful observation we tend to make about a text such as Bhimayana: ‘The style of Bhimayana is that of the Pardhan Gond art tradition’. Such a statement replaces serious analyses of the images with a pre-determined category called ‘Gond art’ (similar to the eventual sterility of categories such as realism, surrealism and minimalism in a period identified as the ‘end of art’ by Arthur Danto) which is supposed to speak for itself in the resuscitated annals of Indian art history. More subtly, the very referral to Gond art tends to satisfy wholly and conclusively, and much too easily I might add, all the political concerns of the book, that is, the book is political, its style is political, because it is a site of representation for the Gonds.

Relevant to the role of Gond art in Bhimayana is the observation made in The Poisoned Bread by Arjun Dangle that the mode of expression of Dalit consciousness in the public sphere switched from an inward-facing mode of folk art expression in the form of songs and performances (as well as the organic and continuous expression of identity in the form of the drawing patterns identifiable elsewhere easily as ‘Gond art’ when found on fabric and ceramic artefacts as caste-free aesthetic prints) switched in the 1950s to a more political and discontinuous mode of institutionalized expression in the form of literary bodies (such as the Siddarth Sahitya Sangh) which were established with the express aim of providing a platform for emerging Dalit literature (Dangle, 1992). In this light, Bhimayana appears at the crossroads of two modes of aesthetic expression—one that is political precisely because its origins are pre-political and the other which is more consciously politically and seeking to incorporate the former mode into its single and modern horizon.

Looking for a relatively fresh approach to visual form in Bhimayana, the observations made by Deleuze and Guattari about Gabriel Tarde (who lost to Durkheim while championing a version of microsociology) posits a methodological sentiment worth considering.

This resuscitation of a microsociology in understanding social struggles plays a key role in reading Bhimayana as something other than either a championing of caste identity or an ‘exotic’ confluence of the tribal and the modern in sequential art. Below we shall see in detail, the three fluctuations in the history of caste identifiable in Bhimayana only when we look for Tarde’s ‘microsocial’ interactions in the text.

Spaces of Caste in Bhimayana

In the opening pages of Bhimayana, the space of the village is described as rigidly segmented based on caste. The complete lack of ambiguity or confrontations in the absence of any alternative and equally powerful system is hinted at in the descriptions of village life where everything is in its ‘proper’ place, that is, always already segregated. Thus, relative spatial locations are key to such descriptions in the text; Dalits live on the edge of the village, buying groceries outside the shop rather than inside and collecting leftovers from the kitchen door rather than the front door of houses. It is notable that these spatial relations are not shown as dependent on verbal injunctions. Thus, in the everyday life of the village, the ‘untouchable’ is not made untouchable by being told not to touch something. Untouchability in these instances appears to us as an essence that is prior to existence. It may be called ‘passive’ because it has already taken place in the past. The untouchable is already an untouchable, the brahmin is already a brahmin. Notably, in the village space depicted in the text, the mahar and the brahmin are both terms of recognition arising from a given casted lifeworld.

Bhim is the only person in the village who does not understand caste quite literally. The first few pages in which the character Bhim is introduced to us is filled with questions by him starting with the word ‘why’. It marks the beginning of a rational, linguistic engagement with an issue that has so far been beyond the reach of discourse, particularly so for the members of the lower caste for whom the very scriptures that are said to determine the conditions of their living are not directly accessible. Whenever Bhim brings it up with his aunt, language itself withdraws; his aunt does not let him speak about it, signalling towards the proscribing and external nature of caste in the village: ‘Let’s not go into [it]’ says the aunt, or ‘[I]f you say such things, you’ll get into trouble’ (Vyam et al., 2012, p. 24).

Thus, right from its opening pages, Bhimayana attempts to enter caste through the question of language, or to cast it within a broader Deleuzian landscape such as to incorporate our primary focus on visuality and form, through the question of expression, that is, how ‘expressible’ is caste and by whom? What sort of a fluctuation occurs in the very being of caste oppression when it encounters linguistic/rational expression? In the second type of space identifiable in Bhimayana, this initiation into language in the everyday lifeworlds of caste takes on a new avatar. The newfound site of linguistic discourse, specifically the ‘modern’ use of language as opposed to the restricted, scriptural use of language, becomes the point of emergence of a brand new category of ‘being-casted’ called ‘identity’. This is the second fluctuation noticeable in the text’s interrogation of caste as a concept. The factor first identified in Bhimayana as causing this suppleness is colonial modernity and its nascent spaces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as railway stations, schools and hospitals. In such spaces, the heterogenous, hierarchical, polluted/pure spaces of rigidity are rendered temporarily, or in theory, isotopic. The isotopic categories of ‘passengers’ and ‘students’ and ‘patients’ are notable for the subjunctive mood of their implementation, a legacy that continues to this day and owes its popularity to the belief in gradualism that marks policy-making in India. Thus, within a village life rigidly segmented by caste there existed ‘modern’ schools which were supposed to function as if caste did not exist, and ‘modern’ trains where compartments were not segregated, as if the passengers were simply that, passengers, rather than upper- and lower-caste bodies.

In the school classroom, we first encounter a phrase oft-repeated but never used in the previous space of the village: ‘not supposed to’. The ambiguous space of the classroom, where ‘proper’ caste behaviour and regulations of touch and pollution are not immediately obvious and therefore have to be invented from scratch, gives unto untouchability a new linguistic avatar; it is less scriptural (permanent) than it is pragmatic (temporal). It is less located in written language than it is orally rendered and negotiated. It is new and old at the same time. Its newness is emphasized by the constant need to be reminded of it, the manner in which not only the mahar student but also the peon, the school master, the sweeper and everyone else has to work their way around it. All of this is emphasized in the repeated use of the phrase ‘not supposed to’. It keeps putting everything back in its ‘proper’ place yet the very employment of that phrase suggests nothing is in its ‘proper’ place anymore.

Despite the constant use of this phrase as a reminder of the ‘new’ ways of implementing the old, there is no smoothness to these modern caste transactions. For example, the school master, the peon and the sweeper are not in agreement with each other regarding these misplacings and replacings of the casted-marked bodies of the students inside the school compound. Despite being a daily activity, no ‘new’ rules are set down. Instead, every other day calls for a reconsideration of how to get things done without too much trouble, how to glue together and make workable the unwieldy fragments of two opposing ideologies. As a result, in the negotiations performed by the upper-caste villagers an element of tinkering, a peremptory yet fragile inventiveness may be identified. In the village space, untouchability appeared as an end in itself, therefore passive. But the methods of untouchability Bhim is subjected to in school aims to maintain something that is being lost.

This varying microtexture of untouchability through time reveals alongside the familiar figure of the all-powerful brahminical oppressor at various stages in history, an anxiety-ridden bricoleur as well. This tinkering also reinforces the previously mentioned sense of ‘misplacements’ or ‘non-proper’ order of things; caste surveillance has become a matter of misplacements that are nevertheless in working condition. It is sloppy, uncertain, but persistent. Sarukkai (2009) refers to this anxiety in his argument that while untouchability is habitually spoken of with reference to the body of the lower caste person, the adjacency of that term with the idea of the ‘touchable’, that is, the brahmin body has not been sufficiently theorized.

Bhimayana constantly draws our attention to this specifically and intimately Indian jugaad-like inventiveness. Below is a particularly striking example of an incident that took place in 1929 and reported in Young India, and re-reported in Bhimayana, recording the bricolage subconsciously employed by an upper-caste doctor when faced with the task of treating a lower-caste woman.

This is less a case of keeping caste-marked bodies apart from each other than of drawing them together in unnatural combinations. A single line of logic, a certain caste grammar, passes through persons, objects, spaces, and most importantly is highly manipulative; each combination of such kind can be created from scratch. The primary stimulus for a movement from passivity to inventiveness seems to be the arrival of goods and services, financial transactions, and most importantly the entry of the paying customer into the casted landscape. All examples of inventiveness at a micro-social level in Bhimayana feature some kind of financial transaction; at hotels and offices, with tonga drivers and soft-drink vendors, on the train and at the station.

Apart from inventiveness, a certain unmasking is also performed in this type of space. At the railway station, for example, we encounter the figure of the stranger, a space where the caste of individuals is not evident by appearance and identification emerges as a modern task. Bhim and his cousins are mistaken for brahmins because they are well-dressed. As Gopal Guru points out, this unmasking persists in the form of an archaeology especially or perhaps exclusively in the domestic sphere in urban spaces. The example he provides is that of a conversation between a tenant and a landlord in which the latter attempts to decipher the caste of the former through a series of questions about personal habits while the tenant gives deliberately vague answers (Guru, 2009). Through this interrogation, the mahar as an identity is excavated into existence in modern spaces; a process absent in the village space. This forcible ejection of identity from beneath may be contrasted with the invisibility (or pushing back underneath once again) of caste identity in the third type of space in Bhimayana, as we shall see below.

The third category of caste-marked space is identifiable in the text’s framing narrative which features a failed conversation between a young man and woman about job reservations, a conversation which allows for the biography of Ambedkar to be narrated, along with other important historical events and newspaper reports from the 2000s. The conversation is stripped of a specific location and context (‘an Indian city’ and ‘in the recent past’) in order to refer to the nation as an idea. The need for the nation to play the role of a monolithic background is crucial; the space of the bus stop, unlike the two previous types of spaces, is also the abstract space of the nation and somehow the idea of the nation, as it evolves through time, is inextricably linked to the modulatory processes of caste identity. This textual focus on the idea of the nation is also obvious from the presence of newspaper cuttings, speeches and letters in Bhimayana which offers a historical continuum of sorts across two centuries (Nayar, 2011). A close reading of the conversation at the bus stop reveals the exact nature of the newfound invisibility of caste. The conversation proceeds along the terms of inclusion/exclusion, forward and backward castes and the singular frame of inequality, all of which may be grouped as governmental terms of recognition (Bairy, 2013) and within this statist surveilling gaze, which may well be a culmination of the previously mentioned subjunctive mood of the colonial administrators, caste once again resorts to new linguistic signifiers.

The single most fascinating feature of the bus stop is that caste is apparently not a marker of social behaviour. Here, for the first time in the text, we encounter in the young woman and man figures whose caste remains verbally unidentified. Yet, it is predictable in a way that is not tied to appearances but political allegiances and personal problems respectively. Thus, the young man’s caste is never explicitly mentioned as opposed to the constant verbal identifications in the second type of space as mahar, brahmin, ‘good family’, and so on, but his lamenting about job reservations makes it clear that he is an upper-caste person, that is, he can communicate his caste affiliations without having to actively identify himself by caste. Thus, the young man is both ‘casted’ in the job reservations debate yet caste-blind in his conversation with the woman at the bus stop, a simultaneity that would have been impossible in the two previous spaces.

What is the grammar of caste here that prohibits caste identification at an immediate level yet actively imagines caste in terms of nameless collectives pitted against caste-less individuals? From the passive and inventive lifeworlds of caste where surveillance is in situ, here at the bus stop, we have no lifeworld in the sense that the state machinery has unprecedented hold over what sort of caste articulations are even possible. As Bairy (2013) argues, the emergence of a Dalit identity is inextricably linked with governmentalism such that the word ‘Dalit’ evokes nothing but a public identity while, correspondingly, the identity of the upper-caste person is nothing but a private identity outside of the realm of politics.

Notable is the failure of the act of narration here. The young man, despite being presented with an array of proof, historical and contemporary, about the persistence of caste in deciding distribution of life opportunities in India, leaves when his bus arrives (taking him to his next ‘unfair’ job interview) saying that although he is ‘impressed’ with the story, he is not in agreement at all. The text thus ends on a note of complete miscommunication, a comment of sorts on the current state of public discourse about caste in India. The burden of this failure falls squarely on the terms of the debate.

The Abstract Line: What Can Be a Dalit Aesthetic?

Bhimayana is a nested narrative. The story of Ambedkar and the caste struggle is contained within the framing narrative of a conversation at a bus stop in the ‘recent past’ which is in turn contained within a surreal graphic landscape. The graphic form becomes a container or layer for the story because its main function is not illustrative or supplementary to the verbal part of the text. Rather, the Pardhan Gond landscape forms a background of significance in opposition to the terms in which the story unfolds; parallel to the story but distinct from its logic. Its function is not representative or mimetic as in other comic books. It does not confirm to the logic of photorealism, that is, the images do not seek to approximate to cinematic techniques. This is noted specifically by S. Anand in the concluding section of the text where he says, ‘[No] close-ups or extreme close- ups (of tense hands, surprised eyes, furrowed brow), mid-shot, perspective, light and shadow, three dimensionality, aerial views, low angles, etc’ (Vyam et al., 2012, p. 100). Therefore, we have a landscape where everyone looks like everyone else and there is no linear perspective and no closed spaces or frames.

Consider how the ‘open’ pages of Bhimayana unfettered by panels and frames, or kulla as the artists Subhash and Durga Vyam point out, do not allow individual figures to retain any organic integrity. Their limits are tested, they are prised open and forced into ‘unnatural’ combinations with the rest of the world and its objects, living and non-living. There are no entities of individuation, of selfhood, in Bhimayana. The landscape of free-floating parts does not recognize various fundamental categories of being in the world. Human parts are constantly breaking free and joining with plant parts and animal parts and machine parts in an aesthetic template that finds its closest approximation in visual history to the pre-modern forms of the grotesque.

What does the reader, who is simultaneously navigating a linear verbal narrative which engages with fully fledged socio-political identities, do with such a space? The page invites certain alternative habits of reading, alternative patterns of looking, which deviate from but also compound the issue of identification at the core of Bhimayana. Across the pages of Bhimayana, the dominant visual scheme of the text is one in which animate and inanimate objects (people, things, animals, insects) begin and end from each other. While perusing the images, one repeatedly comes across drawings which can appear like a wasp’s sting or an arm or a water pump or a bench or a woman–or, all these significations appear together in the same image. It presents a scopic imaginary, a purely fictional possibility, by offering two possible ways of seeing. First, note the counterfactual or subjunctive mode of expression here. The text offers ‘x’ as if it were ‘y’. In other words, one way to describe the images is to say that in the pages of Bhimayana, Bhim’s face is depicted as if it were a park, the bench and the water pump as if it were a woman, the wheels of the train as if they were snakes, and so on. Second, we may see it as a forced simultaneity, that is, ‘x’ is also ‘y’. Thus, a bench is also a woman, Bhim is also a park, a fort is also a tiger and so on in the fluctuating schema of the book. In both cases, the visual register invites a dislocation of sense, or a dissensus to borrow a term from Ranciere (2009), not a synesthetic movement from one sense to another, but a rupture within the visual register itself. While at one level the implications of such a style does resonate with the demand placed by Dalit scholars on rupturing the canonical feelings of beauty and harmony and sensual comprehensibility in art, in the case of Bhimayana we are also able to place its style within the plane of a philosophical possibility.

S. Anand argues that Gond art signifies rather than represents (Vyam et al., 2012) but this does not mean that individual images are nothing but a motley group of metaphors. To separate the page into entities such as men, women, objects, animals and birds as though they do indeed appear as separate entities in the text, betrays on our part, an allegiance to certain established ways of looking and reading. We look for entities, hence we see entities where there are none instead of noticing the ill-formedness of the images, the logic of breaks/cuts and combinations that are more dominant than whole or closed objects and entities in space. We refuse to acknowledge the chaotic wandering of the eye instigated by the free-flowing space of the page. All of this is lost in our habits of meaning-making with the text, with the image. In other words, we have to be tuned more to the agrammatical than to the grammatical visuality in Bhimayana. Gond art itself undergoes some changes in its aesthetic nature when made to collaborate with the comics form or the book form. Its estrangement from its natural world of dignas empowers its position in the annals of modern enunciation.

The extensive descriptions provided in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari of the distinction between micro-politics and macro-political formations, between molar and molecular levels of analysis, between the smooth and the striated, also carry within them, a far more compelling clue to understanding the link between aesthetics and politics, and of putting it to use as a reading/visual methodology. More than often, these descriptions bring to the fore the exact role of art and literature in enunciating the said distinction as well as how the literary or the art object can be an entry point into the political by simulating a new or ‘potential’ structure of thought. The reading of Bhimayana given here, however, also allows us to think of the micropolitics illustrated in the text (or a ‘minor’ literature) alongside the exhortations by Dalit scholars to use the contortion of aesthetic expectations as a pathway into a political and even philosophical reformulation.

What is the scope of agrammaticality as a methodology for reading texts especially in the context of Bhimayana’s visual style? Putting together Deleuze’s ‘Bartleby; or, the Formula’ (Deleuze, 1997a), ‘Life and Literature’ (Deleuze, 1997b) as well as parts of ‘Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature’ (Deleuze, 1983), we may gather that agrammaticality (of the kind Deleuze identifies in the modernist poetry of E. E. Cummings, for example) is a certain ill-formedness, or that which seems ill-formed precisely because it is yet to come to form and is in mid-formation. Deleuze sees it in the man turning into a bug as well as the apes and dogs that inhabit Kafka’s storyworlds. He sees it in Melville’s attempt to carve something ‘minor’ out of the English language that will then exist as a strange language within language; the Jewish language within German language, the American language within the English language, as also the Russian, the feminine, the tribal, even the animal (becoming-animal) within whatever is the dominant utterance.

The margins always have to carve out a strange tongue within the dominant tongue, a stark immiscible agrammaticality which stands out on the surface of all other utterance like Bartleby’s incomplete phrase (or formula or ‘formula block’ as Deleuze terms it) ‘I prefer not to’ which frustrates the language of Wall Street but also throws open a new possibility of becoming-imperceptible. The manifest agrammaticality of this process is thus described by Deleuze and Guattari: ‘[i]t is as if the traits of expression escaped form, like the abstract lines of an unknown writing’ (Deleuze, 1997a, p. 229). This in turn takes us to the realm of the smooth, the abstract line, the haptic-optic, the ‘close-range’ and so forth, all of which may be received as newly animated analytical units for the study of the hand-drawn image at a sub-representative realm.

It is this ‘becoming-imperceptible’, this recourse to the sub-representative realm as methodology, that I want to conflate with the inescapability of identity, the anatomy of its molecular prowess, we saw in the previous sections. To do so, first we have to reinvent our understanding of identity, margins and representation from the inside out. ‘If Bartleby had refused, he could still be seen as a rebel or insurrectionary, and as such would still have a social role. But the formula stymies all speech acts, and at the same time, it makes Bartleby a pure outsider [exclu] to whom no social position can be attributed’ (Deleuze, 1997a, p. 73).

The attorney fails repeatedly in ‘bringing Bartleby back to reason’ because all his hopes of doing so rest upon a logic of presuppositions which is in turn, we notice, based on identity—I am the superior or the boss, he is the employee or I am a patron and he is the man in need, I am a friend of his and so is he of mine. Instead, Deleuze identifies that Bartleby has invented a new logic of agrammaticality, the logic of preference which ‘disconnects’ words and things, words and actions: ‘it severs language from all reference, in accordance with Bartleby’s absolute vocation, to be a man without references, someone who suddenly appears and then disappears’ (Deleuze, 1997a, p. 73). The man without references can never be reconciled with the notion of identity. And when caste identity works by becoming supple and auto-poetic, we need to shift the terms of our analysis to the sub-representative realm. ¹

The tussle noted above is not so much a description of the relationship between Bartleby and his attorney boss but a description of the relationship between a certain brand of agrammatical language (‘I prefer not to’) and its reader (the attorney). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the question of what makes a novel ‘Russian’ or ‘American’, what makes certain art ‘Greek’ and ‘modernist’, what constitutes styles and schools and eras in art and literature as well as how forms correspond to possibilities of ‘becoming minor’ in a dominant culture. Note that an alternative is offered here to the issue of identity raised in the above sections, the Deleuzian framework tempts us to replace our political interest in the other or the process of othering within a dominant culture with an interest in the process of becoming-minor: the structure of othering versus the pragmatics of becoming-minor. The former is political in a very definite and familiar sense, the latter is political by means of the aesthetic.

While being on the outside or in the margins has a certain oppressive connotation in the structure of othering, within the pragmatics of becoming-minor, the pure outsider is a jealously guarded possibility. Becoming a pure outsider is dubiously evocative of the pure untouchable Brahmin body and later how caste identity becomes imperceptible by being purely outside of language itself in spaces of governmentality on account of a false private/public dichotomy. But the Brahmin’s outside-ness is relative to the margin, it is heavily coded. The outside-ness of the ‘minor’ is not-yet or yet-to-be coded; it is smooth, it is a possibility, hence imperceptible. Becoming a pure outsider may thus be pitted as the only way to be political, and this becoming-outsider, becoming-agrammatical or remaining ill-formed, being ‘minor’ and so on is the very definition of aesthetics for Deleuze and Guattari. Bringing this theoretical proposition in conversation with the Dalit project of deforming/reforming the aesthetic object makes sense especially when we consider the fact that Deleuze in particular was developing a theory of aesthetics in the context of ‘minority’ or a ‘minor’ literature emerging from a ‘minor’ politics. Strangely enough, in an ironic turn of affairs, this would mean that Dalit art and aesthetics is and will remain at its very core a heavily modernist and avant-garde struggle (although it may not, at first blush, seem to possess its most superficial properties) negotiating its own contradictions even as it throws itself into the stark lifeworld of its narration.

Most theoretical propositions within Dalit studies regarding the need to overthrow an existing regime of aesthetic norms contain within them the simultaneous thought that, perhaps, this becoming purely ‘outside’ is indeed possible; a second task in the pipeline soon after the first one is accomplished. In her evocation of the resurgence of the oppressed as a double-edged karukku, when Bama talks about the ‘passionate desire to create a new society’ Bama in Faustina, 2014, p. xiii one wonders whether the ‘newness’ hinted here also applies to an aesthetic and social reorganization of the senses that must accompany social reform. An example might be found in Gopal Guru’s ‘Aesthetic of Touch and the Skin’ in which not only does he argue against the casted aesthetics of the leather ball within the emotional economy of Indian cricket but also posits the idea that Dalit aesthetics should strive towards ‘resignifying the skin’ (Guru, 2016, p. 304), by not only renouncing aesthetics altogether at times but also by using literature to transform existing aesthetic habits. What is the need of the hour is ‘an aesthetic modification of Dalit reality’ by creating newer forms of literary styles that can break old habits and point the way forward.

In other words, when Sharmila Rege argues that ‘the intention [of Dalit testimonies] is not one of literariness but of communicating the situation of a group’s oppression, imprisonment and struggle’ (Rege, 2006, p. 13), or when Limbale pronounces quite emphatically that it is inappropriate to expect pleasure or beauty in Dalit literature and that ‘[a]n exclusively aesthetic consideration of Dalit literature will disregard the Dalit writers’ fundamental role [as social critics]’ (Limbale, 2004, p. 19), we must bear in mind that opposition, rejection and contention of the norm alone does not constitute the idea of Dalit aesthetics. The most challenging dimension of the idea of Dalit aesthetics remains its philosophical implications which are to be found in its aesthetics (or its anti-aesthetics), and the fact remains that creative non-fiction such as Bhimayana (a strange genre that mushes together biography and history with a veneer of fiction) continues to push at the boundaries of literariness and finds in that aesthetic struggle the means by which true communication can take place.

The question before us then is as follows: what kind of politics are we engaging in when we identify a certain style of drawing as a Dalit aesthetic? Especially in the case of Bhimayana in which any discussion of style is inextricable from its marketing tools, from publishing terms, and from an identification of ‘tribal’ and ‘Gond’ as well as the terms ‘graphic narrative’ and ‘biography’. This question is also necessarily a literary question, a question of reading, of interpretation, of methodology. It is also the reason for tying together the three spaces of caste surveillance enumerated in the first three sections with this larger concern about aesthetics and politics noted in our interest in the graphic style of Bhimayana and the constant evocation on Deleuze and Guattari whose writings have, more than that of any philosophers, conflated the aesthetic and the political almost beyond distinction.

The figure of the Pardhan Gond artist can become more marginalized as ‘exotic’ and ‘tribal’ ‘the more it seeks to realize itself in collaboration with a Delhi-based publisher who offers the idea of abstracting the digna patterns on walls and doorsteps (one of the few art forms today which still have a lifeworld around it—think of Heidegger’s critique of art in his The Origin of the Work of Art) into the form of a book for the modern reader located again in the metropole. How do we reach out to the ill-formedness of the hand-drawn images through and beyond the form of the book, the linear narrative and the very term ‘graphic narrative’ and the metropolitan conditions of its publication? For only then can we move beyond the multi-layered and pervasive modulations of identity into other ways of being political. Rather than an indictment of the form of its publication, this paper suggests that it is only after Gond Art assumes the form it takes in Bhimayana that it can find its aesthetic function in productive opposition to the terms of its publication.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about ‘close-range’ vision and ‘haptic’ vision as integral to painting, as aspects that have been lost and then recovered as they claim, in the works of some modernist artists. This link between prehistoric art and modernist art, as both being nomad art in some sense, requires separate study. However, something similar about the distinct but unspoken modernist innuendo in the harsh, direct and hard-hitting nature of Dalit art and aesthetics is indicated in a more recent study by Nicole Thiara who chooses to emphasize the experimental nature of Dalit literature and its attempt to create ‘radically new narrative strategies that evoke a world free from caste discrimination’ (Thiara, 2016, p. 253). The following passage is particularly striking with respect to the comment made here earlier about the lack of closed or whole entities in Bhimayana.

Later they add, ‘[w]here there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function’. In addition to ‘haptic-optical’ and ‘close-distant’, later in the section, they also introduce a third couple, ‘abstract line-concrete line’ as follows: ‘the abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 577). Describing the abstract line using Worringer’s writings as a point of reference, they continue thus, ‘[h]eads […] unravel and coil into ribbons in a continuous process; mouths curl into spirals. Hair, clothes… This streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation’. There is no better point in the entire book wherein to illustrate the need to unpack Bhimayana’s form or style in terms of its sub-representative parts, or the abstract lines that become visible only at ‘close range’. If one were to make a diagram of the flow of a single line in Bhimayana or a single ‘partial object’ like an eye or a foot or a clock, it passes through several otherwise whole or striated identities; it passes through and escapes from hens, snakes, men, women, houses, fields and parks and fishes. This description also brings to mind what Guru spoke about most wistfully—a ‘re-signifying’ of the world (as much as a de-signifying) that is the basis of any philosophical reformulation of Dalit aesthetics.

Any number of instances may be cited from Bhimayana to illustrate this ‘dividual’ visual register. Why is this feature of the text so crucial to its narration of caste as a self-modulating surveillance machine? It is not simply a matter of thematic mirroring. In the intermediate spaces of colonial modernity, caste was being aggressively retained in and through language, while in the case of the bus stop, caste has completely escaped language and thereby became immanent. Whereas, the critique of caste is still rooted in that very language from which processes of caste-ing have escaped. The ‘dividual’ visual register is thus also a reaction to this failure. It is an attempt to become ‘minor’ rather than to self-document its own other-ness. While the text documents and critiques otherness in its complex layered structure of storytelling, the visual moves in the opposite direction of becoming-minor, becoming the pure outsider to the inventive and invisible political discourse of caste. This is achieved precisely through a visual register that escapes entities and moves in the direction of ill-formedness, of agrammaticality, of carving out a ‘strange’ language within language. Within such a visual register therefore, we should follow the lines haptically rather than look for meaning in the whole or closed images.

Bhimayana exemplifies the radical function of narrative in moving beyond the stultifications of caste identity and towards an alternative imagination of emancipation, the use of the term ‘imagination’ (especially within a political project) cannot be stressed enough here. Reading Bhimayana along its abstract lines restitutes the visual from a regime of identitarian stultifications, and from implications of hierarchy and surveillance. Instead, we are presented with a visual field full of possibilities of escape. While it is clear as to what the visual is escaping from, it is as yet unclear towards what end the escape is oriented. This yet-to-be orientation is the definitive feature of an aesthetic inquiry, a process deeply intertwined with or a process which is somehow also a process of the political.

To conclude, in order to identify the alternative politics of the abstract line, we first need to identify the poetics of the same. And in order to do so, we need a working definition of what constitutes aesthetics and what is its relevance in a study of literary and art objects towards a better understanding of the political, in this case, the question of circumventing or escaping in one immodest line of flight, the concentrating of caste into identity, into a structure rather than a process. The use of the aesthetic model in literary analysis lies precisely in the saturated state of caste politics and its critique today, the various representational squabbles and impasses within which it lies landlocked, and finally, the ambiguity regarding the role of literary studies ever since its dissipation into a conglomerate of cultural studies projects in the last few decades. Ultimately, the question that Bhimayana provokes us to ask ourselves is whether or not we can orchestrate a return to the literary object and talk about form and shape without slipping into the naivety and historical blindness of a vague, pre-Fall version of liberal humanism.