Organisers said the day-long festival, which included photo exhibitions, art by Warli artists from Palghar district and film screenings, was organised to highlight the voices, culture and resistance of Bahujans through artistic means to facilitate spaces denied to them by the Brahminical hegemony.

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“All you know is five words — Dalit, merit, caste, Ambedkar and reservation,” sang Ambedkarite rapper Sumeet Samos at the first Bahujan Art Festival organised at Tata Institute of Social Sciences on Sunday.

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

Rahi.Gaikwad

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.

As performances, discussions and music charged up the evening air, Sumeet declared, “Free I live.” “Free I die,” repeated the audience.

Young Ambedkarite documentary filmmakers — Jyoti Nisha (from right), Omey Mangalore Anand and Somnath Waghmare — at a panel discussion at the fest in TISS on Sunday. Right: Rap artist Sumeet Samos and poet Dhiren Borisa

Samos expressed his own experiences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, where he says discussion about caste is limited to these five things. “I have often wanted to tell the dominant castes that caste is not about us or these five things. It is about how they oppress us. The song I wrote was in this context,” he tells the audience.

Samos, a master’s student at JNU, was among 30 artistes from 10 states, who took part in the first edition of the Bahujan Art Festival. The event was for artistes belonging to SC, ST, OBC, Nomadic Tribes, Denotified Tribes and other marginalized minority communities.

“It is necessary to claim these public spaces. When I began rapping, I was told to improve my English, my performances were never shared on the social media pages of the institute. I managed to perform once during an event and when I began getting recognition, there was a change in the way I was looked at, among the same people who earlier discriminated against me,” says 26-year old Samos.

The Odisha-born rapper writes and performs songs on caste discrimination, land grab and displacement of tribals in his home state, among other issues.

“We asked students from the Bahujan community on campus for names of artistes, both established and upcoming, who could be invited for the festival. A similar event titled Dalit Art Festival was organised earlier this year at Ambedkar University in Delhi, and we also wanted to promote, amplify Bahujan artists. Through this, we wanted to discuss aspects like these artists can self-sustain, what can they do to network better with each other,” says Aroh Akunth, the cultural secretary of the student union at TISS.

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Organisers said the day-long festival, which included photo exhibitions, art by Warli artists from Palghar district and film screenings, was organised to highlight the voices, culture and resistance of Bahujans through artistic means to facilitate spaces denied to them by the Brahminical hegemony.

On Sunday, film-makers from the community, Somnath Waghmare, Jyoti Nisha and Omey Mangal Anand, discussed issues of access to camera and technology. “Film-making is an expensive medium. Due to the access to it for dominant castes, even films on our lives are made through their narrative and gaze. There is a need for the community to provide support through whatever way possible to tell our stories,” Nisha said, who is making a film called, ‘BR Ambedkar, Now and Then’.