The Iconoclasm of the Iconoclast – On Ambedkar, Visuality & Violence

Abstract

As an art historian in training, I bring new perspectives to the study of caste and culture through my focus on iconoclasm and iconophobia. The ongoing research combines multimodal methods that span ethnographic description, qualitative surveys, and visual data charts and implicates multiple sites including the public commons, court room, police stations, and social media platforms. It includes various testimonies from remote places where myriad statues – public, private as well as semi-public, made by local artisans have been installed, desecrated and arrested persistently. All the three modalities of iconoclasm – installation, desecration and arrest can be thus read as visual as well as performative acts stemming from a degenerate desire to deface Dalit iconicity. The Dalit communities that sustain the precarious economy of caste abolition and cultural assertion are rarely included in academic conversations. As a testament to the irony – on 14 October 2023, a colossal statue of Dr. B R Ambedkar, was unveiled in Washington DC in the USA. This is the largest statue of Dr. Ambedkar in the US. The installation of the first such memorial in the US is being heralded as the actualization of a dream of Ambedkarites, his ideological followers, the world over. However, in many other parts of the Indian subcontinent, as well as South Asia, commemorating the memory of Dr. Ambedkar is still a distant dream for the anti caste community. The issue of identitarian iconoclasm in spatial politics especially in the contemporary decolonial context of a mounting global challenge to monuments also necessitates the stakes of this inquiry as timely. Such testimonies spanning a gamut of critical material have not been gathered by researchers in a sustained manner so far in order to further
a critical visual inquiry in South Asia. The power of visibility of anti-caste aesthetics mobilised through the figure of Dr. Ambedkar remains thus a potent field of research.