“His statues outnumber Gandhi’s and Nehru’s, but few people know about his life or work…”
That phrase appears early on in the illustrated work “Bhimayana,” the story of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the man who drafted India’s Constitution. He was also the country’s first law minister and fought against the discrimination faced by Hindus, who like him, are Dalits, belonging to castes considered untouchable.
Artists Durgabai Vyam and her husband Subhash Vyam, who belong to the Gond tribal community and live in Madhya Pradesh, agreed in 2008 to work on the book for Navayana, an eight-year-old Delhi-based publishing house that focuses on caste issues.
The couple practices a style of art unique to the Gond community, that uses motifs from the natural world to paint intricate patterns, traditionally on the walls or floors of their homes.
S. Anand, one of Navayana’s founders, said he was attracted to the idea of pairing the complexity of their work with Ambedkar’s story.
The result was a book that expresses events in ways that border on the surreal. Speech and thought bubbles, for instance, are linked to characters through a string of eyes or with a scorpion’s tail.
“Each page in this book has many, many meanings,” said Mr. Anand, who says he still discovers new details on each page.
The book, first suggested by Ravikumar, the Dalit Panther and Tamil lawmaker who is Navayana’s other founder, is out in English and Malayalam. In another eight months publishers say it should also be available in five additional Indian languages.
The drawings don’t use traditional comic book panels, because the Vyams told Mr. Anand at the start of the project that “we shall not force our characters into boxes. It stifles them,” according to an essay by Mr. Anand that appears at the end of the book.
Animal motifs fill the pages. On one page, a train runs on a track of snakes, and coiled snails make up its wheels. The drawings meld the animate and the inanimate—when a group of people with sticks appear to beat up Ambedkar, each person is depicted as a head on a stick perched on a solitary shoe.
The book draws links between the past and the present by drawing parallels between recent acts of discrimination against Dalits to those against Ambedkar a century earlier.
This isn’t the first time the life of the father of India’s Constitution has been depicted visually. The Amar Chitra Katha series has a comic book on him, now available on iTunes. But Mr. Anand criticizes the comic for inserting upper-caste elements into the story, such as a Brahmin mendicant who tells Ambedkar’s father he’s going to have a son destined for greatness.
In the Amar Chitra Katha version, Ambedkar also praises his “Brahman teacher” for being “the only one who will let me come near him” and one panel shows the teacher touching the boy in affection. The teacher is also mentioned in a positive light in a 1990 biography of Ambedkar (although the book also notes this teacher wasn’t often around as he had another job as a tobacconist’s accountant. Some things never change.). The Navayana version instead has the schoolteacher saying the boy is “always a nuisance.”
Is the Navayana version correcting the record or omitting details that might introduce shades of grey into “Bhimayana”? Mr. Anand, who collaborated with writer Srividya Natarajan on the story, says the book relied on fragments of Ambedkar’s own writings about his life, gathered under the title “Waiting for a Visa.”
“Everything is more or less in his own words but we have dramatized it,” said Mr. Anand.
The book has been widely praised in India and overseas, more frequently for its art than for its narrative, with some Indian reviewers saying the story was too simplified.
Mr. Anand says the book is meant to be “a small conversation beginner” and says that even today many Indians don’t actually know very much about Ambedkar, especially in comparison with non-Dalit Indian leaders. In his closing essay, Mr. Anand draws parallels between Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar—noting they both took train journeys where they experienced acts of discrimination that clarified for them their place in existing social orders.
“That Gandhi had to go all the way to South Africa to discover racial discrimination, whereas young Bhimrao encountered this as a 10-year-old in Satara, Bombay Presidency in 1901 is forgotten,” he writes.
The book’s New Delhi release will take place Wednesday. 6:30 p.m, Conference Room 1, India International Center, 40 Max Mueller Road.
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