Abhaya Rajani
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Abhaya Rajani's MPhil/PhD Art research project
Anti-caste feminist portals: Traversing fluid dalit polyvocal ancestral / fictional bodies through expressions of embodied labour
Purity and pollution are central to casteist oppression; accordingly, the spatiality, crafts, food and touch formed by a dalit body are considered ‘untouchable’ (Mandloi 2020).
Caste structure being patriarchal and homophobic, savarna–men, women and dalit men collectively oppress dalit non-binary, queer people and dalit women.
As Rege (2003) precisely identified, “the masculinisation of the dalit movement and the savaranisation of womanhood has led to the exclusion of dalit women in anti-caste activism”’.
Counter to casteist untouchability, this project, embedded in values of dalit feminist resistance, will utilise Participatory Action Research - PAR (Baum et al 2006) through the re-cognising of dalit ingredients and caste-assigned makings.
Through Fugitive Feminist (Emejulu 2022) Portals, ‘we’ as (non)/fictional dalit feminist collective propose that, in our current human body, we engage with our “broken” (Ambedkar 1936) embodied dalit ancestral knowledges of the past such as godhadi (quilt), Aaidan (bamboo) weavings and dalit cooking. By tactile engagement, we travel several time frames to witness our multi-species ancestors communicating with us through many registers (Soundararajan 2020) to imagine other futures.
We are particularly investigating, how our ancestral knowledges are simultaneously, the tools of oppression where our oppressors strategically imposed these ‘unimportant’ ways of ‘untouchable’ knowing upon us to perpetuate caste through polluted objects. Yet the same ways of knowing are the recovered tools of expression for our ancestors in an inflicted structure of casteist illiteracy.
Now, we are investigating how the same tools also have the possibility to form collective dialogue on anti-caste feminist futurisms where collective (non)/fictional dalit agency, consent and care is at the very centre of this tactile engagement. Then we indeed argue that the tools of caste oppression have been reclaimed as tools of anti-caste expressions by our dalit ancestors which have immense possibility to reimagine as portals of anti-caste feminist resistance.
Further, the project will result in an auto-mythological thesis and a travelling installation. This tactile/textual output will be a culmination of shared dalit agency which will continue to grow as it moves through domestic or institutional spaces spreading anti-caste consciousness developed by dalit queer, non-binary and women’s ancestral collective knowledge within and beyond art academia.
Supervisors
Researcher biography
Abhaya is a dalit queer feminist artist, trained architect, educator and a cook based in London. They are invested in constructing fictional ecologies to develop anti-caste consciousness through sound work, films, cooking, workshops, durational performances, participatory research, translations and text.
They are co-founder of Godhadi collective, Intersectional Healing Network and mitara collective. Abhaya is a 2021-22 recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston School of Art. They are currently undertaking practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London as an awardee of CHASE doctoral studentship.