Environment, Touch, and Dirt in Contemporary Indian Art

Abstract

In recent years, Indian art has witnessed the increasing presence of artists who identify with the Dalit political struggle. These artists critically examine the Subcontinent’s caste system from the perspective of those excluded from it and branded as untouchable. The article examines the junction between their political art, which criticizes social discrimination, and environmental art. In order to analyze artworks that respond to what Mukul Sharma calls Dalit ecologies, the article reviews the theories of the British anthropologist Mary Douglas and the Indian historian and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, who defines the Indian approach to dirt as an expression of civil disobedience. The article also follows the transformation in Chakrabarty’s thought over the last two decades. A member of the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) and a leading thinker of postcolonial theory, Chakrabarty now engages with ecological concerns. Even though this turn has pushed the issue of social discrimination to the margins, I argue that Chakrabarty’s discussion of Dalit politics can be read as a decolonial critique of modern epistemology and of how it shapes politics and the relationship between humans and nonhumans. While analyzing the artworks, I show how the artists undermine the ways human society treats dirt and establishes its outside.