Pardhan Gond Art has been around for 1400 years. It can also be called Pardhan painting or ‘Jangarhkalam.’ The art form comes from the Deccan and is practised by the Gond community, a tribe of around four million people. It is precisely this art form that four illustrators used to illustrate the discrimination Ambedkar faced as a Dalit.
For the uninitiated, Bhimrao Ambedkar was the man who drafted the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar sat at The Wayside Inn in Mumbai and wrote the Constitution for hours ordering cup after cup of tea. The same man who wrote the Constitution wrote books about how caste affects Indian society. Of the other things he wrote, he clearly distinguished caste as not a division of labour but of labourers. The former implies choice. The latter implies involuntariness.
As much as Ambedkar’s writings were the result of extensive research, they also were the result of his own experiences. Four people came together in order to make his life experiences better known to the public – Srividya Natarajan, S Anand, Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. Of these, Natarajan and Anand were the writers, while the Vyam couple were the illustrators.
The four discarded conventional ways of graphic novels promulgated by the West in favour of an art form native to the Dalit community. The art form was interpreted as a political tool to put the point across. CNN hailed the book as one of the top five political comic books. The Washington Post commended the book for bringing out the cinematic narrative style and visual magic realism.
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