Abirpothi

Nitya Choubey

Contributor

Mayawati’s Lucknow: Buddha, Baba Saheb Becomes Visible in the Cityscape

In 2002, the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Kanshi Ram, announced his intentions to convert to Buddhism on 14th October 2006, the 50th anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion at Nagpur. But on 9th October 2006, the charismatic Dalit leader died at his official residence in New Delhi after a long history of health complications. After […]

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A Calendar That Starts on 14th of April: Bahujan Calendar Art in India

It was in 1894 when famous Indian painter and artist Raja Ravi Verma, also regarded as the father of modern art in India, established his lithographic press in Girgaum, Bombay. In September of the same year, the chromolithographs of goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati were launched. Expensive and exclusive pieces of Verma’s art started to circulate

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Madhubani Art of Raja Salhesh, Buddha & Baba Saheb: More Than Just Mithila’s Upper-Caste Women Enterprise

Religious histories are often synonymous with legends and myths that root for a king or a demigod who possessed magical powers and eventually uplifted the society from evil towards ‘Dharma’. Fortunately, these legends and folklore have been documented as various visual and performative art forms of the subcontinent. Dalit visual and performative histories have always

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Servants of God, the Wife of the Whole Town; Visual Narratives of Devadasi

In 1789, a famous British landscape artist, Thomas Daniell, visited the affluent city of Varanasi with his nephew William Daniell. Amazed by the marvel of the temple architecture of the town, he painted the famous image ‘Hindu Temples at Brindavan’ in 1797. Daniell’s painting does not try to capture the contemporary life of the country’s

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Why is No Dalit Artist on India’s Most Expensive Artists list?

The Indian caste apparatus flourished inside the womb of various religions of the Indian subcontinent. Caste practices grow across many religions, like the Sayed-Ajlaf division in Islam; and Jats, Khatris, and Aroras in Sikhism. What is primary to note is that Caste, across all faiths, is a socio-economic practice that creates innate social divisions based

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