ABSTRACT
Investigations of Dalit art have conventionally been found as a part of anthropological or folklore studies and only in the past decade have there been discussions on the idea of Dalit art in art criticism or visual culture. These discussions have either taken a recuperative route by invoking traditional Dalit practice or they have concentrated on the idea of visual imagery in the context of Dalits in the public sphere. In rare instances, there is a focus on a particular artist or work and these have, in many cases, been either tentative or polemical. This is in contrast to the idea of Dalit literature.
This chapter studies this striking absence of the question of caste in art discourse and moves away from a loss and recovery framework, which seeks to render visible that which always was present. Therefore, the focus in this paper will not be on recovering images and practices that can feed into a body of work that is called Dalit art. Nor will it be to set up a program or manifesto. Instead, the chapter works towards understanding the possibilities and limits of some of the existing modes of engaging caste in the field of art.
