Mahad Satyagraha

This artefact forms part of an ongoing counter-archive series, employing papier-mâché to reimagine pivotal moments in anti-caste history. It depicts the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927, led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, a landmark assertion of Dalit rights wherein caste-oppressed communities defied entrenched hierarchies by collectively drinking from the public Chavdar tank in Mahad, Maharashtra. The event also witnessed the symbolic burning of the Manusmriti, a Brahmanical legal text codifying caste oppression. This series mobilizes material and symbolic forms to foreground Dalit resistance and reclaim epistemic agency through embodied, anti-caste historiographies.