Formation of Space, Experience and Thought: A Critical Study of Ambedkar’s Biopic Bhim Garjana

Abstract

In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin establishes that it is the ‘aestheticization of politics’ or ‘politicization of art’ which streamlines the cultural discourse of a nation at a given moment. The present paper attempts to critically analyze the ‘politics of visuality’ vis-à-vis ‘visuality of politics’ as an elemental framework in the making of Indian national discourse. To understand or rationalize this elemental framework, the paper postulates its hypothesis, that the politicization of art is a valid inquiry into how a certain ideological discourse is pre-selected and pre-programmed with a certain grid of features and structures of perception. It is this ideological discourse that needs to be exposed through a visual text namely, Vijay Pawar’s Bhim Garjana. This visual text broadly represents what Kancha Illaiah terms the Ambedkarite phase of Dalit history spanning over two decades – 1936-1956[i]. Bhim Garjana is an aesthetic artifact directed by a Dalit himself – an ‘insider’s’[ii] document on Ambedkar’s life and philosophy. There have so far been three films on Ambedkar including Bhim Garjana, one directed by Jabbar Patel titled Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) and second by Anand Patwardha titled Jai Bhim Comrade (2011). All the visual texts though do not follow the definition of biopic strictly, but more or less, the paper places them in the category of biopics. Each text focuses on the life and struggle, both in historical and ideological terms, of Ambedkar.