A row of sari-clad Chyame women, heads held high, stand in a row, holding brooms that mark their trade. The shortest, in the middle, dressed in a nightgown, stares straight into the camera. Taken in 1995, outside a municipal office in Kathmandu, this photograph by Tuomo Manninen epitomises the assertion of dignity by Dalit women, triply oppressed by gender, caste and class. It is one of the first images in a book of photographs that attempts to change the "way we see" a long-marginalised section of Nepali society.
Dalit: A Quest for Dignity – a 2018 photobook edited by Diwas Raja Kc and produced by NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati – does not claim to represent Dalit history. Instead, it creates a visual archive of the Dalit experience in Nepal, a rare documentation of its kind. While Diwas Raja Kc writes in the book's introduction that their work "was guided by our love of photography and our latent faith that photographs can contribute to the erosion of injustice and exclusions", the book also examines the ethics of collecting, exhibiting and publishing images of distress, admitting that a plethora of such visuals has served to desensitise rather than mobilise. Rather, their intention is to "reinvigorate" the way in which history is told, and reconstruct the obscured histories of Dalits. It demands, in the words of Dalit poet, writer and Marxist activist Aahuti, whose searing verse has been reproduced in the book, an "accounting of humiliated history".
Constituting over 13 percent of the country's population according to the national census – although researchers and activists suggest a figure as high as 20 percent – Dalits in Nepal have a long history of being subjected to exploitation and oppression. The revised Civil Code of 1963 formally ended the legal sanction of the discriminatory caste system. But despite several political gains, including affirmative action for the community in the new 2015 Constitution, social ostracism and structural disadvantage against Dalits continue. In this context, through photographs and accompanying commentary, Dalit attempts to piece together the community's quiet acts of resistance, as well as document the more dramatic upheavals that cleave through the complacent myths of modern-day democracy.
Unseen labour