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In a September 27, 2022 interview with Scroll, artist and educator Savindra “Savi” Sawarkar said he had never been represented by a gallery and attributed that exclusion to what he calls “Brahmanism in the arts.” His account connects gallery access to caste, while describing an artistic practice shaped by Ambedkarite politics, Buddhist imagery, Dalit popular culture and the visual memory of caste oppression.
What Sawarkar means by “Brahmanism in the arts”
“Brahmanism” is Sawarkar’s explanation for the institutional conditions he says have kept him outside gallery representation. In the interview, he states: “I have been in the art world for many years and yet have never been represented by a gallery. That is because of Brahmanism in the arts.” This is his first-person interpretation, not an independently measured finding about every gallery or about the art market as a whole.
The interview does not establish whether he remained unrepresented after 2022. His statement should therefore be read as testimony about his experience at the time of the conversation, rather than as a verified status in 2026.
How caste entered his visual language
Sawarkar presents caste not as a secondary theme but as a central analytic and aesthetic concern. He describes his work as drawing on B. R. Ambedkar’s political philosophy, neo-Buddhist imagery, Dalit histories and popular visual culture. His approach rejects the idea that political commitment and formal experimentation belong to separate spheres: “Politics and aesthetics are not separate from each other but are interconnected,” he told Kamayani Sharma.
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Foundation of India (1986)
The interview singles out Foundation of India, a 1986 painting that uses Buddhist imagery to critique the Purusha Sukta and its account of social hierarchy. Sawarkar represents caste through the anatomy of a man, turning the body itself into an image of a system that assigns people unequal places. Sharma’s profile describes aggressive brushwork, black and red, and sharp light-and-shadow contrasts as part of the expressionist language associated with this work. That description belongs to the profile’s framing; it is not a field-wide ranking of Sawarkar’s historical priority.
Symbols of labour and stigma
In discussing his imagery, Sawarkar identifies the matka (pot) and jhaadu (broom) as markers of caste oppression. These objects are not neutral still-life details: they point to labour, enforced occupation and the social meanings attached to particular bodies. His visual references also include calendars and images associated with Deekshabhoomi, Buddha, Ambedkar, Savitribai Phule, Jyotiba Phule, Kabir and songs by Nagorao Patankar.
Ambedkarite identity and the experience of education
Sawarkar recounts growing up in an Ambedkarite family in Nagpur. He says his grandparents converted to Buddhism with Ambedkar in 1956, that his father valued education, and that his grandmother passed on histories of Peshwa rule. He also recalls attending an RSS-managed school while experiencing discrimination there. These are personal recollections reported in the interview.
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He studied painting in Nagpur and printmaking at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda from 1982 to 1984. He says many contemporaries there did not engage caste as a discourse and that he felt isolated when he raised Ambedkar. In his discussion of the Kerala Radicals, he argues that class analysis alone does not resolve caste. This is his political assessment, not a claim that all artists associated with those traditions hold one identical position.
Sawarkar distinguishes “Ambedkarite” from the broader term “Dalit.” As he explains it, being Ambedkarite means aligning oneself with Ambedkar’s ideas and political commitments. “When you come from the kind of politically aware background I do, you feel proud to call yourself an Ambedkarite,” he says.
The devadasi research that changed his practice
Sawarkar describes a turning point in 1986, when he visited a school for children of devadasis and later spent six months near the Yellamma Temple in Saundatti. He says he observed exploitation there and made ink sketches. The interview records his account of that field experience; it does not independently verify every event he describes.
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He links the temple’s architecture to the bodies and poses in his images. A platform becomes a visual element associated with a devadasi’s feet, while the temple flagstaff becomes a crown. He also says the experience led him toward an expressive ink line that became important in his practice. The transformation is therefore both documentary and formal: the social world he encountered altered the marks, structures and symbols through which he worked.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallManu, protest and the risks of making caste visible
Sawarkar says he developed a recurring image of Manu after hearing a song by Tulsi Ram. In the interview, he recalls that an exhibition at Rabindra Bhavan in 1996 was attacked by RSS members over a painting titled Manu and Dalit. This is his recollection of the incident and should not be treated as independently established evidence of the attack.
The Manu image places the figure associated with a codified caste order into direct confrontation with Dalit experience. Sawarkar’s strategy is not to conceal the political charge of the subject; it is to make the conflict visible through iconography that viewers may recognize from religious, historical and popular contexts.
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Travelling beyond India without leaving caste behind
The profile reports that Sawarkar travelled to the United States on a USIS grant in 1991 and studied in Mexico on a Mexican-government scholarship between 1999 and 2003. He says African-American art in the United States and Mexican mural traditions in Mexico expanded his reference points. The dates and travel details come from the interview rather than independently checked institutional records.
These encounters did not replace his Ambedkarite foundation. Instead, they offered comparative ways to think about race, public art, collective memory and political imagery while he continued to work from the specific histories of caste in India.
Career, teaching and the gallery question
The interview reports that Sawarkar taught at Delhi’s College of Art from 1996 to 2019. His teaching career and exhibition history sit alongside his stated lack of gallery representation, raising a distinction that is often blurred in discussions of contemporary art: institutional employment or visibility is not the same as commercial representation.
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His complaint is consequently about more than a missing dealer relationship. It concerns which artists are considered legible to the mainstream art system, which subjects are treated as universal, and whether caste-conscious work is welcomed as art rather than confined to the category of social testimony. The interview supplies Sawarkar’s diagnosis, but no independent data in the available record quantifies gallery representation by caste or proves that his experience describes every institution.
What his account asks viewers to reconsider
- Caste as form: anatomy, line, colour, objects and architectural fragments can carry arguments about hierarchy.
- Politics as method: Sawarkar treats Ambedkarite commitments as part of how images are made, not merely as subjects added after the fact.
- Iconography beyond elite canons: Buddhist symbols, Deekshabhoomi calendars, songs and everyday tools become serious sources for contemporary painting.
- Access as an aesthetic issue: his gallery complaint asks who receives institutional validation and how exclusion shapes what becomes visible as modern Indian art.
- Distinct political vocabularies: “Dalit” and “Ambedkarite” are related but not interchangeable in Sawarkar’s explanation.
A concise timeline from the interview
| Year or period | Event described in the interview |
|---|---|
| 1956 | Sawarkar says his grandparents converted to Buddhism with Ambedkar. |
| 1982–1984 | He says he studied printmaking at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. |
| 1986 | He made Foundation of India and describes research near Saundatti as transformative. |
| 1991 | He travelled to the United States on a USIS grant, according to the profile. |
| 1996 | He recalls the Rabindra Bhavan incident involving Manu and Dalit; the profile also dates the beginning of his reported College of Art teaching period to this year. |
| 1999–2003 | He says he studied in Mexico on a Mexican-government scholarship. |
| 1996–2019 | The interview reports his teaching at Delhi’s College of Art. |
| September 27, 2022 | Scroll published Kamayani Sharma’s interview containing his account of Brahmanism in the arts. |
Why the interview still matters
Sawarkar’s argument is not simply that caste should appear more often in exhibitions. It is that caste structures the conditions under which art is taught, interpreted, circulated and purchased. His paintings and testimony challenge a modernist story in which politics is treated as contamination and formal innovation is presumed to be socially neutral.
Read on its own terms, the interview offers a sustained account of an artist who makes Dalit subjectivity explicit, uses Ambedkarite and Buddhist references as active visual resources, and sees institutional exclusion as part of the aesthetic field itself. Its strongest claims remain Sawarkar’s claims: powerful testimony that requires attribution, not a substitute for broader evidence about the entire art world.
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