Looking from the margins: The Art practice of Madhukar Mucharla

Contemporary Indian artists are producing the most critically engaging artworks in recent times. Nonetheless, the common kind of art one largely sees in mainstream art galleries either deal with the celebration of dominant narratives of gender, class, religion, culture, or global themes like environmental crisis, migration, and so on. However, very few of the artists move away from these dominant and elitist narratives and challenge the canons of caste, community, and social hierarchies. 

The category of ‘caste’ has often been neglected in mainstream art practice and art historical writings sparing few interventions (Achar, Panikker 2012). Although little magazines like ‘Rava’ and ‘Samuh’ featured illustrations and paintings along with Dalit poetry and essays since the 1970s (Varun, 2020), so-called ‘Dalit Art’ only began to be acknowledged through the works of artists like Savi Savarkar by the 1980s. More recently post the 1990s, artists such as Sanjeev Sonpimpare, Prabhakar Kamble, Sajan Mani, Rajyashri Goody, Malvika Raj, P.S. Jaya, and others have been exploring issues of Dalit rights and empowerment in various new media such as installations, Video art, and Performance Art. Interestingly, most of the artists hail from Maharashtra, a centre of the Dalit movement in India.

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Coming to the prevailing art scenario in the region of Telangana, rarely does one encounter art that challenges social inequalities. One such young artist whose work deals with social discrimination is Madhukar Mucharla. Madhukar hails from Nandi Wanaparthy, a village in the outskirts of Hyderabad. His primary material to work with is leather or animal hide. Belonging to the Madiga community, who are traditionally leather workers or tanners, he realised the scope of the material when he attended a workshop of traditional leather Puppetry, Tholu Bommalata during his Masters at the College of Fine Arts, JNAFAU. With this inspiration, he began exploring the possibilities of using leather in a more contemporary or unconventional manner.

Leather has been typically overlooked as impure and was associated with untouchability; leaving the communities who processed and produced utility leather products like shoes, belts, and bags; stigmatised and socially discriminated against over the generations. It is this stigma associated with the material that the artist wants to overturn by bringing it to mainstream art practice. For understanding the material and the process of procuring the leather, he went back to artisans of his community who still do the tanning using traditional methods.

Madhukar’s initial works during his final year of M.F.A were ‘Self Portraits’, which were hand-made by cutting and stitching pieces of leather together similar to the process of shoe-making. Soon he came up with large portraits of ‘Baba Saheb Ambedkar’ and ‘Jotirao Phule’ after reading about them and their contribution to empowering the socially marginalised communities. These works brought him recognition and were selected to be a part of the Students Biennale at Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018 and 2020. Conscious of his own identity and upbringing, his works began to explore the socio-political and cultural lives of the Dalit communities. 

One of his artwork titled, ‘Victorian Era’ represents a coin from the British times when India was under Colonial Rule. The coin is made on a leather drum (dappu), associated with the Dalit community, to reflect on the Imperial oppression of Indians and their role in bringing diverse communities under homogeneous categories of race, caste, religion, and tribe during the census. While the caste system existed for centuries, these categories only strengthened the social divide. Even after the reservation provision was put into place after independence, discrimination continues to prevail. The leather drum is symbolic of the rising oppressed voices.

The drums which were used to make announcements in villages by the Madiga community in earlier times, now remain unused. They are synonymous with social movements like ‘Madiga Dandora’ in the late 1990s, led by Manda Krishna Madiga and Dandu Veeraiah Madiga to ensure categorical reservation to Scheduled castes. Madhukar procured these redundant drums from the artisans in his village and worked on them. One such artwork is titled ‘The Urinal’, a take on Marcel Duchamp’s decisive Dadaist work. An image of a leather urinal is pinned onto the drum but only to raise issues of manual scavenging and unaccounted deaths in the process of cleaning drains across the country by the majority of Scheduled castes. 

His recent series titled ‘Plight in Pandemic Times (Kisan)’ is part of a larger set of calendars made in leather. They were created during the Lockdown 2020-21. The present calendar reflects on various events that occurred during the pandemic. One of them is the ongoing social movement by farmers/kisans in North India. The image of Goddess Laxmi is stitched in leather, which is otherwise considered an unholy material to make an image of Hindu Gods. However, the artist uses material that he is familiar with and challenges cultural understanding of what may be fit or unfit to express devotion. The barcode underneath is symbolic of opposing the privatisation of food products and repressive farming bills. 

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The next calendar titled ‘Plight in Pandemic Times (World Cup)’ is a reaction to the staggering number of death rates of migrant labourers in the West Asian country of Qatar. Most of the victims belonged to developing nations like India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The incidents that have occurred since 2010 when Qatar was announced as the host for FIFA World Cup 2022 and underwent a building spree engulfed the nation. However, even during the pandemic times, the death toll continued.

The deity shown here is Mallanna who is a tribal god and is worshipped for protection. Migrant labourers travelling with families and their meagre possessions are sewn under the idol.

 Another piece in the set of the calendars, ‘Pandemic Times (Migrant Labour)’ depicts Goddess Yellamma, the deity of the subaltern. The calendar becomes a poster for worship as well as a reminder of the dates in the year 2020 when the CORONA virus broke out across the world and spread panic. Chaos and unrest prevailed in metro cities like New Delhi and Hyderabad as migrant labourers were left with no daily wages and stranded in temporary accommodations. Soon a great exodus of the migrant labourers travelling barefoot and hungry was witnessed leaving many of us wondering about the plight of these people without whom the metros cannot function or survive a single day.

Madhukar’s recent works, move away from wall hangings to site-specific installations as he started working at his village and sourced locally available materials like thorns, drums, election campaigning flags, and posters. He gradually started involving the community sometimes and used sites in his neighbourhood to exhibit his art objects.

‘The Abandoned house’ is an on-site installation, consisting of the paraphernalia of a Dalit migrant labourers’ house, abandoned during the Lockdown, 2020. The utensils and tools lying inert are made out of paper mache, which itself is made from torn election posters stuck on walls in his neighbourhood. The election campaigning flags which lie useless post-elections are collected and turned into ropes for weaving a cot, using help from community people. School bags are stitched out of cement bags as bricks fall out of them representing the burden of labour and migration during the crisis.

One of his installations is made of thorns collected from commonly found ‘Thumma’ trees also popularly known as ‘Sarkar Thumma’ as the government seeded most of these trees in these regions. A treacherous pathway is created with thorns and footprints cut out from leather marking the exodus of migrant labourers during Pandemic. A leather drum mounted on the wall is pierced with thorns again in the shape of footprints, signifying the struggle of strangled voices of the oppressed. Another interesting work is an installation of ‘116 coconuts’ which are again made out of stitched leather and paper mache. The artist remarks that the work represents an offering made to god when a wish comes true. Here the wish is for an egalitarian and just society.

Madhukar’s evolving art practice reflects the socio-cultural issues of the marginalised communities. As a scholar and mentor, I strongly feel that there is a need to acknowledge both individual and collective efforts of marginal artistic practices in Indian Contemporary Art. The purpose of such an endeavor is to expand the study of ‘Dalit Art’ or ‘caste’ as a category within the discipline of Art History as mainstream Art historical scholarship and art practices often ignore issues of social sciences. In a book review of ‘Dalit Art and Visual Imagery’ edited by Gary Tartokov( 2013), Y.S Alone discusses that Indian Art history neglects anything that relates to Dr. Ambedkar or his ideology. He further remarks, “Eulogising tradition becomes a concern that prevents seeing cultural productions very critically and it also amounts to invisible nature of the downtrodden in Indian Art History”.

Fortunately, Ambedkarite artists like Sanjeev Sompimpare, Prabhaker Kamble, Sajan Mani, Rajyashri Goody are taking up the challenge of creating a culture of their own, that rejects  elitist and mainstream conventions of art practice that invisiblize or ignore ‘Dalit Art.’ Hence, the contemplation of the ‘Art of Resistance’ can become a useful tool in bringing out issues of marginalities into public discourse and henceforth call for affirmative action.