The graphic novel Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability presents episodes from the life of Bhimrao

Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), a man who, despite being born in a caste considered “untouchable” by
Hindu communities, became one of the most distinguished and influential figures in the history of
modern India. The very distinctive artwork of the Pardhan Gond tribe supplies the visual language for
the text, unifying two parallel narratives of marginalization within one text.

The text of the graphic narrative is emphatically political and didactic. While Ambedkar’s story has
acquired nearepic proportions for Dalits in India, it is the artwork that makes this particular retelling
unique. Bhimayana is undoubtedly the most successful attempt to integrate Indian folk art and an
English-language narrative, despite the fact that the artists are themselves illiterate.Unlike other graphic
novels who use speech bubbles apologetically, dialogue is an important part of the narrative and
occupies speech balloons that mimic birds and scorpions rendered in the intricately detailed
contemporary Gond style. The bird-shaped speech bubbles speak for the gentle and the good, and the
scorpions enclose the speech of those who are part of caste-based oppression and whose words
“contain poison” (Vyam et al. 2011, 101). The story is framed by a conversation between a scorpion-
tongued South Indian Brahmin man who is resentful of people who belong to the lower castes and a
North Indian woman who tries to show him—via bird-shaped speech bubbles— what the Dalits
experienced and continue to experience in India. The North-South divide also implicitly rationalizes the
use of the English language, which is still an important medium of intellectual and academic
communication across India’s linguistically diverse communities. At the end of the book, the man’s
hesitant acceptance of Ambedkar’s importance is paralleled visually by the transformation of his
scorpion speech bubbles into redemptive bird-shaped ones—just one illustration of the unusually close
engagement between word and image in this graphic novel. Traditional panels and gutters are discarded
in favor of dignas—meandering, decorative Gond motifs—that partition the page while retaining spatial
continuity.
Instead of offering a traditional biography—or even hagiography, as often happens with Ambedkar—in
the popular Amar Chitra Katha style, the authors rely largely on Ambedkar’s autobiographical fragments
collected under the title “Waiting for a Visa.” This material is then made more topical with
contemporary examples demonstrating that caste-related violence continues to exist in contemporary
India, and rounded off with additional incidents that indicate the general trajectory of Ambedkar’s
career
The historical and the documentary in Bhimayana are themselves in constant danger of being overrun
by a visual register that presents itself as inhabiting a radically different imaginative space. The art of the
Vyams offers a residual sense of the casteless and timeless forested spaces that inspire Gond art. The
narration of Ambedkar’s suffering and indignation, therefore, has as its counterpoint the largely
affectless, abstract faces and the decorative myopia of Gond art. The mostly dehumanized villages and
cities of Bhimayana are paradoxically redeemed by the encroachment of the Gond jungle. In the
postscript to Bhimayana, Anand calls attention to the proliferation of vegetable and animal life in the
artwork:
‘The ecology of Pardhan Gond art is such that even when dealing with urban subjects we see
freefalling animals, birds and trees in landscapes without a horizon. The train becomes a snake,
the intimidating fort a lion.… ‘

Again,early on in the text, we hear of how the young Ambedkar is denied water from a water pump. In
the first iteration, this pump is represented as a woman, from whose hands the upper-caste children
alone can drink. In the next panel, the pump looks more or less like an elephant’s head mounted on a
post: what is a woman/mother is now nonhuman and unresponsive, though the visual analogy between
an elephant’s trunk and the outlet of a water pump continues to animate the image. When the hand-
pump appears in the next panel, the elephanthead has grown a pair of eyes, which are associated with
sentience elsewhere in the book: “Thinking happens with the mind’s eye,” we are told (100). The
narrative, however, almost immediately abandons the elephant-hand-pump image to return to the
water-as-woman image, which exclaims through a bird-shaped speech-bubble, “What walls, how many
walls, can you build around water? How will you shackle the rushing form of water?” (22; see figure 3).
While the iconography in Bhimayana is largely consistent—most unsettlingly so in the us-or-them
dichotomy of the bird-or-scorpion speech bubbles—instances of inventive exuberance, even
whimsicality, such as these grant the reader some relief from the solemn textual material. Things do not
remain the same or always obey the same rules in this world—a premise that could model social and
political change.