This is my gallery,” says artist Siddhesh Gautam. It is his 80,000-strong Instagram account, @bakeryprasad. The quirky name came accidentally—he first called it @bakeryproducts, but after people began tagging him in actual cakes, @bakeryprasad was born. For over a decade, Gautam has used Instagram as a showcase. “For me, social media is the underground media of our time—at least it started out like that,” he says. His “gallery” is awash in a deep shade of blue of BR Ambedkar holding the Panchsheel flag, of Ramabai with raised fist, of Mahatma Phule turning into a stairway for children to ascend.
Gautam says the medium remains largely uncensored. What drew him in was not just visibility but accessibility. “Producing art is expensive and to showcase it, you need patrons. But thanks to social media, with an iPad and Procreate app, I have managed to create hundreds of art works.” His work has evolved—from responding to national politics to anticaste art, a shift that came around 2021, after reading Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. For Gautam, it is also a way around the exclusionary nature of the art world. “Virtual media is not just a new medium for galleries to play with, but new galleries themselves.
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It’s a sentiment shaping Dalit and Bahujan expressions online as artists post work attempting to debrahminise India’s visual artscape. Priyanka Paul of @artwhoring posts a sci-fi image of Ambedkar, commissioned for a book cover, and frames Savitribai and Jotirao Phule in a heart-shaped Valentine’s greeting. Rahee Punyashloka of @artedkar imagines Rohith Vemula as an astronaut. Artist Shrujana N Shridhar draws Babasaheb reading on a bench in New York’s Central Park. Visual artists Jay Sagathia and Vineet Gedam remember Phoolan Devi, while Mumbaibased illustrator Bao of @thebigfatbao releases “The Anti-caste Calendar” every year.
This Dalit assertion on Instagram goes beyond the image as the artists give detailed captions—sometimes personal, sometimes educational. Some honour food memories while others recount caste discrimination, revisit anti-caste struggles and spotlight unsung heroes. Young Dalit artists frequently use metaphors and symbols borrowed from Dalit history.
QUESTION THE VISUAL LANGUAGE Mumbai-based illustrator Paul, 27, who makes a lot of zines and writes prose and poetry, has been on the internet since she was a teenager. “I wanted to build a space where people like me could find a sense of belonging and understanding.” She says savarna cultural production is boring and hinges on the same old middle-class tropes such as parlour aunties and domestic workers taking leave. “This cultural production assumes that everyone lives life in these same contexts. I want to show that a world built on exploitation is not the norm, because it isn’t.”
Bao too says: “We need to question the hegemonic visual language of India. Om, swastika and upper-caste imagery become the default definition of ‘Indian’, while minorities and marginalised communities are erased. At the same time, Adivasi art forms like Warli are appropriated and commercialised without acknowledging the communities they come from.”
For years, Bao says, Indian art relied on imagery that never resonated with her. Gautam agrees. One of his artistic concerns is reshaping how Indian figures and histories are depicted visually, especially in relation to caste and colourism. “In India, even our historical imagery is sanitised and upper caste-coded. Savitribai and Phoolan have been shown as fair with pink cheeks. We need new ways of telling stories.”
Shridhar, who has done her master’s in fine arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, is working on a series called Educate. It is the first of a three-part body of work: Educate, Agitate, Organise. “Through Educate, I’ve been exploring what moves, inspires and hurts Dalit students, and what motivates them to continue pursuing knowledge—not only through institutional pedagogy, but as a larger political and emotional act.” Her series of paintings, “In Lieu of Mukta Salve”, is about Dalit women in academia.
She says, “These works also act as an anti-reference to artists like Raja Ravi Varma, who has essentially used upper caste women as his muse and painted them as literal goddesses. As scholars like Shailaja Paik and Christina Dhanuja have written, savarna women are afforded womanhood and dignity in ways Dalit women often are not.” Shridhar wants to reimagine what it means for Dalit women in academia to simply exist as human beings before carrying the enormous burden of scholarship, research and survival. “I’m also interested in how respectability politics shapes the imagery of Dalit women’s bodies and how rest itself can become a political act.”
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One part of her project is on water as a site of resistance, memory and caste violence. It is the focus of her well-known work Water and Caste, inspired by the Mahad Satyagraha.
Other artists mine personal memories. Graphic designer Vineet Gedam, who posts typography and looping animations of Dalit icons, recently wrote about lambya rotya, a paper-thin roti that has a long history in the Dalit communities in Nagpur. He wrote: “Every time someone talks about Nagpur’s local food, you’ll only hear of either Saoji food, orange burfi, or tarri poha, none of which I, as someone who grew up in Nagpur, can relate to liking or eating at home, or even at family gatherings…. What I avoided talking about was how lambya rotya and our mutton curry were the foods most cherished at home. I learnt much later these foods were specific to our community and caste.” He mentions how foods from Dalit communities are now making it to the mainstream. Recently, Shahu Patole’s work Anna He Apoorna Brahma, chronicling the food cultu
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