In the 14th century, the Indian poet and spiritual leader Guru Ravidas imagined a utopia called Begampura. This “land without sorrow,” as Begampura translates from Hindi, would be casteless, classless, and griefless. Free from anxieties and discrimination, inhabitants could pursue spiritual freedom.
A modern reinterpretation of Begampura undergirds Dalit Dreamlands: Toward an Anti-Caste Future, a multimedia group art show currently on display in downtown Oakland.
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Curated by artist and organizer Manu Kaur and supported by the Asian American Women Artists Association, the works are by—and dedicated to—Dalits, those at the lowest rungs of South Asia’s caste hierarchy. The show also honors other South Asians often sidelined within the mainstream understanding of South Asian identity, including Muslims, Indo-Caribbeans, and Adivasis, India’s Indigenous people.
“I really wanted to finally have something that is dedicated to voices that are often not heard and oppressed,” says Kaur, who hails from a Dalit family and identifies as a queer non-binary femme. “I wanted it to be about centering our stories and our joy.”
A few days before Dreamlands opened in April, Kaur walked me around the exhibit space at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, located in the heart of Oakland Chinatown. The venue is one of two locations for the exhibit—the other is the nonprofit ARTogether, a short walk away—and Kaur was putting the finishing touches on the installation. Among the art displayed were saris and stoles hand-painted by Malvika Raj, a Dalit artist based in India who fuses the Indian art form known as Madhubani into their fashion design, and a film on the Siddi, an Afro-descendant community of tribes that reside in parts of India and Pakistan. Another piece on view at the ARTogether space featured a suitcase opened up to look like a shrine, meant to document the artist Anika Nawar Ullah’s relationship to her Marma heritage. (Marma is a tribe native to Bangladesh, and the suitcase was the very one Ullah’s mother used to immigrate to the United States.) Nearby were photos of Kaur’s weight-lifting sister Mia clad in a crown and bikini, skin shiny, during a bodybuilding competition.
Kaur’s family portraits are also part of the exhibit, including an arresting photo of their maternal grandfather seated beneath portraits of Guru Ravidas and B.R. Ambedkar, India’s most renowned Dalit figure and the architect of the country’s constitution, respectively.
When Kaur was five, their family immigrated to the Bay Area from Punjab, India. The two portraits of Guru Ravidas and Ambedkar always hung side by side in their family’s living room in Fremont, and Kaur always assumed that Ambedkar was a distant family member and Ravidas one of the Sikh gurus. Their family never discussed the portraits.
Later, Kaur learned that Ravidas’s hymns envisioning Begampura are included in Sikhism’s holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. The social reformer was born into a family of leather workers from the “chamar” caste—the same so-called untouchable background as Kaur’s family.
Kaur’s family never wanted their caste name spoken given the fact that it’s sometimes used as a casteist slur. So they acknowledged their caste privately but never mentioned it openly, especially at their local Sikh gurdwara. Although Sikhism emerged to resist caste discrimination, Kaur says they frequently encountered dominant caste pride and caste divisions within the Sikh community. “If anyone asks you about your caste, just tell them you’re Punjabi Sikh,” Kaur, now 31, recalls their mother advising.
In 2022, Kaur attempted suicide but survived, embarking on a journey of joy and healing. They celebrated their next birthday at a party that they proudly describe as “very queer and Dalit and anti-caste and very intentional.” And they started to draw connections between their family’s muteness around their marginalized caste and the fear of reprisals from dominant communities that perpetuated intergenerational shame and trauma.
That family history, familiar to many from Dalit ancestry, feels like the silent scream emanating throughout Dalit Dreamlands. It’s well-known that many Dalits hide their identity, and portraits of people open and proud of their marginalized castes—including the Los Angeles–based model and DJ Seema Hari—are part of the exhibit’s transgression of that trauma. “Whenever you face the brunt of such societal issues, what generally tends to happen is that then the society focuses just on this trauma, and then we get restricted to just talking about the trauma,” Hari says. “What I really loved about Dalit Dreamlands is it flipped the narrative from our lives just being about trauma to our lives being about celebration and arts.”
Caste made headlines in 2023 when the California state legislature passed Senate Bill 403 by an overwhelming majority. Intended to clarify caste as part of the state’s antidiscrimination law, the bill was fiercely resisted by mostly Hindu Indian Americans and was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in October. High-profile Indian American Democratic donors who opposed the bill take credit for influencing Newsom’s decision.
Kaur, who advocated on behalf of 403, sees the strife surrounding caste as part of a broader authoritarian current in national and global politics to sideline the voices and histories of oppressed peoples. Connecting their art show to other pressing global affairs, Kaur also featured photos devoted to Palestine in Dalit Dreamlands.
“Dalit liberation goes hand in hand with Palestinian liberation,” they say. “It’s been hard to do this work without acknowledging that there are people literally being killed because of oppression, because of violence and discrimination and land,” they tell me.
Kaur is quick to note that the futurism espoused by Dalit Dreamlands still feels distant, but it’s not keeping people from continuing to search for, and creating, their own Begampura. “It’s like a dreamland because it hasn’t really happened in reality yet,” Kaur says. “So it feels like a dream that I’m trying to make into a reality.”•
Dalit Dreamlands runs through May 16 at ARTogether and June 9 at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.
