Every year, in the first week of December, Shivaji Park in Mumbai becomes the site of bustling activity. Thousands of bookstalls are set up. Songs and slogans rend the air. And the face of one man is everywhere—on the soaring flags, on book covers, on photographs pinned to pockets.
The week-long event is meant to be the commemoration of BR Ambedkar’s death (December 6, 1956); Mahaparinirvan Din, as the day is now known, holds immense significance for the Dalit community. Millions of Dalit-Bahujans from across the country come to Mumbai, to Chaityabhumi, where Ambedkar, affectionately known as Babasaheb, was interred, to pay their tributes to the leader and icon.
Somnath Waghmare, a Dalit filmmaker and researcher, documents the eventful week with an intimate and ‘insider’ lens in his documentary, Chaityabhumi (2023), which was recently screened at the India International Centre in Delhi. The film begins inside Rajgruha, Dadar, Ambedkar’s residence, and expands out to the people on the streets, and how they are keeping the legacy of the man alive. It presents how Chaityabhumi is not just of great emotional significance to Dalits but is a site of socio-political and cultural importance as well.
Social justice movement
“Popular documentaries on Dalits always focus on either manual scavenging or some other atrocity faced by the community. They are important issues that need to be addressed, but that is not all. People have conveniently ignored the assertion of the community, both intellectual and cultural. This is what I wanted to document with Chaityabhumi,” says the filmmaker.
Chaityabhumi is a record of the thriving Ambedkarite movement for social justice. The film presents how an event of such scale, with a recorded footfall of over 30 lakh, plays out as a cultural festival, with numerous street and stage performances of Ambedkarite plays, songs and dance and over three thousand bookstalls, which makes it, according to Waghmare, the biggest literature festival in the country.
Chaityabhumi also becomes a site for public political assertion, with the attendance of leaders of Dalit-Bahujan organisations from across the country and marches by organisations like the Samata Sainik Dal. The film is, for Waghmare, a statement against the politics of erasure that has been levelled against Ambedkar, the man and his movement. “There has always been an attempt to diminish, if not erase, Ambedkar from popular imagination and public spaces,” says Waghmare.
Filmmakers’ challenges
A PhD scholar at TISS, Mumbai, Waghmare was born in Maharashtra’s Malewadi village. “I come from a family with no material resources. No privilege or networks,” he says about the difficulty faced by filmmakers who come from such backgrounds. “Chaityabhumi was entirely made with the contributions from Ambedkarites and the community,” he adds. The documentary is presented by Neelam productions of Tamil filmmaker Pa Ranjith. Waghmare has previously made two documentaries- I am Not a Witch (2015), about witch-hunting in an Adivasi community in Nandurbar, Maharashtra, and The Battle of Bhima Koregaon-An Unending Journey (2017), about the annual Dalit- Bahujan gathering at Bhima Koregaon near Pune.
Waghmare talks about the various ways in which Dalits have kept the memory of Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite movement alive.
A living legacy
“People conserve the memory and legacy of Ambedkar through songs, statues, paintings, writings and even calendars. In any Dalit basti in Maharashtra, you will find Ambedkarite calendars in houses, which mark important events in Ambedkar’s life, like the day he got a degree, and also days of more contemporary events, or the day the BSP was formed,” he says.
Chaityabhumi has been screened at the London School of Economics in the UK and also at Stanford and Columbia Universities in the US. “The internet has given Dalit filmmakers and artists the opportunity for greater visibility,” says Waghmare about how his films have travelled the world and garnered critical acclaim. The film is set to be screened at the University of Gottingen, Germany, on January 15 as part of their Film Series, Crossings, that present works of seven documentary filmmakers from India, including Waghmare.
At a recent screening of his new film in Delhi, Dalit filmmaker Somnath Waghmare talks of how the community coming together in millions to commemorate the death of BR Ambedkar is an act of remembrance and assertion