Rajyashri Goody revisits the ripples of the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha through ceramics, printmaking and recipes at the 10th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival in Panaji.

By Aishwarya Bodke 

A hollow stairwell separates two rooms across the first floor of the Directorate of Accounts, a venue for the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) that was once an administrative nerve centre in 16th-century Panaji. Overlooking the Mandovi River, the first room holds another waterfront. It is no ordinary one. A lake of glazed ceramic mounds sprawls across the breadth of the room as shades of soft blues, greens and browns gleam in the daylight spilling in through the window, as if it were water reflecting the sun.

Artist and ethnographer Rajyashri Goody’s Is the Water Chavdar? recreates the Chavdar Lake in Mahad, Maharashtra, a historic landmark of collective action, as part of Bitter Soil curated by Latika Gupta for the 10th edition of SAF, which brought together works by women examining relationships between land and water, colonial histories and structures of marginalisation and exclusion.

I first learnt of the unassuming town of Mahad in a bedtime story, as my father guardedly narrated the happenings on the day of 20th March 1927: the day of the Mahad Satyagraha. A 35-year-old Dr. B. R. Ambedkar had marched with over 10,000 people down the steps of the lake, dipped his hands in to drink the water. The lake, like many public spaces, had been denied to Dalit people for generations, with even the cast of their shadow believed to compromise the purity of the water.

This monumental event in the country’s public history played out in my private memory—drawn in turn from memories borrowed from our ancestors and in oral retellings—for years until I grew up and read about it. “The thousands who made that journey to the Chavdar Lake remain unaccounted for, with no significant visual documentation of the protest, unlike the Salt Satyagraha led by Gandhi three years later,” says Goody. Through the many ceramic hemispheres, which also resemble cupped palms with water turned upside down, she wants to represent each person who marched with Dr. Ambedkar.

Goody explains, “I wanted to give the satyagraha some kind of physical weight. When I mention Mahad, people often ask: What is it? Where is it? That really brought home the need to recognise it as one of the most important sites in Indian history that remains relatively unknown.”

The ceramic domes also denote stupas, employed by the artist to address the conversion of many Dalit people to Buddhism in order to escape the Hindu varna system. “As a gesture, I also see it as a begging bowl turned upside down into a stupa,” says Goody.

The work references another symbolic act of defiance that the Chavdar Lake was witness to. That same year, on Christmas Day, Dr. Ambedkar publicly burnt copies of Manusmriti—an ancient Sanskrit text that codified and legitimised caste hierarchy. The Kranti Stambh, built on the site in Mahad, stands as a tribute both to this act of satyagraha and to the historic burning of the Manusmriti. The exhibition builds its own Kranti Stambh out of an arch at the venue. Copies of the Manusmriti, shredded and pulped, are layered across the curved wall.

This is a recurring practice in Goody’s body of work. In her 2021 work, The Milk of the Tigress, a selection of books on caste and Dalit writing sits on plywood shelves covered with paper pulp made from the Manusmriti. The title borrows from the powerful metaphor used by Dr. Ambedkar to describe education. The extensive process of making the pulp—tearing each page, stacking and pulverising them—was also made into a three-hour performance with the Goethe-Institut. Just the knowledge of the meaning that the tactile material holds pours the weight of centuries of prejudice into the room. For a moment, it is emancipation. And in the next, it is just paper.

Goody employs a combination of materials and a thoughtful use of space to create a world that seems to interact with itself. The walls of the room are also lined with a set of photographs. They look smudged and stained, almost as though water spilled over the printing ink. They are images sourced from Google Maps of visitors to the Chavdar Lake, which is also considered a place of pilgrimage. “People do their own documentation with camera phones and selfies now. I wanted to look at a place like Google Maps, where images simply accumulate. In a way, it validates the space and questions the idea of a traditional archive,” Goody elaborates.

Chavdar, in Marathi, translates to ‘tasty’. A Dalit existence, however, is accorded the primary experiences of life coloured with caste. To touch, to taste, to love came—and often enough, still come—at the end of a fight. This relationship with food is movingly captured in the exhibition by a series of booklets. Excerpts from Dalit autobiographies that explore food, or the lack of it, are converted into second-person accounts and deconstructed to read like both instruction and poetry. Goody calls them recipe books. The truth, though, is that they cannot be followed.

“I wanted to question the existence or non-existence of the recipe book in Dalit culture. Shahu Patole’s Anna He Apoornabrahma is perhaps the only one, and was later translated into English [as Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada]. He, too, writes about his memories connected to the food more than the ingredients. These experiences become more important in providing the background to why these recipes exist at all. It is not surprising that a lot of Dalit literature is about food,” says Goody.

While the ceramics and the exhibition walls proudly assert these acts of defiance and rejection of the religious basis of untouchability, the recipe books turn the visitor inward to pause and reflect. This pride is not without shame. For many Dalits, having to resort to lying, hiding and compromise have been intrinsic to the simple act of eating.

Some of these poems pierce through your gut. A booklet titled Do you have the courage to drink from the pond? draws from Daya Pawar’s autobiography Baluta and reads: Your wife might worry that you have nothing to eat/She might come to your office with your sister and your lunch/Feel touched by the gesture/But worry about what your friends in office might think of her/They might not recognise her as your wife/They might take her to be a servant… Feel embarrassed for not having the courage to tell them the truth.

Literature on Dalit food practices is abundant with accounts that have little to do with how to make a dish. What is Dalit food? What makes it Dalit? Is it the person or the food? Is it meat? What if one stops eating meat? Do they stop being Dalit? These are the questions that Goody is interested in asking.

A lot of what Dalit artists and writers produce unwittingly makes people uncomfortable. Goody confesses that when she first started out, she was afraid of her art being too on the nose and was often met with reactions of rejection, implying caste does not exist anymore. That society has progressed. However, a lot of our lives are spent being witnesses to ignorance. “If what emerges is discomfort, it’s a good emotion to sit with because at least it is not denial. I am not here to prove to anyone that caste exists. So perhaps discomfort is ideal,” she notes.

During the hour I spend at the exhibition at the SAF, I see a happy irony. No one is too hesitant to touch the ceramic mounds. Some walk by this lake, others sit beside it, some reach out to touch it, while others take photographs. Goody chuckles as she recalls being told that someone even tried to take a stupa home.

It is through these instances that one realises what art interventions are capable of doing, where a city lends its corners to be dressed, broken, reimagined and reinterpreted. Windows and staircases, cabs and boats are all colluding to conjure 10 days of collective wonder.

Across the staircase, the room opposite Goody’s exhibition summons a long queue of curious eyes waiting to get a glimpse of a work from another period of awakening. ‘Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy’, Italian painter Caravaggio’s 400-year-old masterpiece from his tumultuous final years, was serendipitously rediscovered in 2014. He was a man mired in conflicts but revered for the radical, human depictions of biblical events. Warts and all.

When the whiff of hardened ceramics and the spirit of Ambedkar blends with Baroque chiaroscuro, the idea of ‘high art’ is overturned. When a Dalit artist occupies the same space as a multi-million post-renaissance work, the impact of a festival lasts well past the ten days.

This article was originally published in the February 2026 issue of ON Stage.