Chaityabhumi: A Documentary of Resistance And Remembrance

December 6, 1956 marked the loss of Bharat Ratna Dr B.R Ambedkar, lovingly referred to as Babasaheb Ambedkar. Babasaheb died peacefully in his sleep, three days after completing his final manuscript for Buddha and His Dhamma. The Buddhist cremation ceremony at Dadar Chowpatty beach on December 7, 1956, was marked by the presence of half a million grieving people. Chaityabhumi is a Buddhist chaitya (a shrine or prayer hall) and the cremation place of Dr. B.R Ambedkar. It has become a revered place for millions of Ambedkarite followers, who visit the site annually on his death anniversary.

“Chaityabhumi’s aim is to highlight that the Dalit life is not about violence and atrocity,” says the documentary filmmaker Somnath Waghmare on Chaityabhumi, his musical documentary film. The film brings to light the history and cultural politics of how people commemorate December 6 at Dr. Ambedkar’s resting place, and what relevance this event holds in the country today. It explores how the Dalit community comes together to honour this day, and the political implications it holds for their identity and empowerment.

 The occasion is marked by a cultural celebration, an affirmation of sorts that celebrates the Ambedkarite thought of social justice through a mass gathering involving speeches as well as enlightening performances such as theatre and music about the Dalit community, and the life of Buddha. For 64 minutes, the viewer is shifted to Dadar, between the crowds of people walking towards the stupa, waving blue flags with Babasaheb’s picture on them.

On 10 April 2025, The Savitri Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (SAPSC) organised the screening of Chaityabhumi in Ashoka University, followed by a discussion with Waghmare.

Waghmare Waghmare and Atul Howale at the screening organised by SAPSC (10 April 2025) | Source: Atharva Salve

Waghmare has been working with media and film for over 10 years. Most of his work deals with the lives and resistance of Dalits and historically oppressed communities in India. He has previously worked on I am Not a Witch (2015), The Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey (2017) – which was previously screened at Ashoka too, Memories of Mangaon (2022) and There is no caste discrimination in IITs? The Chaityabhumi project took him four years to complete and was started during his M.Phil in 2019. “Sometimes you feel like you should stop documenting, but with documentaries, it’s difficult. The Gail project took 6 years,” says Waghmare. Waghmare is currently working on three projects: documentaries on sociologist-activists Gail Omvedt and Bharat Patankar, and on multi-talented Ambedkarite artist Yashwant Painter, along with research on the global Ambedkarite diaspora inspired by his travels.

Being born into a neo-Buddhist family, the symbols in Ambedkarite culture are unique — the Ashoka chakra, the Constitution, the peepal tree, a statue of Buddha, a statue of B.R. Ambedkar. I myself have grown up in a culture that is quite different from others, and I find there to be an immense beauty in that uniqueness because of the way it stands in resistance and contrast with Brahmanism and caste oppression. Chaityabhumi, in this way, is somewhat of an outlier. Waghmare describes the aim of his film as such: “Chaityabhumi aims to highlight that Dalit life is not solely about violence and atrocity. The dominant narrative often portrays Dalits only as victims — weak, oppressed, and defined by suffering. While violence, discrimination, and resistance are real, their lives go far beyond that. Culture is central to their identity. At Chaityabhumi, people come together to celebrate, buy books, and engage in community life. They have their own organizations like the Samata Sainik Dal, their own music, religion, and cultural practices. It is their own space, their cultural politics. I wanted to show that they are producers of knowledge too.”

As a documentary filmmaker for 10+ years, Waghmare became interested in art and filmmaking during his postgraduate years— “I realised that our lived experiences, our histories are erased out of cinematic spaces— our stories are missing, especially out of Bollywood. I believe it’s out of caste arrogance. But okay, they ignored it— what do we do now? Do we sit and curse them? I decided that I could criticize, but I’ll tell our stories through our medium. People started liking it, and it got recognition.”

Working on a documentary like Chaityabhumi also came with significant challenges for Waghmare. He works with a small budget and mostly does the camera work by himself or pieces together a crew with the help of a few friends. The documentary itself is a low-budget affair, without any producer, which he pegs to production studios’ general disinterest in funding works explicitly dealing with caste. Interestingly, Waghmare questions this very conception of the “dealing” of a work with any specific topic in our discussion. “If you really look closely,” he says, “every film is a caste film… Even Shah Rukh Khan’s films are “caste films”. Just examine the roles he plays — in most of them, his characters are upper-caste.”

 A film just about Dalits is not a “caste film.” Despite challenges with budget, Waghmare has confidence in his work. “If you look at mainstream documentaries, their minimum budget is 5 crores. A 5 crore documentary versus a 5 lakh documentary is incomparable. Imagine, if a 5 lakh film can travel this much, what can we do with 1 crore?”

Waghmare grew up in a caste-ghetto (Boudha-vasti, as it’s called in Marathi, often referring to a slum where Dalit Buddhists live), studied in a Marathi school, and was raised by uneducated parents. “I acknowledge that, I do not want to romanticise it, everyone has come from their own struggles, but it matters where you come from. Even English education is a privilege in today’s context, according to me. Today I can travel, I can speak in English, that’s something I’ve gotten through struggle, nothing came easy— but I won’t cry about it. Babasaheb wrote Waiting for a Visa talking about his struggles, but then he moved past them. Similarly, I have had my struggles, but I move forward,” he says. 

MUBI Release Poster of Chaityabhumi (2025) | Source: Waghmare Waghmare

On the 14th of April of 2025, Chaityabhumi was officially released on MUBI, a global streaming platform with a wide catalogue of curated independent, art house films and documentaries. Till now, the film has been screened at multiple universities across the world, including the London School of Economics, King’s College, London, Cambridge and Oxford University in the UK, Columbia University, Stanford University, Princeton University and University of Texas at Austin, NYU in the USA, and University of Gottingen, Germany. 

Which is to say that a passion project that celebrates a marginalized identity’s culture has bloomed into international recognition. With Begumpura Productions, Waghmare aims to continue his work documenting the life and resistance of Dalits and other historically oppressed communities in India. A documentary like Chaityabhumi is larger than its 64 minutes of runtime, it is an art form crafted to convey untold stories— to let the world know that Babasaheb was here, and that he made invaluable contributions to the world and his people, which can never be forgotten.