"My Work Will Not Satisfy What This Institution Has Been Selling": An Artist's War on Elite India

The confession comes quietly at first, delivered in the measured tone of someone who has spent years calculating the cost of truth. "I am Chamar," Siddhesh Gautam tells the small visual arts studio at Ashoka University. The artist, known to his 70,000 Instagram followers as Bakery Prasad, is midway through a talk titled "The Art Side of Ambedkarism: Visual Resistance, Memory, and Imagination," but what unfolds over the next hour reads more like a surgical deconstruction of how India's cultural establishments have spent decades erasing the very communities whose labor built their foundations.

This is not the sanitized version of caste conversation that typically circulates in progressive academic spaces. Gautam is describing something more insidious: the systematic aesthetic annihilation of entire communities, executed with the precision of people who understand that controlling images means controlling reality. "Whatever aesthetics that we are talking about, it really didn't cover the aesthetics of my community," he says. "Where is the aesthetic of education? Where is the aesthetic of my people?"

To unpack this methodical dismantling, Gautam takes his audience backward through his own biography, each revelation building toward a larger indictment of India's cultural institutions.

Gautam begins in the small towns of Uttar Pradesh, where "you cannot really even go out after six because there are bears, there are wild elephants." It is here, at age ten, during a discussion with classmates, that he first encounters the casual cruelty of caste hierarchy. Fourth-standard students are discussing surnames, debating what a classmate's name reveals about her social position. "They all laughed at that girl and said that she must be a Chamar, we must not interact with her," Gautam recalls. "I, for some reason, made this decision when I was in fourth standard, that  I do not want to have such friends who talk about people's caste."

The isolation that follows shapes everything. While his peers form social bonds, Gautam befriends seeds, leaves, dead animals, and insects. "That's how the beginning of my art journey actually started," he explains. The observation is delivered matter-of-factly, but it reveals the profound psychological architecture of marginalization: when human community becomes conditional on erasing your identity, you turn to objects that cannot discriminate.

This pattern intensifies when Gautam arrives at Mumbai's National Institute of Design,  in the 1990s for college, carrying skills his family had taught him—stitching shoes before cloth, working metal sheets decorated with intricate parrot motifs, contributing to commercial art production from childhood. "I was born in a family where I learned to stitch shoes before I learned to stitch cloth," he says. His practical training, built from necessity and family tradition, exceeds that of most design students. Yet the visual vocabulary surrounding his community consists entirely of what he describes as "fragile, colorless line drawings of people doing something in a very bad direction."

The institutional gaslighting reaches its peak during apartment hunting. When potential flatmates begin revealing their surnames and castes, Gautam faces a choice: homelessness or erasure. He chooses erasure. "My surname is Kumar," he lies, claiming a Brahmin identity that will unlock doors his Chamar surname would seal. The deception works, but at a devastating cost. "I never had my classmates come to my house because if they ever come to my house, they will know where I come from because my parents are very devoted, so they will see the symbolism of Buddha right in front of them."

Meanwhile, his professors celebrate the India Report, the foundational text of Indian design education. The document rhapsodizes about the pot as the cornerstone of Indian design philosophy, describing how this humble vessel evolved across millennia into countless regional variations. But as Gautam explains, "India Report does not even mention who made that pot."

The omission is not accidental. It represents what Gautam identifies as the foundational lie of Indian design education: the systematic extraction of aesthetic knowledge from its creators, followed by the erasure of those creators from the narrative. "That is why the foundation of design education felt wrong to me," he says. "Who made that pot? Who made those clothes? Who made those temples and sculptures that you are so proud of?"

The questions expose a deliberate inversion of European design education, where craft communities organically evolved into design institutions. "In Europe, the first metal workers, carpenters became designers," Gautam observes. "In India, in the 1960s when NID was established, only upper class elite people who have never made anything became the first batches of these institutions." The result, he argues, is seventy-five years of creative sterility. "What is the accomplishment of Indian design? What is the contribution of Indian design and art in modern art? Which is one aesthetic, which is one theory, which is one product that is found globally everywhere?" 

Salvation arrives from an unexpected quarter. During an exchange program in Milan, Gautam encounters a white semiotics professor who becomes his inadvertent liberator. Convinced this is his only chance to study in Europe, he decides to risk total vulnerability. 

The professor's response transforms him. Rather than judgment, she offers education, introducing him to works by marginalized communities worldwide. "That day I did not just become an Indian," Gautam says. "That day I became a global person because I realized that I can find solidarity 6,000 kilometers away, 10,000 kilometers away. I do not have to really search for solidarity in my neighbors."

The revelation is both liberating and damning: a Dalit student has to travel to Italy to discover that marginalized communities globally have been creating powerful art. India's institutions meanwhile convinced him his people possessed no aesthetic tradition worth documenting.

Returning to India transformed, Gautam makes his boldest statement yet. On Facebook, he writes: "I am Chamar"—reclaiming the caste name weaponized as a slur. The response exposes everything about India's progressive pretensions. "People started to laugh. Oh, what a fun joke," he recalls. "I realized that there are so many friendships that I thought were friendships but were only caste amalgamation inside the society, inside institutions." Friends disappear, connections dissolve, and Gautam confronts the reality that his acceptance was always conditional on his successful performance of upper-caste identity.

But his most radical insight concerns B.R. Ambedkar himself. While mainstream India remembers the constitutional architect and political reformer, Gautam positions Ambedkar as an aesthetic revolutionary. "We always see Dr. Ambedkar as a leader of the masses from the perspective of social sciences and politics," he says. "We don't really see him as an inspiration for artists, and for artists, inspiration can be found anywhere."

Gautam's family history embodies this intersection of personal and political transformation. His grandfather, a postman who taught himself to read, established a community library and wrote essays critiquing patriarchal structures through metaphorical analysis. His father, despite never attending university, pursued correspondence courses while working as a messenger, eventually becoming a banker. "My father was the first one to actually make a pakka (proper) house—that was the first time we had concrete walls," Gautam explains. "From there, we made institutions, we made schools, we started building our own houses, we started to rethink architecture, symbolism."

This architectural transformation represents something profound: marginalized communities claiming physical and aesthetic space, asserting their right to beauty, permanence, and cultural dignity. The blue flag of the Ambedkarite movement becomes, in Gautam's interpretation, more than a political symbol—it represents an aesthetic declaration, the shared sky "under which we are all born equal."

The contemporary relevance of this aesthetic revolution cannot be ignored. Gautam documents how caste-based discrimination persists in supposedly modern contexts. He describes his father, recently retired, contracting COVID-19 while cleaning their neighborhood because municipal corporations refuse to service Dalit areas. "My father still cleans his own area, still does that, and last year he got COVID because of it," he says matter-of-factly. "The municipal corporation would not come to clean, so my father cleans his own area."

The observation, delivered without melodrama, exposes how "cleanliness is also a caste issue." Basic civic services follow caste geography, determining who gets clean roads, functioning infrastructure, and municipal attention. But Gautam's work transcends victimization narratives. His embrace of digital media—thousands of artworks created on an iPad purchased despite significant financial strain—represents a new model of cultural production that bypasses traditional gatekeepers. "I bought my iPad for ₹35,000. I paid $8.99 for Procreate and I have done thousands of artworks on that," he says with characteristic pragmatism.

His curatorial practice reflects similar innovation. After discovering that free exhibitions attracted minimal engagement, he began charging modest fees. "When we used to do it for free, people would not really talk to us. But when we started to take money, they started to feel that they are now buying some way of learning about exhibiting," he explains. The shift reveals a crucial understanding: sustainable cultural work requires economic viability, not charity.

The political stakes of this aesthetic revolution extend far beyond art world concerns. Gautam's practice suggests that true decolonization requires not just political and economic transformation but aesthetic liberation—the fundamental right to represent oneself with dignity, complexity, and joy.

Standing before Ashoka's audience—students who represent the beneficiaries of India's most expensive liberal education, many inheriting the very systems he spent his childhood navigating as an outsider—Gautam embodies this possibility. His presence in this elite space, speaking his truth, claiming his identity, demanding recognition for his community's contributions, represents the kind of cultural invasion that terrifies guardians of aesthetic hierarchy. "I carry the burden of my own community," he declares near the end of his talk. "My work will not be to satisfy what these institutions have been selling me as an idea of design and art."

(Edited by Giya Sood.)