Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Title: Untitled
Date: 2020
Medium: Reading performance
Artist: Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Exhibition: Ideas Travel Faster than Light, 2020
Reading aloud of Annihilation of Caste – an undelivered speech by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
Annihilation of Caste is by the social reformer, first minister of Law and Justice and principle author of the Constitution of India. He inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement and campaigned against discrimination against the so-called Untouchables or ‘depressed classes’. He wrote the speech in 1936 but was unable to deliver it because the organisers who invited him got cold feet. He published the speech instead and it became hugely influential. Recently it has been picked up again internationally – its ideas on caste applied to race and class, in the context of the US and Britain. Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction to a new edition, piggybacking Ambedkar’s book with her own, as she acknowledged. Her book provoked both acclaim and sharp criticism for a form of cultural appropriation (she has a Brahmin, i.e. high-caste, name) and shows that caste, class, and identity politics are still alive and kicking. At the moment of going to press, in response to an increase in infection rates of Covid 19 in the UK, rules have changed once more, and it is forbidden to hold social gatherings of more than six people. In order to keep people safe, we will deliver a socially distanced, fully accessible performance that is in the spirit of the original undelivered speech. After all Ambedkar found a way to share his ideas, and so will we.
Ambedkar lived in London in the early 1920s studying at LSE (not far from Mecklenburgh Square), and the house he lived in is now the Ambedkar House Museum in Primrose Hill.
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