Dr B R Ambedkar: Now & Then

Jyoti Nisha is a multi disciplinary professional – an academic, writer, screenwriter, filmmaker and a producer with a focus on cinema, gaze, caste, gender and mass media. She theorized a political theory, Bahujan Spectatorship that opposes the popular culture’s casteist male gaze and stereotypical representation of the marginalised, earlier called as untouchables, on the silver screen and explores the consumption and spectatorship of popular cinema’s representation of caste, gender, and sexuality by the marginalized of India.

Her second theory, The Oppositional Bahujan Agency replaces the Brahmanical aesthetics of Natyashastra with Ambedkar’s historical methods as an epistemology to locate a non-Brahmin experience in order to explore the representation of caste, gender, and marginalized communities in Indian cinema.

It is an inverted methodology of creating a unique oppositional socio-political Bahujan aesthetics in Indian cinema embedded in Bahujan lived experience, culture, history, movements, and ideology via Bahujan film makers. Produced by Dharmatic Entertainment and streaming on Netflix, she also worked as a Director’s Assistant to Neeraj Ghaywan on his short, Geeli Pucchi (part of Ajeeb Daastaans anthology), which received rave reviews. She studied journalism from IIMC, Delhi, screenwriting from FTII, Pune & and Media and Cultural Studies from TISS, Mumbai. She wrote for many national and international publications and worked as a full time Producing faculty with a film school for a year and half. ‘Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: Now & Then,’ is her debut feature length documentary film, which she has directed, produced, crowdfunded and are co producing with Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Productions.

Cynthia Stephen has been actively involved in the development sector for over 25 years as an activist, writer, trainer and policy analyst on gender, poverty, development and social exclusion. She has been the State Programme Director, Mahila Samakhya Karnataka, and was also a member of the Ramesh Kumar Committee which worked on recent amendments to the Panchayat Raj Act.

Cynthia has done doctoral research in the area of women’s political participation, with special focus on women from marginalised communities. She has published extensively on the situation of Dalits in general and Dalit women in particular.

She contributed a chapter titled “Higher Education in India: Fresh Visions and Visionaries from Marginalised Groups the Need of the Hour” to a 2014 book, “Higher Education in India: New Perspectives.” She is the Founder Director of the Training Editorial and Development Services Trust and is presently engaged in setting up an institution for the all-round empowerment of women. Associated with a number of people’s movements for justice across the country, she has also been involved in the issue of Dalit student suicides.

Vishal Kumaraswamy is a Bengaluru, India based artist-curator working across text, film, sound, performance and computational arts. He employs experimental technologies to create media-based works addressing critical concerns around Caste, Race and Technology. He has an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins, London and his works have been shown at The Venice Biennale’s Research Pavilion, CCS Bard College, Contemporary Calgary, The Royal College of Art, SITE Gallery Sheffield, HKW Berlin and the Rencontres d’Arles 2023. Vishal has upcoming exhibitions at Center Clark Montreal and PARI, Sydney in 2024 and his works are scheduled to appear in The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies.

Vishal has been in residence with the US Consulate General Mumbai, Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, SAVAC Toronto, Vital Capacities videoclub UK, Onassis AiR and The Singapore Art Museum. He is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts Transmitter Delhi X Darwin Grant, the Warehouse421 Artistic Research Grant and is a current 2022-2024 Research Associate at the CCA Derry~Londonderry.

Vishal’s independent curatorial practice is centered around developing anti-caste curatorial models that foreground a wide range of subaltern practices and he is the inaugural guest curator at Arts House, a City of Melbourne for 2023 & 2024. Vishal has previously presented projects with the Wrong Biennale & Sluice Biennial and is the founder of the artist collective; Now You Have Authority, a collaborative practice through which he has curated exhibitions, residencies, and delivered workshops at the Tate Modern’s Tate Exchange Program and Tanzfest Aarau.