Reframing the Dalit experience

A row of sari-clad Chyame women, heads held high, stand in a row, holding brooms that mark their trade. The shortest, in the middle, dressed in a nightgown, stares straight into the camera. Taken in 1995, outside a municipal office in Kathmandu, this photograph by Tuomo Manninen epitomises the assertion of dignity by Dalit women, triply oppressed by gender, caste and class. It is one of the first images in a book of photographs that attempts to change the "way we see" a long-marginalised section of Nepali society.

Dalit: A Quest for Dignity – a 2018 photobook edited by Diwas Raja Kc and produced by NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati – does not claim to represent Dalit history. Instead, it creates a visual archive of the Dalit experience in Nepal, a rare documentation of its kind. While Diwas Raja Kc writes in the book's introduction that their work "was guided by our love of photography and our latent faith that photographs can contribute to the erosion of injustice and exclusions", the book also examines the ethics of collecting, exhibiting and publishing images of distress, admitting that a plethora of such visuals has served to desensitise rather than mobilise. Rather, their intention is to "reinvigorate" the way in which history is told, and reconstruct the obscured histories of Dalits. It demands, in the words of Dalit poet, writer and Marxist activist Aahuti, whose searing verse has been reproduced in the book, an "accounting of humiliated history".