The lights ran on batteries. When Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar went to photograph the magazines of the Dalit Panthers in the Mumbai homes where they had survived, she took a small setup and her own lighting, “in case the power went out wherever we were documenting,” she told AIGA Eye on Design in 2022. The pages were about half a century old, printed on paper that printers and bigger publishers had thrown out. They had been kept by people close to the movement: Ramesh Shinde, a bibliophile who has collected the literature of B.R. Ambedkar’s anti-caste movement in Maharashtra, the western Indian state whose capital is Mumbai, for decades; Satish Kalsekar, an editor and publisher of the period’s little magazines; and J.V. Pawar, one of the Panthers’ founders.
Dalits, the communities once branded “untouchable”, are at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy. The Dalit Panthers were a radical political and cultural organisation founded in Bombay, now Mumbai, in 1972 by writers and activists including Raja Dhale, Namdeo Dhasal and Pawar. They took their name from the Black Panther Party in the United States and, Pawar says, “even borrowed their logo”. As an organisation they lasted under five years: by Pawar’s account, set out in a review of his history of the movement, they were formed on 29 May 1972 and formally disbanded on 7 March 1977. Their writing lasted longer. Much of it appeared in little magazines: small, independently produced literary periodicals that, in Maharashtra, carried radical and anti-caste writing outside commercial publishing in the 1960s and 1970s.
Shridhar, an illustrator from Mumbai’s Ambedkarite Buddhist community, Dalits who follow the Buddhism of Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who led the drafting of India’s constitution, co-founded the Dalit Panther Archive in 2016 to find that print, scan it and translate it from Marathi, the language it was written in. Its case rests on what Shridhar found: material that institutions had not kept, held instead by the movement’s own people.
“The ability to preserve something is also a privilege. Most people from marginalized communities, especially in Mumbai, don’t have enough space to preserve this material.” — Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar, to AIGA Eye on Design, 2022
An accidental archive
The archive started as research for a film. “A few friends and I were researching a documentary on the Dalit Panthers, and we kept running into the same problem: There simply wasn’t enough accessible material,” Shridhar told the art historian Maya Varma in a two-part conversation that the Museum of Modern Art’s online journal, post, published in January and March this year. “As we continued researching, we realized that much of the Panthers’ history was being held privately. People had posters, pamphlets, and publications in their homes, but they were often in very fragile condition.”
The documentary was never made, Fontstand News reported in 2021. The scans became the archive. Shridhar first co-founded it with the musician Nayantara Bhatkal, and has since run it herself. When she went looking for the magazines at the Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalaya, a library of Marathi literature, she found other publications that mentioned them, but not the magazines themselves. “So we started looking for people who might have copies of these magazines at home,” she said.
In some homes the material had been well kept. “These (archives) were informal collections in people’s homes. People have kept it in very good condition - books, pamphlets, since the fifties,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Context in 2023, in a report on Dalits building their own archives.
That report set her beside other Dalit collectors: a retired bank manager in Kalyan, near Mumbai, who spent five decades building an Ambedkar archive in shoe boxes in his flat, and a doctoral student digitising Panchama, a Dalit movement magazine of the 1970s and 1980s, starting from copies her family kept. S. Anand, an anti-caste campaigner and director of the publishing house Navayana, told Context: “Even the history of the modern period is often lost … What survives owes totally to Dalit efforts.” In the same report Shridhar put it in terms of what her community does and doesn’t own: “We have struggled to find belonging, historically speaking … We don’t have generational wealth or property. If we don’t do this, what resources are we left with to survive?”
What the pages hold
In 2021, Fontstand reported, the main way for the public to see the archive was an Instagram account. It then held about 40 scanned objects, from little magazines to posters, more than half of them translated, and Shridhar was working on a website to host the scans and the research on them.
About 40: scanned objects in the Dalit Panther Archive in 2021, more than half of them translated from Marathi into English. Source: Fontstand News, October 2021.
Some of those scans have been published with credit to the archive, and they show what kind of objects these were. One is a booklet that Fontstand captions as the Panthers’ 1973 manifesto. Its Marathi title is Dalit Pantherchi Bhumika, “the Dalit Panther’s position”. Under a black panther, the cover gives the publisher as Dalit Panther Prakashan, Mumbai, and the price as fifty paise, half a rupee. Its first page marks the organisation’s first year. It says misunderstandings about the Panthers’ aims and position are being spread on purpose, inside the movement and outside it, and that the position must therefore be set out plainly.
Another is the eighth issue of Chakravarty, a literary daily published by Raja Dhale and Satish Kalsekar. Its imprint lines say, in Marathi with the words “Private Circulation” in English, that it is for private circulation and only for donors, and name a book stall in Dadar, in central Mumbai, as the place to get it. Around the title, Dhale drew a ring of rays and filled the spaces between them with the names of figures from the little-magazine scene; Eye on Design read the circle, with no start or end, as a nod to equality against the pyramid of caste. The same page carries a wire report on that year’s Pulitzer prizes and a clipping from The Guardian about a new New York magazine called Avant Garde.
That issue also shows how quickly a record shifts in the retelling. Eye on Design placed Chakravarty “in the early ’70s”. The issue’s own date line, in the Saka calendar used in India, gives the year 1891, which is 1969, and its Pulitzer report, datelined New York, 5 May, covers the 1969 prizes. Chakravarty came three years before the Panthers, out of the little-magazine world they grew from. Accounts of the run differ too: Fontstand counts 13 issues in a fortnight, while Shridhar remembers “a literary daily he published for fourteen days straight”.
What the pages show most clearly is a way of making things with very little. “All of the aesthetic choices were influenced by restrictions of money or printing methods,” Shridhar told Eye on Design. “The Panthers were using paper that was discarded by printers and bigger publishers, because it was cheaper.” One magazine, Ata, was folded like an accordion to get more pages out of one sheet with no cutting. The makers spelled out issue numbers, dates and prices in words instead of figures, and Bhatkal, in a 2019 interview Eye on Design quoted, recalled back covers that promised “the next issue will be published as and when we goddamn please”. Members travelled up to six hours to Alibag, on the coast south of Mumbai, to print by cyclostyle, an early stencil duplicator, which kept the price down.
The reason for the form was exclusion. “Dalit writers and poets were not being published anywhere else, and were denied a place on mainstream publishing platforms,” Shridhar told Eye on Design, “so these pocket-sized magazines became a medium for them to share their anti-caste literature.”
The argument the summaries leave out
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CC BY-SA 4.0Original on Wikimedia CommonsShort accounts can close the Panthers’ story in a line. Eye on Design’s ends: “Due to ideological differences, the Dalit Panthers were disbanded in 1977.” The people involved tell a longer story, and they tell it as an argument conducted on paper.
In Pawar’s telling, the split was between Ambedkarites and a Marxist. “Raja Dhale was an Ambedkarite, as was I, but Dhasal came to be known as a Marxist,” he told The Wire in 2022. The flashpoint was a manifesto. According to Pawar’s book, as Forward Press’s reviewer summarised it, Dhasal issued it in mid-1973 without the approval of Pawar, Dhale and other leaders, and it said society would not change through constitutional methods, elections and satyagraha, Gandhian non-violent resistance, alone. The answer came in print as well: “To clear the confusion, Raja Dhale wrote a series of articles in Nava Kaal. We also printed booklets,” Pawar writes. Nava Kaal is a Marathi daily published in Mumbai. Pawar also blames communist leaders for driving “a wedge between Dalit Panthers”.
Dhale’s objections were sharper still. According to The Wire’s obituary of him in 2019, he accused the document of being “a Brahmin manifesto” (Brahmins are the priestly caste at the top of the caste order), diluted and cut off from the original Panther vision, and asked whether it was a jahirnama, a manifesto, or a namajahir, a pun that turns the word around. Sunil Dighe, a lawyer who co-wrote the manifesto and sided with Dhasal, gave the obituary the other side’s account: “There was a Dhasal faction and Dhale faction. But this split was only ideological.” He and Dhale stayed cordial and shared a stage on several occasions, he said.
Neither version settles the argument, and the archive doesn’t claim to. What it does is keep the material the argument was conducted in: manifestos, booklets and magazines whose makers argued with one another as well as with the state. Shridhar’s own family covers the range. Her parents, she told Varma, are “Ambedkarite, Marxist, anti-caste people”, and her father, a Dalit Marxist poet, helped her rework translations that a hired translator couldn’t fully follow.
Translation as archival work
The grant that let her take on that work came in 2019, from the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF) and Asia Art Archive in India. The foundation’s grant page said the Panthers’ work, “though widely recognised as a landmark in radical aesthetics, has been poorly researched and documented”, and noted that the materials were “scattered across the personal archives of various individuals”. Under the grant the digitised material was to be freely and publicly available, “should permissions from their holders be granted”, and facsimiles were to go to local public libraries in the region.
Shridhar is clear that scanning wasn’t enough. “Almost all of this material was in Marathi, and I was extremely dissatisfied with displaying or circulating it without translation—especially outside of Maharashtra,” she told Varma. “When people can’t read the text, engagement stops.” She hired translators and then set the English back into the original layouts, keeping the line breaks of free verse and the onomatopoeia. “The language in these magazines was extremely colloquial, and some of the references are very specific to that time or setting,” she told Eye on Design. “It was often like decoding a puzzle. The format, poetry, or language wasn’t simple either; it’s experimental, which was the point.” She wanted readers “from Dalit Bahujan or non-Marathi speaking communities who are not from Maharashtra” (Bahujan is a term for the wider oppressed-caste majority) to “be able to experience these documents the way they were designed to be read.”
Working through Dhale’s writing changed how she saw him. He died in July 2019, around the time she was translating; they had spoken during the documentary interviews, but not once she was working on the translations. “What became clear to me was how urgent his relationship to language was,” she told Varma. “He wanted language to be sharp, so that what was being said could not be easily distorted. I relate to that very strongly.” She also found that Chakravarty was funny. “There were fake obituaries, satire, moments of play. That combination of rigor and humor felt very important.”
What others take from it
Artists have been among its keenest users. “Had it not been for Shrujana’s digitizations, I would not have known about this whole artistic register,” the Ambedkarite artist Rahee Punyashloka told Hyperallergic in 2023. “These are artists who have created iconography that we can build on.” Shridhar told the same writer what the work had done to her: “It changed me as an artist,” she said. “It taught me how I must view myself as an anti-caste Ambedkarite Dalit feminist artist today.” Later in the same answer she asked: “If it can do that for me, what can it do for others?”
It has also travelled. In April 2024 she presented the archive’s posters, magazines and poetry at Poster House, a poster museum in New York, in an online session with Christina Dhanuja, a co-founder of Dalit History Month. In Chicago, in March 2025, she paired a talk on the archive with a print workshop at an event called “From Panther to Panther”, where, she told Varma, she met former Black Panthers. “That experience felt like being at home,” she said. She is wary of making the comparison too neat. “It would be a disservice to both communities and both political movements to place them side by side as if they’re the same,” she said. “The contexts are entirely different, including [with regard to] the role of women in each movement.”
The gaps it carries
That last point is one of the archive’s open problems. The Panthers’ founders were men. Hyperallergic described the archive as a way for artists to study and rearticulate “the male-led movement”. The SSAF grant page noted that Shridhar was familiar with the feminist critique of the Panthers and planned interviews with women activists and thinkers of the time, “to ensure that their own narratives find a place in her archive.” Much of her recent work as an artist turns on Dalit women’s lives; in the MoMA conversation she says art has to push her own movement to ask, “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”
Some gaps come from the archive’s size and how it is built. The archive is small: about 40 objects as of 2021, from a print culture whose issues were printed in small runs, passed among friends and the community, and, in Eye on Design’s words, “gradually lost to time”. The archive works from collections it doesn’t own, and making scans public depends on the holders’ permission, as the grant terms note. Its public face, at least as of 2021, was an Instagram account, on a platform the archive doesn’t control. The project’s own story drifts in the retelling, like the Panthers’: the SSAF grant page dates its founding to 2016, Hyperallergic to 2017.
Shridhar doesn’t claim more than she can hold. She calls herself an “accidental archivist” and, in the MoMA conversation, separates her role from a scholar’s: “I am not a historian or an archaeologist, but rather an artist working with history.” She is just as careful about what belongs to the Panthers. The leopard she uses in her own art comes from a cover that Subash Awachat drew for Manohar magazine, which she places in the progressive print culture of Pune, a city south-east of Mumbai. “It wasn’t published by the Panthers themselves,” she said.
Keeping it in circulation
Her reason for doing the work is about the future more than the past. “The Dalit Panthers as an organization didn’t last long, but the culture [that its members] generated runs deep,” she told Varma in March. Of her own art, she added: “So the work has to keep reactivating itself.”
The magazines were made to be passed from hand to hand. Half a century later, Shridhar is passing them on again, to readers who can’t get to a collector’s shelf in Mumbai or read the Marathi on the page. “There are always people ready to erase it the second they get a chance,” she said. “I don’t want that chance to exist.”
