Art is often understood as an aesthetic object, something to be desired, preserved, curated, and eventually inherited. I argue we must begin from a different premise. Art must be approached as a practice of survival as much as through its aesthetic allure. Certain art forms do not seek endurance through preservation, but through repetition; they are not made to be wanted or displayed, but to continue. Emerging from bodily labour, social marginality, structural prohibition, material restriction, and historically inherited invisibility. Such art belongs to an economy of survival rather than an economy of spectacle. Its resistance does not announce itself through monumentality or permanence, but through its refusal of both. Remaining evaporative, tattooed, and perishable, its disappearance is not a failure of form, but a deliberate defiance of capture.
One such articulation of art-as-survival appears in Godna, a Dalit art form whose primary life resides not on paper or canvas, but on the body itself. Godna is fundamentally a tattooing practice, where motifs may later be transferred onto cloth, paper, or canvas, yet never fully detach from their corporeal origin. Its aesthetic language is restrained and earthly—predominantly black and white, using natural dyes derived from flowers, clay, leaves, and often cow dung. It depicts scenes drawn from daily life rather than mythic grandeur. Godna translates body art onto surfaces without relinquishing its bodily memory. In this sense, it remains aesthetically close to its roots, not by aspiring toward permanence, but by remaining grounded.
While Godna shares material and visual affinities with Madhubani, particularly in its use of natural pigments and symbolic forms, their conditions of emergence differ significantly. So do their durability and modes of endurance. Mainstream Madhubani today circulates as a curated and collectible art form, whereas Godna persists as a lived, gendered practice—central to identity rather than display. Among Bhil women, bird-like tattoos at the outer corners of the eyes function as markers of belonging as much as adornment. Elderly women often carry motifs of scorpions, deer, peacocks, and flowers—inscribed not as ornament but as memory. Here, art is a lived practice of survival, a testament to identity, kinship, and talisman. Crucially, Godna remains inseparable from the female tattooist, whose embodied labour sustains both the form and the life upon which it is inscribed. Godna does not seek to be seen; it seeks to endure.
A recurring condition across Dalit visual arts is their location within ritual labour rather than leisure. Art forms such as the Chowk—drawn inside homes, courtyards, and at thresholds—are inseparable from childbirth, death rituals, seasonal transitions, and daily acts of domestic sanctification. These markings are not decorative interventions but obligations, repeated through the body under conditions of necessity. They are erased by footsteps, weather, and work, only to be redrawn again. Their value lies not in visibility or preservation, but in continuity. In contrast, their mainstream parallels—Rangoli or parlour art—are increasingly detached from ritual burden. They are produced in moments of leisure, photographed, aestheticized, and preserved in art history curricula. What remains ritual labour in one social location is transformed into culture in another. The distinction is not one of form, but of who is allowed to make art without carrying the weight of survival.
While Dalit art often emerges as a testament of survival, its contemporary parallels operate within structures of religious dominance rather than necessity. Practices such as Sanjhi—seasonal paper-cut compositions associated with Vaishnav devotion—are deeply ritualistic, yet fundamentally different in their relation to power. Sanjhi is embedded within dominant religious iconography, structured pedagogy, and protected ritual space. Its performance is temporary but never precarious. The ritual here is elective, celebratory, not compulsory.
In contrast, Dalit ritual art does not rehearse devotion within sanctioned symbols, nor does it circulate within religious authority. It emerges instead from the thresholds of life and death, labour and continuity. Where Sanjhi performs sacrifice as symbolic devotion, Dalit art absorbs sacrifice as lived condition.
Dalit art must also be understood as a form of defiance. Historically forbidden from depicting Hindu deities and excluded from dominant sacred iconographies, Dalit artists turned instead toward nature, livelihood, and the material intelligence of everyday life. In this process, the art also transgressed the religious status quo imaginations. Animals, tools, fields, bodies, thresholds, and seasons became aesthetic sources not by choice alone, but by necessity. Here, artistic practice is inseparable from practical skill, ecological intimacy, and labour-based knowledge. And yet, their canvass continues to be expansive and subversive. In this sense, Dalit art resists not only through what it depicts, but through what it was never permitted to depict—and the worlds it chose to make visible instead.
But art cannot remain the privilege of one section of society while functioning as obligation for another. When creative practices are unevenly distributed between leisure and labour, the question is no longer aesthetic but ethical. Rituals embedded in Dalit life cannot be romanticised without erasing the conditions under which they are performed. To refuse romanticisation, then, is to shift our attention merely from the form of these practices to the conditions in which they are born. Yet it is precisely here that Dalit art endures—not through preservation, patronage, or celebration, but through necessity. Its survival does not depend on museums or markets, but on the fact that it must be done. Dalit art persists not because it is safeguarded, but because life, ritual, and memory would falter without it.
The question that inevitably follows is whether such historical obstruction and strangulation imposed limits on what Dalit art could have been. Yet to ask what Dalit artists might have produced under conditions of unrestricted expression is already to misplace the problem. It is to overwhelm the ethical with aesthetic. The restriction was not merely on subject matter or iconography, but on access to leisure, patronage, and the very right to create without compulsion. Dalit art does not testify to an absence of creative possibility; it testifies to the conditions under which creation was compelled to occur. The issue, then, is not that we have failed to see what Dalit artists could have produced, but that the social order never allowed art to emerge without bearing the weight of survival.
If the golden hour has represents the universal aesthetic ideal—in light, timing, and visibility—then Dalit art emerges without it. There is no privileged moment of illumination, no pause for perfection. For Dalit art, survival itself becomes the golden hour: the condition under which creation must occur, again and again, not when circumstances are ideal, but when life demands it.
True appreciation is not about moving a wall drawing onto canvas or an Alpana onto merchandise. The beauty lies instead in impermanence, in detachment, in a practice that refuses possession. This is the core philosophical value of Dalit aesthetics.
Sabahat Fida is a Kashmir-based educator writing at the intersection of science, religion, metaphysics, and philosophy.