For us, and all our fellow Ambedkarites, The Fourteenth of April is a day of reckoning and recognition. It is the day we come face to face with the essence of Babasaheb's legacy in its most distilled form. For those who grew up steeped in Ambedkarite culture, the Fourteenth is a day of communal joy and festive assertion. A day when our streets light up in blue and amidst it, the blue sky becomes graspable. It is the day of locating fellow Ambedkarites in a new place, to recollect one’s collective selfhood. It is the act of missing one's streets when one is away from home. 

And for those of us who ‘discover’ Ambedkar later in life, the Fourteenth is when the calls to his name become a beacon, a calling, a glimmer of light to be followed on the path to emancipation. The distant humming of the Jai Bhim one gravitates towards. The quiet, clandestine celebration amid a world saturated with Savarna celebrations. It is the sudden recognition of a fellow Ambedkarite in a distant, foreign land one has ended up in, in search of a better life. It is the melancholy of not having accessed Baba earlier. 

In putting together this first issue of Fourteen Mag, we knew we were engaging with this rich and complex totality. Without shying away from this, we wanted this collection to be situated within anti-caste history and discourse, giving breadth to the issues that we felt required pushing further, and documenting ideas and experiences that were hitherto under-explored. Through a combination of commissioned pieces and submissions through an open call, we have managed to gather fourteen startling pieces that respond to the idea of celebrating Jayanti with breadth and multitude that we could not have anticipated even in our speculative best.   

The Latin origin for the word celebration denotes “numerous attendance.” Creating a collection around the celebration of Jayanti meant grappling with the numerous nature of April Fourteenth. That is, to foreground and  placate the many, many ways in which the ‘heterogenous mass’ of our people articulate themselves on this day. While the common underlying motive i.e. to carry forward the Ambedkarite cause, is found within each voice that we present here, the stakes involved, and the shapes that the celebrations take, suggest that there reside numerous Jayantis within Jayanti. Local celebrations around the country are often linked to regional anti-caste climates, as a number of the contributors demonstrate. 

Sumeet Samos writes about how in recent years the Dom community in Southern Odisha has mobilised around Babasaheb Ambedkar, in a landscape where anti-caste organising has been relatively fractured. Hritik Lalan takes us through Jayanti festivities in her hometown Ganeshnagar, a Dalit neighbourhood in Gandhidham Gujarat - where the relocation of the Ambedkar statue from the city centre has triggered protests. She reflects on how the legacy of Dalit Asmita Yatra and the Una movement has shaped the lives of Gujarati Dalits.

Jayanti celebrations have a particularly deep-rooted history in the BDD Chawls of Mumbai, which is also the neighbourhood where the Dalit Panther movement began. Kunal Lokhande revisits this place that he grew up in to create a mixed media comic with photographs, illustrations and text. He chronicles the ways in which the space is alive with the legacy of working-class, Ambedkarite assertion.

In a stunning photo essay rife with archival images and research, Gorvika Rao retraces her family’s history within the Ambedkarite literary-cultural sphere of Delhi. She writes, “The images I have chosen connect the material history of objects like photographs, diaries and magazines, with the public history of claiming spaces”. Ajay Dhoke shares photographs taken on Bhim Jayanti in Pune during his time as the behind-the-scenes photographer for the film Naam Kya Hai Tumhara?. On a lively festive day, his camera captures some of the quieter intimate details.

April is also Dalit History Month, a phenomenon that has brought a generation of Dalit youth across borders together in solidarity and left a deep cultural imprint for future generations. This issue includes a conversation between Christina Dhanuja, one of the co-founders of DHM, and artist Shrujana Shridhar, about her personal journey of political discovery and the process of bringing DHM to life. Highlighting more international iterations of Jayanti, Kirtika Kain writes a letter to one of our editors. She describes growing up Dalit in Sydney in the 90s, and how the diaspora Ambedkarite community shows up to celebrate Jayanti now.

Vihaan writes about finding the strength to live and embody his identity as a transman, a step he took on Jayanti while drawing inspiration from Babasaheb’s writing. Personal essays from Bavani, Angad, Ashish, Poorva, Harsh and Bharat are each a poignant story of discovering identity and community, and the confidence to re/claim and occupy spaces challenging Brahmanical impositions.

Every single one of these fourteen pieces forms a mosaic, giving us a glimpse of how Jayanti connects Ambedkarites, inspires assertion and anti-caste articulation, and becomes a site for enacting and carrying forth Baba’s legacy.