The chapter was published in the book: Photography in India, from archives to contemporary practice, edited by Chinar Shah and Aileen Blaney, published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Reviews of the book
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My association with a critic and scholar in Malayalam, B. Rajeevan began in 2007 while I was doing my Masters. Unlike a more common professor-student relationship that usually begins in a classroom, my meeting with Rajeevan happened because I was dating his son at the time. I admit I was lured into that relationship by the prospectus of getting married into a family that has radical views and has actively worked as cultural activists and literary scions for over five decades. I was in, I think, as soon as I heard about the beautiful library in their house.
Beyond the romance, which was dewy and smelled like jasmines, I spent long hours discussing political ideas with Rajeevan, with Savithri by the side. Cups of tea were devoured with peanuts. Rajeevan, at the time, was working on a series of interviews that elaborated a set of questions around the philosophical ideas propounded by Deleuze and Guattari. He was disgruntled by the state of Marxian critical frameworks which were being used without reflection and its inefficiency to account for the current transformations seen in the society thanks to the success of global capitalism. A part of this interview was already published by Mathrubhoomi. Many of the questions I raised during tea were picked up by Rajeevan to comment and discuss, which was eventually published by Madhyamam, and later as chapters in his book Vaakukalum Vasthukalum ( DC Books, Kottayam) and Janasanchayathinte Jaivarashtreeyam ( Raspberry Books, Calicut). He was kind enough to mention my name in these expositions.
B.Rajeevan’s awards and bibliography can be found here.
I have translated and transcreated Rajeevan’s works from Malayalam as well as co-authored chapters with him. I appreciate the veracity of his ideas when it comes to political analysis of observable phenomena in contemporary Kerala and I continue to learn from him about its social and political history. A recent transcreation can be found below.
Bridging the Left-Liberal Divide, Economic and Political Weekly, Aug 2016
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I like the opportunities I get to morph into different insects. With the UNSUNG project, I was being a tiny little ant, carrying a small morsel of food towards a destination predecided by the other important ants in the colony. But to do this part, I was happy. Eventually, we were celebrating the extraordinary grandness of small people, women such as Lakshmikutty Amma living along the edge of the Ponmudi forest in Kerala.
UNSUNG is a project envisaged by Mahesh Bhat who began work on the project in 2004. Through the stories that he collected, interviews and photographs of ordinary folks, presenting their daily life without the frills, transformed into beautiful volumes with extraordinary kindness and warmth in their folds, helped raise almost 9 million to the heroes in the books. The project is an excellent example of how photography can begin to contribute back to its subjects in a more systematic and ethical way. Mahesh writes about this here.
Lakshmikutty Amma is a traditional healer. When she is not in the forest collecting herbs for her healing practices, she writes poetry at her small desk. Thematically, her poems vary from concerns about everyday living to aspects of spiritual fulfillment that as humans, we crave. She writes poetry which she calls a parody of life emulating popular verses in Malayalam. In terms of voice and style, she is versatile and as a translator of her writing, I found it a huge challenge to keep up with her Malayalam that sometimes employs classical poetic structures or slips deliberately into colloquial Malayalam at other times. As readers, we are trained to look for voice in writing. We hold on to the conviction that the ‘Who’ who speaks through the poem has to be the writer itself. The critics of the recent times become a disgruntled lot when they do not see a women’s voice in a woman’s verse, especially when they do not talk about breasts or body or the feminine experience. Lakshmikutty Amma will give any critic a run for their money by befuddling the voice in her writing. She can easily become a forty-year-old male alcoholic, a hardworking ordinary man or a wise old woman. Yet, in all of them, you see a message for living close to earth and the happiness one can achieve from doing so.
Here is a film about the project which, was presented at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2017.
My gratitude also goes to Karen Dias who worked on the story of Lakshmikutty Amma.
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Put together by Pooja Sagar and Jeena Mary Chacko, and the student artists of Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, the concept is derived from the genre of ‘Weird Fiction’ that subverts the natural laws, dissolving the border between the real and the unreal.
Here is a film on the Festival of Stories.
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