Lounge
Sajan Mani's act of history making
Summary
The artist continues to create alternative ways of documenting narratives around marginalised communities
At the Shrine Empire, New Delhi, a scarlet-hued wall comes into sight. It serves as a backdrop to six drawings by artist Sajan Mani. Though small in scale, the layering of visuals, colours and text adds a certain complexity to each of them. The text, underlying the visuals, has been extracted from pages of German missionary reports about Kerala available in archives in Berlin and other German cities. And for the visuals, Mani has referred to photographs taken by German anthropologist Ego (Freiherr) von Eickstedt in the 1920s of Dalit and other indigenous communities in Kerala. Like an archaeologist, Mani has excavated through layers of colonial perceptions and prejudices to create an alternative way of documenting and archiving narratives of marginalised and oppressed people.
Part of Mani’s first major solo in India, the Multiple Legs of a Historically Wing-Chopped Bird series features drawn forms and video sequences. The show carries forth the intersectional artist’s ongoing effort to create new forms of history making, and bring the personal and the political together. “I made a conscious effort to bring certain elements from Eickstedt’s photos to the foreground. It was a deliberate act for me. The lives of indigenous people have long been buried in these archives," says the artist, who lives and works between Berlin and Kochi. “The post-colonial approach focuses on so-called Brahmanic history, royalty and related clothes and ornaments, but never on the people who made these and suffered through the social systems," he adds.
In the exhibition note, art historian and commentator Cleo Roberts-Komireddi refers to this aspect of Mani’s practice—of opening up and creating new routes through Kerala’s past. “He does history in a full-bodied way that, drawing on his ancestral memories along with their materials, mythologies and manuscripts, unsettles conventional modes of knowing those that came before," she writes.
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Throughout his practice, Mani has engaged with the poetry of Dalit revolutionary Poykayil Appachan. In 2020, in his first solo in Europe, titled Alphabet of Touch: Overstretched Bodies and Muted Howls for Songs, Appachan’s lament, “There was none on the earth to write the story of my race", were rendered on the walls in the form of drawings. This time, the very title of the exhibition stems from one of Appachan’s songs about two children wandering in search of their parents, when they chance upon a pariah kite soaring high in the sky. They look to the high heavens and cry that there is no one for them.
According to Roberts-Komireddi, Appachan extricates the prejudice-laden word, “pariah", just as Mani’s practice at large wrests his community from historical obscurity. “The point in the poem—where children cry out to the pariah kite—is where the exhibition starts as an organism in itself. Different moods and mediums can be seen as its multiple legs," explains the artist.
Just like Appachan’s words, rubber is also something that he has revisited several times in his work. Hailing from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in north Kerala, the material holds immense significance for him. “I don’t necessarily differentiate between my personal biography and artistic practice. There are points of convergence between the two," he says. There was a time in his life when the material only held nostalgic value to him—a reminder of his childhood years.
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However, as he read more and researched further, he realised how, through rubber, he was part of a larger colonial story—of the manner in which the seeds of the weeping tree were smuggled from Brazil to London, and then trafficked to the subcontinent via Malay and Sri Lanka. “I realised the complex, and often brutal, association between rubber and the indigenous communities in Kerala. Those kinds of stories became significant to me, and I found a way of working with rubber as medium itself," says Mani. So, in the exhibition, you will find white text spread across black rubber sheets. These feature words from notebooks by German missionary and Indologist, Hermann Gundert, who put together the first Malayalam-English dictionary (1872). “Rubber also has the quality of skin. In the past, I have created works in which I have stitched multiple sheets together," explains Mani.
For him, the body is an important medium as well. He has often stated in the past how he voices issues of the marginalised through the “black Dalit body" of the artist. In the show, one can see a video sequence, I am the River (2023), in which he explores the fluidity of the river Barapole that he grew up with and his own body. “Is this something I am born with or am I a product of the system? If you read the subtitle it says: ‘I was born out of the Western Ghats or maybe from the star dusts’. I carry this body into different spaces to different reactions and experiences. Sometimes, I also transfer my body on to rubber (as seen in an earlier work I Want to Touch the BWO of the Rubber Tree), which ends up becoming another body altogether. My work forms different legs of this pariah kite," he says.
At Shrine Empire, Defence Colony, New Delhi, till 22 January, 11am-6pm.
