GENERATIONS IN MY BODY: LAKSHMI MADHAVAN
August 08 - September 19 , 2024
A thread, a yarn,
a cloth… a skill, a livelihood, a community… a story, a history, a generation.
Lakshmi Madhavan
grew up watching her widowed grandmother wear a differently bordered kasavu mundu veshti all her life. Though the artist lived in
Mumbai, she was always aware of being an outsider in the city. Lakshmi rejected
her Malayali roots and felt alien to her own language and culture. When Lakshmi
lost her grandmother in 2021, she was desperate to find ways to reclaim her grandmother’s
memories. Language and food were a residue compared to Lakshmi’s strongest sensorial
memory – the whiff of her grandmother’s rice starched veshti. Holding onto this cord, the artist was plunged into a vortex from
which yards of creation, recognition, acceptance and generational histories
emerged for a future telling.
The roots of her grandmother’s veshti link back to the kasavu weavers’ community in Balaramapuram, Kerala. However, the kasavu weavers who are considered
traditional to Balaramapuram proudly trace their ancestry to the Shaliyar community that originated from Thirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. By placing their
livelihood outside of their belonging, the weavers’ bodies become functional
producers located within a geography that they do not identify with. For
Lakshmi, a quest to thread a family member’s history, cascaded into historic
pasts of communities, and generational beliefs that were entrenched in bodily
functions of caste, purpose and allowances of belonging.
The artist’s initial visits to the kasavu weavers’ community in Balaramapuram
were met with hostility. She was looked at as an outsider trying to come in to
disrupt their system. This was until Lakshmi met her master weaver, Jayan, who guided
her through the nuances of the community. He asked her one question: “What is the purpose of doing this?” “A
memory for my Ammamma (grandmother)”, was Lakshmi’s reply. He responded, “Your story is my story. After I die, they’ll shroud me with the last cloth
I have woven and all of these looms will go silent. Your grandmother carries
the same anxiety of you not continuing your journey with this land, your birth
land.” Jayan passed away shortly
after too, but his kasavu weavers became the artist’s link to open up worlds
that continue to exist well beyond memory keeping.
While Balaramapuram continues to
be the central space where Lakshmi creates works with the kasavu weavers, the experiences of working with them is a constant grounding process
through incidents, rituals, nuanced layers of acceptance and rejection, and reconstructing
new belief systems. It is in these focused and tightly knit, yet fragile communities
that a realisation of the layered worlds within a world came to exist.
The exhibition seeds from an installation of ninety-six shuttles, the
age Lakshmi’s grandmother lived until. The bare shuttles wrapped with kasavu threads and hair (a carrier of genes) become the invisible loom that
spools out yarns of words and stories into the rest of the exhibition. A wooden
chest filled with rice water starches memories of Lakshmi’s grandmother, her
ancestral home, family gatherings and sounds of the past. These sounds spool
into the space and settle on the red laterite bricks sculptures that hark the
soil of Kerala to weigh down the bodies that create shadows across the room.
The shadows that sometimes fold onto the woven kasavu pieces are perhaps the
closest these bodies will come to draping the fabric, similar to the weavers
who laboriously weave this textile over months and sometimes, years, only to be
worn by another body belonging to another caste. Histories, caste systems and
memories tide through centuries in the weavers’ bodies as they do in ours.
There is a sudden realisation of being the other body. This othering occurs
when the body is assigned a name. The name associates it with a caste and colour
privilege. The caste determines how the body can don the kasavu that none of its weavers can ever wear.
Within the kasavu fabrics that Lakshmi creates with her weavers, she
incorporates words that appear singular but weigh down the movement of time within
a narrative. Akin to a knot and the complexity of a switch from white to gold
thread on a loom, these woven words invite pauses and interventions for a
viewer’s body and story. The lightness of the fabric, barely sheer, elicits
wonder, beauty and snatches of joy at first. These are quickly shadowed by
reflections of fear, anger, and empathy. The errors that personalise a handloom
weave versus a machine weave become metaphors for the bodies that toil to carry
burdened truths of past generations. Sweat drops and silent shadows are the
only remnants that carry onward from the weavers’ bodies onto the wearers’
bodies. The cloth becomes a marker of commodification and an identification of
recognising the hierarchy of a body. But the body is no longer singular. The
body belongs to a weaver, who belongs to a community, similar to the wearer who
drapes the fabric on their body which decomposes and passes on within
generations to be worn by other bodies.
Text by Veeranganakumari Solanki
Images
Installation
Press
