Pothikkettu is a monthly editorial that ‘wraps up’ the issue for our readers.
Dear Reader,
This issue carries Harikrishnan’s thoughtful coverage on the retrospective exhibition of the cartoonist Abu Abraham’s writings, sketches and cartoons that was held at the Durbar Hall in Ernakulam along with Shilpa Parthan’s excellent commentary on two editorials published in The Svadeshabhimani. Previously published in Himal SouthAsian, Hari’s article is a deep dive into the corpus of Abraham’s work at large, including his tenure at the Rajya Sabha. As a politically conscious Malayali who had grown up in the midst of social movements, Abraham’s sketches attend to the turbulent political transformations that characterised the seventies. Even when this attention had made him critique the political party that he was close to, the Indian National Congress, Abraham’s work shows how proximity to an ideology is not an excuse to withhold critique.
Abraham’s rich body of work is also a moment to revisit the work of contemporary artists in Kerala who have engaged with the medium of art to communicate the mood of our present time. Ala had previously published the work of New-York based artist, David Dasharath Kalal’s “Ravi Varma Recreational Vehicle” (RVRV) series. The series combines the heavily reproduced Ravi Varma paintings with present-day South-Asian American faces to create portraits. By stretching the omnipresence of Ravi Varma to accommodate a present time, Kalal encourages the audience to engage in a playful dialogue with his art. Readers may also enjoy revisiting Vipin Das’s widely popular sketches of the Kerala monsoons. Capturing the scenes of buses covered in tarps and people standing with their umbrellas at tea shops, Das draws his audience into a shared nostalgic monsoon time.
As readers might know, Ala has been publishing a recurring series of commentaries on the recently digitised archives of the early 20th century newspaper, The Svadeshabhimani. In our last issue, we had Deepti commenting on the discussion of free elementary education. In this issue, we have Shilpa exploring two editorials that charted the emergence and expansion of theatre in Travancore. While the first editorial was particularly critical of women actors being cast in theatre and on the encroachment of Tamil theatre troupe practices in Kerala, the second one explicitly expresses distaste at a scene that depicted a woman openly kissing and embracing the Nayakan while instructing him on sex. By attending to the caste-gender logic that undergirded the visual space and by reflecting on the transforming nature of the public, Shilpa shows how these early anxieties on ‘good theatre’ and ‘fallen women’ continue to circulate alongside the visible discomfort in witnessing public displays of femininity. However, it is also important to note how these editorials which were fundamentally bothered about the presence of Nair women on stage were silent on women actors who came from oppressed caste locations. This silence, as Shilpa notes, is characteristic of the missing discourse on the Dalit women actors who were potentially the first to grace stage as well as screens in cinema. Like the more recent Hema Committee report whose findings on junior artists have been sidelined, these absences are not merely restricted to a time. Given the richness of the issues covered in the archives, we invite readers to go through the Svadeshabhimani website and send us their reflections on any pieces that they find interesting. As prefatory notes, these commentaries can help us understand how a newspaper made sense of the shifting moral-political order that was characteristic of the 19th century Kerala.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
The Ala Team.
