City-based artiste Lakshmi Madhavan will host a studio visit this Sunday and explain her homecoming to Malayali roots through the 200-year-old textile called Kasavu
Lakshmi Madhavan drapes Kasavu on a model; the artiste poses with the woven fabric
Veteran politician and author Shashi Tharoor had once said that if America is a melting-pot, India is a thali, where every bowl is made to taste different, but complement each other nonetheless. Mumbai is a testament to this claim, where nearly 90 per cent of the population is believed to have originated from other parts of the country. One such story is of Kasavu chronicler Lakshmi Madhavan, who was made to shift to the city at a very young age from Kerala.
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“As a child, I always had a very complicated relationship with my hometown. Apart from the holidays and vacations I’d spend in Vadagara in Kerala, I was always here, in Mumbai. My parents had a heavy English accent, and so, naturally I felt like I was being looked at differently by people. When we’d be back in Kerala, it was the same problem. I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere — neither in Mumbai with my friends, nor back in Kerala, with my cousins,” Madhavan reveals. However, there was one person in Kerala who kept the child tied to her roots and her culture — Madhavan’s ammamma (grandmother in Malayalam).
“I was extremely attached to her,” she recalls, adding that if she were to ever close her eyes and recall how her grandmother looked, it would always be this woman draped in white and gold Kasavu saree. “But not by choice,” she adds, explaining that her grandmother was widowed very soon after her marriage, constricting her to the form of Kasavu reserved for widows with muted shade of gold at the borders. Giving us a short background on this traditional form of clothing, Madhavan tells us that this is a versatile apparel that one can wear at all functions — sad or happy, with minute changes. “You wear a Kasavu to a temple, a wedding, a funeral, and it is even wrapped around a dead body before it is cremated. But this form of clothing has more history than meets the eye.”
A traditional artisan at work
Taking us deeper into the history, she explains how once Kasavu was a genderless cloth worn by both men and women. It was only used to cover their lower body, from the waist downwards (mundu), and the upper body would remain uncovered, even for women. Madhavan’s journey as a Kasavu artiste began five years ago, starting with a simple Google search. “I didn’t know much about the cloth. I just knew that as a girl, I was mind-blown seeing my grandmother wake up and choose to wear the same saree everyday.” Her first work of art with the artisans of Balaramapuram was a body of work that featured the letters and conversations exchanged between her grandmother and her, imprinted on Kasavu. “She always tried to speak in Malayalam with me, and I’d lean towards English. We created a language of our own that challenged the linguistic hierarchy prevalent in India. It questions why we give more weight to English than to our own mother tongue.”
And that’s how her journey into the world of Kasavu began. The artiste, who now shuttles between Kerala and Mumbai, is set to host a studio visit in Bandra wherein she will display the process of making art, instead of the readied works. The visit, she tells us, is a walk into her headspace, where she will share the history of this 200-year-old traditional textile, its artisans back in Kerala, and how she reconciled with her roots years after practising art. “Even after five years of research and work on Kasavu, I can tell you that I have scratched only the surface. The same cloth with little alteration tells you the occasion, and even the caste and the class of people. Kasavu has come a long way from being a genderless piece of cloth to a potent marker on the body. My journey is much like the cloth. We’ve both had a complex relation with our origin,” Madhavan laughs, as she signs off.
On: August 10; 11 am to 1 pm
At: Bandra West (exact location will be revealed after booking)
Log on to: @artandwonderment
Cost: Rs 1,500
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