The image of three women lying down on a floor next to paintings larger than them is somehow so fulfilling that you’d want to gently walk away from the frame, not disturbing them. But if you could take a peek from the other side of the frame, you will see figures of men on the paintings, of brown bodies wrapped in white mundu. Quite the contrast it’d pose. Not that that would have been Devi Seetharam’s intention when she quietly snapped a picture of her family dozing off next to her paintings on the floor and posted it on Instagram. The men in mundu are part of a series she has been working on since 2016. By the end of 2022, after touring several art exhibitions, the series titled Brothers, Fathers and Uncles, found a place in the Kochi Muziris Biennale.
Devi, who has never lived in Kerala, but considers Thiruvananthapuram the closest to what she calls home, came down to the state in August 2022 to work on three new paintings for the Biennale. Bose Krishnamachari, founding curator of the Biennale, told her to “go large.” So she picked up 6x6 ft, 6x9 ft, and 6x12 ft canvases, laid them on the floor, and began painting for the next four months. In December, the three paintings went up the Coir Godown in Aspinwall, forcing Biennale visitors to pause in their strides and cast long looks at the mundu-clad men. You don’t see their faces, only the lower half of their bodies, gathering in public places in visibly relaxed postures.
“I felt all the information you need is there. I don’t want you to empathise with each individual man. You don’t need to associate with the features on his face. I just want to portray mundu, because mundu has a certain messaging,” says Devi Seetharam, speaking to TNM on a day she is in Thiruvananthapuram.
The city gives her mixed feelings. Having grown up in several countries as one of her parents is in the Indian Foreign Service, Devi has not lived in India for more than five years. “As much as I enjoy Thiruvananthapuram, it also has a way of making me uncomfortable,” she says, looking at the busy street outside a café in the city. Pointing to a man standing on the street, she remarks how that simple act of occupying public space is not easy for women. If it was her, outside, standing on the road for 20 minutes, she’d get a lot of unwanted attention, Devi says. It is true, she would.
This is what she brings into her paintings — the absence of women in social gatherings and public places. “This series was born from the notion of discomfort that I had with my own relationship with home. There is this notion that women don’t loiter and men do, that women exit from point A and travel to point B, without aimless loitering,” Devi says.
She has transcribed these thoughts word by word, detail by detail, into her paintings. The men in mundu are just around each other, perhaps talking, perhaps simply hanging out. Some have raised and folded their mundus, some are about to do so. One has pinned an umbrella to the ground, another has tucked a newspaper in his hands. Devi specifically mentions the flowers these men are treading on in our conversation.
“It is a sense of entitlement to dominate space. Flowers have fallen and they are standing there. The reason I put the flowers there is also to try and capture time. I generally try to avoid any indication of time in my paintings. I want to say this is not happening today or in a particular year. It could be the same scene from 80 years ago. It is not only about public space. If this is your psyche in the public space, then it is the same thing that trickles into your psyche in other aspects of life,” Devi says.
She was working in “a shoebox of a studio” in Melbourne, Australia, where she had moved from the UAE post marriage, when the idea for this series struck. Till then she had worked for years with other series — a long one on sleep, and another on women in abayas (titled Anonymity). “I thought it was important to remove cultural elements, that my work had to be neutral so anyone from anywhere in the world could relate to it. It was when I moved to Melbourne that I looked inwards at my own community. I had concerns at the time, with regards to the ideas surrounding marriage, the pressure to get married. This made me unpack and look at the culture of patriarchy,” Devi says.
Because of the colours she used – the dark brown bodies of men – and the largeness of the paintings, and even certain designs such as the kasavu (jerry) borders on the garment, quite a few assumptions were made about the work. Devi explains that it is not about caste – brown is just the skin colour she used for Indians – and no, kasavu didn’t mean they were all of a certain class – in her excitement, she just forgot to pick the regular kara mundu she had painted plenty before. Mundu, to Devi, is egalitarian to men. If you don’t look at the design or the way it is worn, it transcends class and caste. Her work is essentially about patriarchy, she says.
Devi hopes to have a solo exhibition of the mundu paintings, filling a room. The whole point is to stress the absence of women, she says. As creepy as we both imagine it will be, to see long legs in mundu on all four walls, it will be a reflection of the reality of all times.