Monday, October 26, 2020

Parvathi Nayar - on her work

Parvathi Nayar 


Film : A River

“A River” is a performative reanactment of the seminal poem A River by AK Ramanujan. Water has been a thread that runs through so much of my work, and a subject that I return to over and again.

I wanted to talk about how water leaves its mark in the city – ironically both as flood and drought, as mentioned in the poem by Ramanujan. I therefore walked around the city with camera in hand (and with another friend and her camera ) to find every word of the poem in the streets and shops and residences of Chennai. I performed the poem on foot in Chennai, so to say, embedding Ramanujan’s poem in this city.

The poem, recreated word by word, loses none of its urgency in this retelling.


Film : Tamarind Trails: The Tree that Went on a Walk


“The Tree that went on a Walk” is part of a four-video installation I created for Girish Shahane’s show on botanicals, Anthesis
The roots of it are autobiographical – ie, a large tamarind tree was a beautiful part of my childhood in Chennai. When I returned to Chennai after many years abroad, and came back to live oddly enough in the same building in which I had grown up, I would see this lovely tamarind tree outside my window. It was heartbreaking when the tree was uprooted in Cyclone Varda, and crashed to the ground. Then, to dispose of it, we had to pay workmen to come and chop up the mammoth tree into little bits and take it away.

I filmed the chopping up of this tree.

Years later I decided to develop these sequences into a film – to move out from this intensely emotional moment of my journey, and think about the “journey” of the tamarind tree. I discovered the tamarind is not actually native to India but was brought by traders from Africa. This seemed such a powerful idea in these times when immigration and immigrant issues put the spotlight on the “other”.

As botanist Dr Narasimhan told me – “I don't like to think of the tamarind tree as alien - What is alien, what is the other? When something has taken root in our soil for so long, I like to think of it as one of us.”

The truth of his saying is exemplified in the journey I took to the Dindigul area of Tamil Nadu to see how the tamarind is cultivated and harvested and is part of the life and livelihood of so many people. I was especially lucky to meet Mahalakshmi and her extended family/community of women whose lives revolve around tamarind cultivation and processing.

Vedanth’s music – old poetry about the tamarind in Tamil and Hindi that we handpicked are a wonderful counterpoint to the film.

Click here to watch the films:



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