Hemachandran Karah

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will study the nondominant Tamil narrative traditions, which are replete with instances of disfigurements, associated with two deities - Sudalai Madan and Madurai Veeran, in an attempt to explore disability access cultures. Hemachandran Karah is the Principal Investigator for this Project.     

Hemachandran is an assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT-Madras. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has extensively written on disability and identity politics in various national and international journals, and presented papers on these themes at conferences and seminars over the past two decades. His forthcoming book titled the Metanarratives of Disability will be published by Routledge, followed by a monograph on the writings of Ved Mehta by Oxford University Press, UK. Hemachandran’s active and extensive scholarship in disabilities studies makes him a suitable Principal Investigator for this project. Shilpaa Anand will join him as a collaborator. Shilpaa is an associate professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad Campus. She has a PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has a vast body of work in the area of disability to her credit. 

Representations of injuries and disfigurement populate narrative traditions in a wide variety of ways which have the potential to contribute to our understanding of culturally specific notions of bodies and minds. This project will examine the stories of two non-dominant deities of Tamil narrative traditions - Sudalai Madan and Madurai Veeran. These narratives are replete with instances of disfigurement that lend moral and affective significance to human elements. Notions of sacrifice and punitive justice are also nestled in these narratives. They depart from well-known conceptions of the Western/Abrahamic oeuvres and Tamil classical and dominant ritual-art logics.

The project will examine features of embodiment that shape the representations of these figures in the different expressive forms. One instance is that of studying the ways in which the narrative of the Madurai Veeran Kathai, shape the hero into an imaginative existence and in the performative narratives of the Nontinatakam. In its generic character, koothu is a performance tradition associated with the Sudalai Madan rituals and the lifeworlds around it. The explorations will include the ways in which narratives of disfigurement and bloodletting are constitutive of the ritual-worship practices of Veeran and Sudalai, and investigate how body parts affectively constituted as subjects of moral discourses.

The scholarship on disability studies informs this project in two ways. Firstly it is through the representation of disability, which explores how bodies are shaped and disfigured in relation to affect and morality in the different narratives – visual, oral and performative. Secondly it is through disability access where the questions are around whether disability access informs the performance reception of these narrative traditions. While disability in dominant Hindu mythology has been a part of research and scholarship more recently, its framing within nondominant worship and artistic traditions is in a nascent stage of explorations. 

Collecting and analysing visuals and oral narratives practised as art and as rituals will be done by attending on-site performances in this project. Interviews using the snowballing methods will be conducted with performers, worshipers and audience members to tap into the moral and affective meanings that are made within different socio-cultural spheres. A pair of blind and sighted researchers will identify and create access routes of audio and textual descriptions for the visual material to examine them. These access routes will be documented and presented in the form of access-abled pedagogic videos at the end of the project. 

The second objective of this project is to study disability access and aesthetics in relation to Indian narrative, visual and performative traditions. One of the primary motives of this project stems from the fact that disability is not merely the subject of art, but people with disabilities are also artists and consumers of different kinds of arts. While physical infrastructural access is gaining greater compliance with the policies such as the United Nations Convention on the Persons with Disabilities, aspects of sensorial, cognitive and emotional access are not at the heart of these ventures. This project intends to test the accessibility of visual prototypes with reference to a diverse set of screen readers and magnifiers across platforms such as JAWS for Windows, and NVDA, and voiceover for Mac. Since nondominant worship traditions tend to ignore a tight-knit classical idiom, image descriptions in multiple languages and presentation styles will be put in place. To make local histories of objects that concern worship and rituals accessible, the project will adopt a multimedia approach to describe the objects, such as the shapes of Sudalai representation and make them speak for themselves via the soundscapes they are embedded in. 

The outcomes of this project will be manuscript for a book, pedagogical videos, and a haptic exhibition. The Principal Investigator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a manuscript for a book, pedagogical videos, and audiovisual documentation from the exhibition. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme in the manner in which it intends to study the disability access cultures in relation to performance and reception in nondominant Tamil narrative traditions, which is unexplored as of now. 

IFA will ensure that the project is implemented on time and the funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with the Trustees.

This project is supported by BNP Paribas India.