Singing Along with my Mom

Digital prints. 12” x 18”. 2018.

My mother, Manorama, passed away in December 2017; my father, Ananthanarayana, passed away in June 2021; and my younger brother, Sujay, passed away in July 2022.

Obviously, these were emotionally challenging moments and the initial days were consumed by disturbance, sadness, and mourning. Eventually, there was stillness interspersed with moments of melancholy. As I came to terms with the loss, these works emerged organically as a means of exploring my own emotional as well psychological connections with each one of them. In spite of their physical absence there are images, words, places, songs, objects, fabrics, textures, patterns, colours, sounds, and smells that trigger certain patterns of memory and open up the past. At the same time, an acute awareness of the fragile, ephemeral nature of the body remains omnipresent.

Showing these deeply personal works are my way of sharing with a larger audience the ways in which loved ones linger in our present in innumerable ways, and hoping to find a resonance in how we perceive our past.

The Singing Along with My Mom works were done in 2018 during my residency in Belforte del Chienti, Terra dell Arte - an artist commune in Italy - which offered me ample time to be with myself in peaceful, natural surroundings.

My mother had learnt singing in her youth and had the habit of writing down the songs and their raga notations in Kannada in her diaries. She would light a lamp at the altar to God every day and sing; as a child, I would sing with her. This was her time for introspection, perhaps her way of making household chores more bearable. Some of the songs were bhava geete (lyrical songs) and many were devotional songs. Though some of the bhava geete revealed her sense of joy in simple things, the devotional songs spoke of her fear of the unknown, as well as her pain, anguish, desperation, and above all, her belief in a supreme being. They also spoke of her ennui of the routine of everyday and her hope for deliverance.

I have photographed her song books and used them as a base to build the imagery for this work. In some books, the content of the song is related to the imagery and in others it is not. As an atheist, I had a complex relationship with her beliefs, but it has not come in the way of my loving and empathizing with her. It is a tribute to my mother’s tenacity against all the odds that life threw at her. As I was creating these works I realized that if you remove the aspect of religion, all the same fears, turbulences, and hopes are within me as well, and I’m singing along with her.