Between subjects, between mediums: an artist’s sketch of an activist’s life

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the life narrative of C K Janu, a prominent Adivasi activist from Kerala, a state in Southern India, written by the artist Bara Bhaskaran in 2002. I read the visual and verbal composition of Janu’s life narrative in relation to Bhaskaran’s aesthetic practices. I foreground the process through which a visual artist’s mediation shapes this book rather than presuming direct access to the narrator’s voice. The unfinished strokes of Bhaskaran’s sketches become a compelling entry-point to reflect on the exchanges through which life narratives acquire a public form. Thus, I argue that this narrative revises conceptions of authorship and subjectivity by bringing to the fore the constitutive relation between the subject and her surroundings, the narrator and her interlocutor. This paper demonstrates that in order to produce perceptive accounts of multiple forms of life narratives, which we encounter as readers today, it is important to turn our attention to the material practices of representation. The linkages between political subjects and narrative forms can be studied only if we reflect on the intermedial exchanges through which cultural texts are assembled. This paper aims to intervene in the debates on life narratives and marginality by moving away from the frameworks of veracity, authenticity and direct access. It opens up for analysis the political stakes of practices of book making that brings together visual and verbal mediums.