A Wise One, a Warrior

Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it? Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple.

Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry and memoir, she talks back, forward and sideways with the object.

Series Objects Talk Back published by Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss

Autorentext
Meena Kandasamy Meena Kandasamy ist Dichterin, Romanautorin und Übersetzerin. Ihr Werk konzentriert sich auf den militanten Widerstand gegen die Unterdrückung durch Kaste, Geschlecht und Ethnie. Sie erforscht dies in ihren Gedichtbänden wie Touch (2006) und Ms. Militancy (2010) sowie in ihren drei Romanen The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017) und Exquisite Cadavers (2019). Ihre Romane standen auf der Shortlist u.a. für den Women's Prize for Fiction und den International Dylan Thomas Prize. The Book of Desire, ihre Übersetzung der Liebeslyrik des 2000 Jahre alten tamilischen Klassikers Tirukkural, ist 2023 erschienen