Dravidian Futurities: A Creative Process

Abstract

In this article, author and artist Meena Murugesan analyzes their creative process and research in the making of Dravidian Futurities, a multi-channel video installation with live performance. Methodologies of auto-ethnography, visual aesthetics, embodied movement practices, Tamil historiographies, queer futurities, caste analysis, and poetics are applied to treat the issues at hand. Dravidian Futurities draws connections between communities of South Indian and Sri Lankan Shudra and Dalit caste backgrounds, Dravidian, and Afro-Indian peoples, depending on the historical era examined. As someone of the Shudra caste, the author draws connections between agriculture, land, and earth, as being rooted in Shudra identities, and in opposition to brahminical systems. Therefore, the movement forms of somatics, improvisation, and nature-based embodiment practices are investigated as possible embodied inroads to grapple with caste within brahminized bharatanatyam. Notions of futurity and place-making are unearthed from the depths of the Indian Ocean with a hypothetical sunken landmass called Lemuria or Kumari Kandam that might have once connected South India, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar. Dravidian Futurities also dreams into existence this speculative landmass as a possible utopia we might co-build, similar to that which Dalit mystic saint Guru Ravidas imagined five hundred years ago with Begumpura (“land without sorrow”) as a casteless, stateless utopia.

2028

My body will have kneeled down in surrender on stones laid on top of dirt. On earth. With earth. On this part of overgrown Tongva-Kizh South Los Angeles land. My face will have been inches away from the roots of tall trees towering above me, witnessing me. Deep breaths, sighs, moans, and the edges of tears will have gathered in my throat and released. Inky blue indigo liquid will have appeared in my kidneys, in my mind’s eye, and vortexed me down through the soil, roots, worms, mycelium, through the oscillating molten core of the earth, and towards the murky bottom of the ocean on the other side of the world. There is a frequency calling me (See Figure 1).

2023

Dravidian Futurities is a multi-channel video/performance installation that grapples with caste, colorism, and Blackness to co-create and re-imagine Earth-based art rituals with underrepresented caste and religious groups in the South Asian diaspora. A pivotal motivation of my interdisciplinary project, Dravidian Futurities, is illuminated by Braj Ranjan Mani, in his book Debrahmanising History:

“Etymologically, the word ‘varna’ means colour, and initially, to a great extent, caste had the implications of colour. Supposedly, the first two varnas or castes, especially the Aryan-brahmans, were fairer than the non-Aryans and Dravidians, the dark-skinned original inhabitants, who were branded and stigmatised as shudras. This is why the top two castes are known as savarna (literally, with colour) and the rest are despised as avarna (without colour).”

(Mani 2005, p. 52)

This unravels some of the key concepts in Dravidian Futurities. Dravidian refers to the people who are thought by many to be the original caretakers of the lands that are now called India, prior to the arrival of Indo-Aryans thousands of years ago from the northwest. Dravidian refers to specific languages that pre-date Sanskrit and trace back to South India, Sri Lanka, and parts of Pakistan. Dravidian also refers to the peoples of India who became assigned Shudra castes by the Indo-Aryans, who forced Shudras into exploited laborers and then were further subdivided into complex caste categories over time. Dravidian also refers to a myth/scientific hypothesis of a sunken landmass that once connected East Africa to South India called Lemuria or Kumari Kandam, and the pre-colonial migrations of Afro-Indians. Dravidian also refers to caste abolition movements by the Tamil activist Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, the Self-Respect Movement and Dravidar Kazhagam.

Part poetic documentary, part science-fiction, part ritual, this project interviews dark-skinned artists of South Indian and Sri Lankan ethnicities, and people from the Caribbean, South Africa, or Fiji with histories of South Asian indentured labor. These dark-skinned artists are all from caste backgrounds that experience caste oppression, primarily Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi (referred to as DBA for short), some non-Bahujan Shudra castes such as myself, and people of minority religious and sexual and gender identities who are persecuted to this day in India (Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, animist, atheist, LGBTQIA+). These artists express their nuanced and life affirming experiences with caste, spirituality, art-making, and the Earth. In the lineage of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we are treading the waters of “speculative documentary”, a work co-authored with both ancestors and survivors (Gumbs 2018, p. xi).

Dravidian Futurities is a video installation with sculptural indigo-dyed textiles that frame and re-frame the video art. Indigo is a central material with layered meanings for the project. Though indigo has rich histories in pre-colonial Mughal India (Nadri 2016, p. 5), indigo has a deeply entangled and troubled global history with colonialism, the trans-Atlantic enslavement of Black people, stolen indigenous lands, and caste-based forced labor. Kling wrote, “From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries indigo was a fugitive among industries, wandering from Gujarat in western India to the West Indies and then back to Bengal in eastern India” (Kling 2016, p. 15). I work with indigo in order to illuminate these complicated connections. Indigo also serves as an entry point to explore representations of melanin by South Asian and Black painters to connote dark brown and almost black skin tones. When I was a teenager, I renounced Hinduism because of the patriarchal, colorist, and casteist through-lines threaded into all Hindu mythology. The “heroes”, or gods, are represented with pale skin, and the so-called demons or “villains” are often painted dark brown or black. A few gods and goddesses are often represented with a blue hue, and blue became an aesthetic and political choice to represent dark brown or black skin. Did the painters of these blue gods believe that blue was more beautiful than brown or black? Although caste and skin color are not inextricably bound (there are many fair skinned oppressed caste2 people), my project is interested in the intersections between Dravidian, Shudra, Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, and melanin. As Nrithya Pillai, a Bahujan hereditary dancer3 of bharatanatyam, stated, “The notion of caste seeped into everything, including the body and as a ‘plus sized’ child with a darker complexion, I felt it on a psychological level. I believe the body carries all of it when we dance or indulge in any art form.” (https://feminisminindia.com/2021/03/25/nrithya-pillai-interview-bharatanatyam-isai-vellalar/, accessed on 26 June 2023) (Singh 2021). Thus, caste, melanin and body size are embedded in dominant caste, brahminized aesthetics, which have unfortunately become the representation of South Asian aesthetics at large. Dravidian Futurities moves away from this. More recently, I have learned that the dark brown demons were often actually caste-oppressed people, often known as Shudra, Indigenous, Dravidian, Bahujan, or Dalit. For example, the popular North Indian Hindu festival Holi celebrates the burning of Holika, a Bahujan woman (https://feminisminindia.com/2017/03/13/caste-holi-burning-holika-bahujan/, accessed on 26 June 2023) (Waghule 2017). Indigo also references the murky bottoms of where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea co-mingle, where Kumari Kandam lies, a speculative landmass that some believe once connected South India and Sri Lanka to East Africa. Dravidian Futurities draws from pre-European migrations between the Afro-Indian or Dravidian peoples of South India, Sri Lanka and Africa. Indigo blues also represent the notion of “kala pani”, or black waters, which some South Asian indentured laborers hoped would swallow up caste apartheid systems as they crossed vast oceans to Fiji, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and South Africa (Bhardwaj and Misrahi-Barak 2022, p. 18). My sculptural, indigo dyed, patchwork textiles invoke topographic contours of these oceanic bodies at play here, as well as the bodies of brown and Black people. The indigo textiles conjure up tectonic plates, the re-earthing of sunken land masses, and ancient futurist Earth- and Ocean-based societies. Indigo is both layered into the video art (I film the process and collage it in), as well as a part of the presentation of the video art installation as sculptural textile elements (See Figure 2).

1995

My mother took me to a friend’s house for an informal lecture on Indian dance. The South Indian community gathered in Lalitha Aunty’s basement in a suburb of Montreal, to hear scholar Davesh Soneji speak about his research. Dr. Soneji spoke about his time with the kalavantalu community of hereditary dancers. A key point stood out to me at the age of seventeen: the hereditary dancers of what would later officially become bharatanatyam were criminalized for dancing publicly in the 1940s. A matrilineal community, women’s land was taken away, and the “Madras Devadasi (Prevention of Dedication) Act officially outlawed the social, ritual, and aesthetic practices of these women.” (Soneji 2012, p. 3). As Nrithya Pillai wrote, “the original custodians of [Bharatanatyam]—Sudra women from former courtesan communities—are systemically denied access to the elite socio-cultural spaces now occupied by the dance.” (https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/cycles-cultural-violence-within-performance-and-scholarship-bharatanatyam-165159, accessed on 26 June 2023) (Pillai 2022). A decade or so after I heard this revelatory talk, I read Dr. Soneji’s book Unfinished Gestures (2012), and it was a vital source for my MFA thesis work at UCLA, World Arts and Cultures/Dance in 2013.

I had already been learning brahminized Kalakshetra style bharatanatyam from a brahmin woman in a suburb of Montreal, Canada for thirteen years. At this point in my life, I was already critiquing, rebelling, and questioning many aspects of society, primarily what I interpreted as white and Indian patriarchies, as well as Indian and Eurocentric standards of beauty. I was somewhat aware of caste because on a prior trip to Tamil Nadu, my favorite athai (aunt) told me that we were OBC, other backwards class, a government caste classification in India that refers to Shudra communities. I remember her writing it out on a scrap of paper as though that would somehow make the categorization clearer for me. I do not remember having too many open conversations about caste when I was younger. However, I heard rumors that my father had chosen a slightly different last name when immigrating to not reveal our exact caste positionality. I heard my father was only able to go to university because of ‘reservations’, a policy in India analogous to affirmative action that reserves entry spaces into college for Dalit, Shudra, and Adivasi people4. I remember some of the brahmin Tamil grandmothers did not come over to our house for dinners because we ate meat, and even though my mother would not cook meat at the community functions, somehow our pots, plates, and utensils were considered polluted. I remember the obsession my extended family in Tamil Nadu had regarding who I would marry, and whether I would marry within the caste. At the time, my brother and I were the first in our entire family to be born outside Tamil Nadu. I remember my great-grandmother in Tiruppur who wore a white sari with no blouse and chewed tobacco. On early visits to Dharapuram, I remember seemingly mundane things that now feel complicated and related to my Shudra caste positionality, such as raising and killing chickens for dinner, milking cows, or eating chicken neck and fish head curries. I remember the smells of edible oil grinding machines in the backyard and then oiling my hair and skin with freshly ground sesame or coconut oil. I remember Selatha, an elderly dark brown woman in a white sari with very few teeth, who cleaned, cooked, cared for the babies, and was always the last to eat (now I wonder what was her caste positionality?). I remember all my uncles sporting huge mustaches, unlike the clean-shaven brahmin fathers in my South Indian diasporic community. All of these complex memories stir up curiosities around Shudra-ness as perhaps being connected to agriculture and land, however, still in a privileged position that owns land and employs DBA people.

1998

After hearing Dr. Soneji’s talk, I had a hard time reckoning with going back to learning and performing bharatanatyam. I ended up quitting for a few years, then went back for a year, then stopped again for good in my early twenties. I tried to talk about caste with my dance teacher but the conversations did not go well. I did not want to perform bharatanatyam as I had learned it anymore. I already had issues with the mythological stories we would interpret, and the extremely pale Wet And Wild face makeup I would have to smear on my darker brown face, neck, and arms. At the time, I was already on an artist’s path in the photography/film/video realms of art. I had not heard of people coming from non-ballet-derived dance forms being full-time dancers or choreographers. My journey into contemporary dance started with one non-major modern dance class at Concordia University in 1999, the only ballet-derived course I have ever taken (I write this with a little bit of pride). A few years later, I was a part of an Afro-diasporic musical collective called KalmUnity Vibe Collective in Montreal, and I started to create improvisational bharatanatyam-inspired movement to live poetry and music. I then began to intensively take movement classes, such as contemporary African with choreographer Zab Maboungou, house dance classes with Dazl, and chi gong with Marie-Claude Rodrigue. My twenties were filled with non-bharatanatyam-related technique classes, while my thirties and forties saw countless hours of self-directed solo practice in movement improvisation and somatic practices to develop and shape my personal sense of embodied expression. This felt like the beginning of my attempt to grapple with the violent histories of the movement language I had been taught.

2016

I have been focused primarily on video art-based works that contain key dance or movement elements. I created a series of chapters prior to Dravidian Futurities called KARUPPU (meaning “black” in Tamil), where my preoccupation centered around issues of anti-Blackness in a choreographic work entitled i witness (Kedhar and Murugesan 2015), a solo choreography KARUPPU that re-imagined contemporary pre-Vedic Tamil ritual dances of possession for deity Karuppu Saami (Murugesan 2016), and a short film work named Destroy + ReBuild that investigated connections between Black and caste-oppressed Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi Liberation movements (Murugesan 2020).

Dravidian Futurities expands upon some similar themes, such as Afro-Indian/Dravidian connections and pre-Vedic rituals of possession, but it dives deeper into speculative notions of re-earthing a sunken landmass that might have once connected South India, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar. Dravidian Futurities also dreams into existence this speculative landmass as a possible utopia we might co-build, similar to that which Dalit mystic saint Guru Ravidas imagined five hundred years ago with Begumpura (“land without sorrow”) as a casteless, stateless utopia (Soundararajan 2022, p. 178). Drawing from Dalit, Black, and Indigenous visions of building new worlds, I am also inspired by José Muñoz’s concept of creating queer utopias and “disidentifying” (Muñoz 1999, p. 4) with caste-apartheid, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and heteronormative capitalist Hindu/brahmin patriarchies. Though there have been numerous critiques in the academic world, specifically European philosophers, about notions of utopia, hope, imagination, and futurity (Muñoz 2009, p. 10), I follow in the footsteps of futurist BIPOC, DBA, and queer visionaries to invest in worlds that are based in a new sense of ethics and empathy, where humans are not considered and treated as less than human, and where we dream and actualize beyond the “broken-down present” (Muñoz 2009, p. 12). How might we co-build utopias with and centering around darker-skinned Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Shudra, as well as minority religious communities (Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, animist, atheist, ex-Hindu), descendants of indentured laborers, mixed-race Black and DBA South Asians, and queer, non-binary, and trans South Asians? As Mani stated, “…there were concerted efforts to dehumanise and demonise the other, particularly the shudras, ati-shudras and those outside the pale of varna society, who either did not observe or refused to conform to the rules of caste laid down in the Dharmashastras. The term coined to demonise the other, apart from rakshasa and asura, was mleccha, the ‘unclean, unwashed other,’ which has a history, according to Romila Thapar, going back to around 800 BC and occurs originally in a Vedic text (1999:17). Contrary to the Hindutva claim that the term was essentially one of contempt for the invading, barbarous foreigners, especially Muslims, it was used originally and frequently by the upper castes to refer to shudras and ati-shudras, considered the enemy. Thapar contends that demonisation/rakshasisation of the enemy—irrespective of who the enemy was—has been a constant factor with reference to many pre-Islamic enemies and going back to earlier time.” (Mani 2005, p. 23).

In addition, German philosopher Nietzsche’s notion of “superman” was appropriated from the caste system’s notion of the “brahman”, those who placed themself at the top of the caste hierarchy. Nietzsche’s superman became a central figure for the Nazis (Mani 2005, p. 23). The ideology of the caste or varna system is a precursor to and feeds racial apartheids, cis-heterosexual patriarchies, and the ongoing violence towards Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and DBA communities by dominant-caste Hindus. Accompanying this project is a community arts engagement program that facilitates dialogue and art-making about these notions of othering, of dehumanizing, and where this might stem from. We create inter-caste, inter-religious, inter-gender, inter-racial, restorative justice circles to heal through these issues. At its core, my notions of Dravidian are expansive beyond any specific languages or ethnicities that might be considered Dravidian. Rather, I focus on this notion of how caste apartheid causes a “rakshasisation”, or demonization or othering of people of once-born castes, of darker skin, and of oppressed castes, religions, and sexualities. I am swimming in the deep oceans of complexity and intersectionality (See Figure 3).

400 B.C—1900s

In many ways, Lemuria followed in the footsteps of other infamous sunken and vanished landmasses, such as Atlantis and Mu. Lemuria was a lost continent hypothesized into being by European and American paleo-geographers in the 19th century, and then it was lost again to the imagination due to later conflicting geological theories of continental drift and plate tectonics. Lemuria was theorized as an ancient landmass that some paleo-geographers believed existed in the Indian Ocean, linking India, Madagascar, and Australia (See Figure 4). Zoologist Philip Sclater was attributed with naming Lemuria as such in 1864, noting the similarities between some species of lemurs found in Madagascar and India. He proposed that a land bridge once connected the two regions, thus allowing migrations of species and proto-humans (Ramaswamy 2004, p. 22). The theory of Lemuria was even kept afloat and embraced by early European and American occultists and Theosophists as early as the 1880s. They believed the lost continent was the cradle of human civilization and was home to an advanced society of spiritually evolved beings called the “Third Root-Race.” (ibid, p. 55). Some even claim(ed) that Lemurians were an extraterrestrial race that came to Earth and imparted their wisdom to humanity (ibid). Colonial Tamil India followed suit and picked up these unraveling threads, suggesting that the southern peninsula of India offered a home to migrating Africans during the later paleolithic era (ibid, p. 47). At the same time, Tamil revivalists of the Dravidian Movement rekindled the numerous references to sunken coastal lands in Tamil literature dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, otherwise known as the Sangam period. Indeed, anthologies of ancient Tamil poetry from this era “allude to oceanic floods and consequent loss of land and life” (ibid., p. 116). Named Kumarikkantam in a 15th-century text, Lemuria was “recast as the birthplace of the Tamil people, their ancestral homeland lost catastrophically to the ocean” (ibid, p. 97). A drowned Kumarikkantam offered Tamil revivalists an alternate origin story against the growing Aryan-Hindu-Hindi-Brahmin nationalism on the rise, as well as European racism. Kumarikkantam entered Tamil discourse as a possible Dravidian homeland as early as the 1850s, both by citing colonial paleogeographers as “proof”, and then by simultaneously invoking connections from ancient Tamil literature (ibid, p. 103). From the 1930s onwards, Tamils began to interchangeably use Ilemuria, Kumarikkandam, Kumarinaatu (“land of queens”), and then in the 1940s even Tamilnaatu (“land of Tamils”) and Tamilaakam (“Tamil homeplace”) (ibid, p. 107). In the 20th century, Tamil-caste abolitionists and activists such as Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, continued the movement for a Dravidian homeland, in stark opposition to the dominant nationalist Gandhian rhetoric steeped in the casteist brahminical Indo-Aryan-rooted notions of Hinduism.

I follow in the footsteps of Sumathi Ramaswamy in her book The Lost Land of Lemuria, regarding a desire to create meaning, intimacy, home, place, and identity from a lost continent, and of a lost past (ibid, p. 3), diving into the black abyss to resurrect ancient futurisms. In many ways, this has become part of the Tamil/Dravidian imagination. Kumarikkantam has become tethered to Tamil identity as a source of unearthing, of speculation, of an ancient origin story removed from the pressures of Indo-Aryan, brahmin, Sanskrit, and Hindi dominant movements.

The Dravidian Movement, as Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy (1879–1973) intended, is an anti-brahmin and caste abolition movement (Soundararajan 2022, p. 183). Bahujan scholar Dr. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd wrote about how “the Indo-Africans who later have come to be known as Dravidian and in caste/Varna terms Shudras, built Harappan civilization without Brahminism being around.” He explained that Shudras and brahmins are diametrically opposite in that “the Shudras were agriculturalists and the Brahmins were anti-agricultural” (Shepherd 2021, p. 2). Archaeological, DNA, and human migration studies show that the Harappan civilization was constructed by Ando-Africans, later called Dravidians (Shepherd 2021, p. 3). Theories suggest that the third migration to India occurred around 1500 BCE and involved the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, who wrote the Rig Veda in their language, Sanskrit, after conquering the region. The Rig Veda, and the Vedas in general, abound with the most horrific caste violence towards Shudra and Dalit people (ibid). Periyar’s vision of Dravidian culture was based on a rejection of traditional Hindu customs and practices, which he saw as oppressive and discriminatory. Instead, he sought to create a new culture that was based on reason, science, and humanism. One of Periyar’s most controversial ideas was his call for the creation of a separate Dravidian nation, which he believed would give the Dravidian people greater liberation. This idea was opposed by many people in India, and Periyar faced significant opposition and criticism for his activism (Verma 2018, p. 5). Periyar was still a cis-gendered heterosexual man of a certain era who had conflicting ideas about caste, gender, and minority religions. For example, Periyar was in favor of criminalizing hereditary courtesan dancers, from practicing their art forms. This deeply complicates his anti-caste position. His activism does not provide all the solutions but is rather part of a larger history of caste abolitionists. I am building, critiquing, and expanding some of his caste politics and strategies in Dravidian Futurities.

Figure 4. Still 4 from “PRELUDE”, an accompanying short video art work. By Meena Murugesan.

Figure 4. Still 4 from “PRELUDE”, an accompanying short video art work. By Meena Murugesan.

2021

Since participating in Equality Lab’s four week course “Unlearning Caste,” I have been reading Dr Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s work, learning about the specificities and differences within the Shudra and OBC caste classification. I still feel as though I am making more and more sense of the complexities between Bahujan, dominant-caste Shudras, neo-Kshatriyas or brahmin assimilationists, Hindu, not Hindu, land-owning or not, etc. My extended family owns land in Dharapuram and Erode and has owned land for at least three generations because of a great grandfather. My extended family was once textile weaver laborers, but for at least three generations, they now own and manage small businesses, such as edible oils or towel-weaving businesses. Some of my current questions are: How did the shift from textile weaver to small business owner occur? What are the caste positionalities of the people whom my family hires? The people who till the soil, pick the peanuts, coconuts, sesame or cotton, grind the peanuts, process the cotton, weave the towels, clean the house, help cook food? How do the people in my family treat their employees? Do they feel safe? Do they feel well treated?

As a dominant-caste Shudra with a mixed class background, I am interested in multiple pathways towards caste abolition. How can I follow and support Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi leadership and be in more inter-caste dialogue? How can I work towards caste abolition in my own circles? How can I repair and heal harm that my caste group has inflicted? I currently align with three possibilities inspired by DBA activists: (1) Can I be part of a caste based reparations movement that involves passing family land (or its equivalent value) to local DBA people who work on these lands, and yet have been systemically blocked from owning any land? (2) Continue to perform the internal nervous system regulation work for my own caste healing so that I do not engage in Savarna or dominant-caste harm, otherwise called “Savarna fragility” (Soundararajan 2022, p. 85). (3) Continue to engage in conversations about caste abolition with friends, family, and others in my spheres. (4) Can I radically imagine new utopic worlds and possibilities of caste healing and abolition? Dominant caste South Asians, especially those in the diaspora who try to be anti-racist, can no longer ignore caste from our analyses since caste-apartheid systems were an essential influence on the creation of European racial apartheid systems.

I am in an interesting position in the South Asian diaspora because I have experienced micro-aggressions from more dominant caste folks who might be called twice born, or dwija. My family does not perform the thread ceremony or upanayana. Thus, we are once born. There is tremendous violence in the Vedas towards once-born people. Yet we are also dominant caste and do not experience the caste atrocities that Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi people experience, even in the diaspora. As of yet, I have not had the opportunity to engage in many meaningful conversations with individuals from similar caste positionalities, to grapple with the complexities and harm that dominant caste Shudras cause. Dravidian Futurities is my attempt to create dialogue, imagine, and future a world for South Asian artists and cultural workers who are considered once born, those of us who fall into the cracks and chasms outside of conventional brahminized Hinduism (see Figure 5).

2006

My friend Pohanna invited me to co-tend a vegetable plot in a community garden in Montreal. Since then, I have always tended to soil, worms, herbs, and vegetables. There is something in the daily practice of caressing a leaf, smelling a blossom, replanting roots, feeding worms, sinking one’s fingers a few inches into the soil to see if plants need water, reading sun patterns, catching rainwater, etc. These past few years I have drawn connections between Dalit, Bahujan, Indigenous, and Black knowledge systems that are entrenched in the earth. Combined with my twenty-year somatic practice of chi gong and its Taoist earth/cosmos inspired imagery, visualizations, and energetic practices, there is a way in which the earth and my very embodied connection to it has offered me an inroad to healing, for myself and in connection with others. It has been a very real nervous system regulation tool for me, and as Thenmozhi Soundararajan writes in her masterful book, The Trauma of Caste, nervous system regulation offers us tools into caste awareness, to “dive below our knee-jerk responses…to examine our conditioning” and build towards inter-caste dialogue (Soundararajan 2022, p. 85). My practices of meditation, earth-based visualizations, and gardening keep me in relationship with the land, reclaiming caste notions of dirty and polluted under my fingernails, darkening my brown skin, and as a way to re-connect with earth-based spiritual practices before they were co-opted and codified by brahminical Indo-Aryan Hinduism, and then by Western spiritual systems that strive towards false notions of purity and exiting the body. They also help me have difficult conversations about caste with my family, friends, colleagues, and communities. In these ways, Dravidian Futurities strives to reconnect Dravidianness to Indo-African, to Blackness, to Indigeneity, to centering Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi femmes, queer and trans communities, and towards caste abolition. I am moving further away from brahminical and white assimilationist strategies that I see so often in dominant-caste South Asian communities.

Figure 6. Still 6 from “PRELUDE”, an accompanying short video art work. By Meena Murugesan.

Figure 6. Still 6 from “PRELUDE”, an accompanying short video art work. By Meena Murugesan.

2022

I was brainstorming for Dravidian Futurities and wrote a list of poetic and practical interview questions that I plan to ask people who I would like to feature in my video installation work. Based on their interview responses, we will co-create a video portrait/art ritual that I film. My friend and collaborator D’Lo told me to answer my own questions and create a video portrait/art ritual for myself. I see the accompanying film PRELUDE (Murugesan 2023) as a preface to my larger project, a way for me to interrogate my own complex positionalities and relationship to caste, to test out ideas and learn from the process, to show others and have something concrete to share when I ask them to join me in co-building this world.

When my creative partner d. Sabela grimes interviewed me on camera with my own questions in our backyard in South Los Angeles/Tongva–Kizh territory, the reality of location became very present. Living in a working class neighborhood with predominantly LatinX and Black communities, we heard helicopters, planes, yard dogs barking, and the tunes of Frankie Beverly and Maze wafting from the yard behind us. At first, we would halt the interview for a plane or a helicopter, but eventually we just gave up. The sounds of South LA are all up in this piece. In the fall of 2021, I directed and edited a two-channel chapter of Dravidian Futurities called PRELUDE to present at a visual arts group exhibit at Wesleyan University with a South Asian artist working group I am a part of. For a few nights in September 2022, Susu Attar, art director and camera collaborator, d. Sabela grimes, thought partner and composer, and I ventured onto Western Avenue, south of Exposition, to film me in my Malli Poo (Jasmine Flower) character in alleyways, dark corners, and bustling streets as the sky turned shades of indigo blues (See Figure 6 and Figure 7).

I had been working out movement material six months prior to this shoot. Not in a studio but outdoors, alone, in my backyard. The same backyard where the tunes of Frankie Beverly and Maze would emerge. My morning routine started off as a pathway to heal certain health issues I was experiencing. One of my herbalist teachers told me to get sunlight in my eyes and on my skin first thing in the morning to balance my circadian rhythms. This turned into an embodied practice where I might perform any variety of different tasks depending on how I felt: sweep the yard, throw down an exercise mat, lay on my back, do gentle stretches and myofascial release work, walk backwards with hand gestures, perform a few sun salutation-ish flows, jump on a trampoline, perform some chi gong-inspired visualizations and exercises. This would often turn into dance improvisation sessions. Moving and breathing with the two trees towering above me, crows cawing, a resident squirrel that taunts me by choosing to sit right above me in the trees and spit nuts down on me twenty feet below, swatting the mosquitos and flies, flowing with the variations in wind, connecting to the growing phases of bougainvillea, aloe, dragon fruit, arugula, calendula, comfrey, nasturtiums, snap peas, and other seasonal herbs and vegetables I grow. This movement practice also began a year after I broke a bone in my right foot, and I could feel this as an integral aspect of my recovery. Certain movements kept showing up. Shaking. Pulling something out (Lemuria?) from the earth. Crowning gestures. Thus, these movements made their way in the film. During one of my shoot nights, I felt as though I was in conversation with the tectonic plates deep in the earth that once connected Shudra and African diasporas. I was in a world where Lemuria or Kumari Kandam might actually float back up again (See Figure 8).

2008

I do not believe in a future. I do not believe humans are going to make it. I believe we have been in the midst of multiple apocalypses for far too long. Some call me cynical or hopeless or, on occasion, a realist. I honor Indigenous and Black futurists such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Octavia E. Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, for they have provided me with glimmers of re-framing. I owe a debt to Dalit and Bahujan artists such as Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Nrithya Pillai who work towards caste abolition amidst caste-based violence. After the catastrophic earthquake in Nepal in 2015, Sangita Shresthova, a friend with family in Nepal, suggested to have a tent in an easily accessible place in my home. If an earthquake hit and one’s home became unstable, at least one has a tent to live in. About a year later, Los Angeles experienced an earthquake, albeit much lower on the Richter scale. Something hit me. I somehow felt the impetus to create an emergency kit filled with survival tools that might assist my family and I through an earthquake or any other natural occurrence with catastrophic outcomes. It felt odd somehow, to put together this kit of mylar thermal blankets, an emergency magnesium fire starter, compass, whistle, water purification tablets, paracord, flashlight, N95 masks, solar radio, other random things, and a four person tent. In that moment, I felt the desire to survive emergencies, natural occurrences that affect human life, and try to stay alive in the midst of apocalypses. Perhaps this is when the notion of re-imagining futures in the here and now became seeded. I am curious to feel through notions of futurity in the now, in the present moment, in this world, where there exists a collapse of capitalist linear time as we know it. I want to co-create worlds within worlds, as the Anthropocene is perhaps ending. Needless to say, I find it amusing that I chose to create a project with the term futurity in it (See Figure 9).

2024

There is a sunken landmass vibrating in my frequency, vibrating in the frequency of deep-melanin, Black-skinned queens before the violent implementation of a Eurocentric social matrix of race, and the drone of syllables in Tamil, my mother tongue, one of the oldest languages on this earth.

As we who have felt fragmented, we who have felt as though we do not belong in this world, as we who search for home, for liberation, and for peace, as we who are not considered fully human become more whole, we call in this ancient landmass my people call Kumari Kandam. Land of Queens. What you might call Lemuria. We are building a new world. An ancient and futurist world. A land that once connected India to Africa but is now sunken at the bottom of the inky Indian Ocean. A land that was cared for by Dravidian people, Afro-Indian people, by Indigenous people, by Dalit and Shudra people.

I am calling in people of once born castes such as Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, and Shudra. I am calling in people with family histories of indentured labor, people with mixed South Indian or Sri Lankan and Afro-diasporic ancestries. We will co-create surreal film rituals imbued in beauty, in our vision, and in our collective ethics. We will saturate our darker brown skin with indigo dye and create indigo textile sculptures. We will co-create masks, movement, music, and aesthetics that call in the frequencies of the new earth we are building. Dravidian Futurities is a conjuring of ancient futurist circular ethical worlds, where deep melanin, caste abolition, and syncretic earth-based spiritualities co-exist in surreal beauty and where once-born South Asians speculate into the future. A re-earthing of Kumari Kandam, re-connecting Dravidian and African peoples through ancestral re-call and response that weaves South India, Sri Lanka, East Africa and their diasporas together in waves of indigo (See Figure 10).