Indu Antony And The Gentle Art Of Feminism

In an unfiltered conversation with Akshaya Pillai, the multidisciplinary artist lays out a manifesto for a creative life

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It wasn't planned. But when Indu Antony extends her hand and shows me a ziplocked pouch containing strands of her hair folded with precision, like a wad of cash, I decide to play a version of 'What's in my bag?' Except here, it's 'What's on your table?' Hand cream, a lint roller, journals, and three books she's dipping in and out of Kim Jiyoung, Bom 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, Feminist Killjoy by Sarah Ahmed, and Nandithayude Kavithakal by Nanditha KS. The table itself was a gift from someone Antony dated briefly, she tells me seated in her Bengaluru apartment, and I couldn't decide if I felt glad or let down that nothing topped the hair.

"Hair, for me, is a metaphor for memory. The part of our body that takes the longest to decompose," says the multidisciplinary artist who has been collecting her hair for ten years and wielding a needle and thread ever since she turned five. "My mother was a typical young housewife who often embroidered little flowers onto our frocks."

The day Antony realised that she could use hair as a material and sewing as a medium, a garden of possibilities blossomed around her like Parijatham at dusk. Her curls, long and cascading, have since been employed to embroider on paper, fabric, photographs, cyanotypes and more. For 'Words They Called', she used strands of her hair to inscribe in Malayalam the many catcalls that women often face: Kayyapi. Maramkeri. Feminichi. "In and out, in and out, the rhythm is very meditative," she says as her fingers twist and twine through the air, stitching together the chasm between our screens.