Sajan Mani's act of history making

At the Shrine Empire, New Delhi, a scarlet-hued wall comes into sight. It serves as a backdrop to six drawings by artist Sajan Mani.

- Avantika Bhuyan

Though small in scale, the layering of visuals, colours and text adds a certain complexity to each of them. The text, underlying the visuals, has been extracted from pages of German missionary reports about Kerala available in archives in Berlin and other German cities. And for the visuals, Mani has referred to photographs taken by German anthropologist Ego (Freiherr) von Eickstedt in the 1920s of Dalit and other indigenous communities in Kerala.

Like an archaeologist, Mani has excavated through layers of colonial perceptions and prejudices to create an alternative way of documenting and archiving narratives of marginalised and oppressed people.