In 1950 when Haleema Hashim started to photograph her family and a few others in the neighbourhood of Yasmin Manzil in Kochi, little did she know that one day her work would be read as documentation of the community of Kutchi Memons settled in Kochi. Thrilled at the Yashica SLR camera, someone had gifted her husband, Hashim Usman, Haleema simply began clicking the women and kids around her in Yasmin Manzil. The exercise transformed into a consuming passion which continued for 25 years and gave birth to an exhaustive photographic archive. Sixty-six photographs in both black-and-white and colour, out of some thousand, form “Ummijaan: Making Visible A World Within”, one of the partner projects at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, which is on view at Aasiya Bai Trust Hall till the end of the Biennale. It has been curated by her great-grandson Nihaal Faisal who is studying at Bangalore-based Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology.
It was his grandmother who informed him about his great-grandmother’s treasure trove of photographs lying in Kochi, where the 86 year-old veteran photographer continues to live. “Looking at those photographs, I realized even though she wasn’t trained, it didn’t show in the work. She was very concerned about the composition and framing. How the light was falling on her subject. She took references from studio photography. The photographs were taken inside domestic spaces yet had a very formal approach,” says Nihaal of the technical aspect of Haleema’s work.
For Haleema, it was a very personal exercise which she carried out without any anthropological concerns. “She was shooting her immediate family in Yasmin Manzil which was also fairly large. Here also, she was shooting only the women and kids of the family,” he adds.
Memons trace their origin to Sindh in Pakistan and are believed to have migrated to Kutch in Gujarat. The Abad business family and a few others, came further down to make port city of Kochi their home sometime in 19th Century. “It was a very small and little documented community living in isolation speaking a unique language which doesn’t have a script. So the Kutchi we speak today is very different. It’s a mix of Hindi, Urdu, English, Malayalam,” says Nihaal. Just like the language, other aspects of its culture are also an amalgam of varied influences. “Our rituals are not very Muslim but a mix of Islam and Gujarat. It is a very progressive community scattered all over and not really concerned about its numbers. Unlike earlier this generation doesn’t mind marrying outside the community,” the young curator notes.
The progressive aspect of the community reflects in Haleema’s works too. Haleema, who at that time could speak and read four languages, shot a series of frames that had women either holding or reading books.
“She shot a self-portrait too. It was clicked by her husband,” says Nihaal, who sifted through thousands of images to build this project. He was also struck by her bridal photographs in which she with the idea of showcasing the rituals and culture, captures the brides in all their finery and the paraphernalia around. “She didn’t just shoot the brides in the family but also in the neighbourhood. She had gradually started to move beyond her immediate family and shoot Kutchi Memon families. She didn’t shoot men except her husband and father-in-law,” says Nihaal, who would rather have a book published than to make it a travelling exhibition.
“In Kochi Biennale, I have found a perfect opportunity to showcase it to a large audience. Selling these works was never the agenda,” feels the curator who is yet to collect more photographs taken by his Ummijaan scattered amongst the family members living in different parts of the world.
(The exhibition is on at Aasiya Bai Trust Hall, Mattancherry, Kochi, till March 29, 2015, the day the KMB also ends.)
