Mattancherry Mix, 2018

funerals”. In Joseph’s painting the female figures, despite their black attire, are not attending
a funeral or a wake but are ostensibly part of a photographic séance, however embalmed
they will become as image once they have been captured by the lens.
But what if “What are We?” is a question that the women ask of themselves or is asked by the
painter on their behalf? The unstated (potentially) feminist premiss of the query suggests
another angle to the recurrence of female figures in Joseph’s work, and not only in relation to
those depicted as belonging to a religious minority – whether Muslim or Christian – but the
Hindu majority, too, in the light of the matrilineal system to which it had adhered and whose
repeal by legal decree in 1925 “normalized” the chauvinism that had once been something of
an exception in Kerala and not the rule as in other parts of the country. Joseph is too delicate
to broach the subject frontally, but she is hardly indifferent to the business as usual according
to which men dictate and women submit that prevails even in a state that has had a record
run of democratically elected communist governments over several decades and prides
itself on its high level of literacy. Moreover, when the paintings are seen in a wider national
context of the current political situation in India, dominated as it is by ferocious ideologues
of Hindu supremacy and the insidious climate of fear created by the violent attacks to
which religious minorities and dalits and those defending the secular values enshrined in
the Constitution have been increasingly subject, Joseph’s representations of Muslim or
Christian folk going about their individual and collective lives as observed in her home town
acquire a rather different resonance.
In yet another register, the title – what Duchamp called “the invisible colour” of the work –
and the panoramic formats of the three paintings cannot but recall an iconic art historical
precedent, Gauguin’s famous mural-like pictorial manifesto of life that was also his ode to
cultural alterity: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).
Stylistically, of course, there is nothing Gauguinesque about Joseph’s handling any more
than the microcosm of a community in Mattancherry depicted by her has anything in
common with the idyll in the South Seas, his Edenic vision of otherness, projected by the
self-styled outcast of European civilization. And yet the existential tenor of the question that
is the “invisible colour” of Joseph’s set of paintings finds a distant echo in the allegorizing
title that Gauguin inscribed on the surface of his masterpiece, marking as it does the
inaugural modernist moment of such existentialist interrogations. Thirty years after his
death (in 1903), Gauguin’s representations of the non-European body would prove to be
exemplary for another artist in quest of her identity as a painter, and the itinerary of the
journey that Amrita Sher-Gil undertook in her discovery of Indian art led her from Ajanta and
Ellora to Mattancherry and the famous seventeenth-century frescoes in its palace. These
visual narratives of episodes from the Hindu epics are notable for their robust and ebullient
depictions of erotic appetite. Sher-Gil found the voluminous forms of the women ‘curiously
Rubenesque’ and she enthused over the vigour and plasticity of the drawing and the ‘rich
but subdued’ colour scheme. She was connecting with a part of her Indian heritage that had
hitherto been occluded by her training in the conventions of the western tradition of oil
painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For someone like Joseph who has spent all her
working life as an artist within walking distance of the building housing these frescoes, the
lessons they offer of “an art in the image of people” might well have struck her as relevant