I like the opportunities I get to morph into different insects. With the UNSUNG project, I was being a tiny little ant, carrying a small morsel of food towards a destination predecided by the other important ants in the colony. But to do this part, I was happy. Eventually, we were celebrating the extraordinary grandness of small people, women such as Lakshmikutty Amma living along the edge of the Ponmudi forest in Kerala.

UNSUNG is a project envisaged by Mahesh Bhat who began work on the project in 2004. Through the stories that he collected, interviews and photographs of ordinary folks, presenting their daily life without the frills, transformed into beautiful volumes with extraordinary kindness and warmth in their folds, helped raise almost 9 million to the heroes in the books. The project is an excellent example of how photography can begin to contribute back to its subjects in a more systematic and ethical way. Mahesh writes about this here.

Lakshmikutty Amma is a traditional healer. When she is not in the forest collecting herbs for her healing practices, she writes poetry at her small desk. Thematically, her poems vary from concerns about everyday living to aspects of spiritual fulfillment that as humans, we crave. She writes poetry which she calls a parody of life emulating popular verses in Malayalam. In terms of voice and style, she is versatile and as a translator of her writing, I found it a huge challenge to keep up with her Malayalam that sometimes employs classical poetic structures or slips deliberately into colloquial Malayalam at other times. As readers, we are trained to look for voice in writing. We hold on to the conviction that the ‘Who’ who speaks through the poem has to be the writer itself. The critics of the recent times become a disgruntled lot when they do not see a women’s voice in a woman’s verse, especially when they do not talk about breasts or body or the feminine experience. Lakshmikutty Amma will give any critic a run for their money by befuddling the voice in her writing. She can easily become a forty-year-old male alcoholic, a hardworking ordinary man or a wise old woman. Yet, in all of them, you see a message for living close to earth and the happiness one can achieve from doing so.

Here is a film about the project which, was presented at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2017.

My gratitude also goes to Karen Dias who worked on the story of Lakshmikutty Amma.