Mumbai-born Malayali Seema Harindran talks about her art project with Reva Pandit that changed the meaning of the word ‘kali’ from being a word she was ridiculed with to goddess Kali with a capital K
Reva with Seema
Seema suffered insults for being dark-skinned even in Kerala, the land her parents came from. Relatives would ask her mom what was wrong with her, while the ‘modern ones’ taunt indirectly
The words come out too fast. Experiences of the unpleasant kind are easy to recall, there’s been so many of them. Seema Harindran can go to a day in her childhood and slip to one in her teens, and just as easily pick a memory out of last year — all on the same theme — the colour of her skin. All of it now culminates to a single point in her life — the January day she took a local train in Mumbai and met artist Reva Pandit. The result is this picture above, black lines and curves all across her face. Few hours with Reva had changed the meaning of the word ‘kali’ for her. It was not anymore the Hindi word that meant black and that everyone had teased her with. It was goddess Kali, with a capital K.
“All my life I’ve been ridiculed for being dark skinned,” Seema began a long Facebook note that would be shared more than 500 times. But she didn’t know that then. All she knew was she was writing their story — hers and Reva’s and the serendipity of it all. They were just two random people on a train who had never known each other before, but became such amazing friends after that January day. Reva had stared at Seema for a long time before she smiled back and they started talking. Reva had been excited because Seema looked exactly like a picture she had drawn — her interpretation of the birth of Kali, the goddess. They spent a day together, creating the Kali that Reva had imagined, out of Seema — painting her face with black paint.
Kali
“And just like that, she changed the definition of the word kali in my life,” Seema says. That has been the word she grew up with in the streets of Mumbai. Her parents had come there much before her birth, when her dad got a job. “My dad is from Kannur and my mother from Thalassery. They are planning to leave Mumbai and go back to Kerala soon. I too have visited Kerala a lot,” she says. But in Kerala too, she’s had bitter experiences where her skin colour was concerned. “There are relatives who would keep asking my mother what was wrong with me. Then there are these ‘modern relatives’ who would indirectly hint at it, by asking, ‘How did she get so tanned? You should not let her play sports’.” The concerns would switch to the usual who-will-marry-her questions, variants of which women reaching a certain age and not getting married are very, very used to in India.
Seema was also quite a tall girl when she grew up. “It was hard for me to be inconspicuous but I would try my best to not stand out.” She never reacted when someone called her kali. It is in fact her friend who walked with her one day that first reacted to a comment teasing her skin colour. “You guys are disgusting,” the friend had retorted when Seema stood next to her and realised that this could be done. She was then a ninth grader. But she continued in her ways, remaining silent as the teasing continued.
However, she stood up for others. All those ads of fairness creams promoting prejudices — dark women can’t get a job, can’t find love — had angered her. Seema wanted to do something about it on this visit to India, for she’s been away for a while. She had gone to the US for her Master’s on product management, and found a job. She was a software engineer before that. There’s been China in between and it is going to be the US again for Seema, ready to join a startup. On her break before that, she has plans to express the suffering of dark people, perhaps through performance arts — “painting my skin white and walking around as a prisoner of the fair and lovely culture” or by starting a page that points out how Bollywood shames dark skin. But then she met Reva and focused on writing that story to empower other women.
After their Kali project they came together for doing live art at the Lil Flea market in Mumbai where Reva painted Seema’s face again in a different avatar. Their story brought a lot of response. More of Seema’s friends became interested to be faces for Reva to work on. Mothers called to say how their daughters suffer in the same way. “The project helped me be more confident in my own skin and helped Reva realise the power of her art and the joy of painting on people’s faces.”
Visiting India before joining a new job in the US, Seema wanted to use her break to express the sufferings of dark people through art
