In the basement of the Shrine Empire Gallery in New Delhi’s Defence Colony lie the remnants of artist Sajan Mani’s performance. The loopy black lines he draws creep up from the floor along the walls, your gaze invested in their verticality, noting how they stop just short of the ceiling. The black marks, looping seamlessly across a white expanse, index their own labour – in performance, Mani draws staccato clusters of loops using a rickety wooden ladder to access higher patches of wall. Viewed as an accumulation, they speak to the marginalisation and invisibilisation Mani has sought to document through his practice. His solo exhibition, Multiple Legs of a Historically Wing-Chopped Bird, is on view at Shrine Empire Gallery until January 22, 2025.

The exhibition moves between text, material and archival sources to lay out a complex history of caste and religion in Kerala, one which doesn’t always neatly fit into postcolonial modernity. “Indian modernity was a Brahmanical modernity,” Mani noted in a 2021 interview with STIR, referencing the dominant caste groups at the top of India’s entrenched caste hierarchy. Mani was born Dalit, to a family of rubber tappers in Kerala. ‘Dalit’ is an umbrella term for members of oppressed caste groups in India, popularised by Dr B.R. Ambedkar as a counter to Gandhi’s use of harijan, or people of God. In Kerala, even as converting to Christianity opened up new social and economic possibilities for Dalits, including access to education, caste hierarchies were carried forward into new religious identities.

The 19th century German missionary and scholar Hermann Gundert (a German-Swiss poet and novelist Hermann Hesse’s grandfather) is credited with creating the first Malayalam-English dictionary in 1872. Within colonial archives, Dalit communities are often present as objects of anthropological inquiry but rarely visibilised as independent voices or sources of scholarly production.

Mani uses poetry by Dalit leader Poykayil Appachan (1879-1939) to reflect on caste and his own lineage. Appachan was part of the Mar Thoma Church and the Brethren Mission, both local Protestant Christian missions, which reinforced caste divisions and viewed Dalit members as inferior. Mani uses the term “caste-pital” to imagine intersections between Dalit histories and contemporary society through his body, inscribing “the laboring body’s connection to the surrounding ecology” (as Mani wrote in a 2023 issue of e-flux) through durational performance.

His 2023 series, Transmigratory Whispers, superimposes Dalit figures in oil pastels on printed pages from Gundert’s dictionary and missionary reports from Kerala, addressing this historical imbalance. In one work, a bare-bodied man imprinted onto the inner cover of Gundert’s dictionary turns sideways to the camera, his face obscured by giant yellow petals that bear a similarity to the rubber flower. The words “Rev H. Gundert D. Ph.” are emblazoned on his torso; the printed word runs clear across his body, briefly disappearing into folds of fabric. Transmigratory Whispers, across all six works in the series, deploys this juxtaposition of Dalit bodies against colonial-era records that reinforce their absence from official archives.

In performing the presence of the Dalit body, Mani veers from the historical to the environmental – a 2023 video work, I am the River, focuses on the riverine and coastal ecologies of Kannur, his hometown, chronicling interspecies interactions among animals, birds and trees along the river Barapole and inside a lush mangrove forest planted by environmental activist Kallen Pokkudan. Mani frames his body within this ecology, lying prone on an orange tower, in the nude, alone on silty riverbanks and swamp beds, the inertness of his body complementing the hollow stillness of the forest.

Mani’s practice in general is constituted of assemblages of history and identity: material fragments of his lineage enmesh with larger discourses of knowledge production and environmental legacies. Gundert’s Malayalam writing appears in a series of serigraphs on sheets of rough black rubber. This series also reflects Mani’s present-day relationship with Germany, as he has lived in Berlin for some years now. While meaning-making projects such as dictionaries enable languages and systems to be available to a wider pool of people, they may also be mobilised in regimes of control and oppression. Mani has often spoken about the difficulty of accessing colonial-era archives. While researching the history of Dalits in Kerala, he found materials ranging from manuscripts to photographs in German archives – but these carefully controlled repositories remain inaccessible to most artists and scholars in Kerala. In a sense, Mani’s work also puts these hitherto obscure sources back into circulation, alerting viewers to their existence.