KOCHI: Images of Kutchi Memon households, captured between the 1950s and 70s, will line up at a show that will form a partner project at the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)-2014, next week.
Titled ‘Ummijaan: Making Visible a World Within’, the three-and-half-month-long exhibition will open at suburban Mattancherry on December 13, providing glimpses of the history of a community whose origin can be traced to Sindh in the present-day Pakistan.
“The Aasia Bai Trust Hall will house 66 photographs taken by veteran photographer Haleema Hashim, and the show will be curated by her great-grandson Nihaal Faisal,” the organisers said on Sunday.
Haleema, 86, belongs to the Memon community of the Kutch province - now in the present Gujarat. She started clicking pictures after she moved to her marital home at Fort Kochi. Her husband Hashim Usman was running a shop at Chullikkal, where a friend gifted him with a camera. “Since then, the ‘Yashica SLR’ became a means for Haleema to pursue a new hobby, capturing images,” says Nihaal, about his great-grandma who lives in an apartment in Kochi.
As a migrant in Kochi, where she got settled in Yasmin Manzil after marriage at the age of 17, Haleema shot hundreds of photos. The exhibition, which features 66 of them in black-and-white as well as colour, will conclude on March 29, 2015 - the day on which the KMB also ends.
Haleema, who can speak and read four languages, including English and Urdu, pored over reference books on photography and started clicking the women, children and brides in her family. Her interest in photography probably stemmed from a tragedy - her mother became blind after a surgery that went wrong.
“She had kept all the negatives until about ten years ago, after which she burnt them, probably to save space or because no one showed much interest in them.
Now, she recognises some of the people in the pictures taken by her, though not herself. She never shot pictures of men, though she took snaps of her husband,” says Nihaal, who is studying at Bangalore-based Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. He recalls how he chanced upon the whole set of pictures when he was in high school. “What struck me was the technical perfection and the composition. They are a rare historical record of the little-documented community that owns most of the Jew Town,” he says.