5 months ago
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“Desperate days. Justice nowhere. I fail. What of tomorrow?
We person nary uncertainty astir Tomorrow: There is ever thing successful the thought of our Father
More profound, much beauteous than thing we tin imagine.
Who has described the lilies that turn successful His Garden of Tomorrow?
Not adjacent the Angels of God.
Let america tally with patience the contention that is set before us.”
Eliamma Matthen wrote these words connected November 4, 1938, connected her knees successful her supplication room in a hopeless telephone to God for guidance astatine the commencement of five turbulent years. Days earlier, her hubby CP Matthen had been arrested, along with KC Mammen Mappillai and chap directors of The Travancore National and Quilon Bank. Pioneer bankers from Syrian Christian families, both men merged their enterprises in Travancore and expanded successfully into British India from Madras. Despite grounds to the contrary and aft a protracted ineligible wrangle, they were extradited from Madras by the Dewan of Travancore, CP Ramaswamy Aiyar, acting hand-in-glove with the British Raj. They were given a amusement trial in Trivandrum and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment.
Eliamma’s tenacity and perseverance, alongside brother-in-law lawyer KP Abraham, meant that she, a homemaker from a backwater successful the far southwest on India, was brought to the attraction of the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow himself. Her petition for his release was backed by a powerful 12-page opinion from the Advocate General of India, Sir BL Mitter, who declared the conviction “was amerciable and was secured by means which nary decent modular tin beryllium called fair”.
‘Letters measurement heavy’
East India Office papers uncover that the proceedings was motivated by malice: Ramaswamy Aiyar disliked Matthen personally and suspected the slope of backing the Travancore State Congress, which helium viewed as a threat. The British, keen to maintain imperial control, sided with monarchy over equal rights for Indians, covered the backmost of their ain governmental cause Resident CP Skrine and allowed idiosyncratic frictions successful imperial fiscal medication to predominate the Reserve Bank of India, the lender of past resort. Following reappraisal by the imperial legislative section and after months of unsuccessful attempts by Travancore to extract a confession, Matthen was softly released successful January 1942.
The events of 1938-1942 shaped Eliamma’s family for generations. She could not spot the lilies successful her future garden and yet present we are today, living testament to her resilience. This is her story, and a portion of mine.
Lilies successful the Garden of Tomorrow | Photo Credit: Sarah Chandy
About the exhibition
I am the mother of a girl of India, and a girl of colonisers of the imperial Raj. More specifically, I americium the parent of Eliamma’s great grandson’s daughter: a achromatic British pistillate with household who served successful the Imperial Forestry Commission and elsewhere in the Indian Civil Service. I lived and worked successful Chennai from 2005 to 2015. For the Time Being began with my attempt to marque consciousness of my attachment to household and place, which endures successful the 10 years since I returned to the UK. It is simply a presumption of layered memory across five generations, inviting viewers to prosecute with the communicative successful their ain mode and link it to their ain histories. The extremity is not to talk for, but to make abstraction for conversation.
This conflicted positionality shaped the enactment I produced. Part insider and portion outsider, I wanted to collaborate with family wherever possible. It was an iterative process, led by conversation, material shared, and places visited, rather than a premeditated effort to present the enactment successful a particular style oregon format.
Lilies successful the Garden of Tomorrow | Photo Credit: Sarah Chandy
The value of being Mrs Matthen
Mrs Matthen’s relation successful securing her husband’s merchandise and a aboriginal for her children was pivotal. Many radical crossed South India are familiar with the Mammen Mappillai Malaya Manorama story, and some with CP Matthen’s relation successful the discourse of the banking crisis. Eliamma Matthen’s story — like that of galore women who unrecorded done political, personal, and economical upheaval — has remained largely untold. This accumulation activates her communicative for the archetypal time.
Born Eliamma Varugis and baptised successful Kochi, she came from a household for whom education, alternatively than ancestral wealth, enabled societal mobility. Syrian Christian by civilization and Anglican successful faith, she was raised successful an intellectually engaged household: her begetter was a Christian Missionary Service teacher, and her siblings went connected to go professionals. She received her pre university education astatine the Basel German Mission College, an antithetic accidental for a pistillate of her generation. Her matrimony successful 1913 to CP Matthen from an orthodox Syrian Christian landowning family in Thiruvalla, likely curtailed further ceremonial education, but not her intelligence life.
Eliamma and CP Matthen were joined successful 1913, and, aft his years astatine university in Madras, began a family and the banking enterprise that became The Quilon Bank. These years saw mounting discontent successful Travancore with monarchy, appointed Brahmin Dewans and British “stewardship” through Resident governmental agents. Agitation from Christians, Ezhavas and Muslims for greater practice successful government gathered momentum.
For Eliamma and CP Matthen ‘the word’ was at the bosom of their emotion and their life. They wrote copiously to each other in times of separation. Then in the aboriginal 1930s they began to be guided in faith by the Protestant Irish missionary Amy Carmichael of The Dohnavur Fellowship Mission, Tirunelveli. “Amma,” as she was known, encouraged a life of witness, quiet contemplation, and faith-led action. These values shaped Eliamma’s response to the crises that followed.
Between 1938 and 1942, during her husband’s imprisonment, Eliamma wrote regular successful 10 volumes of diaries. These writings connection uncommon penetration into her interior beingness and the satellite she inhabited. She recorded her views connected section and nationalist politics, the British Raj, the Church successful India, pupil movements, and planetary affairs, alongside reflections connected motherhood, household management, nutrient prices, marriage, and ethical living. In her work, the intimate and the humanities are inseparable, allowing micro-history to illuminate broader themes of decolonisation, emancipation, justice, gender, and secularism.
RK Jayasree, former Professor of English, who indexed the diaries, described Eliamma as “a singular pistillate and an archetypal thinker” noting her captious engagement with figures specified arsenic Sir CP Ramaswamy Aiyar, Winston Churchill, and MK Gandhi, and her penchant for the “quiet life” implicit nationalist display.
Eliamma’s words uncover a formidable intellect moving with humility, discipline, and motivation courage. Her penning shows not a withdrawal from the satellite but an aggravated engagement with it: she reads widely, questions authority, and continually tests her responses against scripture, experience, and conscience. In the look of repeated miscarriages of justice — circumstances that mightiness pb galore to despair oregon abandon faith — she alternatively undertakes a rigorous rethinking of what justness itself mightiness mean. This enactment of surrender is not passive; it becomes a root of endurance, clarity, and ethical resolve.
In activating Eliamma’s voice now, this accumulation honours women arsenic custodians of representation and arsenic imaginative agents susceptible of forging meaning, and futures, from wrong constraint.
The exhibition is a dialectic of fragments across multiple styles and media. Studio work with my cousins and audio drawn from generations around the world make up embodied memory through sound and gesture. Documentary images of spot beryllium alongside household archive photographs, sometimes intact, sometimes worked. The intimate words of household letters are set against the formal documents of government and newspaper archives.
Eliamma recorded events, thoughts, reflections, prayers and Bible quotations daily in 10 volumes between May 1938 and March 1942. Her signifier of quiescent reflection mirrored mine in times of anxiety. I was moved by her words, which offered a exemplary of transportation with interior life, and yet alert that vivid acquisition tin request forms beyond language. Photography offered a caller voice, peculiarly for women’s stories.
From Lilies successful the Garden of Tomorrow
This is simply a woman’s communicative of resilience, passed down largely woman to woman: daughters, daughters-in-law, in albums, stories, and written records. Archival enactment by Eliamma’s granddaughter Thankan Eappen and her hubby Don Hansen predated my ain probe successful British archives, including the East India Office and National Archives.
Arrow Mark | Nosh Haus, the accumulation site, is the erstwhile location of a Jewish family — home being the so-called site of “women’s work”. This is not to reinforce this work arsenic abstracted oregon marginal, but to demonstrate its powerfulness arsenic a tract of change. The archetypal country represents the household eating room as the locus of connection; the 2nd reflects the imposition of the amusement proceedings connected the household psyche and Eliamma’s flight into prayer; the 3rd becomes the tract of activation for Eliamma’s writing.
In this last space, viewers are invited to prosecute actively — with the enactment and with themselves — by sharing memories and messages wrong the gallery. We each transportation fragmented histories within. When we recognize who we are, and wherefore we are, we are escaped to imagine alternate futures and beryllium proactive successful their creation.
Lilies successful the Garden of Tomorrow, curated by Bakul Patki and produced by Kalpana Kumar astatine Yolk Studio, is open until March 31, 2026 at Arrow Mark | Nosh Haus, Jew Town Road, Mattancherry, Kochi.
