Sometimes a camera can capture a truth still beyond the real world. A recent art project titled Truth Dream offered 12 members from Bengaluru’s transgender community a chance to dress like they truly feel. The results are evocative, dramatic, beautiful.
Transmen, transwomen and gender non-conforming adults inhabited fantasies held on to since childhood. For the women, famous movie stars, queens and women from myth were the inspiration; for a transman, it was a simple moustache and suit.
Photographs of them inhabiting the dream persona were showcased in an exhibition titled Truth Dream, held at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) in December.
The project and exhibition were a collaboration between Payana, an NGO working to empower sexual minorities in Karnataka, and Maraa, a media and arts collective in Bengaluru. The photographs were taken by Jaisingh Nageswaran, who has often focused on those society marginalises, including the transgender community, migrant workers and Dalits, and Rudra Rakshit Sharan.
“I feel this exhibition presents our community in a different light,” says Chandni, 49, who works as a relationship manager at a tech company, founded Payana in 2009, and thought up the project. “Members of the hijra community are mainly seen as beggars and sex workers, but we too have dreams and desires. We deserve to be looked at with respect.”
Chandni’s own fantasy inspired Truth Dream. “As a young woman, I wanted to dress up like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, a beautiful woman and daughter of a royal sage, as I thought this would make a man fall in love with me,” she says. Even after 25 years in a community that embraces who she is, she had not been able to look and feel like Shakuntala, she adds.
This made her wonder, were there others in her community who felt as she did? When she asked, it turned out most had a self-image they hadn’t been able to actualise. Eleven joined her in putting their dreams out into the world.
The participants are all aged 49 to 60, representing a particularly poignant kind of hope, to a community with high rates of deaths by violence and suicide.
“It was a conscious decision to choose older people because I wanted to show that people don’t stop dreaming after they turn a certain age,” Chandni says. Also, she wanted to emphasise that beauty is “something that comes from the inside and shines through at any age.”
IMAGE BUILDING
Work on the exhibition began with a workshop where the participants’ dream personas were discussed.
For her shoot, Chandni chose a diaphanous white sari and floral jewellery, with flowers in her hair. Watching the 1983 Kannada film Kaviratna Kalidasa as a teen, Chandni says she felt very aware of how different her body was from what she wanted it to be. It was with a feeling of immense satisfaction that she finally lived out her dream.
Bhanu, 52, a transgender activist, picked satiny garb of the kind worn by apsaras, paired with a matha patti, multiple necklaces, bangles and a kamarband. A hand-painted backdrop and songs from ’70s and ’80s films featuring the actress Jayamalini, her childhood idol, set the scene for her transformation.
In all the times she’d performed, at weddings, births and other celebrations, she’d never felt like this, Bhanu says. “As soon as my makeup was done, I felt like I’d transformed into Jayamalini. Thirty-four years after joining the community, I’d finally fulfilled my dream.”
Bernie, 55 and a sculptor, posed as a drag king, complete with moustache and beard. He wanted to impress his girlfriend and friends, he said. Lakshmi, 54, picked a bejewelled golden sari and ornate jewellery, inspired by images she’d seen of maharanis of Mysore.
Reshma, 60, said she felt she’d stepped into actress Sridevi’s shoes as she posed in a blue sari, flying in the breeze of a fan, inspired by the song Kaate Nahi Kat Te from Mr India (1987).
Sarvana alias Shakila, 54, fulfilled a dream of dressing up and performing as a Bharatanatyam dancer, a form he had trained in for a few months as a teen.
“The exhibition was well-received,” says Raghu Tenkayala, chief operating officer at BIC. “It was eye-opening and gave us something to think about. The photographs had so much attention to detail. I think this really uplifted the exhibition.”
Telling one’s story is a political act, adds Ekta Mittal, a filmmaker and co-founder of Maraa. “By choosing to share their dreams and stories, the participants pushed viewers to look at the community from a different lens, one that’s full of pride. There are layers in between that often get lost but in them lie human experiences of rejection, acceptance, desire, pleasure and pain. Truth Dream lays bare these different layers and invites you to look at them.”
Up next is a docu-film on the making of Truth Dream, due out in February, in collaboration with Falana Films. A book on the lives of the 12 participants is in reprint.
All three projects were funded by the US-based Fund for Global Human Rights, which empowers grassroots groups, and the UK-based Human Capability Foundation, in addition to crowd-funded donations.
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