Photographer Amrita Chandradas on generational trauma & womanhood in the Tamil community

Your latest film, Phase/Less, is largely about Tamil traditions, and how women are seen through the lens of these traditions. How much of the film was rooted in your own personal experiences?

Even though we are all Tamil women in the community, we all have different experiences – like with funerary traditions. I remember a very traumatic experience I witnessed when I was young. When my neighbour lost her husband, they made her wear her wedding bangles, and they broke all the bangles. They burned her wedding sari. The way she was crying... It was very violent, very visceral. I was maybe 12 at the time, and it was very upsetting to see – it really imprints on you.
I’ve seen similar sorts of things with my aunties, after they lose a husband. They’re seen as ‘inauspicious’, and they’re not able to participate in various ceremonies and social events. And the same kind of thing doesn’t apply to men at all.

If you’re a Tamil woman who has lost your husband, your identity is immediately stripped away. You’re not allowed to wear flowers, or the red pottu – you can’t live your life the way it was before, and as a woman, you have no say in this at all. It’s not just men who impose this, other women do it too: There’s a sense, among women who have lost their husbands, that we need to ‘upkeep the tradition’.

In Phase/Less, you also mentioned the topic of generational trauma. How has this manifested in your own life?

There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand when I was younger – certain things which my mom, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, had to do without questioning.
For example, hair – my hair is usually very curly. For me and a lot of my friends, when our grandmothers or mothers are plaiting our hair, they do it with a lot of force and pressure. It feels, in a way, like they’re trying to smoothen out their own memories, trauma and pain. You can feel like they are there, but at the same time, not there – and that itself is a very painful process.

Women, and their experiences, are a central theme in your work. Why is that?

Because for the longest time I was not allowed to question, or say anything about what was going on. Even though I had parents who were very open, I still grew up in a community where you don’t really have much of a say as a woman.

Also, we still live in a world where it’s still quite patriarchal and misogynistic. You know, I’ve been underestimated so much as a photographer. I’ve been asked so many times: ‘Are you the assistant? Where’s actual photographer?’ And this underestimating is done across the board by both men and women. At some point I wondered – do I have to be a man to be taken seriously? There was an anger, and it was definitely a motivating factor in my work back then.

Do you view your work with Phase/Less – and your other creations – as an act of rebellion?

There are themes of rebellion in the film – naturally, because that’s how we felt as Tamil women growing up in this community. But we weren’t just listing out things we found wrong – we also were celebrating our community.

We were also asking questions which we didn’t really have answers to. We wanted it to be a dialogue starter for others. And someone asked us something really interesting: ‘So there are certain practices which you perhaps disagree with, or frown upon, or you’re not sure about. What would you want the future to be like? What would be the practices you would like to introduce?’ And it was amazing to hear, because we’ve not had that autonomy.

Like for example, the puberty celebration – it was supposed to be celebration of a womanhood. Can we go back to that, instead of making it as a public spectacle for families who choose to go along with it? Can we go back to the time where it’s just women who’d come, and tell you things which are beneficial for a woman, can we go back to that?

It’s also why the film in Phase/Less loops – because this doesn’t solve anything. It’s cyclical, nothing is solved. That’s the reality of it: There’s no happy ending.