A River to Flow Through Us All
Photo: Karan Madhok
In a famous verse, Kabir wrote, “The river that flows in you also flows in me.” Inspired by this grand uniting spirit of humanity, transgender artists of the Aravani Art Project presented their artwork in front of the Ganga in Varanasi.
At the Mahindra Kabira Festival in Varanasi, Karnika—a transgender artist from Jaipur—recalled an instance in New Delhi, where she and other trans women of the Aravani Art Project were painting outdoors. Two men working on local labour projects came up to the artists and quipped, “Look, the hijras are painting, too.”
“My artist friends wanted to give a response,” Karnika said. “But I told them, ‘No. This is something we deal with every day. What’s the big deal?’ Slowly, the men started returning and watching, often in big groups, and one day they stayed a whole day watching us paint. ‘Waah,’ they thought, ‘They’re doing such great work.’”
“You’ll see the Ganga River flowing through the male and the females,” said Vinni. “Kabir Das said that we are all the same beyond dharma (faith) and jati (caste). And if the male and female have the Ganga sitting in their minds, the same is true for the transgender community.”
The Kabira Festival returned to Kabir’s hometown of Varanasi in mid-December, with a showcase of music, fine arts, and literary and philosophical discussions on the ancient city’s ghats, right in front of the mighty Ganga River. Even some six hundred years after he was first credited with a collection of philosophical poetry at the height of the Bhakti Movement, Kabir’s impact continues to be felt each passing generation, symbolizing and encouraging critical thought, rebellion against dogma, and a progressive lens towards social acceptance.
In one of more famous poems, Kabir was said to write, “The river that flows in you also flows in me.” And it was in the grand spirit of this flow between people that artists of the Aravani Art Project presented their artwork in front of the Ganga. Aravani is a trans women and cis women led art collective that aims to create a space for people from the transgender community, who have come together to create, collaborate and work on several art projects in India and abroad. Over the course of the three-day festival, transgender artists from Aravani worked together in Varanasi to make three canvasses as part of the same larger artwork inspired by Kabir’s theme of that unifying, flowing river.
The painting features an abstract scene of Varanasi’s ghats and the river, highlighted by the trademark geometric shapes and lines that have become a “watermark”—said Aravani’s founder, Poornima Sukumar. Sukumar made a close bond with the trans community in Mumbai, Pondicherry, and Bengaluru while working for a London-based filmmaker on the subject. “I realized that there is no proper portal for the rest of the society to reach people from the trans community,” she said. “Every time the media wants to show them, it’s always shown as if it’s a sad thing to be them. I think there was so much joy and freedom in who they were—it inspired me to start something.”
Photo: Karan Madhok
“We have a very geometric approach to stylizing the art,” Sukumar said of Aravani’s work. “It becomes easy for anyone to come and paint. We had to make it not so complicated because many of the trans women [at Aravani] have not studied art.”
“The art here is made in a kind of cut-piece, no curves, no rounds,” said Vinni, one of the trans artists at the festival. “All straight lines. This is kind of Aravani’s trademark style.”
Based in Delhi, Vinni used to work with an organization focusing on HIV/AIDS issues within the trans community. Around two years ago, she heard of Aravani, who were interested in collaborating with trans women interested in art. In our school days, she had once held a curiosity about art and design; Aravani, thus, seemed like the ideal next step.
There are around 30 artists as part of Aravani’s nationwide team, including in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi. The collective aim to create safe spaces for alternate voices through art—and this was very much Karnika’s experience, too, when she first encountered the Aravani Art Project in Jaipur in 2017. “At that point I was still going through my gender journey,” Karnika said. “I was exploring my gender, and used to identify as gay. When I arrived to Aravani, my first project was painting by a metro station. We painted for 3 days, and we didn’t feel like we were any different. Because all the other time the world thinks differently about us.”
Before Aravani, Karnika said that she used to make and sell home decoration products in Jaipur. “I used to live like a man, but sometimes, I would put on some lipstick or eyeliner. People used to show me a funny face after buying the products. But when I joined Aravani, I was looked at like an artist. I feel that people’s perception had started to change. Before… I never saw myself as someone who could become an artist. But in this 7-8-year journey of mine, I have become a self-taught artist, and I have led many Aravani projects.”
The most exciting such project took Karnika and a small group of artists to the 2024 Venice Biennale, where the collective was commissioned to paint a massive wall mural—100 feet long and 25 feet high—to be displayed at the Arsenale. Five trans and two cis women from India travelled to Italy, where they were also assisted by art students in Venice to help finish the project.
Photo: Karan Madhok
“We’ve been very conscious of the fact that we didn’t want the collective to be supported because it was made by transgender people,” said Sukumar. “We have worked very hard to achieve a style and a kind of reference point for people, so when they see the art, they know it’s from Aravani. And it took us years to reach to that place. We felt validated that we were called (to Venice) because of our art, and not because of who made it.”
At the Kabira Festival, Karnika said that Varanasi felt like a “Chhota Venice” (Little Venice), too. It was apt, then, that the city which once inspired the poetry of Kabir played the stage for Aravani’s inspiration, along with Kabir’s verses. The artwork now finds home in the Kabir Math in Varanasi, at the memorial built to Kabir in the city and now the headquarters for his followers.
“You’ll see the Ganga River flowing through the male and the females,” said Vinni. “Kabir Das said that we are all the same beyond dharma (faith) and jati (caste). And if the male and female have the Ganga sitting in their minds, the same is true for the transgender community.”
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. He is the author of Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis In India (2024) and A Beautiful Decay (2022), both published by the Aleph Book Company. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Plank, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
