‘Souls of Someone’: Photobook on trans women at the Koovagam festival is sensitive and full of life

The complexity of South Asian gender and queer expressions can’t be contained by the Anglophone queer theorisation. First, because any such exercise makes one engage with South Asia’s rich and textured myth-historical past. Second, it’s this inheritance that renders the contemporary, contextual meaning to modern-day queerness, making the latter always in conversation with its past, enabling imagination of collective queer futures.

It’s not that South Asian queerness refuses to offer a comprehensible template. It just doesn’t offer an easy one, which is why artists must invent ways to engage creatively to effectively and authentically portray queer expressions. One such work is Shino Cherian’s debut photobook Souls of Someone: Myth, Magic and Mourning in Koovagam.

“Art is born out of an ill-designed world” reads a part of the epigraph that quotes Andrei Tarkovsky in the book. Activist Grace Banu in her Foreword to the book expands on the idea, and Cherian’s desire to explore and document the Koovagam festival.

Banu writes, “The brilliance of this work lies in Shino’s willingness to ‘unbecome’ the person he thought he was. He admits to his early hesitations, the knot in his chest and the queasiness of overthinking.”

This overthinking aspect stems from the fact that the “authenticity” of the one looking at...

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