Meena Kandasamy: A Wise One, A Warrior
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| 12 € |
| Now available in the Humboldt Forum shop and soon to be ordered online |
| English |
The Mithuna couple is a 17th-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu (India) depicting lovers. Meena Kandasamy examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. She unfurls worlds of possibility around this seemingly idyllic couple, connecting them to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom. With astonishing narrative flair—mixing X threads, academic discourse, poetry, memoir—she lets the object talk and talk back.
Published by Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss
Diaphanes, Paperback, 88 pages, 11 x 17 cm, ISBN 978-3-0358-0754-7
Mithuna Figures (Loving Couple)
The entry record of the royal Kunstkammer in Berlin listed the Mithuna figures as an acquisition from the “summer of 1852” under the heading “Krishna and Radha”. They came from the collection of Colonel C.H. Sommer and were acquired through the Copenhagen-based art dealers Henriquez and Petersen—a trail that fades in the archives, as no further information on Sommer is available.
The figures later became part of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, initially catalogued as IC 528 before being corrected to IC 468. During the war, they were relocated, as indicated by a note referencing the town of “Celle”. With the museum’s re-establishment in 1963, the figures were incorporated into the Indian Department, where they remain today—identified as a “Mithuna image”—under the inventory number I 382.
Srirangam, India
Late 17th century
Ivory with ruby inlay, height: 20.2 cm
Museum für Asiatische Kunst – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Meena Kandasamy (born 1984) is a poet, novelist and translator. Her novels The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017) and Exquisite Cadavers (2019) focus on militant resistance to caste, gender and ethnic oppression. The Book of Desire, her translation of the love poetry of the 2.000-year-old Tamil classic Tirukkural, was published in 2023. In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), UK. Meena Kandasamy is the winner of the 2022 Hermann Kesten Prize of PEN Germany.