The Inlaks-Asia Art Archive Art Grant seeks to support artists who demonstrate a critical and imaginative approach toward the archive as concept, system, and medium. This year, the Grant has been awarded to Aravind Chedayan, a Delhi-based multidisciplinary artist, folk singer, performer, and photographer. His practice revisits and reimagines the lived realities of subaltern life, weaving together themes of labour, the body, environment, sound, and music. His work delves into the nuanced experiences of marginalised communities, spotlighting their resilience, creativity, and cultural expressions often overlooked in mainstream narratives.

Aravind’s project for the grant “Kelkkane Kelkkane Ente Lokaru Koottam: Reviving the Sonic and Visual Archive of Kerala’s Nadanpattu” proposes to document Nadanpattu (folk songs) in Kerala, a musical tradition that embodies the collective aspirations of the caste-subaltern communities. Aravind proposes that Nadanpattu, encoded as they are with particular forms of historical experiences and local knowledge, are archival in nature. Nadanpattu signpost historical struggles—as an oral tradition passed down through generations, they exemplify the idea of the body as archive; the songs are recalled on various occasions of resistance by artists, activists, and collectives; and they find themselves accidentally archived across various registers of state-funded programmes.

Largely overlooked by mainstream intellectual discourse, Aravind’s project proposes to build an archive of this tradition as a way to establish its epistemological, aesthetic, and political significance, as well as to activate this tradition “in its capacity to act on the present.” Archiving, therefore, for Aravind, entails translating both the sonic possibilities and visuality of the Nadanpattu—opening up possibilities for transmuting them into resistant forms capable of speaking for new egalitarian and planetary imaginations.

The title of his project, “Kelkkane Kelkkane Ente Lokaru Koottam” translates from the Malayalam as, “Hear ye, Hear ye, My People, Amass.” It is derived from the song “Aanandam Paramanandam,”written by Brahmasree Subhananda Gurudev (1882–1950), the founder of the Atma Bodhodaya Sangham. A subaltern theologian, Gurudev’s song addresses the public at large, simultaneously confronting subjugation and resistance while offering a political and aesthetic framework for egalitarian praxis. It presents a cosmological vision that is both sacred and profane, particular and universal, historical and everyday.