Abstract:

This paper focuses on the mediated practices of representation in Januvinte Jeevita Katha (C. K. Janu’s Life Story) (2002) to examine how this life narrative undoes the presumption of transparent access to a speaking subject. This book is a short, fragmentary account of C. K. Janu’s life that takes us from her childhood to her youth – her participation and disillusionment with Left politics and entry into the public sphere of Kerala as a community organizer and a key figure in land struggles. It is labeled in the front page as a ‘biography’. Yet, the reader will encounter a first-person narrative that seems to capture the cadences of Janu’s speech. The writer of the book, Bhaskaran, is a painter and illustrator and there are multiple traces of Bhaskaran’s visual practice – especially his investment in producing visual and verbal sketches of people, places and objects in the pages of this book.

The dynamics between words and images, movement and immobility, that animates this multi-layered book allows us an entry-point to reflect on the materiality of book making and how it interlinks with the mechanics of the production of a political subject. This paper will explore the edges of Janu’s life narrative, such as the preface by Bhaskaran and the sketches of objects, animals and spaces that unfailingly appear in the corner of every page – in juxtaposition with the formal strategies of the narrative itself –to think through questions about life-writing, subjectivity and representation. The very form of conventional biography and portraiture come into a productive crisis here because the possibility of culling out a human form that stands separate from it’s surrounding is rendered an impossible one.

About the Speaker:

Navaneetha Mokkil is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Women's Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has previously taught at the Central University of Gujarat (Gandhinagar) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), where she completed her PhD in 2010. Her articles on the non-linear imaginations of sexuality have been published in the journals *South Asian Popular Culture* and *Inter Asia Cultural Studies*, and in edited anthologies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled *Unruly **Figurations: Cultural Practices and the Politics of Sexuality in India.*