'Black Mother'

A thousand years before
Common Era, language Tamil was commonly spoken in ancient Tamilakam (present
Tamil Nadu, Kerala, parts of Karnataka, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Lakshadweep
and Northern Sri Lanka) and the region had begun developing its own unique
identity. Generally considered as the Iron age (1000BCE – 300BCE), this period
saw much growth in the socio-political cultural arena. Starting this period
onward many a poets and composers created hymns and poetry in praise of the
ruling kings. 

Approximately, three hundred years before Christ (3rd century BCE), a cultural collective (Sangam) was formed in ancient Tamilakam, to record and commit to writing these hagiographical works that had so far been maintained in the form of oral tradition and to create new literatures. This was also the time when maritime trade and cultural exchange was at its peak owing to the knowledge of monsoon winds, the influences of which could be seen in the art, architecture and literature. 

This period starting three hundred years before and ending three hundred
years after Christ (3rd century BCE to 3rd century CE) is
considered by historians as Sangam
Period (Early historic/classical) and the Literature composed/compiled during
this period is called Sangam Literature.

"Black Mother is the continuation of Azad’s cultural search for the archetypal Mother image, the Goddesses of the 4th century, the Goddesses of the 20th-21st century, and the Mother Goddesses of pre-history are the field of his study.The point is to encounter the reality in the primordial nature of this pre-historic popular icon

"that is Mother, within the context of time within. The biological ancientness boils into the blackness of the photographs, exploring the utmost human possibility of the medium of Photography. The black here ceases to remain a color in order to become the darkness of the Garva Greeha, the womb." - 2003, Kabita Mukhopadhyay, Artist and Independent Writer

"These oracles in the various stages of trance, can be seen stomping around, sword in hand, in convulsive movements of frenzy. Weird-looking in their hysteric outbursts, the women oracles are part of the temple functionaries who devote themselves at the service of these unique customs and rituals observed in the temple that are related to ancient and possibly, pre-Brahminic mother goddess cults. Though the atmosphere is charged and overwrought with a kind of

"This becomes clear when the oracle series is read alongside the other series called “Goddess” – both challenging the accepted notions of the cultural stereotypes of feminine subjectivity in relation to the female body. Though the frame itself emphasises frontality of point of view, the figures in the former are at times partially left out or cut at half length or are silhouetted but, however, are invariably

"seen with their ritual accoutrements like the anklet, the sword, the string of bells around their waist, etc. These part objects (as partial drives, in the Lacanian sense) evoke a specific referential field in the whole range of Azad’s work as the metonymic image."
- 2007, R. Nandakumar, Cultural Historian

"His images reveal the inherent drama of frozen movement. The most striking aspect of his photography is the concept of “Darshanam”, intended to dramatize the viewer to experience the enigma coupled with the voyeur’s fear of the sacred – mother archetype.
His eye for detail captures

"the aura, smell and sounds of this ritualistic experience. . He reinstates a Dravidian identity of the matriarchal society. The artist also transcends his own identity to feel faith beyond religion and to live through this immaterial human experience and look beyond the image." - 2003, Suresh Jayaraman, Artist and Art Historian

"she inflicts self-torture, has culture-specific and trans-cultural phallic associations, to follow the argument of David Shulman in his study of the local Tamil versions of the Mahishasura Mardini myth.  Considering the fact that the occasion is also marked by the loud and uninhibited singing of frankly erotic songs replete with pornographic details, especially by women, the psycho-somatics of trance as the interface between devotion and deviance, mark a form of gender transcendence and switching of identities through the

"bodily experience of the ritual. The withered and world-weary look on these abject faces that is unrelieved by even the ritual trappings that attest to their sanctified status, makes of them less of any divinity than what is discreetly suggested of their socially marginalized existence." - 2007, R. Nandakumar, Cultural Historian

"Turning his attention to the mother goddess worship in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Azad started taking ‘feminist rituals’ within the subaltern Hindu contexts as his point of departure. A series titled ‘Black Mothers’ came out of this engagement. Interestingly, as Azad does not make any claim about his theoretical or political

"leaning based on his images or interests, these works are not taken by the literary inclined feminist theoreticians for further studies but I am sure that is going to happen in the coming years." - 2016, Johny ML, Cultural Historian