“O you hair,” he said,
“It’s like ranclouds
Moving between
Branches of lightning.
It parts five ways
Between gold ornaments,
Braided with a length of flowers
And the fragrant screwpine.”
(Kapilar, Kalittokai 55)

Tamil poetry, in its long tradition, finds its earliest surviving origins in Sangam literature. Sangam, which translates to a confluence or a gathering, is named after the assembly of poets and scholars who met each year in Madurai, India, from 300 BCE–300 CE. Often standing in for what was lost in the historical record through successive crowns and governments, Arumbakkam tells us, “It’s our Shakespeare.”

Sangam poetry is categorized under two worldviews: akam, ‘that which is inside’ (in essence, love poetry); and puram, ‘outside,’ which consists of public, often political, poetry. Akam poems revolve around a prescribed set of anonymous characters, symbols, and, importantly, landscapes, in which these romantic minidramas play out. Of the five recurring landscapes—all named after a native flower—each represents a legible mode of romantic interiority: kurinci, or hillside (union); marutam, or pasture (unfaithfulness); mullai, or forest (hopeful waiting); neytal, or seashore (anxious waiting); and palai, or desert (separation).

Like rainclouds moving between branches of lightning takes its name from Kapilar, the most prolific of the Sangam poets. Arrumbakkam’s project continues a regional, centuries-long fascination with hair: “Bards, right from the Cankam era, have written effusively about desirable women with long, black, fragrant tresses. In these poems, hair is also the erotic landscape in which union and intimacy play out.”

A woman’s hair in Tamil Nadu–the subject of Arumbakkam’s photographs—holds incredible aesthetic and cultural weight, tied to centuries of traditions, customs, and negotiations. Grooming is read alongside regional standards and expectations around caste, respectability, and sexuality, carrying meanings ranging from mourning to promiscuity to honor. Stigmas around untied, “open,” or short hair worn by women are furthered by traditional Hindu religious practices preserved by conservative groups, who similarly frown upon shaved or tonsured heads worn by married women. With this cultural weight also comes centuries of elaborate and meaningful traditions of hairstyling; Arumbakkam photographs plaits (Pinnal, Jadai), buns (Kondai, Surul, Kuzhal, Mudichu), a knot (Mudi), tonsuring, open hair, and the dying art of tying (Alli mudithal). Hair remains revered across Tamil Nadu, but Like rainclouds moving through branches of lightning pays particular attention to women’s hair in rural parts of the region, where traditional stylings such as weaving and tying are maintained. As prevalent as hair is in the cultural imagination of Tamil Nadu, parts of its traditions are simultaneously at risk of disappearing as the region and country face rapid urbanization.

Arumbakkam’s project began in 2019 after visiting her family in Chennai. Across eight years, she traveled by taxi to rural villages, generally after an initial contact through her father (a retired missionary in South India), relying on the generosity and interest of village women to spread the word of her arrival and guide her from subject to subject. Knowing full-well the failure of political borders in representing the southern state of India, Arumbakkam uses the five emotional landscapes of Tamil poetry to organize her photographs. Acknowledging the impossibility of creating an exhaustive portrait of Tamil Nadu, she creates a romantic approximation through representing each of the interior landscapes.

Tamil poetry can be read as a formulaic blank frame; without names for the characters—He, She, Her Mother, a Passerby—the reader is meant to project themselves into the story, supported by a steady cast of recognizable symbols from daily life. In addition to an interior meaning, each landscape in akam poetry has associated gods, animals, trees, flowers; In their introduction to The Rapids of a Great River, Holmström, Krishnaswamy, and Srilata write in the many centuries of collected poems, “The Sangam poets never lose sight of the landscape that they know, and their poems are full of concrete and unforgettable details of the fauna and flora of Tamil Nadu,” a few regular examples of which include, “the black-legged white heron, the hen-eagle with its parched head and chisel beak, and the long arrangements of flowers upon cassia twigs.”

Arumbakkam’s photographs emanate this classical form, inviting the viewer to project their own memories and associations of hair onto her thousands of portraits of women facing away from the camera amongst, to those in Tamil Nadu, another familiar landscape. And, as much as we might project a politics onto the images—associating elaborate braiding with a state-wide suppression of women—Arumbakkam is as mystified by hair as the Bards once were, imbuing every image with undeniable romance and beauty, her own kind of descendant from the poets.

In his beloved The Interior Landscape, a collection of translated classical Tamil love poems, author Ramanujan remarks on the fundamental incompatibilities between English and classical Tamil; detailing his method, he concedes, “anyone translating a poem into a foreign language is, at the same time, trying to translate a foreign reader into a native one.”

Arumbakkam was raised in Tamil Nadu and currently lives in Chennai with her family, though she spent years away from home during her education. She tells us that beginning this project was a way of coming home and returning to her identity, which she had grown distant from in the years in between.

Introduction by the Editors.