CARIBBEAN QUEENS

US-based Indo-Trinidadian artist Renluka Maharaj powerfully reinterprets the lens through which Indian women of Trinidad were viewed during the colonial era, via her embellished black and white photographs.

- Priya Kumari Rana

Trinidad-born, Brooklyn-raised Renluka Maharaj is a raconteuse, anthropologist, photographer, historian, and feminist rolled into one. She embellishes ‘found’ black-and-white photographs of Indians living in colonial-era Trinidad, as well as her own haunting portraits, with digital and acrylic art... The intent? To infuse life into the nameless, disenfranchised, and voiceless men and women who had been imprisoned, as it were, under the colonial gaze. And to do this, Renluka had to go back to her own roots.

A trained photographer, Renluka’s journey of self-discovery began in 2016, while she was in her second year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “I wanted to discover my history,” she says. “My parents were no more; I tried to find out where Nani and Nana were from, but oral stories are tricky—they keep changing.” In 2017, a 17-day trip to India organised by her graduate school changed her perspective. “I felt I belonged in India,” she says. But it’s in Kochi, Kerala that she truly felt at home, walking between concrete houses with their fancy gates and ornate ironwork, goats, coconut trees, and the sea. Kochi’s Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian population also reflected the multi-culturalism of her own Trinidad. A genealogy test revealed that she was 100 percent South Asian.