Every society has something in its history that it is ashamed of — rituals, customs, rulings, governance, or even protests. Most civilised societies document these as part of their history so that the younger generations can learn from the mistakes made by their forefathers.

But in India, the tendency is to hide such incidents or bury them.

An exhibition of paintings by artist T. Murali, under way at the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi Art Gallery in Kozhikode, is a bid to excavate buried aspects of the past and analyse them rationally to reveal the hidden agenda behind such attempts. A series of around 30 paintings by Murali go through various instances in the history of Kerala and India and even Indian mythology to bring out the injustice meted out by the Hindu Brahmanical caste system towards the people of lower castes and even other religions.

Descriptions

The descriptions attached to each of the paintings are a result of Murali’s long years of research into the root of each social problem in the country.