Resisting Colonial Erasure, Reclaiming Ancestral Traditions
Words by Asha Sudra
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Resisting Colonial Erasure, Reclaiming Ancestral Tradition by Asha Sudra
As a child, infrequent trips back to London where my family lived, and a disconnect from the Desi community in Los Angeles, created a curiosity about my own culture that had me constantly digging into its exiled past. My great grandmother was the second to last member of my family who was adorned with the Mer practice of tattooing known as Trajva. I grew up staring at the tattoos along her arms, chest, feet, chin, and especially her hands in wonder of its meaning. The tattoos were mostly all dots, and were blown out (tattooing term meaning blurred and spreading because of the deep impact from the needle during the process). They speckled across most of her fingers, covering her knuckles, and flowed up her arms. Because she wore a saree daily, small glimpses of her chest tattoo could be seen along her collarbone, where her blouse crossed the saree draped over her shoulder. The blurred and faded past peeking through the present, surrounded by colorful embroidered and embellished silk fabrics.
Many regions of South Asia have different intentions and traditions around tattooing, but for us, members of the Mer tribe, it tells a story of life. Each symbol or set of dots represent different things from grains, to flowers, animals, bees, physical items, and some Hindu deities. It was a coming of age tradition for women and girls as young as 5 years old in the western region of India which is essentially now the area of Gujarat.
With a lack of physical abundance, ancient Dravidians, who were people that settled along the western coast and utilized trade with other communities as a means of redefining culture, like the indigenous Mer tribe, practiced Trajva. This art used the tulsi plant to make a paste that would become tattoo ink. The Mer people believed while physical goods like gold could not be taken into the afterlife, the tattoos, as protection, as armor, were forever.
When I was first wanting to research more about the meaning and history of my great grandmother’s tattoos, there wasn't much out there, and she had already passed on, so I couldn't ask her directly. A lot of my preliminary research began with asking my family questions. Most however really didn't know much about my great grandmother's story of getting tattooed or the history of the tradition. I learned it was called Trajva and went from there, first collecting as many photos as I could to chronicle the patterns and symbols she had on her body. After my grandfather passed away, going through bits and pieces of his things would become routine during trips back to London. My favorite was the shoe boxes full of photos from Africa and London. Highlighting not just the large family celebrations, but the day to day life and stories I had never heard. Each time I found a clear photo of my great grandmother, I would file it away to examine later. I also found a few websites dedicated to South Asian tattooing and was inspired to see others from my generation sharing the same curiosity I held in this indigenous practice.
When I turned 30, every time I found a new photo of my great grandmother’s tattoos, I started to stencil out on paper each region of the body (hands, feet, and chest). Trying my best to replicate hers exactly. Once I had the patterns completed and was mentally prepared to embark on the journey of full body Trajva, like the traditional process, I started the communication with my ancestors through tattooing on my hands and feet. While my Trajva is more precise and smaller than my great grandmother’s, looking at my hands gives me some sense of ancestry and familial connection that I had never before experienced. I am proud to wear it. Honored to be a part of the history of the indigenous Mer tribe while also acknowledging the fact that I am of the new generation trying to make sense of a diasporic identity that has many blanks, which has been erased by colonialism.
My family moved to East Africa during the 1900s from the region known as Gujarat. Through British imperialism, many low caste people left the sub-continent in search of opportunity. The British were looking for a way to increase their profits in East Africa by building a railroad, so they exploited low caste Desi people into moving to a new continent as low waged workers.
Decades later, my family was a part of the group of exiled South Asian that fled Uganda to refugee camps in England. Imperialism began to take a toll on the relationship between Africans and the Desi community. With rampant anti-blackness perpetuated by economic opportunity for Desi people, but not indigenous Africans, animosity began to grow at exponential rates as wealth accumulation became extremely disproportional. When the British left Uganda in 1962, a series of military coup d’etats and political assassinations left dictator Idi Amin to self declare himself ‘president for life’ in 1971. This began an 8 year rule of genocide. Amin targeted a number of groups, including disabled people, christians, women, and many others in his ‘Africa for Africans’ campaign. He barbarically killed and tortured over 500,000 people during his rule. In 1972, Amin exiled all South Asian people from Uganda. At the risk of brutal death, over 50,000 Desi people left East Africa. The displacement and diaspora of our people challenged the sustainability of certain traditions. In 2022 however, Trajva is still very much alive.
Grandma’s Hands
It smells like home in houses of strangers.
I feel her in my baby hairs.
These bangles, too small to ever come off,
vibrate during MRIs and it makes me smile.
At least some part of me
remembers the ancestry.
Remembers rose water
and mango trees.
Tribes of womxn with Trajva head to toe.
Remembers masla ratios
and saffron royalty.
by Asha Sudra
My grandmother’s sister, who we call Mami, was born in Africa, but when the Second World War started her family went to India. There, at the age of 5, her grandmother started to put Trajva onto her arm, but it hurt so much and she cried so they stopped. Later, when she came to understand its meaning, they finished both her arms around the age of 7. After the war they returned to Africa. She would come to be embarrassed because of how school girls would talk about her tattoos. So much that she began to hate it. She would talk about how she would do her best to cover herself. To shrink. To find places to hide her indigenous skin from others. Covering sun kissed tradition and protection with colonial school uniforms of doubt and disdain. After the Ugandan exile, in the UK, when she got older, she had one laser session to remove as much as she could. Her son had heard about how much she hated it for years. When they saved up enough money, he drove her to the nearby city to have one session. Even though the dots remained faintly on her skin, because of the financial cost and physical toll, she would settle for only the partial erasure of her culture. Something once held as protection and armour, now a faint reminder of the otherness she feels from torment. Imperialism and European beauty standards created such intrusive thoughts that she questioned her own ancestry. When she saw my chest years ago, she told me she didn't like it. Something she had once asked for with pride and honor, knowing the pain she would endure, was now something she saw as ugly. Years later, now, she sees mine and appreciates that I wear it proudly. She, however, still doesn’t like the faint marks that reside on her skin. Shadows of ancestry faded.
My generation seeks to honor Trajva again. Over the years, what seemed like an individual curiosity has become a generational one. Something conjured deep inside me, once spinning from lack of information and access, now finding space in a digital dialogue. Social media has allowed a global connection of diasporic children to engage in exploration of this long faded indigenous art; many people inspired in sharing similar curiosities about their nani, baa, grandmothers, and aunties. With the emergence of South Asian tattoo artists, like Heleena Mistry and Ciara Havishya, have also created the emergence of those willing to explore ancestry not only through knowledge, but through tattooing and integrity.
Cultural shifts and diasporic migration force communities to determine what traditions remain sacred at exponential rates all the while existing in a neo-colonial state.
The balance of honoring something sacred while confronting the appropriative and reductive way Desi culture is looked at by the West is a constant challenge. Historically, South Asian culture is inundated with exploitation from the west, where ethnography is reduced and simplified for the sake of white consumerism. This creates a familiar challenge to authentic self preservation as a generational product of the diaspora. Reclaiming ancestry through tattooing creates a permanence in history that allows stories to be remembered intergenerationally. For posterity, the diaspora calls on us to ink our history into the afterlife. We find linkage in shared scars turned art. We find celebration in trauma turned joy.
Credits
Asha is a queer, disabled, multidisciplinary artist, abolitionist activist and educator, and child of the East African Desi diaspora currently located in the Bay Area of California. Her Tedx tells her own personal story of identity through poetry and her latest book release, Not Your Masi’s Generation, tackles mental health and healing from generational trauma. Asha consistently uses her platform to voice out against injustice and to speak up for those who have been marginalized and silenced for centuries.
Further Reading
Spoken word Poem Cultural Graffiti by ASHA
Not Your Masi’s Generation Virtual Art Exhibition
Asha’s Website
Asha’s Instagram account
