Long before time fractures into hours, months, or calendars, there exists Akal—the non-time, the unmanifested threshold of the primordial mother Adyakali.

In Jinson Abraham's Kollavarsham 1202, she’s the enduring matriarchal presence around which all other forms gather. The Goddess of Kālam: the final arbiter and witness.

Arrayed around her are twelve soft analogue portraits, representing the twelve months of the Malayalam calendar, photographed using a Sinar F2 camera. In another frame their visual weights are orchestrated to form a monumental composition: twelve apostles celebrating a secular sisterhood bearing the historical weight of subjugation and resistance.

What connects these figures across time is a single piece of cloth—an element that in the Indian sartorial imaginary has assumed many avatars before it evolved into the modern stitched blouse: the Uttariya, a fluid veil draped across the shoulder; the Kanchuka, a tightly fitted bodice; and the Stanapatta, an unstitched chest-band tightly wrapped around the breasts.

In Jinson’s imagination, this fabric becomes an archive of memory.

In Kerala, the female body has historically operated as an arena of caste discipline, purity rituals, and feudal hegemony. From royal diktats levying adiyara, a tax on the very permission to wear gold and refined ornaments, to denial of the right to cover breasts for lowered caste women, marginalised bodies were systematically stripped of the right to drape, adorn, or conceal themselves.

This history of violence generated its own dialectic of resistance. In 1858, Arattupuzha Velayudha Panicker spearheaded the Achippudava strike, reclaiming the gold-bordered woven fabrics for the Ezhava women artisans who crafted them for dominant-caste Nair bodies. By 1859, Channar women led the breast-cloth agitation to assert bodily sovereignty. In 1915, Ayyankali’s Kallumala Samaram catalyzed Dalit women to tear off the stone-bead necklaces imposed upon them as markers of servitude.

It is this legacy of corporeal reclamation that Kollavarsham 1202 summons into the present. Each blouse worn by women in the twelve portraits begins as a single, unstitched length of cloth. These women do not perform history—they carry it, holding up a mirror to what was once denied, what was claimed through struggle, and what still waits, quietly, beyond the frame.