Directory of the Outsiders (First Edition)

Indu Antony 

2023

Cotton, paper and print, Grass

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Directory of the Outsiders is a long-term research and photographic project that examines the little-known but deeply significant phenomenon of Themmadikuzhi—a segregated burial practice historically observed among Syrian Christian communities in central Kerala. Over seven years, the project traces the social, religious, and emotional contours of this tradition, which marked certain lives as unworthy of burial in sanctified ground.

My entry point into this history was personal. In 2017, when my aunt died by suicide, I first encountered the word Themmadikuzhi—spoken in whispers, weighed with stigma—as the family and church debated where she could be laid to rest. This moment of rupture opened a path into the unrecorded narratives of others who had been quietly excluded, erased, or denied the dignity of a “proper” burial.

The resulting book is both an archive and an act of resistance. It brings together fieldwork, oral histories, and fragmentary traces of those interred in Themmadikuzhi, alongside photographs that refuse to fully reveal. Each image is produced from the reverse of discarded passport-size portraits—placeholders of identity that, when held against light, do not disclose the face. This gesture echoes the way these lives were obscured: present yet unseen, documented yet unacknowledged.

Designed in the form of a Bible, the book deliberately mirrors the authority of ecclesiastical texts while unsettling the hierarchies they helped uphold. By embodying the visual language of scripture, it confronts the moral weight of a practice enacted in the name of faith, and invites a reconsideration of belonging, exclusion, and the politics of sanctity.

Directory of the Outsiders becomes not just a record, but a counter-directory—one that refuses silence, restores presence, and makes visible the stories that would otherwise remain buried.