Lilies in the Garden of Tomorrow

Lilies in the Garden of Tomorrow is the story of the strength, resilience and tenacity of a woman bound by societal construct amid personal and political crisis in the run up to Independence in India.

 If that work of endurance, be not finished yet, do I want to escape it? No, Lord, no: never would I choose that choice of cowardice…

We have no doubt about Tomorrow: there is always something in the thought of our Father, more profound, more beautiful than anything we can imagine.

Who has described the Lilies that grow in His Garden of Tomorrow? Not even the angels of God.

Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

Almost a hundred years ago these words poured out of a woman crying for mercy before God. In her prayer room in Madras, robed in a pure white chattayam mundu and bent double over bible and her diary, she committed to endurance as an act of resistance --twice a day, every day, for five years.

Her oppressors were the British Empire and the powerful Dewan of the Maharaja of Travancore. Together, they shut down one of the largest independent banks in India and imprisoned its Syrian Christian directors, her husband among them. He was one of thousands in what is now Kerala imprisoned in the 1930s for connections with the movement for democratic reform and increased minority representation in government. He maintained his innocence and was punished severely, leaving his wife alone, ostracized, indebted and with eight children to care for, fighting for his release.

 Her name was Eliamma Matthen and it was her express wish that her story be told. Lilies in the Garden of Tomorrow traces  Eliamma’s struggle to maintain her mind, her faith, her family, and her community. It reveals the strength and resilience of a woman bound by societal constraint, unrelenting in the efforts brought to bear against the edifice of empire, culminating in a brief appearance at the pinnacle of governance.  

 It is reflection on the often unseen, untold, and undervalued role of women in crisis, both as witnesses to injustice and as active agents of creative resistance.

 This story, activated in visual practice for the first time, is not my work alone. It is the steady work of female collective memory. It began with Eliamma herself and the ten volumes of diaries (1938-42) in which she recorded her psychological, spiritual, familial and material struggles. It lived on in retellings by her children, and their children, and their children after them. It lived in photographs stored in brown paper bags by daughters and daughters-in-law one to another, in letters and drawings preserved and cherished, in family jokes and threats and tales shared in drawing rooms and kitchens, at baptisms, weddings and funerals, on high days, low days and holidays.

 I am a daughter-in-law of this house. Together with the family, I join Eliamma’s words with archival documents held in London, Chennai, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram, I join old black and white 2x3’s  of family made to send to a father in prison with newly made portraits made of family today, I join the still life of treasured objects of survival and the everyday practices of Syrian Christian culture. Together with family I explore the embodied dimension of memory within the studio, posture, proximity and gesture through which the past is carried forward. The images we made are not reenactments acts of relational mapping. They trace of the process of memory and its residues, bridging time and emotional distance.

 This work embraces interplay of memory, archive, photography, and embodied practice and holds them in dynamic tension. I chose to offer multiple entries into the story as a way of reflecting the nuances of reading history, the process of developing understanding. It is a way of showing my working out, and a way of allowing the reader to exercise their own criticality in triangulating meaning.

 Eliamma Matthen could not see her Tomorrow, and yet here we are in it, her lilies, living testimony to her strength. Lilies in the Garden of Tomorrow seeks not only to honour one woman’s story, but to open a broader conversation: about how women carry history, how female memory resists power, and how new futures might be imagined through acts of remembrance.

[The captions with these images are excerpts from the diaries of Eliamma Matthen.]