In early 2024, Keerthana Kunnath was searching for a series to photograph in southern India when she came across the Instagram profile of a female bodybuilder in Kerala. “The second I saw it, I was fascinated to know more,” she says.
Kunnath was born in Kerala and understood the state as “quite a conservative space in terms of dressing and the things that women get to do. When I was growing up,” she recalls, “we were not allowed to wear short clothes. If you did, you were spoken about in the community as a bad girl.”
Through that Instagram profile, however, Kunnath found more women in the region who were defying disapproval from families and communities to pursue their bodybuilding dreams. Rather than photographing them in gyms, she took them outside into nature and, with the help of a Keralan stylist named Elton John, asked them to pose goddess-style on beaches and in forests.
Finding a serene backdrop in Bengaluru, where Chitra Purushotam, the woman in this photograph, lived, was a challenge. But they located a temple with a rocky outcrop where, early one morning when there weren’t many people around, Purushotam, struck a formidable pose. Her apparent effortlessness belies the difficulties she faced. Purushotam is a school teacher and “comes from a caste in India where they eat only vegetarian food,” says Kunnath. “She was telling me how her family was extremely against [her bodybuilding], mainly because she poses for competitions and has to wear bikinis.”
Getting muscly also invites objection. “Everyone starts with the whole talk about how you’re losing the beauty of a woman and becoming very masculine; your body is not slim enough. This kind of talk is quite common in India.”
That said, Kunnath – whose bodybuilder series Not What You Saw is currently showing at a biennale in Kerala – has noticed attitudes evolving. “Initially, none of their families were on board, but now, [with some of the women] winning championships at national and even international levels, I could see the shift in them. Slowly, the families are coming on board.”
Keerthana Kunnath’s Not What You Saw is part of the show Edam at the Kochi-Muziris biennale in Kochi, Kerala, until 31 March