Indian ink

A lot of our ancestors had tattoos and that's quite surprising. People don't really know what the tattoos on their grandparents mean. A number of archivists have come up in India in the last 10 years who have felt the need to document this, question their grandparents, and also to look into their communities' histories through the tattoos that they no longer have. Here is a tradition that we have lost but it's something that we now consider so trendy." Naman P Ahuja, editor, 'Indian Tattoos; Only Skin Deep?' talks to Manjula Narayan about traditional Indian tattoos from communities as varied as the Baigas, Pashtuns, Todas and the Nagas, the vanished south Indian tattoos recorded by LK Ananthakrishna Iyer in the 1930s, why people yearn to mark their lover's name on their body, tattoos as talisman, caste markers and adornments in this world and the next, the colonial encounter and the disappearance of traditional tattoos among many groups, and why it's harder to reconstruct a history of Indian men's tattoos