IF A CHILD is raised with the wonder of colour and light, the magic of ritual and the implicit spice of history, texture and material, she learns greatness. Fabric and thread artist Amita Makan never constructed the trajectory of her artistic life with predictability; she rose to a respectable level in her artmaking fairly late in her life. After a brief and beautiful career, Makan passed away from natural causes at just 55 years on 22 February 2023.
Hers had been a life of immense fullness and deep thoughtfulness and it was only in her mid-30s that she began to weave a grown-up narrative of artmaking that blended her aptitude for a wide range of research interests – from politics to culture, history to ecology – and her love of family, with oil paint and later, the stuff of embroidery and haberdashery. But drawing was never far from her heart, ever. Makan was deeply modest about her creativity but drew assiduously and fiercely all her life. She emerged into critical awareness in South African art in 2009 as an award-winner in the Sasol New Signatures art competition.
Between 2011and 2021, she mounted four solo exhibitions armed with a sensitive eye and a love for everything from vintage saris to metallic thread. In Makan’s eyes, hands and sensibilities, silk and organza, viscose and linen, nylon and crystals became her palette. Needles became her paintbrushes and a celebration of life, even in its absence, her platform.
On 19 October 1967, in South End, Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth) Makan was born into a fourth generation of South Africans descended from India. Schooled in Gqeberha, Makan was the third of four children.
She read English and Political Science at Rhodes University in Makhanda, graduating with her Masters degree in International Relations in 1993. She went on to conduct policy research at the University of Cape Town and the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria.
On the first day of the new academic term in 1990, Makan met Xavier Carim, the former South African permanent representative to the World Trade Organisation. At the time, Carim was in his first year of his Masters degree in International Relations. She was completing her Honours degree in the same field.
It was a blessed relationship that lasted 33 years, taking them both through the complexities of Makan’s mother’s breast cancer, dementia and death, the loss of her father in 2001, her brother Bupendra in 2006, her sister Nalini Makan Raga in 2018, and the challenges of working in connected disciplines together and apart.
In 1994, Makan was awarded a British Council scholarship and spent time at University College in London working on gender policy and planning. Carim and Makan married in 1998, and travelled, explored and worked in Paris and Geneva, London and elsewhere, eventually settling in Pretoria. But it was Carim and Makan’s trips to India that really fuelled her realisation of what she could do. These were trips in which she filled suitcases upon suitcases with thread and beads, as she filled her days with cramming in as many gallery visits that she could.
While she conducted brief visual art training forays at Pretoria University and Rhodes University with the medium of oil paint, she came to embrace the threads, fabric and textures with which she had been raised, as a meaningful medium as much about heritage as it was about identity and nostalgia. The saris that she had grown up close to became support and medium for her work. Carim recalls that Makan wasn’t a great sari-wearer herself. She constructed her own comfort zones in her dress codes; it was her sister, her mother, her cousins, her community who wore the saris.
It’s a standard cliché that if you take care of an elderly loved one who is afflicted with dementia, you lose a little of them every day. Makan memorialised her mother with several portraits in oil on canvas and ultimately, an embroidered portrait, lovingly made over the most devastating period of her life. Vasanti Dhanjee Makan was her name. She recovered from breast cancer but in 1997 developed early onset dementia at the age of 56. She passed away 12 years later in 2009. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, Makan celebrated her mother giving nuance and dignity to her life and legacy.
Indeed, portraiture was a pivotal genre in Makan’s oeuvre and her work in oil paint of luminaries such as Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela set the tone for her celebration of icons of the ilk of Mahatma Gandhi, Philip Tobias and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, works which embrace the texture of these people’s faces in a way that her earlier photorealistic paintings didn’t. Sewn on Indian cotton, with stitches as line work that embrace the texture of these beloved people’s features with a delicate yet robust touch, the works don’t stoop to cliché because of the process and the depth of understanding of these faces. And Makan was never didactic or two-dimensional in her reflections on her own work, displaying the back side of her embroidered pieces as happily as the front – the former, often more exciting visually in its sense of controlled discombobulation.
But a note about her portrait of Tobias, attests not only movingly to these values, where her needle and thread dance and bring his face to life, but in a comment she made about the work. She is at pains to acknowledge the photograph upon which the work is based and John Liebenberg, the name of the photographer, who took it. It’s a small point, but a huge gesture that shies from the pedantic and looks at the potency and meaning of ownership and her awareness of how art begets art.
Makan’s documented family legacy in South Africa reaches back to 1901 when her great grandfather, Makan Bhana, arrived in South Africa, armed only with his language and his shoe-making tools, and settled in South End, a residential area in Port Elizabeth. He was an artisanal master who made and repaired everything from shoes to saddles. Like a smous, he earned his reputation by knocking on doors and asking for broken shoes and other items which he could fix.
In the 1920s, he established himself as a general dealer in the area, and there, he grew the first two generations of his family in South Africa. But the bitter mantle of apartheid overshadowed their lives in different ways. By the 1960s, everything was up-ended with the Group Areas Act and forced removals in which people of colour were made to uproot themselves and re-establish their lives in areas designated by the apartheid powers that were.
Makan and two of her siblings were toddlers when the Group Areas Act reached their neighbourhood, and Makan held close to memories of the big Baakens River from which you could see the ocean. Their house was on a hill and in the garden, there was a stone sculpture of a lion, big enough for her to climb on, as a very tiny child. She nurtured memories of a great mulberry tree in that same garden, and how she and her siblings used to crush the mulberries into ice and relish them on a hot summer’s day.
Many years later, after the rich community history spanning generations had been scattered to the wind and the failing memories of elders, Makan and her father revisited the area. Not even that beautiful mulberry tree could be found.
Meeting the journalist Vidya Bhandakar, a sociologist and researcher into Hyderabadi culture, in the early 2000s sparked Makan’s research into her own lineage and deepened her artmaking processes.
“She did so much work during the Covid pandemic,” remembers Carim. “The upside of that whole time was being able to be at home with her every single day.”
Her sudden death devastated Carim, her younger brother, Roshan, and five nieces, Riya and Nirvana, Azzara, Larissa and Nikita and a nephew, Khiran. But the family cherishes the wonder and beauty she brought into their lives and they are working on a publication memorialising her and celebrating her oeuvre of close to 70 art works.