Navneet Jayakumar

Home
India
Keralassery
Navneet Jayakumar

Surrealist portraiture artist Photographer/Film Maker/Editor

05/11/2026

Portraits of London. London is the most diverse city I have lived in, and the people make the city what it is. It’s where most of us are far, far away from Family and roots and somehow find both in a strange land far away, sharing love, pain and a longing for home that paves the way to deeper forms of Unity and connection.

PHOTO OF - SAMU - ITALIA

AYAVA - POLAND

GARIMA - NEPAL

ZOI - GREECE

JOE - NIGERIA

LUIS - SPAIN

GRACE - SOUTH AFRICA

CORNEILIA - SWEDEN

KELSEY - USA

RONCH - ITALIA

AMI, ENORA - INDIA/FRANCE

ME— 📸 & Jacket - Jose Canepa

31/10/2026

Pictures of Rome, of people’s voices echoing through the ancient city. 24th October 2026

25/10/2026

I went to the Anti War protest in Rome and this is a photo/video essay of what I saw. The media creates so many convoluted narratives that side the people in power and at the end the truth just becomes lost in murky waters.

I am very sad that I am unable to participate in the protests in India like the cockroach I am but at the moment I am in Italy and I found the intention, the energy, the pain and the will to change the exact same here but manifested in a different form.

We’re witnessing universal shift in consciousness thats unprecedented around the world.

India, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, Italy and France are all experiencing the power of revolution.

The internal one evolution was unseen by many but the external revolution that it creates will rewrite history

“FISTS IN THE AIR IN THE LAND OF HYPOCRISY”

23/10/2026

2026 എന്റെ ഏറ്റവും മികച്ച തെയ്യം ചിത്രങ്ങൾ

My favourite Theyyam pictures from when i I went home in 2026.

For tha longest of times I’ve been kept away from exploring my roots through the rituals of home aka migration. For the past years I’ve been very much enjoying seeing my deepest ancestral values reflected on the core ideologies of Theyyam.

What remains now is but a shell of the original Theyyam values and purpose. Since the British branded theyyam the Devils Dance and banned the ritual which scattered the communities that it belonged to which consisted of lower castes, the stories, values, philosophies and most importantly the power of ritualistic protest that transcends the physical has been completely lost. Such is the fate of Oral traditions under colonial rule. Systematic erasure of roots and resistance in order to reduce the depth of the human existence to that of an animal without the ability to reflect on your own culture and history.

Feels like we are at the crescendo of these atrocities of the past. But we here reclaiming, relearning and rebirthing ourselves all over again.

FISTS IN THE AIR IN THE LAND OF HYPOCRISY.

21/10/2026

Portraits from the villages that are seldom visited in Manali. Most parts of Manali have become tourist traps to such an extent that it is a pain being there. But in the villages life, culture, roots flourish within the hearts of the people.
My time was filled with love and affection and hospitality that I have only found in very few places on earth.
As tourism slowly encroaches close to these villages, the essence and the purpose of life shifts slowly into the capitalistic turmoil that the cities find themselves in. What will remain ? Only time will tell.

16/10/2026

Sacred Geometry - Theyyam

The story behind these goes back to when I was trying to design a poster for my exhibition.
I have OCD when it comes to asymmetry in my pictures, the patterns and the complexities of the Theyyam costumes drove me insane as it just would not fit with the text on the poster. On top of that I was very unsure about wether it was okay to print a poster that was going to be stuck in as many places as possible in London, France and Italy as it depicts a god and culturally we consider it disrespectful to use the images of god without consideration.
That is how the first picture was born and became the face of my exhibition Beyond the Colonial Gaze, a deep dive into the colonial chains that altered the perception of rituals like theyyam in the minds of the people who it belonged to (including me).
These images are made using different mirroring techniques from my original photographs of Theyyam. I see sacred geometries and many many shapes and forms within these images and somehow I feel like they mirror the way I see the world and its hidden secrets and patterns that elude many for when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to be as it is, INFINITE.

10/10/2026

“Unfettered from the lies the eyes perceive, we march into the unknown abyss of surreal consciousness beyond reality but within creative magnetism thriving within us”
Most times I live in what feels like a world imagined for me by someone else. I refuse to conform.

BTW these are not AI. Just warped perspectives and surreal dreams of pictures I’ve taken throughout my adventures.

07/10/2026

In Longwa, I wasn’t just photographing another disappearing tradition.
I was looking at a version of my own story.
Perched on a ridge between India and Myanmar, Longwa carries the memory of a people whose identity was systematically reshaped by colonialism, conversion, and the idea that anything outside the Western imagination was primitive, savage, or in need of saving.
The Konyak once carried their histories through ritual, wood, metal, tattoo, language, belief, and oral tradition. Today, much of that knowledge survives in fragments, in objects, in stories, in the hands of the few who still remember.
Standing there, I kept thinking about home.
Every time I return, I see the same forces at work: our traditions made embarrassing, our histories made inconvenient, our indigenous ways of knowing replaced by Western constructs left behind by colonial rule. Not always through force anymore, but through aspiration, shame, modernity, and the quiet suggestion that progress means becoming someone else.
The colonial gaze doesn’t always look like conquest.
Sometimes it looks like forgetting.
Sometimes it looks like being taught to be ashamed of where you come from.
And sometimes it looks like calling the destruction of a culture development.
Longwa reminded me that this is not only a Konyak story.
It is a story shared by much of the Global South — including mine.
Perhaps decolonisation begins with remembering what we were taught to forget.
And refusing to be ashamed of it.

30/09/2026

I had the privilege to spend some time in the mountains in Manali couple months ago. The mountains carry feelings of a divinity that the world has lost and the people embody it through their way of living, traditions and their openness to welcome strangers.
Manali is being bombarded with mass tourism that is slowly killing the peace and transforming the landscape of Manali that used to be just mountains and forests into what I can only describe as a mass tourist paradise, unfortunately this is the case with the vast majority of India and the rest of the global south.
While tourism brings temporary financial gain it comes at the cost of the natural harmony that Manali is an adobe of.

15/09/2026

Theyyam is often presented through images of colour, costume, spectacle and ritual.
But what happens when we look beyond the spectacle?
What happens when we understand Theyyam through caste, memory, ancestry, land and power?
Kerala has a long history of caste hierarchy, where oppressed communities were denied access to spaces, resources and forms of authority that were reserved for those higher in the social order.
Within Theyyam, that order can be temporarily disrupted.
The performer becomes the deity.
A body that has historically been placed at the margins becomes a body of sacred authority.
People come before them, make offerings, seek blessings and listen.
But Theyyam is not only about this temporary reversal.
It is also about remembering.
Many performances carry stories of ancestors, communities, local histories, land and past struggles. These histories are not only preserved through written records. They survive through bodies, movement, music, costume, oral tradition and ritual.
This matters because whose history gets recorded — and whose history gets dismissed as “myth”, “folklore” or “tradition” is also a question of power.
A decolonial reading of Theyyam asks us to take these forms of knowledge seriously.
Not as something exotic to be photographed.
Not as a colourful relic of the past.
But as a living practice through which communities continue to remember, transmit knowledge and maintain lineage.
The body becomes an archive.
The ritual becomes a way of carrying history.
And continuing the tradition becomes a way of refusing erasure.
At the same time, we shouldn’t romanticise Theyyam as if it has somehow abolished caste. The ritual is temporary, and the caste structures outside it continue to shape people’s lives.
Perhaps that tension is what makes Theyyam so powerful.
It doesn’t simply show us a different world.
For a moment, it performs one.
And in doing so, it asks us to reconsider who gets to hold knowledge, who gets to be sacred, whose history gets remembered and who gets to tell it.

Address

കണ്ണൂര്‍
Keralassery
670001

Website

http://www.navsart.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Navneet Jayakumar posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.