Unni–Dr Unnikrishnan Pulikkal–was my classmate and dorm-mate during the medical course. He had a keen interest in the arts right from his student days during MBBS, our undergraduate medical course, and was a wonderful painter. He told me about his switch to photography, though he continued to paint and make sculptures and other artistic creations. And In addition to creating art, he has created venues to display art; Unni, who hails from Kodakara in Thrissur district of the southern Indian state of Kerala, has started two museums in his hometown, in close proximity to the town’s hospital.  

The Art Museum of Love is one of the few museums in the world devoted to representations of love in art. When I said I wanted to visit, Unni gave me precise directions about reaching the place; it is located at the Azhakam service road about a kilometer from Kodakara town. The early December afternoon was hot. The climate has become warmer over the last three decades; temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius are now common during the summer. Climate change has hit Kerala hard.  

The art museum is delightfully air conditioned. I interacted with the two ladies managing the reception desk who told me that before I went in, I had to take off my shoes. I liked the design of the museum. Plenty of planning and thought had gone into the layout and the display rooms. The rooms are small and provide you with an intimate experience; the lighting is superb and highlights the exhibits. There are also spaces to sit and relax. You can read and reflect. The display boards provide detailed information about the exhibits, which were tastefully designed.  

Various types of love are addressed. Most of us are very familiar with romantic love. The love of a family, love between siblings and love between parents and their children and love of an extended family and society are also explored. Spiritual love is common in the Indian tradition. I could see a few of Unni’s paintings and photographs on display. Other art forms were also included in the exhibit. There were river stones sculpted by nature and others carved by skilled human hands on display. The driftwood sculptures fascinated me; in Nepal, I had a good friend, Dr Awate, who was fond of collecting driftwood as he hiked the hills of western Nepal. He mentioned that with some tender loving care some of these can become works of art.  

Ancient India had a liberal approach to romance and love. Traditional paintings had strict rules and regulations. Within these boundaries you were free to explore your creativity. Depictions of the Hindu God Krishna were prominent in the museum. Different traditional art forms from South Asia depicting Lord Krishna were on display. Artists consecrated their work to the lord, and Lord Krishna has been depicted in art forms and styles of painting throughout India. The diversity of these art forms makes them an interesting area of study. Tanjore paintings from Tamil Nadu are renowned for their rich colours and extensive use of gold foil. These have more detailed and regal patterns. Madhubani paintings from North Bihar (the Mithila region) use earthy colours and are usually done in geometric patterns with bold outlines (I was gifted a Mithila painting by Darbhanga Medical College in Bihar, India; the painting still hangs in my old office in Nepal). Rajput paintings are known for their opulent colour.  

Pattachitra is a vibrant art form that originates from the holy place of Jagannath Puri, Odisha, in eastern India. It is also extensively practised in West Bengal. Traditional Warli paintings– the Warlis are a tribe in Maharashtra near the border with Gujarat–of Lord Krishna were also on display as were Gond paintings of love.. Looking at these paintings I was struck by the cultural unity within diversity in India.  

The art museum has two floors and also has a section on erotic art that has a warning about the explicit nature of the material on display at the entrance door. Till today the public has been very accepting of this section of the museum. The museum also has a community space at the side where events can be organized. Several events have used this space; for example, the museum held a competition for letters and poems expressing love to be sent to the museum’s postal address, and some of the winning entries were on display. The Art Museum of Love has created Instagrammable objects and locations for selfies and social media postings. The website of the museum (Sneha Museum in Malayalam, the native language of the southern Indian state of Kerala) is https://lovemuseum.life/. The museum is also on various social media. 

I went with Unni to another museum he curates and manages. Photomuse is the museum of photography. Photomuse was inaugurated by Herbert Ascherman Jr., a renowned US photographer who mainly works in black and white and the rare art of platinum photography. He is the mentor and guide of Dr Unni and has contributed several pieces of his work to the Art Museum of Love and to Photomuse. This museum was in operation at a different location for a few years and in early 2024 shifted to a permanent location at Mattathur near Kodakara. The website of the museum, which has multiple features and offerings (including collections mainly devoted to cameras and photo equipment, a journal, programs, and a gallery showcasing various exhibitions previously mounted at the museum, among others), is https://photomuse.in/. During my visit the first gallery was hosting an exhibition titled “Silence & Chaos.” The exhibition had photographs by different photographers, some depicting silence and others depicting chaos. The major gallery hosts cameras and photographic equipment from various generations and time periods. The old pin hole camera, bellows camera, the auto focus film cameras, polaroid camera and SLRs using film are all on display. Each camera has a small descriptive note providing more information about the object. The pride of the collection is the large format Vageshwari cameras that were manufactured in India and were among the best field cameras in the world. My friend Sanjay Mhatre, an architect, had introduced me to large format cameras and these always fascinated me. The extensive collection is also documented online at https://photomuse.in/index.php/collections 

The museum holds exhibitions of photo collections periodically and these can also be accessed online. Photomuse has a good collection of old photographs; the museum has 1,765 antique prints in its collection. There are a few depicting the birth of independent India. I was intrigued by the photo of the old Cochin Forest tramways, which operated from 1907 to 1963 and enabled the transport of wood from the Parambikulam forest to Chalakudy town. The museum also publishes a journal both in print and online at http://journal.photomuse.in/  

The small town of Kodakara near the Thrissur-Ernakulam highway has two museums that are cultural icons and social gathering places. Dr Unni also has created an open-air art gallery on the premises of the hospital he runs in the same location. Unni, through his arts initiatives, reminds us of the close connection between art and medicine. There are several educational institutions around Thrissur and health students can learn about the close interplay between art and medicine at the museum. These museums and galleries have put Kodakara on the international arts map. So, the next time you visit Kerala, which some have called God’s own country, please do plan a trip to Kodakara. The place is not difficult to reach. The museums are open from 10 am to 6 pm Tuesday to Sunday (closed Mondays). In an increasingly bitter and divisive world, come discover the gentle and healing power of the arts and of love!  

Interview with the Uber-Talented Unnikrishnan Pulikkal, MD

Ravi Shankar Aug 6, 2024

Dr. Unni, a medical practitioner and artist, discussed his rural upbringing, passion for painting and photography, founding PhotoMuse, and balancing art with medicine.

I have been involved in the field of health humanities for more than seventeen years. The field initially focused on medicine but later expanded to involve other health disciplines. I started teaching medical students but have also been involved with nursing and dental students. I have also facilitated sessions for faculty members. My perspective on and comprehension of the practice of medicine have expanded because of this interaction.  

My interest in the field dates to 2007, when I enrolled in the PSGFAIMER Institute’s health professions education fellowship program (https://apply.faimer.org/prog/psg/) in Coimbatore, India. This fellowship comprised creating and carrying out a curricular innovation project (CIP) at my home institution in addition to participating in on-site sessions at the Institute. Combining my passions for teaching, literature, and the arts, I chose to create a medical humanities (MH) module for my CIP. I began by providing undergraduate medical students at Pokhara, Nepal with a voluntary program on medical humanities, which quickly became an area of emphasis for me. My colleague and I also provided a program for all first-year students at a brand-new medical school in Lalitpur, Nepal. I also led workshops on the subject at several Indian universities in 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic. We exchanged knowledge, and I learned about the many projects being carried out in Indian colleges. Traditional teaching and learning methods were of course then upended by COVID-19, which also gave online education a boost.  

 In developing nations there are fewer interactions between the ‘traditional’ humanities and the health humanities. Health humanities (HH) is still a developing discipline in India, where most states/provinces have specialized health universities with which colleges offering health courses are affiliated and involvement of humanities faculty in teaching the health humanities is low. In India, the former Medical Council of India developed an attitude, ethics and communication module that has now been taken up by the National Medical Commission. This module has created interest in the humanities among faculty of medical colleges, and there is now greater awareness of the discipline. A retired English teacher, Dr Radha Ramaswamy, and her team created the Centre for Community Dialogue and Change in Bengaluru, India. This organization offers Theatre of the Oppressed workshops for breaking patterns and creating change. They have facilitated workshops at several institutions in India and even in other countries. Workshops have also been offered in medical colleges. The organization offers periodic training-the-trainers’ workshops. Some medical college faculty who have been trained in these training workshops also facilitate Theatre of the Oppressed workshops. Online webinars and conferences have become more common.  

In Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, I began teaching medical students through films, and for the past ten years, I have been concentrating on this. We have presented seminars on this topic at various health professions education conferences in collaboration with others. I have written a few articles on the topic, and I recently worked on a module that used films to help undergraduate dental students develop empathy. 

The last two decades have seen a steady growth in health humanities in South and Southeast Asia and in other regions of the continent. Modules and sessions are being offered to undergraduate and postgraduate students. A few institutions are also offering electives in this area for medical and other healthcare students. HH has several benefits in the education of future health professionals. Health is inherently psychological, social, and related to history and culture. Modern medicine is dominated by technology, and the health system is inherently complex. Methods from the humanities and the social sciences using an interdisciplinary approach are required to promote sustainable interventions that can address the complexity of health and disease that may have origins in social, economic and other factors. HH can develop students’ capacity for critical reading and reflection, and they can then examine health and medicine in society, practice and their own lives; it may also inoculate students against the hidden curriculum (a set of norms, values and beliefs that are not explicitly taught but are learned at the institution) and loss of empathy that may occur in medicine. Doctors and other health professionals engage in a social contract to serve society. Health humanities can help to introduce the contract to students, encourage its exploration, and also introduce ethical issues and dilemmas.  

I have gained a deeper understanding of HH and its connection both to medicine and to the general humanities. A year and a half ago I became a member of an online global network for the health humanities, and the group in addition to health professions educators also has individuals from the arts and the humanities. I have realized that like medicine and the health sciences, the humanities have their own terms and descriptors, theories and concepts, and these may be difficult for health professionals to comprehend. The opposite is also true, as humanities scholars struggle with medical jargon. An open mindset and greater effort are required to address the gaps. In the developing world, the humanities and the health sciences diverge right after ten years of schooling and are mostly in physically distinct locations, yet many health care professionals still have a personal interest in the art of medicine.  

A variety of factors must be considered to treat illnesses and maintain health. The physical and genetic makeup of the individual, the socioeconomic status, social determinants of health, access to good quality healthcare, rational use of medicines, cost of healthcare and preserving the power of antibiotics are among these. Through my research and teaching in the health humanities I believe I have gained a more holistic understanding of a human being and of health and illness situated in culture, society, family and moral values. Today we have wearables and other devices that provide a constant stream of data that must be interpreted and converted to actionable insights. However, we have a responsibility to make sure that the essential humanity of our patients does not get lost in a sea of data. The humanities and the sciences can, should, and must work together to improve health and well-being.   

Web image by Giuliano Gabella on Unsplash

Dr Ravi: Good afternoon and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.  To begin, can you tell us something about yourself?

Dr Unni: I was Pulikkal Subran and Vilasini’s second son born in 1969. At that time Chettichal, the remote village in Thrissur district, Kerala, India where I was born, was a ‘pure’ village in the real sense, with all the features and richness of a remote countryside untouched by modernization.

Maybe I was destined to be alone while growing up. I grew up as an introvert. Spoke little; brooded always. Plants and flowers, bees and butterflies, birds and branches of sandalwood, dreams, and I – all grew up together. The silence was our language. Intimacy was our grammar. 

In 1986 I enrolled in the Government Medical College, Thrissur. Seven years after this (in 1993) was the most important phase of my evolution. I learned the simple truth that while friends are the greatest teachers of life and love, they are also, by the very nature of close friendship, able to “invade” your emotional and psychological space, to manipulate your thoughts, actions, and even perceptions of the world, sometimes even negatively.   At this time my tastes in the arts began to change; light music gave way to classical compositions and watercolors to oils and acrylics. Themes evolved from landscapes to surrealism, to abstraction and postmodernism.

Dr Ravi: What got you interested in the arts?

Dr Unni: Frankly, it was a natural activity for me, just like eating and playing, right from the earliest days I remember. I used to draw and paint from childhood days, continued it always. With more ‘education’, always informal, from my artist-teachers, the style changed, subject matter changed, and the materials changed. The most important change was the medium. My primary medium changed to photography from the late 1990s. I do paint even now, and make sculptures from found objects and granite, and create on-site installations. What keeps me attached to photography is its innate quality of making memories permanent, and its quality of refining my vision of the world.

Dr Ravi: You were a keen painter during your undergraduate medical days. Do you still pursue painting?

Dr Unni: Yes, I do. But I seldom exhibit. It remains mostly a private engagement. After opting for photography as my primary medium, I have been combining photographic printmaking with painterly practices like over-painting and over-drawing on photographs creating works of art that stay at liminal spaces, smoothening the distinction between painting and photography.

Dr Ravi: When and how did you get interested in photography?

Dr Unni: I got interested in photography around 1995, and I bought my first SLR camera a few years later; photography has occupied the major share of my expressive activities since then. At that time, it was my connection with nature and its beauty that attracted me to photography. I was always amazed by the transience of natural phenomena like light, the moon, and the monsoon. What attracted me was the fleeting moments in the natural world that had no permanence. I hoped to preserve those moments through photography. Later I understood that the transient moments must be transient to possess their innate elegance. This understanding took me to more of conceptual art photography wherein I had to tax heavily my imagination, execution, and labor-intensive processes in both analog and digital photography. Through this practice, I was trying to make my thoughts and memories into palpable objects that can last and stimulate me (and others) to make more meaningful art.

Dr Ravi: What were some key moments in your journey as a photographer?

Dr Unni: For a true photographic artist, every moment is a key moment, the only question being how sensitive he or she is in recognizing the true significance of the moment. As for my evolution as an artist, one significant point in time was my meeting with Mr. Vijayakumar Menon, an art historian and teacher, a relationship that lasted for decades until his passing a year ago. Some other people who influenced me as an artist were Mr. T.N.A. Perumal, a nature photographer and naturalist, and Mr. Theo Berends of the Netherlands, a fine art photographer. The single most important influence in my evolution was, and continues to be, my association and friendship with platinum photographer and photo-historian Mr. Herbert Ascherman Jr, of Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He mentored me in the nuances of black & white photography and analog photographic processes in his Cleveland studio. 

If you mean to ask about my achievements, I have had solo exhibitions in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the USA, the Film and Industry Museum in Germany, and a few group shows in Australia, the Middle East, and the UK, in addition to several venues in India. I received the title ‘Associate of the Royal Photographic Society’ from London in 2007 and a Senior Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in 2013. Along with some of my friends, I founded PhotoMuse – the Museum of Photography in Kerala, southern India, in 2014, the first of its kind in the country. What I consider the greatest achievement is my contribution to mentoring a new generation of photographers in Kerala and beyond, imparting to them the same edge of a new vision that I owed to my mentors, through various academic activities of PhotoMuse over a decade.   

Websites by Dr. Unni Krishnan Pulikkal

www.unnipulikkal.art 

www.photomuse.in

Dr Ravi: How did the idea of the photography museum (PhotoMuse) come to you?

Dr Unni: My interest in the arts and its history has taken me to many museums around the world. Most of my journeys, especially those I did in the company of my mentor Herbert Ascherman Jr., always focus on art and photography museums. This allowed me to understand how important museums are to preserve our cultural legacy, to spread awareness about the cultural and humanistic significance of art, and to appreciate how significant it is to instill goodness in the human mind through art, music, literature and other cultural practices. This becomes especially important in a world filled with falsehood, negativism, antagonism, and violence. It was this realization that fuelled thoughts of setting up a museum of photography – the PhotoMuse – that can over time become a repository of photographic legacy and become a universally accessible tool to impart cultural education and spread awareness about the environment.

Dr Ravi: Can you share some interesting facts about the museum and its inauguration?

Dr Unni: The ‘museum’ was, interestingly, begun in a 50 square foot space (yes, you read it right – fifty square feet!) under the stairs of the Sneha hospital, with one staff, one computer and a small rack, in 2014. Soon, we shifted to a rented building and later moved to two other rented places over 10 years. In 2023 we purchased land, redesigned the existing building into a contemporary museum, and shifted to this new place in early 2024. The museum now holds more than 15000 objects of photographic history and is growing! It now has a board of trustees, and around 500 active subscribed members. Mr. Herbert Ascherman Jr. who underwrote the museum and is an advisor to the museum flew in on very short notice from the USA to India to inaugurate the museum on 10th March 2024. 

Dr Ravi: You have blended the modern and the ancient in your house. Can you share something on how you constructed the house? And how you maintain it?

Dr Unni: My house is basically built in a traditional South Indian design. It was made with locally available natural materials like laterite and wood, mostly reused wood sourced from other ancient houses. The only space that you could probably call modern is my studio where I have photographic equipment, and the paraphernalia for printmaking. It also doubles up as an acoustically designed space for music and movies. 

Dr Ravi: How do you balance your medical practice with your photography and artistic interests?

Dr Unni: Even though my formal training was in modern allopathic medicine, not art, I am living now as a part-time medical practitioner. I practice medicine half of the day, and art during the other half. It goes in a highly synchronous way because the basic undercurrent in both streams is humanism. Medicine heals mostly physical illnesses; art promotes mental wellness. The feel-good moments of art practice help me balance the stressful hours of medical practice. The goodness of art nourishes my mind, and cultivates a more humanistic culture within, helping me recognize patients as ‘human beings with a problem’ rather than ‘cases with beautiful findings’. 

Dr Ravi: You have an open-air art gallery at the entrance to your hospital. Can you mention more about this gallery?

Dr Unni: Yes, the Open Art Gallery in a hospital is something rare in India, I think. It is a project by PhotoMuse Museum and sponsored by the hospital.  It was established in memory of Vijayakumar Menon, an advisor of the museum right from its inception. The gallery holds photographic and art exhibitions around the year, accessible 24 hours a day to the patients, bystanders, and the public at large. In addition to this, the hospital exhibits various works of visual art on its walls. Together, these works of art create a soothing ambiance that calms and eases ailing minds.

Dr Ravi: What are your future plans for the museum?

Dr Unni: We are trying our best to broaden its activities, enlarge its already good collection, widen its reach to different strata of society, and, if possible, rebuild the museum with more space and amenities.

Dr Ravi: How do you think arts should be incorporated into the medical curriculum in Kerala?

Dr Unni: Fascinating and relevant question! Medical professionals need to be exposed to more cultural spaces of the country to broaden their humanitarian outlook and increase their understanding of how people engage with that cultural space. This exposure to the humanities will strengthen medical professionals’ ability to make sensible diagnoses based on peoples’ socio-cultural backgrounds and deliver treatment with humanism at heart and hand.

Dr Ravi: Any other points from your side?

Dr Unni: As part of broadening my cultural activities, I have stepped into another new art project. In addition to the PhotoMuse Museum which holds my photographic collections, I am curating another art museum at Kodakara in Kerala. The Art Museum of Love, which opened for public viewing on June 10th, 2024, holds and exhibits most of my art collection. It is based on the theme of LOVE, and consists of pieces which I have collected over the last 25 years, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, fabrics, and more. I hope this museum will help more people understand the value of the emotion we call love with a vast spectrum of intertwined emotional threads, including friendship, parental love, romantic love, and sexuality.

Happiness to you!
Unni

Dr. P. Ravi Shankar was a classmate of Dr Unnikrishnan at the Government Medical College, Thrissur, Kerala and lived in the same residence hall with him. He has long been fascinated by Dr Unni’s work and visited him at his home in December 2023. 

Webphoto: Jodhpur Royal family, c.1910, Albumen Print, 300×260 mm, Unknown Photographer, PhotoMuse Collection

A Tale of Two Museums  

Ravi Shankar Mar 4, 2025

Unni, a talented artist and photographer, founded two unique museums in Kodakara, Kerala, celebrating love and photography.