![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
In this paper I study a set of late-colonial kantha quilts as sites of recuperation. In the first section I situate kantha and its shifting meanings within the wider field of cultural productions in nineteenth-century bengal. I argue that through kantha embroideries upper caste women participated in Hindu cultural nationalism while recuperating a sense of self. I briefly follow speculative trajectories of kantha’s surfaces and contents to further look for the social world of collected kantha makers. I continue to examine kanthas made by elite women as objects of recuperation inflected by women’s authorial voices and everyday gendered negotiations, and as sites of inscribing the self in relation to the sacred. I end the paper with the contention that while some women embroidered im/possible worlds to recuperate from effects of colonialism and patriarchy, others sought comfort in translating emergent ideological underpinnings of the elite class onto the kantha surfaces.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the two anonymous Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture reviewers for their feedback. I am also grateful to Prof. Rebecca Brown and Prof. Sylvia Houghteling for their indispensable suggestions and comments, and to Prof. Srila Roy for her constant encouragement.
Notes
1 Eastern region of colonial India. Part of present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.
2 Kantha is a form of embroidery, domestic art practice, found in the Eastern region of India. The quilting technique of kantha is used by the women of Bengal to make functional pieces of textile—domestic and ceremonial—indispensable to the everyday life of the region. These quilts were traditionally made from discarded saris, pieced together by threads drawn from the paar (border) of saris.
3 See Aitken (Citation1999).
4 For a brief history of Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch’s life and work in India see Barbara Stoler Miller’s (Kramrisch and Miller Citation1983) biographical essay in Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected works of Stella Kramrisch.
5 A set of rhythmic invocations performed by the women of Hindu Bengali households mainly to invoke goddesses such as Lakshmi, Manasha, Chandi, amongst others.
6 A form of votive ritual.
7 Traditional floor designs made by women using a mix of rice powder and water during festivities. See Tagore (Citation1995).
8 Here I draw on feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young’s (Citation2005) formulation of “ambivalence” as a key concept in construction and reinterpretation of home and objects after their preservation is undertaken by generations of women.
9 Here I draw on Hirsch and Smith’s (Citation2002, 15) definition of cultural memory, “Always mediated, cultural memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they transmit memory.”
10 For a compendium of district wise kantha technique see Ahmad (55Citation1997)
11 See Saloni Mathur’s (Citation2007) India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display.
12 See Trouilloud (Citation2017) for Kramrisch’s location within and contribution to the Bengal School.
13 A type of kantha used to wrap books and other valuables in.
14 Songs of blessing comprised of long invocations made to goddess of snake Manasa.
15 Follower of Shiva.
16 Based on Hunter’s (Citation1883) report The Imperial Gazetteer Of India (as cited in Sarkar and Rasasundari Citation1999)
17 See Pika Ghosh’s (Citation2010) article “Embroidered Ramayana Episodes on Kantha Textiles from Bengal” for a detailed review of embroidered retelling of episodes from the Ramayana in kantha quilts.
18 Rama’s brother in the epic poem. Since Kramrisch assessed this particular kantha as “an inferior work of art” (1949), my contention is that the maker attempted to copy the quartet from a Kalighat painting as the embroiderer has clearly modelled the characters after the members of the Bengali gentility, evocative of the Kalighat style. Cross-legged seating positions, the charpoy and hand fan are all telltale signs of the babu culture. Perhaps due to limited space and skill, the embroiderer had to make Lakshmana sit on the ground instead of keeping him upright, as is seen in the Kalighat painting. The tail-like snake, a continuation of the episode from Manasamangal, on Lakshmana’s right side speak to the embroiderer’s deft improvisation through its unique dual toned (blue and green) line work.
19 The erstwhile ‘woman question’ was bolstered during this period by the reformers. Trailblazing legislations centered around women and family were passed during this period which included banning of widow-burning that took place in 1829 followed by legalisation of widow remarriage in 1856 and determination of minimum age of marriage in 1860.
20 Swadeshi movement focused on homegrown produces to replace the onslaught of colonial industrialisation with swadeshi brands. For a brief overview of swadeshi art in Bengal, see Mitter (Citation1984).
21 See An Empire of Touch (Saha Citation2019) for an account of gendered political labour in East Bengal under the British Raj.
22 For a detailed account of the making of craft discourses in colonial India, see McGowan (Citation2009).
23 See Tanika Sarkar’s (Citation2001) Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation for an in-depth study of non-reformed women’s desire for knowledge which often contradicted and elevated the project of Hindu cultural nationalism.
24 See Kaamya Sharma’s (Citation2019) essay tracing the legacy of elite women’s projects of sari revival in post-colonial India to the Nivi sari being popularised in late-colonial Bengal by a woman from the Tagore household.
25 Referred to densely patterned kantha; a coinage made popular after the ballad Nakshi Kanthar Math (A Field of Embroidered Quilt) by Bangladeshi poet Jasimuddin was published.
26 Manadasundari Dasi’s kantha has a string of Bengali text embroidered on the surface, which reads, “ei sajni [sujni] jangal bandhan nibasi barada kanta basur kanya ami srimati manadasundari dasya mama haste prastut purbak sri dutt pitathakur mahashaye ei sajni pranam purbak dilam shabhyagan mahashayera je trati [truti] hay map kariben”. [I, Srimati Manadasundari Dasi, daughter of Barada Kanta Basu, dweller of Jangal Badhal, present this sujni which is made with my own two hands, to my father to honour him. Gentlemen, kindly forgive any mistakes that may have been made.]
27 See Judith E. Walsh (Citation2004) for an account of the making of a twentieth-century Hindu woman through a review of domestic manuals from the colonial period.
28 Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s (Citation1997) ethnographic research shows that these songs criticising Rama, were in circulation in rural Bengal through women’s oral tradition long before poet Chandrabati decided to collect and publish them as Ramayana. She interprets the translation as a song of shared collective tragedy of women retold through Sita’s ordeal in the epic poem.
29 A mystic saint from Bengal, under whose auspices Gaudiya Vaishnavism cohered in the region to oppose caste system. Members of lower caste communities and women joined this movement in large numbers.
30 A narrative genre performed solely by women in Hindu households especially during festivities commemorating local goddesses such as Chandi, Manasa, Lakkhi and so on.
31 Widely available in South Asia. In Krishna’s hagiographies many Radha-Krishna trysts have taken place under these trees.
32 For a discussion on kantha and terracotta temples of Bengal see Ghosh (Citation2009).
33 The river Brahmaputra, known as Jamuna in Bengal, joins river Ganga in Bangladesh as Padma. The Ganges-Brahmaputra deltaic region cuts across Western and Northern parts of India, and the state of Bangladesh. Nabadwip is situated at the confluence of Bhagirathi, a distributary of Ganges, in West Bengal, which forms the western boundary of the delta.
34 See Banerjee (Citation1986) “‘Prangan-biharini rasabati’: Unish shataker Kolkata’r lokasanskritite mohilashilpi.”
35 See Manfredi (Citation2014) for a study of tree of life motif in kantha embroideries.
36 The tumultuous years between 1905, the year of Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal, to 1911, the year of its annulment, deepened the anti-colonialist sentiments and the nationalistic movement in Bengal solidified.
37 A group exhibition curated by Salima Hashmi paying tribute to textile artist Priya Ravish Mehra.
38 Rafoogari is a traditional restoration method used to preserve old pashmina shawls from Kashmir, known as Kani shawls. A variety of invisible darning stitches imitating the warps and wefts of the worn out shawls along with pieces of rags are used by Muslim men in Northern India to conjoin, embroider and give new life to the ragged pashminas. See Mehra (2004).
39 Amongst others, see Sehdev’s (2020) paper on how the plasticity of crochet provides fleeting moments of respite to survivors of domestic violence.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Debarati Sarkar
Debarati Sarkar is an artist and researcher. She has completed an M.Phil in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University. She is interested in women’s visual and material culture, feminist epistemologies, the archive and domestic objects. [email protected]