Wearing Trauma on Her Sleeve: A Jumlo as a Witness and Recorder of Colonial Boundaries

Abstract

The RISD Museum recently displayed a jumlo (dress) made by a Nuristani woman, an ethnic group native to land that borders modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jumlo shows a deep connection to the geographic and cultural past of the region, with traditional embroidered solar and geometric motifs that mirror local pre-Islamic rock art. The textile also reveals how the maker is embedded in the cultural transitions of the mid-twentieth century, displaying coins that date from both before and after the British partition of India. As the British, Indian, Afghan, and Pakistani political interests were all involved in the delineation of political borders in the wake of British colonialism’s collapse, the shifting and dividing boundaries left a traumatic legacy visible in the material culture.

Now part of a museum collection, the jumlo continues to find these political borders unstable; as it—and other textiles from the same people—are variously labeled as Nuristani, Kohistani, Pakistani, Afghan, Indian, or Dardic. This continued confusion of attributions replicates and risks reinscribing the trauma of the imposition of political boundaries without regard to the cultural, geographical, and historical realities of the women who made the garment. Over 70 years later, this jumlo acts as a witness and documentor of violent processes in Central and South Asia, and can perhaps spark dialogue on personal choices, lives, and trauma within the area today.

Keywords:

• colonialism
• contact zones
• borders
• transnationalism
• Islamic textiles
• jumlo
• numismatics
• Nuristan
• RISD Museum

Notes

1 All quotes from Kipling are in the public domain and easily accessible online at https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk.

2 For more information, the Textile Research Centre’s entry on jumlo helps explain differences across the country of Pakistan, in particular. https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc/index.php/en/about-us/friends?id=100:the-jumlo.

3 Object file dated to January 28, 1999, for object 1998.88. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

4 Embroidered woman's dress (jumlo), Pakistan, c. 1940. A7210. Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, https://ma.as/188375.

5 For more information and imagery, Jason Neelis’ digital preservation project on the Hunza Haldeikish and Shatial rock formations gives extensive panoramic views http://heritage360.pk/#home-slider. Luca Maria Olivieri’s (1998) The Rock-Carvings of Gogdara I (Swat): Documentation and Preliminary Analysis also provides comparative examples.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isaac M. Alderman

Isaac M. Alderman (PhD, The Catholic University of America) is an adjunct faculty at Baruch College. He is the author of The Animal at Unease with Itself: Death Anxiety and the Animal-Human Boundary in Genesis 2-3 (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2020), and lead author of Is It Right for You to be Angry? (Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming). cua.academia.edu/IsaacAlderman. [email protected]

Tayana Fincher

Tayana Fincher (BA, Williams College) is the Manager of Public Programs at the Harvard Art Museums, and the former Nancy Prophet Fellow in the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum. She curated It Comes in Many Forms: Islamic Art from the Collection (October 23, 2020–December 18, 2021), which highlighted the pluralism of Muslim artists, makers, and Islamic subjects across time and geography. Her recent projects include articles for RISD’s publication Manual, a biennial Textile Society of America symposium, and the International Council of Museums. linkedin.com/in/tayana-fincher-123561b0.