Jasimuddin himself came from rural Faridpur, a subregion that has come to be recognized as the heartland of kantha making in the nineteenth century.80 Perhaps inspired by his mentor, Jasimuddin turned to depictions of rural life and nature in his creative work as a poet, dramatist, and songwriter.81 His best-known work, the narrative poem Nakshi Kanthar Math, translated into English as “The Field of the Embroidered Quilt: A Tale of Two Pakistani Villages,” carries forward the themes of these textiles making domestic spaces, and affirming emotional ties. He contemplates the potential of reading kantha as autobiography, and kantha making as constructing the self by imposing order on life experiences and emotions (see chapter 1). At the same time, Jasimuddin gestures toward the agency of these objects. He is also prescient in recognizing the needle as no less powerful than his own instrument of choice.82
The artist Jamini Roy (1887–1972) called attention to the distinctive features of kantha on canvas. An exuberant innovator, he turned to kantha along with alpana, pata (scrolls), terra-cotta relief panels, and other local practices from his home in rural Bankura in the western corner of modern West Bengal.83 In the concerted search for forms and styles to create a new Indian art, his experiments display familiarity with the kantha themselves and careful observation of their motifs, the distinctive ways of creating motifs, and those features that were celebrated in nationalist dialogs about kantha. To simulate a kantha fragment in The World of Kantha (fig. I.16), he rendered the distinctive placing and spacing of the running stitch in opaque watercolor on an off-white background the color of worn white cotton cloth, with stains and discolorations. He selected some of the most popular motifs that survive on the older kantha from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.84 Anchoring the lower corners are kalka motifs that were immensely popular on kantha (fig. I.14, I.32), where they may have found their way from embroidered jamavar shawls from Kashmir and from Scottish woven ones. Characteristic of the symmetrical organization of most kantha, two sets of riders, a pair on elephant back and a single rider on a leopard, complement each other on either side of a flowering shrub.85 Each form is inscribed within strong contour lines in bold colors, a convention that distinguishes kantha embroidery.86 The central plant arises from what appears to be another bush at its base, with floral configurations like those at the corners of the two kantha examined in chapters 2 and 3 (figs. I.14, I.15). The translation of embroidered petals in brushstrokes mimic the careful juxtaposition of running stitches to create the tapering form of each petal opening out from the center. Painted variations in texture suggest manipulations of thickness of ply and number of embroidery threads that could have been used to stitch the fullness of the flowers. The movement achieved through striations of colors of threads from one petal to another by kantha makers is also translated through brushstrokes of contrasting colors. The shifting effect of light on textile is suggested in the careful shading of the yellow flower at the base of the plant. If such close observation of kantha offered inspiration for painting, the endeavor surely also monumentalized the textiles themselves.
I.16. Jamini Roy, The World of Kantha (ca. 1950). Opaque Watercolor on Canvas. Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainsborough, FL. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Needham, 1987.1.56. Photograph courtesy of the Harn Museum of Art.
Despite the varying nuances and complexity of their engagement, these political and intellectual giants made kantha synonymous with Bengal itself. Their convictions contributed also to a craft-oriented vision of an independent India, collecting its textiles for display and institutionalizing the production of things that had once been made at home. Although kantha never acquired the profile of khadi (handspun and handwoven cloth) and the charkha (spinning wheel) in representing the struggle for economic self-sufficiency and independence from “Manchester” cloth, they quickly entered the National Museum and the National Handloom and Handicrafts Museum in Delhi, and subsequently, the National Museum in Dhaka.87 Here, they came to play a critical role in fashioning the aspirations of nascent nations. As Bangladeshi nationalism championed kantha in the resistance to Pakistan, the textiles garnered far more international visibility. High-profile NGOs infused new energy into the production and commoditization of kantha, and an era of “boutique kantha” was inaugurated.88
KANTHA AND THE MARITIME TRADE IN COLCHAS
The quest for an authentic Bengali art driving early scholarship about kantha neglected the complex history of relationships between these domestic textiles and the older embroidery practices associated with the region. For example, colchas, a corpus of embroideries created with silk threads—luxury commodities for the flourishing longdistance maritime trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—share significant affinities with kantha in construction techniques, embroidered motifs, and aesthetic choices.89 These quilted bed covers, hangings for walls, doors, balconies, and furniture including tables, church altars, sarcophagi, and ecclesiastical vestments are best known from European collections, acquired by such luminary seafarers as Vasco Da Gama and patron figures of the Renaissance including Francesco de Medici, grand duke of Tuscany.90 Not surprisingly, relationships between kantha and these trade textiles, with their complex production processes that included transmission of underdrawings from European prints for design elements, were beyond the scope of the early nationalist scholarship that positioned kantha as repository for a pure Bengali identity and the ground for burgeoning nationalisms.91
The visual relationships between kantha and the heavy white cotton colchas were first observed by John Irwin, keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1959–78). In his attempt to identify the Bengali and Portuguese elements of colchas in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Calico Museum collections, Irwin began to discern relationships in style, aesthetic, and motifs between the two bodies of textiles, and to these he brought the terra-cotta temple imagery of Bengal to make a case for a Bengali origin for a particular subset of colchas.92 He recognized an aesthetic sensibility shared across colchas, terra-cotta panels, and kantha in the preference for grids to organize surfaces and bold outlines to articulate motifs.
Although colchas produced in Bengal were initially associated with a monochromatic palette—yellow silk chain-stitch embroidery, for the most part, on a white, undyed, cotton field (figs. I.17, I.22, I.25)—likely the legacy of the early documentation, a significant variety has emerged as recent scholarship has brought greater numbers of textiles to attention.93 These include colored background cloths such as indigo-dyed blue silk, variations in techniques for assembling the large textile surfaces, multiple embroidery stitches, and vibrant colors of embroidery threads (figs. I.18, I.27). Together, this range in technique and style points to greater visual similarities with kantha than had previously been recognized. In turn, such resonances offer the possibility of imagining bodily repositories of technical knowledge, internalized through habituated practice and distilled over generations, to begin to bridge the divide that separates the later colchas from the earliest kantha.
The expanded repertoire of seventeenth-century colchas suggests greater resonances in the organization of large embroidered textile surfaces with nineteenth-century kantha. The variety of lines, patterns, and motifs
