href="#ulink_a27e393d-91c5-5715-8f75-442fa954bb50">I.14). Gurusaday Museum, Kolkata (GM 1481). Photograph courtesy of Shubhodeep Chanda.
I.24. Seated man with hookah, supported by an attendant. Detail of kantha. Attributed to second half of nineteenth century. Kolkata. Gurusaday Museum, Kolkata (GM 1575).
I.25. Peacock amid vine scrolls. Detail of colcha with red embroidery. Attributed to seventeenth century. Bengal. Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Inv. 4581.
Interpretive choices involved in the execution of the same motif through stitch sizes, orientations, and the spaces between them also reveal similar approaches across kantha and colchas. Peacock plumage, for example, is constituted through the juxtaposition of discrete tail feathers, each composed of a single vane terminating in circles for the eye, with barbs spreading on either side. Individual feathers are then stacked adjacent to each other in rows, heeding the integrity of each feather rather than overlapping them, to fill the luxuriant tail stitch by stitch (compare figures I.25 and I.26). Within such parameters, variations abound, arising from each embroiderer’s choices for color, spacing, and ply, for example, resulting in significant differences in the overall aesthetic. The fundamental similarities in interpreting such motifs, however, suggest that ways of doing things and technical knowledge shared among embroiderers could have been handed down over the generations that separate the later colchas and the earliest kantha.
As more colchas are examined and the variety in stitchwork is uncovered, greater similarities with kantha technique and style can be discerned than was previously appreciated when colchas were associated predominantly with monochromatic chain-stitch embroidery that was densely packed to fill a motif.101 Continuous, graceful lines in back and running stitch on some later colchas, for example, when used to outline figural forms and render border patterns, can create a linear aesthetic that resembles that of some kantha embroidery (figs. I.27, I.28). Such affinities are more noticeable when the stitchwork on colchas is not used to fill inside the outline of a motif, and when thread colors are limited. It is also useful to keep in mind that from the back, both chain and back stitch resembles the running stitch closely. Consequently, as more inner layers and backs of colchas are examined, similarities with the aesthetic of continuous lines of running stitch embroidery on kantha can be recognized.
I.26. Peacock and kadamba tree. Detail of Kamala’s kantha (figure I.15). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Stella Kramrisch, 1994-148-705.
Such resonances in construction techniques, motifs, and aesthetic belie the segregation of domestic embroideries from the travels of textiles across the vast expanses of colonial consumption and the desire for exotic luxuries. Instead, they point to a rich legacy of embroidery practices to which nineteenth-century kantha makers were heirs. The visual resonances across these corpuses suggest that Bengali women embroidering kantha in the nineteenth century participated in the knowledge accumulated over the generations that separate them from the colchas created in the seventeenth century, even if we have yet to understand the processes of transmission.
I.27. Backstitch lines in red and yellow silk thread. Detail of colcha. Attributed to seventeenth century. Bengal. Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Inv. 112.
I.28. Backstitch lines used to create a figure within an architectural frame. Detail of kantha. Attributed to second half of the nineteenth century. Bengal. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, 2009-250-13.
LISTENING FOR WOMEN’S VOICES
Kantha have not been subjected to sustained visual analysis, nor have they been culled as material sources for women’s creativity and the rhythms of their domestic lives. This book approaches the textiles as rich visual archives for complicating our perceptions about a vibrant, tumultuous, and minutely scrutinized period in Bengali history. The project also seeks to understand the processes whereby such resonances have become steeped physically within the textiles that survive, how they have coagulated in memories and perceptions of individual fabric articles as these have been handed down, along with the objects themselves. The study thereby nuances the broad sweep of earlier writing that celebrated kantha as the fabric of nation building and the scholarly literature that constructed a canon for South Asian art.
In my earlier work on these textiles for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition and accompanying catalog, Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal, I encountered a range of material across homes, both rural and urban, elite and impoverished, that allowed me to appreciate the embeddedness of ordinary things in people’s perceptions of their lives and selves. I heard women say, “This is what we do.” Such pithy, matter-of-fact observations underscore how making and using kantha is so deeply ingrained in their lives that it requires no deliberation. Ordinary kantha, repurposed from discarded clothing, are used, repaired, and then recycled into cleaning rags and diapers until the base cotton fabric disintegrates beyond repair.102 These glimpses into the everyday lives of such textiles somewhat destabilized my understanding of kantha based on the examination of colonial-period material in museum storage vaults. For the most part, the latter are beautifully designed and dexterously embroidered, far removed from the patterns of mundane domesticity, if indeed they had ever participated in such daily use. Such extraordinary textiles had survived over a century either as heirlooms that anchor families, or had changed hands along the way and entered collections. As my research developed, I began to understand how the acquisition of exceptional textiles into collections, together with the practices, perceptions, and the language of the everyday, had undergirded the ideological quest for nationalist ideals in kantha from the turn of the nineteenth century. This book is, in part, an attempt to probe the relationships between the different kinds of textiles and the narratives I heard in homes to those emerging from nineteenth-century debates around art, craft, and the nation.
This study focuses on the earliest kantha that survive from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, although in my attempts to make sense of this older material, I have turned to many others created over the twentieth century that reside in homes as cherished heirlooms and in collections. For the most part, the parameters of this study are also restricted to household practices of kantha, conceived broadly. More specifically, this study turns around two objects that display some of the finest technical execution and conceptual sophistication. Yet they testify to the domestic lives of cloth articles in their imagery, inscriptions, and marks of wear and tear. They are therefore useful for pondering a particular intersection of the two ends of the divide between “high” and “low” (or “folk”) that still pervades art historical practice and the worlds of art museums and collecting despite the numerous interventions to disturb such hierarchies in the past few decades. Manadasundari’s kantha was collected by the Indian Civil Service officer Gurusaday Dutt during his travels through the Khulna region of southern Bengal (fig. I.14). It now enjoys pride of place in the museum devoted to his collection at the outskirts of Kolkata. The second, Kamala’s
