that had previously been obscured by a historiography enamored of elite cultures.107 They paved the way for scholarly focus on gender issues and more intricate entanglements, including women’s interactions across class and race, such as the impact of European women navigating between the colonial state and local populations in India in the nineteenth century, the differentiated roles of women in addressing issues such as child marriage, for example, and oppression of one group of women by another.108
Most women who make kantha in their homes seem to agree that kantha pata— spreading the layers of fabric to smooth them with precision to the right degree of tautness to create an even surface for dense stitchwork—is one of the most difficult aspects of kantha making. To spread the finished textiles that I encountered was no less of a challenge. I had to start with the most basic decision of how to orient myself bodily in relation to objects that now reside in museum collections. Of the two kantha that are the centerpieces of this book, one is displayed vertically behind glass in Kolkata (fig. I.14), and the other is now rolled between sheets of tissue in a storage drawer in Philadelphia, retired after the 2009–10 exhibition (fig. I.15). To imagine how they could have been opened up, viewed, and used in domestic environments previously, I turned to the generations of scholars before me, the accounts left by collectors such as Dutt and Kramrisch, as well as to patterns of use today. Through such endeavors, I learned to listen for the voices of women who have left only their names and tantalizing glimmers of their ambitions in their layering of fabric, secured by embroidered images, and pithy epigraphs (kantha atkano).
I began to understand that kantha are highly dynamic, sharing the improvisational quality of the conversations themselves and embodying individual agency and relational value. They can become repositories of memories of particular makers, givers, recipients, and owners, of the specific occasions when they were made, given, used, repaired, and preserved, and of the intricate networks of relationships initiated, activated, transmuted, or even challenged in the particular contexts of giving and using. The same kantha can thus carry a host of meanings—shared, divergent, or even conflicting—for the people who encountered or engaged with it. The accrual of associations is also an ongoing process, sometimes shifting subtly or even changing more dramatically over the course of the lifetime of the kantha. Observation of these intricacies, perceptions, proprieties, and variations in living communities informs the interpretation of the two kantha, in some ways more directly, while also reminding of the many dimensions of their ephemerality and tangibility that cannot be recovered with much specificity.
The theme of negotiating the proprieties and reciprocities associated with giving gifts sheds light on Manadasundari’s kantha in chapter 2 and provides useful direction for approaching the imagery through the lead offered in the stitched inscription. The imagery and inscription further offer the opportunity to ask how these objects participate in the articulation and mediation of gender roles and expectations in gift bestowal and reception. Such considerations also yield the possibility that its maker, Manadasundari, may have sought to make her presence felt through her handiwork in ways that we are only just beginning to discern.109 Such rich textiles thus allow for a convergence of multiple approaches to the study of material culture.
Ethnographic research also helped me to home in on the reflections of several older women who have made multiple elaborate kantha over their lifetime. Mulling on their personal processes and internal rhythms in making kantha, much like the introspections of women artists from other parts of the world, indicated the need to recognize the textiles as the externalization or visualization of a process of interiorization.110 They cherished the work of their hands (hater kaj) as meditative and therapeutic. It allowed them to return to their bodies, to reintegrate themselves, to cope with losses, and to gather strength through their hands into their bodies. Such musings have inflected my examination of Kamala’s kantha in chapter 3. I employ their observations to interpret Kamala’s claim about finding her place at the feet of the gods in her inscription in concert with her choice of religious imagery. Moreover, as visualized prayers lavished by Kamala, the embroidery holds the promise of protecting beholders in their embrace. In emphasizing interiority and embodiment in my reading of this kantha, I exploit the two case studies to suggest divergent directions, although in reality, both inevitably embody both inward and outward engagements.
The significance of touch in constituting their meanings, persistent across class and region in the conversations I recorded about kantha, shapes my interpretation of these textiles in specific ways. Touch insists on the corporeal. It relies on contiguity to function, keeping an embroiderer physically and psychically connected to herself through her materials and hands while at the same time expanding her sense of self beyond. Touch can mediate between her body and the textile and what transcends it, which can be understood as a yearning for divine contact. If the gift of a kantha must have been, to some extent, a desire for proximity, for conferring emotions, it would have renewed connection and contact through touch and a world of sensation that invoked the bodies of makers and recipients. Since skin and fabric are permeable interfaces between the inside and outside of a maker’s body, Manadasundari’s touch and feelings might have been communicated through the kantha as conduit as well as through her words and choice of imagery. Likewise, the layers of cloth would have been thickened by the bodies of recipients, through contact with another set of cutaneous boundaries that are also receptive to the malleability and textures of the kantha.
In textiles of such extraordinary visual coherence, it seems safe enough to assume that individual, familial, and social dimensions would have informed, to a greater or lesser extent, the embroiderers’ choices visible in their kantha. Motifs, narratives, and compositional elements including color, shapes, sizes, and stitch types that were selected by these needleworkers from the available repertoire are sophisticated acts of interpretation of forms shared with other media such as prints and watercolors. Their versions incorporate play with colors of threads, thickness of ply, textures, and variation in motifs or patterns. They create distinctive composites that modify earlier iterations and offer up startling or innocuous sequences and juxtapositions and other organizational relationships that highlight particular nuances among elements on a square or rectangular fabric surface. Comparative analysis yields glimpses into how needleworkers interpreted, individuated, reinforced, challenged, or subverted what may have simultaneously been coalescing across multiple visual, performed, and literary genres. Some motifs take on particular significance as dimensions of lived experience in homes and families, which were inherently part of the lives of the objects themselves, distinct from their iteration in prints, Kalighat single-scene water colors, or terra-cotta reliefs on temple walls. Because many of these narratives are known from other media that are typically assumed to be male authored (both European and Indian), the distinctions in the textile renditions are discernible through comparison, and they can yield clues to a woman’s construction of these episodes within her larger vision for the textile, whether a gift, an object for personal use, or dedicated to the divine.
Kamala’s familiarity, for example, with print imagery and turns of phrases from the literary cultures of the Gaudiya tradition under construction over the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly with their increased circulation in print at this time, is discernible when compared with these other media as discussed in chapter 3.111 Her kantha thus also attests to the active role of women in claiming Vaishnavism toward Bengali nationalist self-fashioning in the nineteenth century. Such textiles participate in the resurgence of investment in Vaishnavism in response to both colonial missionary polemic and the spate of conversions among the educated upper-caste Hindus and other emergent intellectual traditions such as the Brahmo Samaj, all anxieties that fueled the quest for authenticity. Although the textual dimensions of such agendas are now better understood, Kamala’s embroidered imagery and epigraph manifests the creative engagement of erudite women in these processes.
Together, these two kantha
