corpus. The array of embroidered male and female figures in kantha, clearly differentiated by class, age, marital, and professional status, can disclose how households are imagined and families and domestic relationships negotiated in the communication from a married woman to her father. Conversely, what is not chosen for visualization on a gift that is relatively public, perhaps sent from one household to another as much as one individual to another, is equally useful for attending to the constraints of communications in the form of a textile of substantial size that was surely to be viewed by many people, perhaps on particular occasions, when meanings could potentially be further tailored to the specific conditions of each viewing act. Textile articles may create or inhabit ambiguous spaces, reinforce social proprieties, or vacillate between emotional, familial, and community registers. They might engage in shared or dissonant sensibilities that exemplify the contingent quality of notions of social relatedness, and complicate assumptions about what is intimate or personal or shared.
The domestic spaces that such textiles typically inhabited are not necessarily restrictive spaces where women were sequestered. Rather than the binaristic language of ghare baire (at home and outside), terms that gained currency from the later decades of the nineteenth century as the roles and status of women and marriage were debated publicly and legislated, it is perhaps more useful for understanding these conveniently portable things as a notional realm of shifting boundaries, shaped, in part, by multisensorial assemblages customized for various uses from daily to life-cycle rituals.112 If monumental structures such as temples yield clues to specific historical ideologies and practices of kingship, courtly culture, theology, and religious institutionalization, kantha offer equally potent material foci for recuperating perspectives on notions of home and how these, in turn, configured the contours of individual imagination and identity and constructed family lore and lineages across class and locality.
Juxtaposing materiality and imagery with strands of personal narratives reveals possibilities for unraveling the threads of seemingly discrete biographical moments to explore the half-hidden social and cultural transactions through which these textiles are empowered. With their intimate details of human relationships in and out of households, articulated in a visual vocabulary that is at once shared and an intensely personal vision, kantha thus offer possibilities for taking textiles seriously within the scope of the discipline of art history as it expands and deepens.
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