close ties with Gandhi’s rally for swaraj (self-rule).
The recuperation of kantha, along with kirtan (devotional songs), alpana, and brata (vows), toward consolidating Bengali identity in the face of the region’s proposed partitioning, was inflected by such diverse agendas. Kantha became firmly ensconced in a romanticized, pure, rural imaginary, the foil to colonial modernity in the prodigious literary output of the first quarter of the twentieth century.57 And they became inseparable from Indian nationalism, from swadeshi as it was imagined in Calcutta. As with other local practices in imperial or colonial contact zones, the attention bequeathed to kantha highlights the politics of domination and subjugation.
At the same time, kantha became imbued with magical qualities. Long-standing associations of kantha with rags and poverty—and intertwined with it, the bodies of mystics (Bauls, fakirs, and bairagis) and their rejection of worldly ways—lent easily to such interpretation.58 Chaitanya, the Bengali saint who had come to be understood as the personified divine, is repeatedly imagined draped in a kantha, perhaps protecting his vulnerable body, which was famously prone to ecstatic fits.59 A well-known song of Lalan Fakir, the best known of the Baul (a marginal mystic-minstrel community), captures the elusiveness of the spiritual quest as one that is experienced bodily and transmitted through bodily contact through kantha: “Listening to Lalan Shah’s emotional state gives one a headache / But wrapping oneself in Lalan’s torn kantha keeps the cold away.”60 Rabindranath Tagore in particular was drawn to such poetic imagery in the search for local cultural practices to stage anticolonial resistance.61 The interest in practices such as kantha, shared by Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, coincides with investment in indigenous mystical expressions drawing conspicuously on shared imagery or denouncing the limitations of both.62 As the fissures between Hindus and Muslims threatened to take on ominous proportions, a shared textile practice in the domestic sphere offered a tangible body of material and symbolic power to espouse commonalities and mobilize public sentiment toward a “Bengali” identity. Kantha can thus be located in the intensified search to transcend communal investments and to test the limits of empire around the time of the first partitioning of the region that was proposed in 1903 and implemented in 1905.
But shrouding kantha in mysticism and bestowing a sacred genealogy also obscured locally understood distinctions between several related textile conventions across a region that was larger than France.63 Stella Kramrisch, for example, constructed a chronological narrative in 1939 about valuing rags to further her argument about restitution, wholeness, and cosmic integration:
In the Kanthā, the symbolic action is equally in the embroidery and its material. It is embodied in its texture by restoring wholeness to rags, by joining the torn bits and tatters and by reinforcing them with a design of such a kind that when a Kanthā is spread out, it unfolds the meaning on which life is embroidered.64
Through a strategic sequence of analogies from Rig Vedic visions of the universe as a fabric woven by the gods and the Buddha’s tattered robes, she sought to bequeath these domestic fabrics legitimacy in cosmopolitan artworlds, and by association, with a more widespread spirituality beyond the mundane spaces that the textiles typically inhabited.
The conflation of kantha with value and virtue percolated deeply through corpuses of children’s stories, gathered in printed form as the preoccupation with textbooks and education emerged to the forefront of nationalist thought. One of the best known, Abanindranath Tagore’s Kshirer Putul (1895), the miraculous tale of a boy modeled from condensed milk and animated by the goddess Shashthi, participates in such idealization of kantha.65 At the same time, the story underscores the potency of kantha as inseparable from women’s lives, their bodily and emotional solace, and from central concerns defining their social status such as fertility. In the tale, Duorani, the king’s first wife, whom he had abandoned for a younger, gorgeous, second wife, is banished from the palace. Implicit in such a scenario is the misfortunes of women who could not successfully bear children to secure the patrilineage. The older queen has little leverage in the social networks of the court as she did not have a son to confer stature upon her, and she is repeatedly portrayed lying on the floor of her hovel with a kantha for comfort, in marked contrast to the younger queen, who is draped in exotic gems, golden fabrics, and other luxuries. Meanwhile, the kantha, holding the tears of the abandoned first wife, witnesses her trials and tribulations. As the story unfolds, the besotted king realizes that he is unable to fulfill his younger wife’s insatiable greed and sees the error in his judgment and treatment of the loyal, elder queen. Duorani is finally rewarded in a tale that entwines kantha with poverty, hardship, and female virtues such as unswerving loyalty, resilience, compassion, and nurturance.66
The return to rags and the rhetoric of poverty as ethical and spiritual wealth was a strategic espousal on the part of an educated elite. The comparison between the good and evil queens surely alluded to the political disaffections on the ground and perceptions of a rapacious and capricious ruling elite, an impoverished and ostensibly helpless Bengali population, and the promise of restitution. Further, issues of infertility and inheritance were at the core of the first widespread challenge posed to British authority in 1857; the British refusal to acknowledge the rights of adopted heirs had incited several north Indian local kingdoms to mobilize their troops.
At the same time, however, these influential narrators acquired kantha collections that belie the romantic image of noble, or humble, rags. What survives from the collections of the Tagores, Gurusaday Dutt, Stella Kramrisch, Dinesh Chandra Sen, and Asutosh Mukherjee are exquisite embroideries, displaying concerted labor, skill, planning, and imagination. Today they form a significant majority of museum holdings across the world. Looking back, it is easy enough to recognize a notion of “taste” shared among this cosmopolitan urban elite.67 It was reaffirmed and replicated as these collections inspired the more institutionalized production of kantha that emerged hand in hand at centers such as Kala Bhavan, the school of arts of Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University at Shantiniketan, and the women’s samitis (associations) established by social reformer and educationist Saroj Nalini Dutt.
I.15. Kamala’s kantha. Attributed to nineteenth century. Collected by Stella Kramrisch. 95.2 × 95.3 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Stella Kramrisch, 1994-148-705.
Their narratives, moreover, elide the complex processes of acquiring textiles that once belonged in homes and families, often with the names of makers, recipients, and personal messages in visual and textual stitched form. As they laid the groundwork, creating awareness through collecting kantha, housing the material in newly established museums and curating exhibitions, ironically, the voice and valorization of kantha as a women’s spiritual practice was predominantly from an elite male intellectual cohort. As art historian Debashish Banerji has reminded us, Abanindranath Tagore acquired material for such work from the women of his intimate family circle in the Jorasanko household and through observation of the practices of its women.68 Likewise, the pioneering efforts of Saroj Nalini Dutt toward institutionalizing vocational training for women, including sewing, weaving, and embroidery, is hardly a footnote in studies of Bengali history;69 the enthusiasm of her husband, Gurusaday Dutt, on the other hand, is noted assiduously in analyses of women’s upliftment efforts. If the scholarship on the manifold collaborations between colonial anthropologist and native informant has been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny, such intimate alliances equally complicate the prevailing picture of male scholars speaking on behalf of vast numbers of women, who remain unacknowledged, and often unnamed. Furthermore, if predominantly male-authored ideologies were projected on the body and sphere of influence of Bengali women, not all Bengali women were so privileged. Rather, it was unambiguously the woman who was married, bore children, and took care of the family and household.70 Younger girls, prostitutes, unmarried or widowed women, and other women who did not fit the dominant image of the Bengali woman as wife and mother were excluded from the idealization
