Making Kantha, Making Home. Pika Ghosh
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of domesticity and the character of women, it entered the repertoire of women’s education in both England and the colonies.74
Making useless things useful, moreover, acquired a political valence in the years leading up to the Swadeshi movement, the nationalist economic strategy to boycott British goods in order to promote domestic production, and the resistance to the 1905 Partition of Bengal. By 1905, domestic rituals were claimed for the nationalist cause to encourage women across a wide spectrum of classes and regions to participate alongside their reformist spouses. Ramensundar Trivedi, for example, called for arandhan, the practice of eating uncooked foods rather than lighting the kitchen fire, usually associated with rituals, such as the observance of the first day of the monsoon. It was framed in terms of a vow (brata) associated with Lakshmi, the local goddess of prosperity (Bangalakshmir brata-katha), now in the service of the nation. The goddess had to be wooed through rituals of arandhan, rakhi-bandhan (tying thread bracelets on the wrists), and abstention from foreign goods, particularly machine-made cloth. The image of a golden Bengal was concurrently envisioned as vistas of ripe rice fields and identified with the body of the goddess to counter the reality of economic privation attributed to the exploitations of colonial rule. Kantha, created for the celebration of vows in rural areas of Bengal, were thus claimed to participate in fabricating a domesticity that was both modern and patriotic.
By 1928, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Pather Panchali, one of the most popular Bengali novels from the first half of the twentieth century, had placed kantha squarely in the making of homes and selves:
In the eastern part of Horihor’s compound there was a thatched hut, which had lain unrepaired for a long time. It was there that the old woman lived. On a bamboo peg hung two dirty garments, the torn ends of which she had knotted together. She did not sew nowadays because she could no longer see to thread her needle; so when her clothes tore she tied knots in them. To one side of the room there was a frayed grass mat and a few torn baby quilts, crude patchwork affairs. Some torn clothes, which were all she had, were tied up in a bundle. It may be that she was saving them to make into another baby’s quilt. But she had no need for quilts now and even if she had her eyes were not strong enough to stitch the rags together. Yet she kept them with great care; and whenever there was a sunny day during the monsoon she took them out and aired them in the sun.”75
The emphasis on taking care of kantha, not only making or using them, had clearly become naturalized as the work and lives of women by this time. Conversely, constructing her life and her shrinking world in this way gives Indir Thakurun purpose as she ages and becomes less useful to the household, unable to make kantha any more.
The histories assembled around the same time also reinforced the association of kantha with Bengal itself. Dinesh Chandra Sen mobilized kantha for the cause of swadeshi resistance, to attain self-sufficiency through the boycott of foreign goods, particularly machine-made textiles, the making of which was recognized as a disastrous economic drain. A prominent historian of Bengali literature and founder of the Bengali department of Calcutta University, Sen dexterously wove material from his reminiscences of travels through the region in his compilation of histories of various cultural practices with the prevailing nationalist ideologies.76 In his monumental historical account, Brihat Banga (Greater Bengal, undivided Bengal), Sen’s pronouncements are succinct:
Rich was the Bengali when he did not eat sweets from the bazaar or wander through shops to find exquisitely carved wood. To make a kantha usually took six months, but we have heard of kantha that grandmothers began stitching, mothers spent a lifetime working on and passed along to their daughters to complete. These invaluable works, which are no longer to be found, hardly cost a rupee or two. The money that we spend chasing German and Japanese shiny wares would have procured ten such kantha. We are a defeated nation, but it is not political defeat that I find as regrettable as the loss of values in the misplaced maze of foreign goods.77
The power of craft is inextricably interwoven with values—the labor of love, investment of time, and connection of generations within the multigenerational family of a joint family system. Such valorization carries forward the trajectories established in anticolonial nationalist scholarship from the second half of the nineteenth century. This construction is achieved by juxtaposition with machine production. A contrast is implicitly set up with the abundance of industrialization. A subdued aesthetic and shabby genteel culture of handmade goods is endorsed over vulgar consumption, as represented by the sheen of machine-made wares. Elaborately stitched kantha are thus strengthened with moral and ethical vigor. Yet as much as he locates domestic kantha within households and the hands of multiple generations of women, Sen’s reflections also testify to an aspect of commoditization; they could become available for purchase, an observation likely based on his own encounters with such material.
Two illustrations culling recognizable elements of kantha embroidery accompany Sen’s text.78 Each is a pastiche assembled from patterns and motifs, likely drawn from his personal kantha collection, which has not survived.79 They display a deep awareness of the compositional and organizational strategies visible on kantha surfaces. They also play with the aesthetic and rhetoric of patchwork visible on many kantha surviving from the nineteenth century, with the surface segmented by elaborate patterned grids that frame individual vegetal or figural compositions. Both anchor popular kantha motifs around a central lotus, the most popular of organizational devices. Figural vignettes such as an elephant and a horse rider fill the field, along with floral and kalka (paisley) borders. The drawings simulate the deliberately pastiche-like juxtapositions of many nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century kantha, while demonstrating a range of motifs and styles.
Sen’s collection was assembled to a significant extent by the acquisitions made by Jasimuddin (1903–1976), one of his favorite students at Calcutta University. 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