I.16. Jamini Roy, The World of Kantha (ca. 1950). Opaque Watercolor on Canvas. Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainsborough, FL. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Needham, 1987.1.56. Photograph courtesy of the Harn Museum of Art.

      Despite the varying nuances and complexity of their engagement, these political and intellectual giants made kantha synonymous with Bengal itself. Their convictions contributed also to a craft-oriented vision of an independent India, collecting its textiles for display and institutionalizing the production of things that had once been made at home. Although kantha never acquired the profile of khadi (handspun and handwoven cloth) and the charkha (spinning wheel) in representing the struggle for economic self-sufficiency and independence from “Manchester” cloth, they quickly entered the National Museum and the National Handloom and Handicrafts Museum in Delhi, and subsequently, the National Museum in Dhaka.⁸⁷ Here, they came to play a critical role in fashioning the aspirations of nascent nations. As Bangladeshi nationalism championed kantha in the resistance to Pakistan, the textiles garnered far more international visibility. High-profile NGOs infused new energy into the production and commoditization of kantha, and an era of “boutique kantha” was inaugurated.⁸⁸

      KANTHA AND THE MARITIME TRADE IN COLCHAS

      The quest for an authentic Bengali art driving early scholarship about kantha neglected the complex history of relationships between these domestic textiles and the older embroidery practices associated with the region. For example, colchas, a corpus of embroideries created with silk threads—luxury commodities for the flourishing longdistance maritime trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—share significant affinities with kantha in construction techniques, embroidered motifs, and aesthetic choices.⁸⁹ These quilted bed covers, hangings for walls, doors, balconies, and furniture including tables, church altars, sarcophagi, and ecclesiastical vestments are best known from European collections, acquired by such luminary seafarers as Vasco Da Gama and patron figures of the Renaissance including Francesco de Medici, grand duke of Tuscany.⁹⁰ Not surprisingly, relationships between kantha and these trade textiles, with their complex production processes that included transmission of underdrawings from European prints for design elements, were beyond the scope of the early nationalist scholarship that positioned kantha as repository for a pure Bengali identity and the ground for burgeoning nationalisms.⁹¹

      The visual relationships between kantha and the heavy white cotton colchas were first observed by John Irwin, keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1959–78). In his attempt to identify the Bengali and Portuguese elements of colchas in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Calico Museum collections, Irwin began to discern relationships in style, aesthetic, and motifs between the two bodies of textiles, and to these he brought the terra-cotta temple imagery of Bengal to make a case for a Bengali origin for a particular subset of colchas.⁹² He recognized an aesthetic sensibility shared across colchas, terra-cotta panels, and kantha in the preference for grids to organize surfaces and bold outlines to articulate motifs.

      Although colchas produced in Bengal were initially associated with a monochromatic palette—yellow silk chain-stitch embroidery, for the most part, on a white, undyed, cotton field (figs. I.17, I.22, I.25)—likely the legacy of the early documentation, a significant variety has emerged as recent scholarship has brought greater numbers of textiles to attention.⁹³ These include colored background cloths such as indigo-dyed blue silk, variations in techniques for assembling the large textile surfaces, multiple embroidery stitches, and vibrant colors of embroidery threads (figs. I.18, I.27). Together, this range in technique and style points to greater visual similarities with kantha than had previously been recognized. In turn, such resonances offer the possibility of imagining bodily repositories of technical knowledge, internalized through habituated practice and distilled over generations, to begin to bridge the divide that separates the later colchas from the earliest kantha.

      The expanded repertoire of seventeenth-century colchas suggests greater resonances in the organization of large embroidered textile surfaces with nineteenth-century kantha. The variety of lines, patterns, and motifs on most colchas and early kantha are marshaled to create a symmetrically balanced field (compare figures I.17 and I.18 with I.19). The majority of extant examples from both groups of textiles organize the square or rectangular surface with a prominent central motif, which is framed within panels and borders extending to the edges of the fabric. The corners are often also marked with distinctive motifs, sometimes set within roundels or variant forms. Colchas display figural motifs such as the Judgment of Solomon (fig. I.22), the pelican feeding its young, the double-headed eagle, architectural forms such as the triumphal arch, family coats of armor, and personifications of the senses.⁹⁴ The motifs embroidered at each corner can feature a specific iconographic relationship to the central motif, as for example on the indigo silk colcha displaying personifications of the five senses, where one is given pride of place at the center while the four other senses mark the quadrants (fig. I.18).⁹⁵ Rectangular kantha employing the lotus blossom at the center, with paisleys and flowering shrubs to anchor the corners, can suggest a similar symmetry and organization (fig. I.19).⁹⁶

      In its aesthetic sensibility, the embroidery on the same indigo silk colcha also shares qualities with kantha imagery. A comparison with the rendition of animals embedded within the exuberant floral field of a kantha such as that of Hemchandra Dutt reveals a common preference for dynamism and vigor through line and color choices, including the use of contrasting color outlines for forms (compare figures I.18, I.20, and I.21). The resulting elegant curves of the birds’ wings, the bold blooming floral forms, and the vitality of animals arrested in motion amid the vines create undulating rhythms of stasis and movement that invite viewers to luxuriate in their richness. Likewise, the bodies of animals and birds, often exuberantly filled with stripes, zigzags, dots, and circles on the colchas indicate that the predilection for colorful patterns was well in place before the earliest surviving kantha were created.