I.28. Backstitch lines used to create a figure within an architectural frame. Detail of kantha. Attributed to second half of the nineteenth century. Bengal. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, 2009-250-13.

      LISTENING FOR WOMEN’S VOICES

      Kantha have not been subjected to sustained visual analysis, nor have they been culled as material sources for women’s creativity and the rhythms of their domestic lives. This book approaches the textiles as rich visual archives for complicating our perceptions about a vibrant, tumultuous, and minutely scrutinized period in Bengali history. The project also seeks to understand the processes whereby such resonances have become steeped physically within the textiles that survive, how they have coagulated in memories and perceptions of individual fabric articles as these have been handed down, along with the objects themselves. The study thereby nuances the broad sweep of earlier writing that celebrated kantha as the fabric of nation building and the scholarly literature that constructed a canon for South Asian art.

      In my earlier work on these textiles for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition and accompanying catalog, Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal, I encountered a range of material across homes, both rural and urban, elite and impoverished, that allowed me to appreciate the embeddedness of ordinary things in people’s perceptions of their lives and selves. I heard women say, “This is what we do.” Such pithy, matter-of-fact observations underscore how making and using kantha is so deeply ingrained in their lives that it requires no deliberation. Ordinary kantha, repurposed from discarded clothing, are used, repaired, and then recycled into cleaning rags and diapers until the base cotton fabric disintegrates beyond repair.¹⁰² These glimpses into the everyday lives of such textiles somewhat destabilized my understanding of kantha based on the examination of colonial-period material in museum storage vaults. For the most part, the latter are beautifully designed and dexterously embroidered, far removed from the patterns of mundane domesticity, if indeed they had ever participated in such daily use. Such extraordinary textiles had survived over a century either as heirlooms that anchor families, or had changed hands along the way and entered collections. As my research developed, I began to understand how the acquisition of exceptional textiles into collections, together with the practices, perceptions, and the language of the everyday, had undergirded the ideological quest for nationalist ideals in kantha from the turn of the nineteenth century. This book is, in part, an attempt to probe the relationships between the different kinds of textiles and the narratives I heard in homes to those emerging from nineteenth-century debates around art, craft, and the nation.

      This study focuses on the earliest kantha that survive from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, although in my attempts to make sense of this older material, I have turned to many others created over the twentieth century that reside in homes as cherished heirlooms and in collections. For the most part, the parameters of this study are also restricted to household practices of kantha, conceived broadly. More specifically, this study turns around two objects that display some of the finest technical execution and conceptual sophistication. Yet they testify to the domestic lives of cloth articles in their imagery, inscriptions, and marks of wear and tear. They are therefore useful for pondering a particular intersection of the two ends of the divide between “high” and “low” (or “folk”) that still pervades art historical practice and the worlds of art museums and collecting despite the numerous interventions to disturb such hierarchies in the past few decades. Manadasundari’s kantha was collected by the Indian Civil Service officer Gurusaday Dutt during his travels through the Khulna region of southern Bengal (fig. I.14). It now enjoys pride of place in the museum devoted to his collection at the outskirts of Kolkata. The second, Kamala’s kantha, was acquired by the historian of South Asian art Stella Kramrisch during her time in Kolkata in the first half of the twentieth century. It came with her to America, where it graced her homes prior to its current residence in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (fig. I.15).

      Although both kantha have embroidered inscriptions, neither includes a date. Manadasundari’s kantha displays carefully delineated motifs such as the official imagery on colonial-period coins and stamp paper as well as jewelry, and architectural elements that together allow us to locate it in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as discussed further in chapter 2. Kamala’s kantha, despite its very different subject matter, reveals some fundamental compositional similarities to that of Manadasundari that suggest it was likely also created during this time. A comparison of the elaborate lotuses centering the embroidered surface of each kantha discloses that these floral forms were similarly conceptualized and executed. They indicate that the two textiles belong in a corpus of early kantha that share these elements (figs. I.29, I.30, I.31, 3.7). The lotus on each kantha consists of two overlapping rings of petals around the seedpod at the center. The inner row is comprised of smaller petals, and every two are framed by one larger outer petal. The petals, moreover, share a similar silhouette, one that is distinct from petal profiles on other dated kantha from the second half of the nineteenth century that are more angular and geometric for example, imparting a star-like shape to the flower.¹⁰³ Each petal on Kamala’s kantha, and each of the outer row of petals on Manadasundari’s kantha, consists of three zones of color, contained within a bold, dark outline rendered in backstitch. Where the tips taper to a point, densely packed red stitches creates a rosy hue, which has since faded and lightened on Kamala’s kantha. The two textiles share the same approach to filling this triangular shape in backstitch, moving in concentric lines along the outer periphery of the three sides toward the center.¹⁰⁴ The innermost section of each petal is white, rendered by the absence of embroidery stitches on Kamala’s kantha, while filled with small running stitches on Manadasundari’s. Striations composed of delicate lines of red backstitch create an intermediary zone from the red tip to white base of each petal. Beyond the outer row of petals, three rows of patterns bridge the distance to the paisleys at the periphery of the central medallion. In addition, the paisleys are also comprised similarly on the two kantha (compare figures I.32 and 3.7). Both alternate contrasting colors of threads for filling and outlining