Making Kantha, Making Home. Pika Ghosh
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shape inside the paisley is embroidered in backstitch from periphery to center as in the case of the petal tips. On Manadasundari’s kantha, each paisley is supported on three prongs and filled with a stem with pairs of leaves. Kamala’s kantha elaborates on this base. These fundamental similarities, despite the divergences in each woman’s interpretation visible in the distinctive qualities of her stitchwork, indicate the likelihood that the textiles shared in the conventions circulating among Bengali embroiderers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the Khulna-Jessore-Faridpur area, today’s Khulna Division in southern Bangladesh.105
The two kantha also share in the practice of elegantly composed and rendered inscriptions, in marked distinction to others that do not carry any text or that bear only brief signatures stitched by original makers or added later (figs. I.32, 2.1, 3.1).106 These texts give us the name of a primary maker, even though the work must have involved some collaboration because aspects such as layering the base cloth smoothly requires more than a single set of hands, as discussed further in chapter 1. The inscriptions also hint at the conditions of making the textile. Manadasundari seems to have adhered to a common practice of making a kantha with a person or occasion in mind, although these highly malleable and mobile objects can reveal complicated perceptions of ownership and histories of use in the long run. Kamala, on the other hand, does not disclose any singular recipient or event; rather, she meditates on her relationship with her god, allowing us to locate her work in a devotional milieu of deep historical significance in the region.
These textiles have received the most scholarly scrutiny afforded to individual works of this genre, scant as that may be. The iconography of women’s work was typically not given the attention that was lavished on painting, sculpture, or architecture, the genres identified as art. Instead, embroidery, relegated to craft, was addressed predominantly in terms of style and technique. Only a rare handful of textiles, such as the Bayeux Tapestry or sumptuous Byzantine attire, have been so indulged, but the recent spurt of textile scholarship encourages such work beyond Europe. The technical dexterity and creativity displayed on these kantha make them worthy of the kind of careful visual scrutiny that characterizes art historical practice. I take the direction from their inscriptions to interpret the exquisitely detailed imagery, while recognizing that such an approach inevitably has its own problems, reifying the traditional hierarchies associated with medium rather than dismantling them.
I use the textiles to ask how far these objects can give us access to their makers, Manadasundari and Kamala, and to the particular conditions of their making and possibilities of use. Manadasundari and Kamala were like most women who stitched kantha at home, typically for use in extended household networks; if they were literate and therefore the composers of their embroidered inscriptions, they probably did not create substantial written texts, or what they did write—perhaps letters or domestic ledgers—was not deemed significant enough to save. Nor do the material worlds that these needleworkers inhabited endure to give us clues to reconstruct the worlds of their activity. Little is known of the household spaces where they worked and lived, their needles, scissors, and the boxes or containers in which they stored their tools. Yet such absences only reiterate the importance of their finished work as historical documents, as elusive conduits to their mostly unrecorded lives and aspirations.
I.29. Line drawing, central lotus medallion of Mana-sundari’s kantha (figure I.14). Prashanta Bhat, The Landscape Company.
I.30. Line drawing, central lotus medallion of Kamala’s kantha (figure I.15). Prashanta Bhat, The Landscape Company.
I.31 Central lotus blossom. Detail of Manadasundari’s kantha (figure I.14). Gurusaday Museum, Kolkata (GM 1481). Photograph courtesy of Shubhodeep Chanda.
I.32 Paisleys (kalka) around central lotus. Detail of Manadasundari’s kantha (figure I.14). Gurusaday Museum, Kolkata (GM 1481). Photograph courtesy of Shubhodeep Chanda.
This concern also takes on particular significance if we recall that these stitched accounts come from about the time when other Bengali women were writing the earliest memoirs and autobiographical accounts that survive. Juxtaposing the textiles with these texts nuances the range of women’s expressions to insert their voices into the historical record. However, the difficulties of trying to listen for such voices of women from bygone days are many. For one, a generation of scholars has cautioned us to heed the domination of the subaltern studies project in their brilliant attempts to recover experiences and identities that had previously been obscured by a historiography enamored of elite cultures.107 They paved the way for scholarly focus on gender issues and more intricate entanglements, including women’s interactions across class and race, such as the impact of European women navigating between the colonial state and local populations in India in the nineteenth century, the differentiated roles of women in addressing issues such as child marriage, for example, and oppression of one group of women by another.108
Most women who make kantha in their homes seem to agree that kantha pata— spreading the layers of fabric to smooth them with precision to the right degree of tautness to create an even surface for dense stitchwork—is one of the most difficult aspects of kantha making. To spread the finished textiles that I encountered was no less of a challenge. I had to start with the most basic decision of how to orient myself bodily in relation to objects that now reside in museum collections. Of the two kantha that are the centerpieces of this book, one is displayed vertically behind glass in Kolkata (fig. I.14), and the other is now rolled between sheets of tissue in a storage drawer in Philadelphia, retired after the 2009–10 exhibition (fig. I.15). To imagine how they could have been opened up, viewed, and used in domestic environments previously, I turned to the generations of scholars before me, the accounts left by collectors such as Dutt and Kramrisch, as well as to patterns of use today. Through such endeavors, I learned to listen for the voices of women who have left only their names and tantalizing glimmers of their ambitions in their layering of fabric, secured by embroidered images, and pithy epigraphs (kantha atkano).
I began to understand that kantha are highly dynamic, sharing the improvisational quality of the conversations themselves and embodying individual agency and relational value. They can become repositories of memories of particular makers, givers, recipients, and owners, of the specific occasions when they were made, given, used, repaired, and preserved, and of the intricate networks of relationships initiated, activated, transmuted, or even challenged in the particular contexts of giving and using. The same kantha can thus carry a host of meanings—shared, divergent, or even conflicting—for the people who encountered or engaged with it. The accrual of associations is also an ongoing process, sometimes shifting subtly or even changing more dramatically over the course of the lifetime of the kantha. Observation of these intricacies, perceptions, proprieties, and variations in living communities informs the interpretation of the two kantha, in some ways more directly, while also reminding of the many dimensions of their ephemerality and tangibility that cannot be recovered with much specificity.
The theme of negotiating the proprieties and reciprocities associated with giving gifts sheds light on Manadasundari’s kantha in chapter 2 and provides useful direction for approaching the imagery