Making Kantha, Making Home. Pika Ghosh
Читать онлайн книгу.
objects participate in the articulation and mediation of gender roles and expectations in gift bestowal and reception. Such considerations also yield the possibility that its maker, Manadasundari, may have sought to make her presence felt through her handiwork in ways that we are only just beginning to discern.109 Such rich textiles thus allow for a convergence of multiple approaches to the study of material culture.
Ethnographic research also helped me to home in on the reflections of several older women who have made multiple elaborate kantha over their lifetime. Mulling on their personal processes and internal rhythms in making kantha, much like the introspections of women artists from other parts of the world, indicated the need to recognize the textiles as the externalization or visualization of a process of interiorization.110 They cherished the work of their hands (hater kaj) as meditative and therapeutic. It allowed them to return to their bodies, to reintegrate themselves, to cope with losses, and to gather strength through their hands into their bodies. Such musings have inflected my examination of Kamala’s kantha in chapter 3. I employ their observations to interpret Kamala’s claim about finding her place at the feet of the gods in her inscription in concert with her choice of religious imagery. Moreover, as visualized prayers lavished by Kamala, the embroidery holds the promise of protecting beholders in their embrace. In emphasizing interiority and embodiment in my reading of this kantha, I exploit the two case studies to suggest divergent directions, although in reality, both inevitably embody both inward and outward engagements.
The significance of touch in constituting their meanings, persistent across class and region in the conversations I recorded about kantha, shapes my interpretation of these textiles in specific ways. Touch insists on the corporeal. It relies on contiguity to function, keeping an embroiderer physically and psychically connected to herself through her materials and hands while at the same time expanding her sense of self beyond. Touch can mediate between her body and the textile and what transcends it, which can be understood as a yearning for divine contact. If the gift of a kantha must have been, to some extent, a desire for proximity, for conferring emotions, it would have renewed connection and contact through touch and a world of sensation that invoked the bodies of makers and recipients. Since skin and fabric are permeable interfaces between the inside and outside of a maker’s body, Manadasundari’s touch and feelings might have been communicated through the kantha as conduit as well as through her words and choice of imagery. Likewise, the layers of cloth would have been thickened by the bodies of recipients, through contact with another set of cutaneous boundaries that are also receptive to the malleability and textures of the kantha.
In textiles of such extraordinary visual coherence, it seems safe enough to assume that individual, familial, and social dimensions would have informed, to a greater or lesser extent, the embroiderers’ choices visible in their kantha. Motifs, narratives, and compositional elements including color, shapes, sizes, and stitch types that were selected by these needleworkers from the available repertoire are sophisticated acts of interpretation of forms shared with other media such as prints and watercolors. Their versions incorporate play with colors of threads, thickness of ply, textures, and variation in motifs or patterns. They create distinctive composites that modify earlier iterations and offer up startling or innocuous sequences and juxtapositions and other organizational relationships that highlight particular nuances among elements on a square or rectangular fabric surface. Comparative analysis yields glimpses into how needleworkers interpreted, individuated, reinforced, challenged, or subverted what may have simultaneously been coalescing across multiple visual, performed, and literary genres. Some motifs take on particular significance as dimensions of lived experience in homes and families, which were inherently part of the lives of the objects themselves, distinct from their iteration in prints, Kalighat single-scene water colors, or terra-cotta reliefs on temple walls. Because many of these narratives are known from other media that are typically assumed to be male authored (both European and Indian), the distinctions in the textile renditions are discernible through comparison, and they can yield clues to a woman’s construction of these episodes within her larger vision for the textile, whether a gift, an object for personal use, or dedicated to the divine.
Kamala’s familiarity, for example, with print imagery and turns of phrases from the literary cultures of the Gaudiya tradition under construction over the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly with their increased circulation in print at this time, is discernible when compared with these other media as discussed in chapter 3.111 Her kantha thus also attests to the active role of women in claiming Vaishnavism toward Bengali nationalist self-fashioning in the nineteenth century. Such textiles participate in the resurgence of investment in Vaishnavism in response to both colonial missionary polemic and the spate of conversions among the educated upper-caste Hindus and other emergent intellectual traditions such as the Brahmo Samaj, all anxieties that fueled the quest for authenticity. Although the textual dimensions of such agendas are now better understood, Kamala’s embroidered imagery and epigraph manifests the creative engagement of erudite women in these processes.
Together, these two kantha also reveal how the interpretation of motifs shared with other media can be brought together to create an extraordinarily coherent iconographic program in embroidery and to customize an intimate universe on these domestic textiles. Such aspiration makes the two textiles exceptional in the extant corpus. The array of embroidered male and female figures in kantha, clearly differentiated by class, age, marital, and professional status, can disclose how households are imagined and families and domestic relationships negotiated in the communication from a married woman to her father. Conversely, what is not chosen for visualization on a gift that is relatively public, perhaps sent from one household to another as much as one individual to another, is equally useful for attending to the constraints of communications in the form of a textile of substantial size that was surely to be viewed by many people, perhaps on particular occasions, when meanings could potentially be further tailored to the specific conditions of each viewing act. Textile articles may create or inhabit ambiguous spaces, reinforce social proprieties, or vacillate between emotional, familial, and community registers. They might engage in shared or dissonant sensibilities that exemplify the contingent quality of notions of social relatedness, and complicate assumptions about what is intimate or personal or shared.
The domestic spaces that such textiles typically inhabited are not necessarily restrictive spaces where women were sequestered. Rather than the binaristic language of ghare baire (at home and outside), terms that gained currency from the later decades of the nineteenth century as the roles and status of women and marriage were debated publicly and legislated, it is perhaps more useful for understanding these conveniently portable things as a notional realm of shifting boundaries, shaped, in part, by multisensorial assemblages customized for various uses from daily to life-cycle rituals.112 If monumental structures such as temples yield clues to specific historical ideologies and practices of kingship, courtly culture, theology, and religious institutionalization, kantha offer equally potent material foci for recuperating perspectives on notions of home and how these, in turn, configured the contours of individual imagination and identity and constructed family lore and lineages across class and locality.
Juxtaposing materiality and imagery with strands of personal narratives reveals possibilities for unraveling the threads of seemingly discrete biographical moments to explore the half-hidden social and cultural transactions through which these textiles are empowered. With their intimate details of human relationships in and out of households, articulated in a visual vocabulary that is at once shared and an intensely personal vision, kantha thus offer possibilities for taking textiles seriously within the scope of the discipline of art history as it expands and deepens.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию