I.9. With its horizontal repeated motifs and thread colors, this embroidered kantha border simulates a woven sari border. Detail of kantha. Attributed to second half of the nineteenth century. Bengal. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Stella Kramrisch, 1968-184-13.

      Herein also lies a potent resource for seeking out the women who were making these kantha. Their handiwork indicates that they were putting down their ideas with needle and thread, sometimes signing their names in stitches at about the time when the first few Bengali women were beginning to write and publish their memoirs and autobiographies. They are the forerunners, in some ways, of the women who became visible at the forefront of the nationalist movement in the last decades of the century. Kantha, often embroidered with vivid and provocative images and supplemented by a range of inscriptions, offer us avenues to probe how women understood their work and how they found ways to express their creativity, sometimes despite the scrutiny from Bengali men and European reformers. Their kantha invite us to ponder how these women may have contemplated their worlds and the wars waged at the time, how momentous events outside impacted their households, how they held their ground, asserted themselves, explored the possibilities of restrained yet resolute dissent or discontent and even toyed with alternative visions. The enormous potential for textile as archive for complicating some of the images that were constructed for Bengali women as hapless, mired in meaningless ritual, seems to have gone neglected. If colonial discourse endorsed such passive images to justify subjugation as moral reform, the modernist project of enlightened Bengali elite men celebrated women within households, primarily as repositories of tradition and authenticity.¹⁰

      More recently, historians have drawn attention to a handful of the women from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They have been celebrated for their activism, for the most part encouraged by male mentors within family circles. More exceptional is the stage actress Binodini Dasi, who rose to prominence from the ranks of prostitutes, albeit with a prominent male patron.¹¹ Yet the opportunities for everyday critiques and hints of alternate visions also lurk in expressions that were familiar, safe, and integrated into everyday life and ritual.¹² Analysis of kantha embroidery suggests that we might usefully begin to recognize the women who wrote their accounts as a much smaller subset among those who pondered the issues across a range of media.

      To listen for their voices also requires situating their works in the couple of hundred years of kantha making that is documented by surviving material. The diversity of creative and pragmatic innovations in the move toward commoditization and institutionalized production of kantha teaches us to look for similar responsiveness in older textiles from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such changes, visible in the objects, and my own observation of processes of making and use today, alerted me to heed shifts in nomenclature in my conversations with practitioners over the course of a decade of fieldwork trips. Fundamental among these are qualifications such as “ashol kantha” (real kantha) or “nakshi kantha” (elaborately designed ones, embellished with embroidery) that explicitly differentiate the older continuous practices from more recent interventions, including the factory-like production environments across Bangladesh and West Bengal that have been spearheaded by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and sold at exclusive boutiques and international outlets.¹³ In other conversations, I noticed that by designating the latter “modern kantha,” the unqualified term “kantha” was implicitly conferred on the older, traditional practices.¹⁴ Such adaptations in vocabulary acknowledge the elasticity in practice and have undoubtedly played a key role in the endurance of kantha, witnessed in multiple “revivals” over the twentieth century. Through these terminological distinctions runs a preoccupation with distinguishing the range of continuous innovation in domestic practice, accommodated within the ideals of “kantha” as it is embodied at particular historical moments, from the commercialized spheres of production—while at the same time recognizing that the two are mutually constitutive and continually interactive.¹⁵ Although differentiating old from new kantha betrays values and anxieties about tradition versus modernity, the categories do not always correspond in straightforward ways.