Making Kantha, Making Home. Pika Ghosh
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toward a “Bengali” identity. Kantha can thus be located in the intensified search to transcend communal investments and to test the limits of empire around the time of the first partitioning of the region that was proposed in 1903 and implemented in 1905.
But shrouding kantha in mysticism and bestowing a sacred genealogy also obscured locally understood distinctions between several related textile conventions across a region that was larger than France.63 Stella Kramrisch, for example, constructed a chronological narrative in 1939 about valuing rags to further her argument about restitution, wholeness, and cosmic integration:
In the Kanthā, the symbolic action is equally in the embroidery and its material. It is embodied in its texture by restoring wholeness to rags, by joining the torn bits and tatters and by reinforcing them with a design of such a kind that when a Kanthā is spread out, it unfolds the meaning on which life is embroidered.64
Through a strategic sequence of analogies from Rig Vedic visions of the universe as a fabric woven by the gods and the Buddha’s tattered robes, she sought to bequeath these domestic fabrics legitimacy in cosmopolitan artworlds, and by association, with a more widespread spirituality beyond the mundane spaces that the textiles typically inhabited.
The conflation of kantha with value and virtue percolated deeply through corpuses of children’s stories, gathered in printed form as the preoccupation with textbooks and education emerged to the forefront of nationalist thought. One of the best known, Abanindranath Tagore’s Kshirer Putul (1895), the miraculous tale of a boy modeled from condensed milk and animated by the goddess Shashthi, participates in such idealization of kantha.65 At the same time, the story underscores the potency of kantha as inseparable from women’s lives, their bodily and emotional solace, and from central concerns defining their social status such as fertility. In the tale, Duorani, the king’s first wife, whom he had abandoned for a younger, gorgeous, second wife, is banished from the palace. Implicit in such a scenario is the misfortunes of women who could not successfully bear children to secure the patrilineage. The older queen has little leverage in the social networks of the court as she did not have a son to confer stature upon her, and she is repeatedly portrayed lying on the floor of her hovel with a kantha for comfort, in marked contrast to the younger queen, who is draped in exotic gems, golden fabrics, and other luxuries. Meanwhile, the kantha, holding the tears of the abandoned first wife, witnesses her trials and tribulations. As the story unfolds, the besotted king realizes that he is unable to fulfill his younger wife’s insatiable greed and sees the error in his judgment and treatment of the loyal, elder queen. Duorani is finally rewarded in a tale that entwines kantha with poverty, hardship, and female virtues such as unswerving loyalty, resilience, compassion, and nurturance.66
The return to rags and the rhetoric of poverty as ethical and spiritual wealth was a strategic espousal on the part of an educated elite. The comparison between the good and evil queens surely alluded to the political disaffections on the ground and perceptions of a rapacious and capricious ruling elite, an impoverished and ostensibly helpless Bengali population, and the promise of restitution. Further, issues of infertility and inheritance were at the core of the first widespread challenge posed to British authority in 1857; the British refusal to acknowledge the rights of adopted heirs had incited several north Indian local kingdoms to mobilize their troops.
At the same time, however, these influential narrators acquired kantha collections that belie the romantic image of noble, or humble, rags. What survives from the collections of the Tagores, Gurusaday Dutt, Stella Kramrisch, Dinesh Chandra Sen, and Asutosh Mukherjee are exquisite embroideries, displaying concerted labor, skill, planning, and imagination. Today they form a significant majority of museum holdings across the world. Looking back, it is easy enough to recognize a notion of “taste” shared among this cosmopolitan urban elite.67 It was reaffirmed and replicated as these collections inspired the more institutionalized production of kantha that emerged hand in hand at centers such as Kala Bhavan, the school of arts of Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University at Shantiniketan, and the women’s samitis (associations) established by social reformer and educationist Saroj Nalini Dutt.
I.15. Kamala’s kantha. Attributed to nineteenth century. Collected by Stella Kramrisch. 95.2 × 95.3 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Stella Kramrisch, 1994-148-705.
Their narratives, moreover, elide the complex processes of acquiring textiles that once belonged in homes and families, often with the names of makers, recipients, and personal messages in visual and textual stitched form. As they laid the groundwork, creating awareness through collecting kantha, housing the material in newly established museums and curating exhibitions, ironically, the voice and valorization of kantha as a women’s spiritual practice was predominantly from an elite male intellectual cohort. As art historian Debashish Banerji has reminded us, Abanindranath Tagore acquired material for such work from the women of his intimate family circle in the Jorasanko household and through observation of the practices of its women.68 Likewise, the pioneering efforts of Saroj Nalini Dutt toward institutionalizing vocational training for women, including sewing, weaving, and embroidery, is hardly a footnote in studies of Bengali history;69 the enthusiasm of her husband, Gurusaday Dutt, on the other hand, is noted assiduously in analyses of women’s upliftment efforts. If the scholarship on the manifold collaborations between colonial anthropologist and native informant has been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny, such intimate alliances equally complicate the prevailing picture of male scholars speaking on behalf of vast numbers of women, who remain unacknowledged, and often unnamed. Furthermore, if predominantly male-authored ideologies were projected on the body and sphere of influence of Bengali women, not all Bengali women were so privileged. Rather, it was unambiguously the woman who was married, bore children, and took care of the family and household.70 Younger girls, prostitutes, unmarried or widowed women, and other women who did not fit the dominant image of the Bengali woman as wife and mother were excluded from the idealization that was simultaneously under construction.71
Abanindranath’s tale points to the firm linkage established between kantha and feminine virtue, thrift, and homemaking skills that were also being elaborated across multiple genres as English-educated Bengalis, both men and women, were reevaluating their domestic lives and relationships to articulate their engagement with modernity and to participate in the transnational discourses on domestic practices of the nineteenth century. A near contemporary of Kshirer Putul is the household manual Ramanir Kartavya (Duties of Women), a work coauthored by Giribala Mitra and Jaykrishna Mitra. In a section for “Making Useless Things Useful,” kantha feature in the prescriptions toward establishing domestic order:
Many women make Kantha quilts from old fabrics. . . . If you heard how the housewife of a certain family uses her kantha quilts in winter, you would be astonished! She makes many kanthas, big and small, puts quilt covers on them, and stores them away. At the start of the cold weather she gives these kanthas out to the children of the family for their use. Then when it gets even colder, she washes the covers with soap or Fuller’s Earth, puts them back on the kanthas, stores those away and in their place gives out heavier, padded quilts (leps). When, again, the cold becomes less severe, she again washes the thick quilts’ covers, store the quilts away, and once again gives out kantha quilts for use. When the cold weather has ended, she washes the old quilt covers with soap or Fuller’s Earth, gets new quilt covers washed by the washerman, and stores the kanthas away for a year. All of this housewife’s work is commendable. She is extremely thrifty; there is no hardship in her household.72
The detailed instruction for making and maintaining kantha here may be expressions of the uncertainties encountered in the navigation of everyday life at the time, the choices between older and newer ideals, objects and ways of doing things. The values of cleanliness, efficiency, and economy, and new materials, bringing to kantha the English practice of using fuller’s earth, a clay that had been used to clean wool and absorb lanolin, perhaps signals the new order that was coming into being alongside the more publicly debated concerns such as education for women.73 As embroidery came to be associated