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.
I.10. Anima and Banasree Nag Chaudhuri display a quilt made by Banasree constructed of small square patches of cloth left over from other projects. Kolkata, October 2007.
Despite the tendency to speak of domestic kantha making as unchanging, the works from the past fifty years reveal as much experimentation as commercial production. Innovations have incorporated new stitches, techniques, tools, and materials, from jute sacks, plastic sheets, and wool, to raffia and beads.16 Iconographic experiments draw from long-standing favorites as well as whimsies. Humpty Dumpty, Donald Duck, Goldilocks, Shrek, and Tuntuni (the tailorbird who outwitted the king) have all debuted on baby kantha (figs. 1.13, 1.14).17 Likewise, ruffles, pleats, fringes, and tassels (figs. I.2, I.6), the replication of particular sari border patterns and motifs to different effects (fig. I.9), and embroidered paisleys in imitation of the jamavar shawls from Kashmir (fig. I.14) indicate fondness for the familiar and flirtations with the trendy. They point to the flexibility and mutability that always inhered in everyday practices; their choices indicate that women recognized these surfaces as a suitable venue for their vision and aspirations.
Kantha from the later decades of the nineteenth century equally display figures and events that caught the attention of their makers. They range from sensational events discussed and visualized across many media, such as the Tarakeshwar temple scandal that rocked the region in 1873 (fig. I.11) and the rising excitement at the first hot-air balloons displayed in circus acts some years later (fig. I.19).18 Bindhabashini, for example, stitched the Tarakeshwar affair in a sequence of three pairs of figures on a kantha two years after the event. Her embroidery may shed light on processes of making sense of near-contemporary events, and perhaps, too, on her observations about newspaper accounts, journal articles, street songs, theater, cheap printed images, and watercolors. Further, in partaking of the visual vocabulary in vogue at a particular moment across various visual, textual, and performative genres, her embroidery yields clues to the compositional arrangements and juxtaposition of motifs on nineteenth-century kantha as to what could have been deemed appropriate to visualize in embroidery at the time. A sensational murder case at the Hoogly Sessions Court in Serampore (Srirampur) brought to the forefront of public awareness the complications navigated by young women, specifically the abuse of power by religious leaders, the discourses surrounding rape, chastity, and femininity, and the anxieties about official intervention.
In this case, Madhavchandra Giri, the mahanta (guru and manager) of the popular Shiva Temple and pilgrimage center at Tarakeshwar, was accused of seducing and raping Elokeshi while her husband, Nabinchandra Banerji, was away working in the city, an act that culminated in her brutal murder with a boti (a curve-bladed kitchen knife) by Nabin.19 Bindhabashini has juxtaposed two dramatic scenes from the narrative, which was visualized both in single scenes and as larger sets in other media such as Kalighat watercolors and Battala prints (fig. I.12). As in some of these versions, Bindhabashini identifies the figures with brief captions. However, her adaptations from such popular compositions in describing the interactions among the three characters suggests her interests. For the interactions between the mahanta and Elokeshi, she elected to depict his aggressive advance—his grabbing her by the hand—rather than a scene of seduction and enticement such as offering her condiments or intoxicants in the form of paan (betel) or hookah as visualized in other media. Bindhabashini complements this assault with a second violence. Nabin approaches her with fish knife in hand, as Elokeshi crouches,