Not embroidered here are some of the intermediary scenes in painted and printed sets that include Nabin forgiving his wife when she first confessed and the resolution of the case with the imprisonment of the mahanta. Distinct from the brutality of these two stitched scenes, a third one features Shiva and Parvati, the gods who are worshipped at the Tarakeshwar temple. Here, the divine couple are presented somewhat unusually with hands clasped, the intimacy pronounced by their raised arms. Bindha-bashini’s version of these deities thus marks a departure from the lingam, the black stone pillar-like form of Shiva preferred for worship in Bengali temples.21 It also strays from the typical watercolor and print iterations that present the Tarakeshwar lingam with three bel leaves upon it, signifying ritual worship, with the mahanta and Elokeshi on either side of the icon (fig. I.12).22 Instead, she interprets the deities as images of conjugal harmony. This divergence signals a choice, particularly because Bindhabashini demonstrates familiarity with the visual vocabulary of the Tarakeshwar scandal that was emerging in other media in the two previous vignettes. She thus invites us to pause and linger on the drama she contemplates, to look for her position on this disturbing event that women were surely mulling over and on contemporary discussions of appropriate behavior, conjugality, and chastity.
I.11. Vignettes from the Tarakeshwar scandal: the rape of Elokeshi (left); Nabin killing Elokeshi (center); and a temple with Shiva and Parvati holding hands (right). Detail of kantha. The inscription around the central lotus identifies the maker as Bindhabashini, who dedicates her work to the goddess Durga. It also offers a location and date: Sangpecharoi, completed in 1875. K. C. Aryan Home of Folk Art, Gurgaon. Photograph courtesy of Shubhodeep Chanda.
Kantha imagery from the late nineteenth century also engaged in the visualization of the emergent nation as goddess, a central preoccupation of these decades in Bengal. On some textiles, she is identified with Durga, through stitched and printed captions; in others, her identity is assumed. She appears in Durga’s martial posture, frontally oriented astride her lion, her hands directing weapons toward the enemy to her left (fig. I.13). She fights men on horseback, who are often depicted wearing hats and shoes and brandishing muskets or swords in the imagery of the colonial period. On Bindhabashini’s kantha, these riders are identified as Shumbha and Nishumbha, a set of demons that Durga destroys in the popular tale of her emergence to power.23 However, their attire and appearance, together with the addition of a third figure, marks a shift from the typical battleground with strewn corpses. The composition of three overlapping riders here instead resembles the Kalighat watercolor of three jockeys at the horse races. Their similar attire is distinguished by alternating colors. Sleek horses gallop at full stretch with outstretched necks and wind in their tails.24 Instead of a finish line marked by a flag, her embroidered riders confront the goddess. Such innovations give contemporary face to these Puranic demons, perhaps as Europeans engaging in their favorite pastimes in the city. Bindhabashini’s interpretation is contemporaneous with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s iconic novel Anandamath, with its rallying cry for a more active nationalism, Bande Mataram, hailing the goddess as mother of the nation.25 Bindhabashini dedicated her work to the goddess in the kantha’s central circular inscription, a move that also resonates with similar gestures in the literary genres. Such embroidered images alert us to the active engagement of women in imagining and giving this new form to the deity, and with it, the nation. These stitched figures are material evidence of their participation in the political debates of the day, alongside the better-known ones taking place mostly among upper- and middle-class Bengali men in the outer formal reception areas (baithak khana, bahir mahal) of elite residences.26
I.12 A pair of scenes from the Tarakeshwar scandal: Elokeshi is presented to the mahanta (head priest) Madhav Giri (left); Nabin attacking Elokeshi with a kitchen knife. Probably last quarter of nineteenth century. Battala woodcut print. Kolkata. 46.8 × 27.8 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Ashit Paul.
I.13. Durga astride her lion, destroying the demons Shumbha and Nishumbha (variant spellings of their names are embroidered below the lion), is recast here as a confrontation with three riders in European outfits. This innovative interpretation of the goddess’s feat suggests the conflation of Durga as slayer of demons with Bharat Mata, the goddess embodying the emergent nation, who appears as a major literary figure at just this time. Detail of kantha. 1875. Sangpecharoi. K. C. Aryan Home of Folk Art, Gurgaon.
This imagery also reiterates that we recognize the permeability of the homes where women embroidered. If we know that where there were walls, there were also screens and swing doors punctuating them, giving access to those who were walled off, embroidered images suggest that women availed themselves of such porousness. Just as they viewed dances and other entertainment in the outer reception halls through screens and slats and observed the happenings in the streets outside, not surprisingly, women’s visualized thought indicates that they grappled with the political debates raging through the region. These complications belie binary constructions of the andarmahal (inner recesses, living quarters) at a remove from areas of public reception, which were used to map interior spheres of female purity and male outward and worldly orientation toward jobs (chakri), the commercial engagements of Bengalis in the making of British colonialism.
Such visible traces from the past suggest that women claimed kantha as a safe site for their thoughts and outlet for their creative energy. Women who may not have had the luxury to choose other media for self-expression due to lack of economic resources, social access, or particular kinds of literacy and training found their space here. They have left us their perceptions of their worlds in layers of used cotton cloth, secured with running stitches and adorned with images created in colored threads. Their needlework is often the only trace of their presence to have survived. Therefore, the significance of these textiles as glimpses into the creativity and agency of women through their handiwork, alongside their written accounts, cannot be overstated.
This book endeavors to listen for these voices from the textiles by considering what women have chosen to depict and how they have done so, while remaining mindful of what they may have ignored or dismissed. From these visual archives, which have not previously been examined for such purposes, I reflect on the distinction between the valorization of kantha in the nationalist idealizations of home and the world, insides and outsides, and the visualizations by nineteenth-century embroiderers that inhere in the objects themselves. The book thus reevaluates the fundamental question “What is a kantha?” through a patchwork of perspectives and approaches. In so doing, it draws attention to the vast spatial reach of textile practices alongside the intensely individual and local preoccupations visualized in the imagery, the play of touch and emotion, and the generation of memory intrinsic to such fabrics. If they were imaginatively deployed in the mobilization of anticolonial nationalisms, such potent, portable objects continue to engage diasporic reorientations of territorially based nationalisms and patriotisms. In their extraordinary malleability, kantha carry the comfort of home and family in their sojourns with those who have settled into communities that have coalesced in Singapore, Malaysia, Sydney, London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.
CANONS, CONSTRAINTS, AND MISFITS
A spectacular kantha found a place in Partha Mitter’s 2001 survey Indian Art, signaling the impact of the turn over the past few decades toward visual studies, material culture studies, recognition of our bodies as social and cultural constructions, and acknowledgment of alternate—particularly, gendered—perspectives, all of which have complicated art history’s canons (fig. I.14).27