Making Kantha, Making Home. Pika Ghosh

The group also included Gurusaday Dutt, the colonial civil service officer and folklorist; Stella Kramrisch, the Czech-born Jewish art historian from the Vienna School, who came to Shantiniketan in 1922 at Rabindranath’s invitation to take up a teaching post at the newly established experimental Visva-Bharati University; Ernest Binfield Havell, founder of the Indian Society of Oriental Art and principal of the Government Art School from 1896 to 1905;⁴² Ananda Coomaraswamy, the geologist and art historian of English and Sri Lankan parentage; Okakura Kakuzo, the visiting Japanese scholar seeking to further a pan-Asian unity; the literary giants and educators Asutosh Mukherjee and Dinesh Chandra Sen; and folklorists, poets, novelists, storytellers, and artists such as Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, Jasimuddin, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, and Jamini Roy. They followed the lead of an earlier generation of English-educated Bengali intellectuals such as Raja Rajendralala Mitra, who had challenged colonial assessments of Indian art as derivative and debauched in the era of suspicion and mistrust following the confrontations of 1857.⁴³ Impelled by anticolonial agendas, these public intellectuals tested out a range of strategies to refute such allegations, which were critical to fueling nationalist thought further.⁴⁴ Rehabilitating Sanskritic terms such as shilpa, they sought equivalence for Indian art vis-à-vis European art, while at the same time expanding the contours of “art” in its dominant European definition inherited from Hegel and Kant. Some turned to the range of everyday domestic practices, beyond the corruptions of the outside world of work and colonialism that had failed to fit in the purview of “art.” Their embrace of such artistic practices, including kantha, were inevitably deeply entangled with the Arts and Crafts project that had identified a goldmine in Indian designs and wares to alleviate the alienation and aridity of industrial modernity and its commercial products. Such endeavors thus contributed to reinscribing the anonymity and handicraft status of works of embroidery that bear the stitched names of their makers.

      Many turned to rural Bengal in a search for origins, a quest unmistakably laced with longing and nostalgia for a pure Bengal, a golden Bengal (shonar Bangla), which they located beyond the contaminations of the colonial capital. Dinesh Chandra Sen, for example, located Bengal itself in richly multisensorial remembrances of things and their material qualities. Their participation in rural household rituals triggered deeply emotional responses that color his prose:

      The sound of conch shells and bells every morning and evening, the sweet smell produced by burning of incense and sandalwood, the ever-emergent red color of lotus flowers—it was as if they all filled up Bengal villages, their marketplaces, fields, ghats, and pathways, with an atmosphere of devotion to God. I began to consider the dust of every village of my motherland sacred. This was nothing like the [new-fangled] emotion of nationalism or patriotism on my part. Nor was it a feeling produced by simply copying the English. Truly did every particle of dust of this land make my tears flow. An indescribable feeling of attraction made me fall in love with the land of Bengal.⁴⁵

      Not surprisingly, most of the Bengali men engaging in such conversations in Calcutta could relate to such effusive responses through shared familiarity with such experiences, as they traced their origins back to the countryside, to homes in Sylhet (Gurusaday Dutt), Bankura (Jamini Roy), Bardhaman (Nazrul Islam), Faridpur (Jasi-muddin), and Dhaka (Dinesh Chandra Sen). Others, such as the Tagores, maintained estates in rural areas (Kushtia), where they sought frequent refuge from the city.⁴⁶ Positioning kantha in the dialogs committed to recovering and valorizing an authentic artistic tradition must be understood in this romantic conceptualization of rural Bengal, defined by its ritual practices, abundant natural resources, and agricultural plenty.⁴⁷ Such ideological moves tend to abnegate the ordinary, everyday practices surrounding kantha, its making, distribution, and use, which accompanied the women of various classes who also settled in the capital city. Moreover, many of these women also traveled back and forth between rural and urban residences, despite the travails involved, as did kantha and kantha-making conventions and innovations.⁴⁸

      The civil service officer Gurusaday Dutt, who acquired the exquisite kantha gracing Mitter’s volume (fig. I.14), accumulated what is today recognized as the most important historical collection to have survived.⁴⁹ During his administrative assignments in rural and remote areas of Bengal, Dutt indulged his love for local art forms and his passion for kantha, painted scrolls, wood carvings, and metal wares, among other material artifacts. However, he does not seem to have left detailed records about the particular circumstances of their acquisition beyond the names of their makers and sites of collection.⁵⁰ Despite the inscription on the kantha bearing its maker’s name, Manadasundari Dasi, the sheer paucity of written information about Manadasundari of Mulghar surely aided in relegating her creation with other non-canonical ones. Ardent nationalists such as Dutt hailed kantha as an essentially unchanging, traditional, “living form” and a “spontaneous expression and inseparable part of the life of the people.”⁵¹ Yet they erased the specificity of the living experiences of makers and users, from whom they extricated and institutionalized the textiles.⁵² That obliteration, in turn, contributes significantly to consigning to kantha the status of handicraft rather than art. The discussion by Dutt and his compatriots is, instead, uncompromisingly swadeshi (of the homeland, homegrown), enmeshed in the sociopolitical upheavals leading up to and following from the British administration’s decision to partition the region.⁵³

      Such location of kantha in the recovery and preservation of cultural practices for the reconstruction of origins in the service of regional cohesiveness and patriotic sentiment coincided with the resurgence of folkloristic interest in “peasant art” in Europe. The multiple cosmopolitanisms embraced by Calcutta’s thriving intellectual community suggests that some participants were attentive to such movements as they looked to mainland Europe for models to counter British colonialism.⁵⁴ They traveled through Europe and across Asia, engaging with contemporary ideologues, artists, and poets beyond Britain, from Germany, Austria, France, and Spain.⁵⁵ As historian Sugata Bose has succinctly observed, “Anticolonialism as an ideology was both tethered by the idea of homeland while strengthened by extraterritorial affiliations.”⁵⁶ The Tagores were equally invested in Okakura’s vision of a pan-Asian unity in their pursuit of alternate models of universalism. At the same time, they maintained close ties with Gandhi’s rally for swaraj (self-rule).

      The recuperation of kantha, along with kirtan (devotional songs), alpana, and brata (vows), toward consolidating Bengali identity in the face of the region’s proposed partitioning, was inflected by such diverse agendas. Kantha became firmly ensconced in a romanticized, pure, rural imaginary, the foil to colonial modernity in the prodigious literary output of the first quarter of the twentieth century.⁵⁷ And they became inseparable from Indian nationalism, from swadeshi as it was imagined in Calcutta. As with other local practices in imperial or colonial contact zones, the attention bequeathed to kantha highlights the politics of domination and subjugation.

      At the same time, kantha became imbued with magical qualities. Long-standing associations of kantha with rags and poverty—and intertwined with it, the bodies of mystics (Bauls, fakirs, and bairagis) and their rejection of worldly ways—lent easily to such interpretation.⁵⁸ Chaitanya, the Bengali saint who had come to be understood as the personified divine, is repeatedly imagined draped in a kantha, perhaps protecting his vulnerable body, which was famously prone to ecstatic fits.⁵⁹ A well-known song of Lalan Fakir, the best known of the Baul (a marginal mystic-minstrel community), captures the elusiveness of the spiritual quest as one that is experienced bodily and transmitted through bodily contact through kantha: “Listening to Lalan Shah’s emotional state gives one a headache / But wrapping oneself in Lalan’s torn kantha keeps the cold away.”⁶⁰ Rabindranath Tagore in particular was drawn to such poetic imagery in the search for local cultural practices to stage anticolonial resistance.⁶¹ The interest in practices such as kantha, shared by Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, coincides with investment in indigenous mystical expressions drawing conspicuously on shared imagery or denouncing the limitations of both.⁶² As the fissures between Hindus and Muslims threatened to take on ominous proportions, a shared textile practice in the domestic sphere offered a tangible body of material and symbolic power to espouse