Glimpses of Comfort: Embroideries of Self in the Imagined Worlds of Kantha Textiles from Late-Colonial Bengal

Abstract

In this paper I study a set of late-colonial kantha quilts as sites of recuperation. In the first section I situate kantha and its shifting meanings within the wider field of cultural productions in nineteenth-century bengal. I argue that through kantha embroideries upper caste women participated in Hindu cultural nationalism while recuperating a sense of self. I briefly follow speculative trajectories of kantha’s surfaces and contents to further look for the social world of collected kantha makers. I continue to examine kanthas made by elite women as objects of recuperation inflected by women’s authorial voices and everyday gendered negotiations, and as sites of inscribing the self in relation to the sacred. I end the paper with the contention that while some women embroidered im/possible worlds to recuperate from effects of colonialism and patriarchy, others sought comfort in translating emergent ideological underpinnings of the elite class onto the kantha surfaces.