Written by Devi Chatterjee

Poetry recitation and textile weaving share a rich intimate history rooted in South Asian craft and oral narratives. In rural communities, not only would the weavers sing and recite devotional poetry and hymns while spinning a piece of cotton, or silk fabric, but the fabrics themselves would then be embroidered or dyed with elaborate motifs, used to depict mythical and ritualistic tales as an accompaniment to oral storytelling traditions. Textile metaphors, therefore, have become the spiritual and metaphysical poetics of most ancient and classical South Asian literature, from form to content. While the Natya Shastra (c. 200BCE), the essence of South Asian classical poetics, describes the prime narrative voice in a story as the sutradhar (literally translating to thread-holder), some of the most infamous lines from the 14th century poet Kabir captures this essence of handloom craft and oration as central to achieving poetic transcendence, with lines like  ‘I weave your name on the loom of my mind’ or ‘What subtle threads the woman weaves, and makes them fine with love and reverence!’ Therefore, it seemed only fitting to represent this collection of recorded South Asian poetry through textile and weaves.  

One of the very first audio recordings we procured were extracts from Tagore’s Gitanjali recorded in 1927, archived with the British Library. Although not known for pioneering South Asian Poetry written in English, a title that was much suited to Nissim Ezekiel, and Dom Moraes, a few years later; Tagore’s poetry and philosophy, defined a transnational South Asian identity. Tagore’s extensive travel across over 30 countries between 1878 and 1932, and meeting poets like W. B. Yeats, who authored the introduction to the translated Gitanjali (1912), had brought home cultures from across the world. He advocated for socio-cultural and political pluralism, speaking strictly against narrow ideas of nation state. This multiculturalism was at the heart of the education system he designed in the utopic township of Shantiniketan in West Bengal, where a diverse mix of cultural ideas provided a holistic space for learning and reviving classical and folk dance, music, craft and poetry. Kantha, dating back to the Vedic Period, was one of the many textile practices that were developed and promoted by Tagore’s daughter-in-law, Pratima Devi in the 1930s.  

A simple running stitch embroidery, Kantha, is made from used cloth and pulled threads of old saris, dhotis and lungis, and spun primarily by women. A prevalent handloom in Bangladesh and the Indian states of Odisha and West Bengal, kantha is a layering of two or three old pieces of fabric, to make durable cotton quilts, known for their comfort, and multi-purpose use in everyday life, especially around the house. In 1985, Shamlu Dudeja, further revived Kantha to attain global reach, transforming this sustainable multi-use cloth into luxury products of art and fashion, with the aim to generate income for rural Kantha artists. Born in Pakistan, raised in India, founder of SHE (Self Help Enterprise) and Chairperson of the Calcutta Foundation, India, Dudeja worked with weavers of Shantiniketan encouraging them to stitch on one layer of silk rather than the multi-layered cottons previously used for quilts. Associated with boho aesthetics worldwide, this patchwork kantha shawl, represents the embodiment of everyday rituals for those who can read in its repetitive running stitch, the threads of history. 

Just before moving to the UK, on a short trip to Shantiniketan, my mother had bought me this Kantha shawl from a village fair and had packed it in my suitcase as the only piece of ethnic apparel. She said it would be a statement piece among all the monochrome black and bridge tops I had chosen to carry. Months later while working on this collection, when asked to design its visual cover, this shawl became a symbol of home and identity, the patches representing the diverse histories of each poet, and the kantha stitch running across representing that which connects us to what it means to be South Asian.  

Harish Trivedi, the postcolonial scholar and translator, describes South Asian literature as “the many linguistic and cultural streams… that flow through our part of the world [to] come to a confluence.” Therefore, flowing metaphors of rivers, and by extension threads become almost ingrained when discussing and theorising South Asian identity and culture, encompassing regional, local and global languages, as running “through, and round, the colonial to draw a line which connects the pre-colonial to the postcolonial.” The poems recorded and collected by The Poetry Archive beginning from Tagore and Naidu’s recording from the early 1900s to present day poets like Imtiaz Dharker, Rishi Dastidar, Seni Seneviratne, David Dabydeen and Pascale Petit, bring forth various identities, and experiences of regional, diasporic and transatlantic writing, becoming truly and wonderfully intersectional. From exploring geo-political struggles, queerness, body politics, and ecology to incorporating mythic allusions and personal histories, these recorded poems create a meta-textual space of dialogue honouring Tagore’s vision of cultural plurality, dreamt years ago. Thus, we aim to carry out what Jeet Thayil terms as “a climactic archiving” in the face of “catastrophic atmospheric changes”, and this ever-growing archive of South Asian poetry is a testament: each poem, a single stitch, each poet, a single thread and the collection a tapestry.  

References: 

Trivedi, Harish, “South Asian Literature: Reflections in a Confluence.” Indian Literature 49, no. 5 (229) (2005): 186–94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23346235. 

Thayil, Jeet, “Forward.” The Penguin Book of Indian Poets: xix-xxi. 

Ghosh, Pika. Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in Colonial Bengal. University of Washington Press, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16t6mwm. 

Chen, Martha Alter. “Kantha and Jamdani: Revival in Bangladesh.” India International Centre Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1984): 45–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001703.