16 December 2025
Today I sat with the piece — the third in the Co-creation series — working on it for hours at a stretch. I wanted to fill in the space created by the couched gold thread with a colour that echoed the muddy-coloured crochet I’d added later. The crochet had made the piece feel bulky, and I wanted the whole to read as a continuum — to draw some of that colour inward, into the inner sanctum, as it were.
I put on some music — an album of Mozart’s violin concertos. I hadn’t really listened to Mozart for a long time. In my thirties I was a devoted listener; I ruined many cassettes playing them endlessly in the car. I was never very fond of his symphonies, but the chamber music, the clarinet concertos, the piano works — those I loved. I even named my black Labrador Mozart.
I wasn’t so familiar with the violin concertos. But as I listened, and by the time I reached the Fourth Concerto in D major, I began to notice a pattern. Mozart would take a melodic line that was poignant, even melancholic and suddenly, shift it. There was no preamble, no warning. It was as if he was saying: enough. Enough dwelling on pain. Enough dwelling on happiness. Enough dwelling in darkness. This interchange kept occurring, and somehow he even managed to create melancholy within a major key. I don’t know how he did it.
At the same time, I was struggling with my single-strand split stitch. I was working on a fabric base that had been ruptured; the organza threads were everywhere, constantly catching in my needle as I tried to lay the floss against the surface and pick into the twist. I kept struggling to control it.
As I listened to Mozart, it felt almost as if I were stitching with him. There was effort, and then suddenly the stitch would fall into place. I would move forward and it would feel smooth and beautiful. Then the struggle would return. The thread would slip out of the needle. I would lose the needle altogether. It felt like a kind of parallel concerto, if one could call it that. The split stitch became a kind of Mozart stitch — no scope to dwell on any feeling for too long, not an indulgent somatic experience sustained by benign repetition.
At this point I was reminded of a cotton Ikat weaver I met in Koyyalaguddem in Andhra Pradesh, during one of the projects I did there. Behind his loom was an old black-and-white television. I asked him why it was placed there. He said he liked listening to cricket commentary while he worked. If the television was in front of him, it was distracting. Behind him, he could listen and still weave.
That distinction stayed with me. Many craft processes are repetitive and exacting. The hand already knows what to do. What is required is sustained attention — the ability to remain there long enough for the work to accumulate. Background sound, in such cases, is not inspiration. It is support. It occupies one channel of attention so the rest can remain steady. The stitch proceeds according to its own logic; the listening allows the maker to stay with it. As I did with Mozart—engaged with the music that enabled me to work for 4 hours at a stretch.
As I worked around and within the boundaries created by the couched gold threads, what stirred a deep curiosity in me was my continued use of gold — or rather, zari. Zari comes from a Persian word zar, so it stands to reason that it is not an Indian invention. Historically, it came through Persia and was popularised by the Mughals. Trade moved along the western coast with Surat becoming a centre for Zari production. And, during periods of instability and invasion in that region, people migrated— jewellers, metalworkers, weavers — relocated to regions of greater stability. They were housed and given work by rulers such as the Pallavas, Cholas, and Vijayanagar kingdom.
Within these temple economies— the Cholas and Vijayanagar, gold thread acquired ritual and symbolic associations related to divinity, radiance, and auspiciousness, but it never lost its connection to prestige and excess as employed by the Mughals. Where zari was unapologetically lush and ornate, used in court dress, ceremonial textiles, furnishings, and regalia, a logic closely mirrored by the Catholic Church’s use of gold embroidery to signify divine authority through material splendour.
Textiles in these religious economies functioned as sacred infrastructure. Gold and silk were not about fashion, but ritual necessity. Gold entered cloth not as ornament, but as an expression of divine light and cosmic order, shaped by temple economies and forms of political theology
As I reflected on this history, I also reflected on myself. I own jewellery, but I rarely wear it. In Delhi, for a significant occasion, yes. But in daily life, nothing. My mother used to lament that girls cannot be without jewellery on their wrists. But bangles interfered with my work, so I chose not to wear them.
I then thought about how gold entered this piece in the first place. It began with sunlight glinting on the waves. That light created a crack in me — an opening that let something in. Not just visual light, but a philosophical one. It was not an intellectual understanding. It struck the gut, spread through the body, and settled as something unshakeable.
Being drawn to gold outside the body, in a controlled, meditative, material way, I realised that I may be responding to its older function — divine light, cosmic order, such as is evoked in the Vedas where, Indra is described as ‘golden hued’ Agni as ‘golden haired’ and the source of life is hiranyagarbha or the golden womb — rather than to its modern role as social ornament.
Standing at the tip of the estuary, on what we call Sandbar Island, this is what I perceived: nothing I do exists without a past. That past is formed by people around me, by their pasts, and by the pasts that shaped them. Everything is layered and co-created as were the images I was recording: sun glinting on water, rippling on sand ripples—a confluence of light, water, earth and wind.
It occurred to me then, within the context of living that whatever one feels or thinks—the authorship is divided. It does not belong to a single person— everything is co-created.
That was a moment of realisation — when understanding moved through the body and settled. I think that is what truly holds the key to this piece.
Reflecting that complex layering, the work appears strange — threads removed, delicate and transparent in places, yet dense and impermeable in others. Fabric from layers beneath surfaces through the organza above. Materials at odds with one another, yet organically combined. I am still attempting to create harmony and tonal parity within the composition — a balance that, in life itself, may well be impossible.
