Material Memory

The work on my third co-creation piece continues. I have been doing a great deal of couching with 6ply gold thread or Zari. As I was couching around a particularly unregulated space, the process became uncomfortable. Moving along the uneven threads of a knitted piece that I had cut and placed into the work— threads I had earlier couched, or tacked— the surface was uneven. The lines moved up and down, curved inward, then rose again, at one point I was couching a strand of 6ply zari around a single strand of 2/30’s cotton. Needless to say, it was a taxing stitching experience

The intense presence required of me to focus so completely on the thread I was couching with and the six-ply Zari itself—brought several thoughts to mind.

One was how much we take for granted the work we see around us. Zardozi work does not refer to couching at all. It is simply called sui ka kaam. The work is intricate, often impossibly complex, and yet one cannot truly understand what it entails unless engaged in doing it oneself. Even when I am couching the 6ply gold thread in straight lines, a seemingly simple task, I find that my couching stitches are not at regular intervals.

Part of the difficulty is visual. I work with a lot of electric light focussed on the work. The gold of the sari shines back at me. The couching thread itself is dyed yellow. Between the two, visibility is compromised. I am also not bent over an adda like the craftsmen are. I sit back on my sofa, sometimes working at a table, and at this point with the fabric resting on my lap, supported by a cutting mat underneath for stability.

I am acutely aware that I do not work the way traditional craftsmen do. They sit on the floor, cross-legged, bent forward over an adda, the body trained into a posture that brings eye, hand, and cloth into a fixed and intimate relationship. I cannot sit like that. My body does not allow it. I work seated on a couch or a chair, adapting the surface to my lap or a table, stabilising the fabric as best I can. This difference in posture is not incidental. It affects visibility, control, rhythm, and endurance. What the craftsman achieves through a lifelong bodily discipline, I mediate through adjustment and compensation.

What is at work here is physical negotiation. The hand is constantly adjusting to uneven tension, to the glare of gold against yellow thread, to limited visibility. It compensates for posture, and it stabilises the work with whatever is at hand. These are not conceptual decisions. They are moment-to-moment bodily responses. The intelligence involved is motor, accumulated through doing, refined through repetition and resistance.

Much of what happens in this work is decided before it can be named. The hand adjusts, compensates, responds. Thought follows action, not the other way around. The hand carries its own intelligence, shaped by repetition, resistance, and material encounter.

All of this made me acutely aware of the importance of skill, and of how skill is acquired across generations. The level of perfection achieved by traditional craftsmen comes from beginning very young, often at the age of fourteen or even earlier, with nimble fingers trained through repetition. This led me to think about the histories that precede and influence us. How did this gold thread come into being? Who invented it? Who first thought of turning metal into thread?

Historically, gold thread is believed to have originated in China, where thin sheets of gold were beaten into leaf, cut into fine strips, and wrapped around a core of silk. In Chinese practice, paper too was transformed into textile material. What was known as zhi bu—literally paper cloth—referred to paper that was strengthened, coated, sometimes laminated with metal leaf, and then cut into narrow strips to function like thread.

I remember visiting the artisanal district of Nishijin in Kyoto, where I saw this process continued in Japan as Shifu, which uses the same characters and means the same thing: paper cloth. Gold leaf was meticulously laid onto paper, then hung vertically beneath the boards of the atelier to dry so that no dust could settle on it. Once dry, it was cut into extremely fine strips. By the 1980’s, Japan had computerized looms producing elaborate designs for obis and kimonos, yet the gold thread itself—the Shifu—was still inserted by hand. As techniques travelled from China to Japan, pronunciation may have shifted, but the material logic endured: paper becoming textile, metal becoming thread.

Although gold thread is used extensively in India today, it did not originate here. The word Zari itself is Persian, derived from zar, meaning gold. From China, this material knowledge travelled westward along trade routes into Central Asia and Persia, carried not only as finished textiles but as technique. In these regions, where metalworking traditions were already highly developed, gold thread gained technical refinement and symbolic importance, becoming integral to court dress, ceremonial garments, and religious textiles. 

India has always worn gold—often heavily, abundantly, and with deep ritual meaning. Gold jewellery has been central to bodily adornment, temple wealth, marriage, fertility, and lineage. Necklaces, bangles, anklets, waist belts, nose rings—gold sits directly on the body in Indian culture, in intimate contact with skin. In ancient times, there was no cultural hesitation about wearing gold as metal.

What did not emerge in India, however, was the widespread transformation of gold into thread as a dominant textile material. This distinction has less to do with aesthetic preference and more to do with climate, clothing structure, and where status was displayed.

In the Indian subcontinent, the hot and humid climate favoured minimal, draped, breathable garments—saris, dhotis, and uncut lengths of cloth. The body remained the primary site of ornamentation. Gold worn as metal remained visible and effective. Heavy surface embroidery with metal thread would have weighed cloth down and interfered with fluidity and drape. Decoration therefore emerged through weaving, borders, pallavs, dye, and pattern rather than through dense metal-thread embroidery. Today, these factors are overridden by things like air-conditioning and heating of our lived spaces. 

In contrast, in West and Central Asia and the Middle East, layered garments evolved out of environmental and social necessity. Desert regions are marked by extremes of heat and cold, abrasive winds, and dust, and many societies were nomadic or semi-nomadic, constantly moving across terrain. Clothing functioned as protection and portable shelter. Over time, layered robes, coats, and structured garments also became associated with dignity, authority, and public modesty. As the body became increasingly covered, jewellery worn directly on the skin lost its visibility and practical relevance. Status therefore migrated onto the garment itself. For wealth and power to remain legible, gold had to enter cloth. It is in this context that gold thread gained both technical importance and symbolic force, becoming integral to courtly, ceremonial, and religious textiles.

These regions also possessed long-standing metalworking traditions—wire drawing, filigree, armour making—which made the transition from metal to wire to wrapped thread technically continuous. Through trade, migration, and court patronage, this material intelligence travelled into the Indian subcontinent, where gold thread was absorbed, adapted, and eventually refined within local practices, gaining extraordinary prominence in ceremonial embroidery.

What is interesting is that contemporary Zari behaves very differently from older forms. Today, Zari can pierce fabric, allowing it to be used for stitches such as stem stitch or satin stitch, not only for couching. This is not a very recent development. I have seen ecclesiastical embroideries in the Museum of Christian Art in Goa where Zari is used in satin stitch rather than laid on the surface.

We also have Dabka, the purled gold wire, which is a different material altogether. Today, Dabka is made from copper or aluminium wire coated with a gold-coloured finish. Modern Zari itself is produced through a fascinating industrial process, where a microscopically thin layer of metal is vacuum-deposited onto a polyester film called Mylar. This metallised film is then cut into fine strips and wrapped around a core thread, creating the illusion of metal while remaining light enough to pass through fabric—an extraordinary convergence of ancient visual language and modern material science.

The other moment that struck me came when I turned the fabric over to secure the thread at the back. Looking at the reverse—the unregulated, overlapping stitches in dyed yellow thread that allows me to couch the zari onto the surface without being overtly visible,  something shifted. What surfaced in that moment was the memory of my wedding lehenga—the weight of it, the labour embedded in it, the unseen back of the work. I cannot fathom why the back and not the zari itself brought to mind the peach-saffron lehenga—perhaps the underside was evocative of traditional Zardozi work more than my contemporary rendition. 

It made me think about how history and memory move together, how they converge into what we are doing today, who we are today. And it brought me back, very clearly, to the essence of this piece—what I call co-creation.

Nothing arises in us without history, conditioning, precedent and our own sense of being human.

A Parallel Concerto—Mozart, Split Stitch and Zari

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.