Golden Sands

I started this embroidery some weeks ago. An Instagram post with haphazardly laid slubby yarn inspired me to scour the Delhi market for some ghicha (tasar silk) which has a wonderful multi-hued (from dull gold to dark brown) texture that’s rough but soft to touch. 

Ghicha is traditionally made from wild tasar silkworms and produced in a variety of ways, one of which is by allowing the worm to emerge from the silk naturally, (without boiling them alive - now called ahimsa or non-violent silk) . The cocoons which are single-shelled and oval-shaped  are collected from the forest or rearing fields and dried naturally in the sun. The empty cocoon is then boiled to soften it for easier extraction of the thread. Ghicha silk fibres are short and coarser hence the silk is not reeled in a continuous thread like mulberry (bombyxymori) and other silks. 

There are several species of Tasar silk moths (family Saturniidae) in China, India, Japan, Africa and North America. The moths are large and have a prominent eye marking on their wings. The caterpillars are bright green, as wide as a man’s finger and they feed on a wide range of plants like Asan (a common herb also called Bijaka) Arjun - a large deciduous herbal plant (tree) and Sal. Valued for its natural golden to brown hues - said to be derived from the tannin in the leaves that the moth feeds on, the main producers of Tasar silk are the Jharkhand and Bihar regions in India.

Why did I find myself drawn to the slubby ghicha, is something that I have been preoccupied with ever since I embarked on this work. For so many years, I have worked with cotton fabrics, not really caring much for the quality of cloth and usually veering towards markeen or mulmul- not the fine muslin of yore, but mill-made cotton voile. I did use silk organza some decades ago, and that too has returned to my repertoire, but Tasar wasn’t ever on my radar. 

Anyhow, this Instagram post - I’ve never been able to find it again, set me on a purposeful journey to find ghicha fabric. The idea was to remove the yarn - ghicha is usually used in the weft, with finely spun Tasar or cotton for the warp and it’s easy to unravel.

I spent way too much money on this, buying all manner of silk - mulberry and organza included, adding muga tussar blends and silk cotton blends. Good quality tussar can cost upto ₹3,500/- per metre, organza around ₹850/- and gold tissue about ₹1,500/- per metre. Sometimes I bought a metre but usually only half a metre. Even so I ended up spending over ₹20,000/- on a single trip and there were more sprees.  Given that all I had were cut pieces that I was going to shred it really does seem like extravagance but when it comes to work, I never stint. 

As soon as I returned from my shopping spree I got down to work by taking out the thread. Some fabrics weren’t so easy to unravel so I got just the yarn length of the fabric width and kept them neatly together for use later. One of the fabrics was a dream: I could actually reel the thread off the fabric and create small balls of it. I use this for embroidery. I’ve been trying to get a spool or two of the finer Katia thread to work with, but as yet haven’t had much luck as the yarn isn’t made locally and suppliers are wholesalers. 

I then used some of these fabrics that I had drawn the threads from and rendered fragile, by layering them upon each other and trying to tack the loosened threads. The end result was a mishmash of fabrics quite large and unwieldy.  I liked some of the textures that stitching had created, and wanted to pursue that - make the work smaller and focus on the detail. 

So, I cut the whole into bits - just random bits. I then divided the organza and gold tissue fabrics into equal parts and got 8 rectangles from each measuring 9.5 x 11 inches each. Hence the series of 8. 

I tried tacking the randomly cut bits of tasar onto the organza overlaid on the gold tissue by hand but it was treacherous. I indulged in getting one of those mini sewing machines I’ve been eyeing for sometime now. I have a good enough sewing machine at home in Goa and didn’t need to add clutter to an already overflowing studio, so it didn’t make sense then. But I’ve been in Delhi since early November, with another two months (when I started the work) to go before I returned home, so I knew I had to get it. It’s reasonably priced and did the basics. Just about that too. The stitches were too large on the lighter end of the  fabrics (you cannot modulate the length) which ended up being a boon in the long run because I just ripped out the stitching once the embroidery had started and the loosened ghicha threads were more manageable. 

I’ve been in n Delhi, taking care of mum who’s ailing. She’ll be 92 in June this year, has Parkinson’s which has affected her swallowing mechanism. This means that she cannot eat. Beginning with a Riles tube, we had to put in a PEG tube in the stomach to feed her every two hours. This site got infected and the doctors  inserted an NJ (nasal jejunum - it goes deeper into the stomach than a RT). She’s pretty much bedridden with her severe osteoporosis and limited mobility plus has had a UTI almost constantly for the last 5-6 years. She’s alert, misses eating her favourites and once in a while asks for coke or chocolate or tea and we feed her licks or by teaspoon. It’s hard and she’s miserable. And, there’s a sense of gloom that pervades the whole place. Her home has been neglected or rather left to the staff to run, so almost nothing works and despite continuous repairs, it’s hardship living for us. 

Knowing the situation and that I was to be here for 4 months this time around, I decided to post most of my stuff and set up a temporary but workable studio on the large oval dining table that seats eight (half of it). I’ve been working regularly and it’s been my salvation. I had brought pieces that I had been working on and there were a lot of samples to be made for a 4 module workshop that I conducted at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Saket. But, sometimes, things can’t be worked to order and one needs some expression that’s more in tune with situation and circumstance of the present. In fact, I find that the chaos of life actually lends itself well to authentic expression. 

My exploration of life along the seashore in Goa, as a mirror to self has been a seven year journey thus far. I have explored and studied the shells and their markings - zoomed in on what scientists have said are neurological responses to the environment - with genetic traces too, to realise that it’s pure colour that make up these patterns. Subtle gradations of colour. I have a series of cross-stitch pieces that replicate my photographic recording and pixilation of these patterns that are fascinating in their hues. I’d been working on one of them, (they take a year to do each) when the Instagram post sent me on another track. 

But, it really wasn’t another track just another way of looking at neurological responses.  And, in studying the colour of these responses as I tried to match each hue - and it’s the most demanding thing I’ve ever tried for each square of 16 crosses takes me approximately ten minutes to complete: 2 minutes to stitch and the rest to match the right colour and tone, I’ve explored emotions in the human context and how we use them to respond to situation and circumstance. 

This led to the understanding that there is a geography of emotion. A terrain that isn’t linear but layered. Like patterns are formed in our subconscious behaviour, emotions also have patterns. How we respond to people is based on these patterns and hence they are referred to as the geography of emotion. 

In mapping this geography, initially I referred to my album of images from my weekly walks on the beach, when I’m resident in Goa. And I found the correlation quite fascinating. But, then my sister came to share the caregiving and running of house responsibilities and all hell broke loose. 

The cook who pretty much runs the house was going on leave and the two of us were to do this along with mother’s care. Our personalities are like chalk and cheese. While she externalises, I internalise. And, we haven’t lived together our entire adult lives - not since we were in our teens. Not only that, we have a troubled past too - I guess most families have their issues and we do as well. It was an ambitious plan that within days became nothing short of a nightmare. My head was screaming overload. I’m used to living alone and barely managed the numerous people involved in mums home and care till sister arrived and then to deal with her entirely different stress coping mechanism  - one that imposed on me, was impossible and that’s how these pieces came into being. But, it’s not just this that created them for I had started the initial work prior to my sister’s arrival. I was under stress and she just became the trigger for something visceral. 

Inspired essentially by the sand bubbler crabs whose radial feeding residue patterns create a lace-like pattern across the sand. These patterns are fascinating in themselves, but the story behind them is equally so - actually more so and lends meaning to what I’m attempting to do with this series of embroideries. 

The sand bubbler crabs are tiny, shy creatures that run into their burrows at the sight of me. They dig these burrows and live in them until the tide brings forth the stuff they feed on. Then, they scuttle out of their hiding places and roll bits of wet sand in their mouths, digesting organic waste and detritus of animals, discarding the rest as little globules that dot the beaches. They work radially outwards from the burrow. And in leaving these globules they inform their tribe that this sand has been sifted and there’s nothing left to feed on. But, the part that I find most interesting is that in consuming the waste and detritus these sand bubblers actually clean the beaches. without which, there would be a stench. 

In these pieces, I’m using this concept of dealing with the detritus of one’s emotions to clean the environment. I started them, despite my beck and shoulders in agony. Finished two aided by a week of daily Physio therapy and then got a whopping cold. First, one side of the nasal tract and then the other with a really lovely chesty bronchial cough. All of which left me no choice but to abandon sewing and sleep it off. 

Not everything can be sorted by mere creative ideas. But, it’s all part of the healing process. If it hadn’t been for the rest, I’d never have cleared my head enough to write this! 

Hope you enjoyed this post. Stay tuned for more on the Golden Sand series - on why silk and gold have become emblematic of this series and other stitching stories.

Resources: 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussar_silk

https://asiainch.org/craft/ghicha-silk-weaving-of-bihar/) 

Personal Threads: ‘The Imperfect Cloth’ by Priya Ravish Mehra, Guest Post

Rafoogar Bathak,Najibabad

Najibabad, my hometown in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh, has historically served as a hub of the shawl trade in North India for the past 250 years, and has been known as the country’s most important centre for the specialized repair of valuable antique Kashmir kani shawls. At one time a profitable industry in Kashmir, the weaving of these beautiful textiles with their tapestry techniques, complex designs and intricate colour combinations is in sharp decline today.

 

Rafoogar demonstrating his craft, photo credit Priya Ravish Mehra

 

My own journey into the world of textiles began in childhood through the sight of kani shawls and other precious fabrics that were often brought to the family home by local rafoogars, expert darners who pass their carefully protected traditional skills from one generation to the next – fathers to sons, elders to youngsters, master artisans to apprentices – within their community. The rafoogars’ relationship with my ancestors had continued unbroken for decades. It was my rare good fortune to be raised by artistic parents – from the late 1930s to mid-1940s my mother and father had been students of Nandlal Bose, Binode Bihari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij,  the  three renowned Santiniketan modernists. I grew up in a house where handicrafts were integral to daily life, and where creativity and aesthetic interests were highly encouraged and appreciated. Kani shawls were prized items in our family collection, and my intimate familiarity with these exquisite objects from the time I was very young proved to be the core catalyst for my interest in the textile traditions of India, and later of the world.

 

Untiled-Kantha fragments with paper pulp, 14.5 in x 17.5 in -2016

 

My deep fascination with textiles took concrete form when I abandoned my postgraduate studies in mathematics and joined Santiniketan. Five years (1982-87) as a student in this renowned institution helped me to develop my interest in  textiles as both an area of study and as a personal art practice.

 

Untitled - Various thread with paper, 12 x 10 inches 2014

 

Over the years various opportunities to exhibit in solo and group shows in India and other countries came my way, and I received encouraging responses to my work. At present I am documenting the darning tradition in India, specifically the mending of Kashmir kani shawls, perhaps the only significant textile woven using tapestry techniques (with the possible exception of Deccan paithani saris). My research project, Making ‘Invisible’ Visible, is about a living tradition of craftsmanship, continuously upheld in difficult economic conditions by Najibabad’s rafoogars who have carefully protected the pushtaini (hereditary) knowledge required for the conservation of antique kani, keeping their specialized skills within the community and hence ‘invisible’ to outsiders.

 



The invisble darning

 

My research is a form of homage to these largely unseen and unacknowledged virtuoso artisans whose collective contribution to the great treasury of Indian cultural forms is missing from India’s textile narrative as well as from the sociological record. Other than the rare passing reference in Mughal manuscripts, quoted by various authors in modern studies of Kashmir shawls, there is no historical documentation of rafoogari as a profession or darners as a community. For me as a researcher, their discursive absence also embeds a symbolic irony, since the goal of repair and hallmark of expert rafoo is to render ‘invisible’ the damage on any kind of fabric.

 

Untitled- Indigo fabric with paper pulp 11 in x 8

 

I am not a textile scholar, textile historian or design/art pedagogue. My research is informed by my passion for textiles, my creative work as a textile art practitioner, my intuitive understanding of darning as an art form, my family associations with Najibabad’s rafoogars, and my deep concern for this vulnerable and unsupported community whose survival is under threat in an era of mechanization, as is the case with traditional artisans all over India. In more subjective terms, my research focus on the mending and restoration of degraded cloth acquired great significance for me some years ago when I was diagnosed with advanced cancer. I am still under treatment; and in this context the role of the rafoogar committed to preserving the unique life of a fragile, damaged kani shawl, who undertakes to repair it through difficult, meticulous, unseen, expert darning, has profound emotional resonance for me – as does the action of rafoo, which like all traditional Indian art forms is infused with meditative as well as cathartic and therapeutic potential.

 

Untitled- Indigo fabric with paper pulp 2, 11 in x 8

 

The medieval saint-poet Kabir, himself a weaver, frequently uses images from the craft to signify the process of material embodiment as well as of transcendence. The whole universe is stretched out on the cosmic loom fashioned from earth and sky; the sun and moon are simultaneously plied as twin shuttles… what was the warp, what the weft, what thread was used to create the finely woven, spotless sheet woven out of the five elements, the pristine cloth inevitably soiled, stained, defiled by the ignorant humans who wrap themselves in it…? So sings the poet, who concludes that only the Weaver can mesh thread with thread… with a formless shuttle weave a shawl with no edge… Today I am easily able to transpose Kabir’s lyric assertions to my own prolonged experience of an illness that has coerced visible and invisible uncertainties, fluctuations, blemishes and disruptions into the once-reliable order, logic and symmetries of my own somatic ‘warp and weft’. But I have also come to marvel at and respect the perfect design of the priceless perishable ‘sheet’; I have come to understand how the edges of each rip and gash have to be continuously aligned by the ‘darner’, firmly yet delicately pinioned, and then sealed stitch by careful stitch, to prevent further damage and to render the resilient cloth intact and whole. I have been absorbing and integrating those deeper intuitions simultaneously into my artistic life and my daily existence.

 

Untitled-Jute Fabric fragment with Daphne pulp,14 in x 21 in, 2016 (2)

 

Rafoogari thus represents an intimate merging of the artistic and personal paths within my life’s journey. My ongoing rafoogari research bestows a sense of coming full circle, a return to my origins which are also the source of my textile art practice that definitively germinated from my childhood love for kani shawls. Earlier, my ‘life’ and my ‘work’ were flowing in parallel, but now they seem to have become one. While my research documents the aesthetic, the technical skills and the sociological truths of the rafoogar community, it also provides me with an invaluable chance to assimilate various aspects of both visible and invisible darning as a powerful metaphor – to understand ‘repair’ as a vital modality of self-knowledge, and to experience the place, significance and act of such ‘darning’ in the fabric of a life, as well as in the life of a fabric. 

 

 

Priya Ravish Mehra is a Delhi-based textile artist, weaver, researcher and designer. Graduating from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, she later studied tapestry weaving at West Dean College, Sussex and  at the Royal College of Arts, London under a  Charles Wallace Fellowship.  To study the maintenance and preservation of Indian textiles, especially Kashmir shawls in public and private collections in the US, she also received an Asian Cultural Council Grant  Her battle against cancer has been aided and inspired by her work in rafoogari.

‘Personal Threads’ is an endeavour to read our histories (both political and personal) as the interconnected pieces of a quilt – each one’s individual threads sewn together to form a larger picture. Telling our stories is a means to locate ourselves and who we are within the folds of their narrative. And often, who we are and what we do, emerges from the people, things and places that played some role in our past. We may claim different nationalities and religions but the DNA of our lives is complex and far from unconnected.

 

If you’d like to contribute to this project, drop me a line.

 

 

 

The Marks of Living Continue to Fascinate - Crochet Stories (Washed Ashore)

I've been sorting through the stones and shells that I've collected - putting them together, mostly, according to their size. With the shells, the categories increase as there are broken bits, there are odds bits like oyster shells which seem like coagulated masses. I'm utterly enamoured of these 'darker' forms of the sea,  hoping to make them into pendants bringing out their salient features with silver filigree. Adding to my growing collection are also those shells which aren't quite shards but almost whole shells with the odd hole in them. I prize these the most from the current standpoint of wanting to sew/crotchet them onto fabric.
 

 

As I touch and feel each one and put them into their designate packets or transparent plastic containers, I marvel at the dents and marks, cracks and shards and pause to see just how perfect they seem with however their adventures through life has marked or shattered them. I can envision using all of them in some way. Nothing seems irrelevant. 
 

I'm often asked by people on the beach what I'm collecting. I say "anything I can find." The most usual response from them is "for an aquarium?" and I remain silent, wondering how could I ever explain that what I'm picking them up for,  is anything but the obvious aquarium. But yes, as a repository of life, mimicking the ocean of existence, I suppose it could be an aquarium of sorts. 
 

With the stones, no matter how small or large, the stoic acceptance of the weight they carry, becomes something to contemplate with regard to the weightiness of being that we, as humans, also carry.  Weathered by the tide, the wind and whatever other elemental experiences they may have passed through.  Do we manage this kind of acceptance? I cannot help but speculate, how on earth can one to muster such stoicism in the face of travails that have challenged and destroyed illusions of self? 
 

 

 

Then come the delicate, delightfully coloured and intricately patterned shells that appeal to the designer and pattern-maker in me. They are mostly separated parts of whole shells - the two almost identical faces that partner to create life, as they swim, tightly hugging each other, through the waves. The few little ones that I've found still intact, I've ventured to crack-open to discover that they're infertile - too young to have nurtured life. But, while all this charms, what I touch and feel and hold most carefully and thoughtfully, as each passes through my fingers, are the fragments that often don't even resemble shells. If I hadn't picked them off the sand I'd be hard-pressed to believe they were indeed shells. Despite being torn asunder thus, I've seen how they hold their ground - digging whatever is left of them into the sand, often more effectively than the stones. These fragments of broken rock pieces, that also people the beaches, are often well rounded but, mostly because of this, they inevitably tumble down, pulled back by the current, into the ocean, probably to be weathered even more. 

And it's the itsiest stones that I just love to collect. Occasionally if a friend comes along, and infected by my ardent fancy of all the rubble on the shore, starts picking up stuff for me. They exclaim "how can you even hold them, they're so small!" But, it's this smallness which I find evocative of diminishing egos that thrills me to hold - to catch their tiny, almost elusive forms, between my, comparatively giant-sized, index finger and thumb. They're adorable and sit together easily, no matter where I put them. They have an ease of belonging that's enviable. But, the process of getting there hurts like hell, doesn't it?