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 Significance of Stains

Are you not ashamed of yourself? you should be!

As a young girl studying in a convent school, one was often chided with this idea and as with much else that one is exposed to as a child,  this kind of thinking becomes embedded in the subconscious and judging one-self based in this way affects the psyche till such point as it drags you down. When, as Kabir says, the fabric of our being becomes so marked that, the inner guidance, which I refer to as the poet, or inner voice, cannot kindle that passion for living because the garb or fabric of being,  is dampened with stains of shame.

गुरू बिचारा क्या करे सबद न लागे अंग ।

कहे कबीर मैली गजी कैसे जागे रंग ।।

                                                                             - Kabir

                    Guru bechaara kya kari sabad na laage ang

                        Kahe Kabir maili gajji kaise jaage rang

          If the poet's words don't  
          arouse your passion.
          She is not to blame.
          It's fire cannot be kindled
          if your garb is dampened
          with stains of shame. 

For years I have been working with the idea of stains. I have studied the stains or marks in my tea-cup which led me to explore the idea of stains in the mind - those things which mark us in our own perceptions is what I call stains. The stuff that does not make us feel good about ourselves, diminishing our self esteem and therefore extends to reflect those thoughts of guilt, embarrassment and pain and at some level also blame where there is anger and resentment for someone’s behaviour, which affects our sense of self.

I also found that textile-saint-poets Kabir, Namdev [Maharasthra] and Dariya Sahib of Bihar also referred to the stains or ‘daag’ in the mind which must be cleansed to find passion in life and the New Age philosopher Wayne Dyer also says that “Happiness is not something you get in life. Happiness is something that you bring to life.” This pretty much says the same thing to me, which implies that in order to feel happy and bring that happiness to life, one’s sense of self has to be uplifted, which infers that it has been diminished and in this sense, the significance of these ‘stains’ in reducing our sense of self becomes huge.

After years of photographing the marks in my tea cup or saucer, I wanted to study them, make them as I found them but this was a tall order. I don’t really like the finished effect of a drawing on paper, there is something about fabric that brings things to life for me in a way that paper and canvas cannot. And while I could have used soft pastels to get a good likeness of the marks that fascinated me, like I said, paper was not the medium I was inclined to work with, so this got shelved and then another year later, which is today, I suddenly came up with the idea of using some fabric on the saucer, beneath my tea-cup to let it absorb the marks that would otherwise mark the saucer. And this exercise was revealing.

First and foremost, it showed me that the stains came, in the first place, because I poured the tea into the cup rather carelessly. I used four layers of muslin cut in approximately four inch squares, loosely tacked together. And while the top fabric seemed to be faithful to the liquid tea as it dropped onto the saucer-covered-fabric, in the lower layers, this spread as if to say that unless you clean up the mess made with your carelessness, the stain gets bigger and bigger with age, with the various skins that one develops through life. Ultimately this blotch becomes unrecognizable and then also more difficult to resolve.

I am not sure how I am going to develop these marks but I am certainly not done with my exploration. Held up to the light, each layer reveals its own outline of the mark that is growing, like a feint outline. The photos I have taken do not do justice to what I can see with the naked eye and neither do I think that as the mark dries that it will remain as strong. So one thing that does come to mind is that I want to trace these lines with thread, to let them show through the fabric layers to bring out the point – a very significant point, I think, that if you don’t clean up the mess or deal with things as they crop up, then the stain gets larger and larger, impinging needlessly on your sense of self.

I know it is tedious to be so particular about putting things into perspective and sometimes I feel very hemmed in by a habit that I have formed in trying to do this.  Actually, I have to because otherwise I find blocks in the channels of connectivity to the source of energy that makes life sublime, effortless and magical. And while I can see there is a contradiction here because it does require effort to achieve this kind of connectivity, I have to confess, it’s better than feeling stressed and unable to figure out what is going on....or why something is occurring when it was not what your intent was to achieve.....etc.....etc.... I think you get my drift....

And as Dariya Sahib Saint of Bihar says:

                रे मन सुिमरि ले सतनाम के िफरि औसर टरी।
                काया कागज हाथ हरि जनि जासि अवघट मरी।।
                समुझि लीजे चरन सतगुर काटु जम के सरी।            
                निहकलंक तन निरबान पद भौ प्रेम बाती बरी।।
                ब्रह्म जागेव भर्म भागेव कर्म काटवे करी।           
                अमी सरवर पिवन लागा मिला निरमल जरी ।।
                तप्त तन के त्रिमिर छुटेव फूटि जम जुथ डरी।
                दरस से प्रतिपाल कीन्हो सकि्त पाएन परी।
                गुप्त मंतर जंतर कीन्हो ज्ञान गुंगा गरी।               
                त्रखा बुताने प्रेम रस बसि रहत गागरि भरी।।
                दनि के दुख तुरंत मेटेव कष्ट कागज फरी।
                कहें दरिया दाया सिर पर क्रपा करि जन तरि।।

                re mn sumire le satnaam ke phiri ausar tari
                kaaya kaagaz haath jani jaasi avghat mari           
                sumijhe leeje charn satguru kaatu jum ke sari
                nihaklank tan nirbaan pd bhau prem baati bari
               brahm jaagev bharam bhaagev karm kaatev kari
               ami  sarvar pivan laagaa milaa nirmal jari
               tapt tan ke trimir chutev phooti jum juth dari
               daras se pratipaal kinho sakit paayan pari
              gupt mantar jantar kinho gyaan gunga bhari
              trakhaa butane prem ras basi rahat gaagari bhari
              dani ke dukh turant metev kasht kaagaz phari
              kahe dariya daaya sir par kripa kari jan tari

                    Repeat, again and again. Endlessly
                    beckon the purifying spirit by name.
                    Lose not this opportunity of time in frame.

                    The fruition of desires; your mistakes
                    and choices are determined by thoughts
                    held in rein, beyond this conscious mind.

                   So call out by name, again and again
                   as you sift through the dust beneath
                   the feet of your experience and mine

                   for the compassion to heal
                   wounds of ignorance, inflicted upon
                   yourself and made another blind.

                   Only when, these marks left by pain,
                   have faded in the knowing light, will love
                   shine forth to share the secret of it to gain.

                   Chant silently, repeat again and again
                   beckon the purifying spirit by name
                   and awaken to the universe’s treasure

                  far greater than illusions that limit
                  the pleasures yet known to those
                  who hope to quench the thirst for love

                  through hearts that deny the divine.
                  Repeat again and again, beckon
                  the purifying spirit. In all humility,

                  urges this poet-saint,  battle
                  the dark stains of judgement.
                  Stand rooted in faith and it will

                 rip through your travails with
                 the drunken splendour of bliss.
                 A love so true, words cannot define.

creative interpretation of re mn sumire - gopika nath

NB

History tells us that Dariya Sahib was a mystic; a saint who lived in the eighteenth century in Bihar. Some say he was Hindu while many refer to him as a Muslim tailor whose father was also a tailor. He opposed and strongly condemned idol worship and animal sacrifice which brought upon him the wrath of the orthodox Hindu community of his village. The local pundit categorized him as a highly dangerous man, whose devotional practice had made him insane. When upset about one of his disciple’s attempt to remove their goddess from the temple, hiding her and leaving her hungry for three months, the villagers threatened to sacrifice him to appease the Goddess. In response he said : Don’t be afraid of those who strive to prosecute.  Sing, every step of the way, that name of the eternal within.