01 June 2010

Exploring the Fabric of Everyday Life in South Asia

New exhibit at U.S. museum provides insight into region’s quilts

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — Visitors in the U.S. prairie city of Lincoln, Nebraska, are touring some of the cultures of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan through their quilts.

Quilt making is a well-known and valued tradition in the United States. An institute at the University of Nebraska, the International Quilt Study Center, has been working for more than a decade to expand the understanding of quilted fabrics from around the world. It opened a museum two years ago, and its new exhibit, running through November 7, explores quilting textile traditions in South Asia.

India has been known for centuries for its fine printed textiles, and textile experts have studied the rich fabrics and clothing of its maharajahs’ courts, said Marin F. Hanson, the museum’s curator of exhibitions. India’s quilts are far less known. “All over the world, quilted textiles have been the least studied textiles because they’ve really been the folk art,” she said.

Hanson emphasized that the exhibit, like others at the museum, is about more than the quilts, as appealing as they might be. She said the goal “is to help visitors think about other societies and other people through this medium, through this metaphor of textiles.”

For this exhibit, the museum relied on the expertise of Patricia Stoddard, an American who lived in Pakistan for several years and wrote the first book on quilts from the region. The museum owns quilts from her collection from Pakistan and the neighboring northwestern Indian state of Gujarat. Also included in the exhibit are quilts from eastern India and Bangladesh collected over two years by museum researcher Patrick Finn, who documented their production and uses; and from a collector and researcher in Mumbai, India.

Hanson said the quilts are the fabrics of everyday life, but that “everyday life” has a broader meaning than most Americans might suspect. A quilt might be used as a bedcovering, as in the United States; it might be spread on the ground for a seating area; it might be hung in a doorway; it might provide padding on a cart seat or a cover for the cart’s cargo; or it might serve as a cushion for the bride and groom in a wedding ceremony. “Women still work on their dowries, and these quilts are often part of their dowries,” Hanson said.

The quilts of South Asia vary as much as the region’s cuisines do, Hanson said. The top of a kantha quilt from Bangladesh or India’s West Bengal or Bihar will typically be a solid piece of cloth — an old sari or dhoti, the garment of a woman or a man — rather than pieces of cloth stitched together. It will be heavily covered in embroidered images, perhaps including fish, to represent bounty, or a Hindu temple chariot, or a Bengal tiger, or a peacock. “They completely cover the surface of this whole cloth,” Hanson said. “It’s sort of mind-boggling.”

In the western India state of Maharastra, the saris are different — typically a fairly plain gray, but with a brightly colored border — and the stitching is done with the thread laboriously unwound from the borders. Hanson said the recycling of fabric is the norm for Indian quilts, which also use worn-out saris and dhotis as their layers of filling. “You do what you can with what you have,” she said.

(Contrary to popular perceptions, she said, American quilts from even as far back as the colonial period, before 1776, often were made of pieces of new cloth. “The idea of thrift in quiltmaking is complicated,” she said.)

The ralli quilts from western India and Pakistan are more typically pieced together from many scraps, with cut-out pieces appliquéd on top as well as embroidery and the inclusion of sequins and tiny mirrors. The motifs might include animals such as peacocks, elephants and camels, and symbols such as the tree of life.

It’s not only people’s blankets that are quilted. The exhibit includes decorative coverings made for camels and bullocks by the Rabari people in the desert region of Kutch, in Gujarat. Bullock coverings are designed to accommodate the Brahma bull’s distinctive hump, Hanson said.

Hanson said the Nebraska center has begun to explore Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for their quilts, and she hopes to travel through China in hopes of documenting the quilting traditions there. “This exhibition is really just the beginning, I think, of finding out about quilted textiles from all over this part of the world,” she said.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)