Using kantha to support women in rural areas

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The kantha is the story of the ingenuity and creativity of the women of rural West Bengal. Lovingly created from the remnants of worn garments, the village women of Bengal transformed tattered cloth into beautiful warm quilts by recycling and layering old saris and dhotis.

The imagery included simple, traditional village vignettes and pictures of deities etc. These were stitched with such precision that each kantha told a different story.
What began in Bengal hundreds of years ago is today the fashion diktat world-over, thanks to the efforts of West Bengal’s Self Help Enterprise (SHE) and its chairperson Shamlu Dudeja, who took few village women folk and started to work on kantha. An exhibition was held recently at the India International Centre, Annexe, New Delhi, from March 20 to 25 which showcased different kantha stitches, starting from a village circus to Durga Puja to the Mahabharata and Ras Leela, depicting the imaginations and scenes that rural women see and experience in everyday life.
Sharing her experience in the national capital, Ms Dudeja says: “The experience was astounding. Prime Minister’s wife Mrs Gursharan Kaur said she is proud to be associated with SHE. The other visitors who came to our exhibition praised our workers, and told us to come up with more exhibitions.”
With the objective to get more and more people interested in kantha creations, Ms Dudeja’s exhibition in Delhi was targeted to all sections of society. “No particular ‘section’ of society is specifically targeted. People from all walks of life and from all over the world that appreciate rural handicraft and have an ethnic artistic sensibility will appreciate these paintings. We want to get more and more people interested in kantha creations so that the number of women engaged in this work increases steadily,” says Ms Dudeja.
However, as the proverb goes “nothing good comes easy”, Ms Dudeja, too, had to struggle in the first phase to get things organised. In 1986, Ms Dudeja took the initiative of few rural women and planned to expand the scope of kantha. She started working with a group of small, casual kantha artists and asked them to work on three saris. Three months later, when they brought the completed saris, Ms Dudeja was amazed to see the workmanship. This was the first step in coming up with an informal organisation called SHE.
“When I gave up my job due to abdominal tumour in 1985, I saw a group of girls selling kantha mats. I did not know much about kantha then. I had only done paisleys on my mother’s blouses and flowers on tea cosies. I asked these rural women to work some patterns on three saris (which I dyed in tea) — one paisleys like I did in red and black, one like a bed cover I had and the third along the lines of a printed sari I had. Three months later, they brought the completed saris, with absolutely amazing workmanship. With the next lot of saris, the informal SHE group was formed. I had breast cancer in 1987. Then my daughter, Malika, helped me in marketing her salwar kurtas for the first time,” says Ms Dudeja.
Ms Dudeja’s efforts to revive this traditional art form revived kantha as she started developing this poor man’s quilt to expensive decorative stitch, which can be used in fashion and home décor. Her journey, which she started with three saris and few rural women, has now been transformed and widened. At present, SHE has several hundred girls who work for two to three hours a day and get an off whenever they have some much prior work in their home. “They get paid on ‘per piece’ basis and depends on how many hours a month they work,” says Ms Dudeja. The surplus money goes back into holding health camps and eye camps. SHE members are given loans, free medicines, solar lights as well as computers for their children.
SHE has taken kantha to the United States, France, London and several other cities through its exhibitions.
Moreover, the Government of India, Delhi and ICCR took kantha as stitch art exhibitions (with Tagore themes) to many cities in Europe, Egypt and Bangladesh. But Ms Dudeja feels that it is not enough. She tells this correspondent that “we need to do more to increase the demand for kantha” as there are more women in West Bengal who can use this as a means to earn some money and support their family. Urging West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee to work out a project to popularise kantha, Ms Dudeja says, “Ms Banerjee was presented a Rabindranath Tagore bust by former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton (who bought it from us in Kolkata). So she knows what good kantha is... Ms Banerjee needs to work out a project to popularise kantha.”
Among the many plans Ms Dudeja has in the upcoming years, one of the most important is to list kantha as an intangible cultural heritage of West Bengal in Unesco. “We have filled up a form to get the listing done. However, the problem is the officials say Bangladesh has also asked for a similar favour. So I urge the ministry of culture in India to contact their counterpart in Bangladesh and get a joint form filled up. It will really help us to get the recognition soon and take kantha to a new level,” says Ms Dudeja.