Making Kantha, Making Home

Regular price €77.99
A01=Pika Ghosh
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Art History
Author_Pika Ghosh
automatic-update
B09=Anand A. Yang
B09=K. Sivaramakrishnan
B09=Padma Kaimal
Bengali kantha
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AFW
Category=AKT
Category=HBJF
Category=JBSF
Category=JFSJ
Category=NHF
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
embroidery
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Gender Studies
iconography
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
South Asian Studies
textiles

Product details

  • ISBN 9780295746999
  • Weight: 1021g
  • Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
  • Publication Date: 15 Jul 2020
  • Publisher: University of Washington Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

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In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use them as shawls, covers, and seating mats.

Making Kantha, Making Home explores the social worlds shaped by the Bengali kantha that survive from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first study of colonial-period women’s embroidery that situates these objects historically and socially, Pika Ghosh brings technique and aesthetic choices into discussion with iconography and regional culture.

Ghosh uses ethnographic and archival research, inscriptions, and images to locate embroiderers’ work within domestic networks and to show how imagery from poetry, drama, prints, and watercolors expresses kantha artists’ visual literacy. Affinities with older textile practices include the region’s lucrative maritime trade in embroideries with Europe, Africa, and China. This appraisal of individual objects alongside the people and stories behind the objects’ creation elevates kantha beyond consideration as mere handcraft to recognition as art.

Pika Ghosh is visiting professor of religion at Haverford College. She is author of Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal, editor of Fashioning the Divine: South Asian Sculpture at the Ackland Art Museum, and coauthor of Cooking for the Gods: The Art of Home Ritual in Bengal.