Among the many reasons behind the compelling pull of Indian textiles is their skill and ingenuity. There are printed and painted Kalamkaris, Baluchars that mirror mythology, fine hand embroideries that resemble “painting with a needle” as the late culturalist and social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya described them. Gujarat’s double Ikat Patolas woven with magnificent elephant processions or Odisha’s weaves with temple motifs, the region’s maritime history or a Geet Govinda woven in Ikat make them revered pieces of cloth. In the Vaishnavite silks of Assam or the Gyasar brocades of Varanasi lives an engrossing saga of merchants, monks, rulers, priests. Mughals and the Portuguese too. This is only a small litany.
The gamchha, on the other hand is familiar and ubiquitous. A red and white checkered cotton cloth from rural Bengal, worn also by its makers in the villages along the Brahmaputra. Or, the cotton gamusa from the Northeast with red swans and large floral patterns, used as a mark of respect and welcome—they are common man’s textiles. Associated with the working-class. With ordinariness. In Bengal even with marginalisation, thrown on the shoulder of a toiling farmer or a rickshaw puller. It is a ‘textile in use’ to be twisted to make a handy turban or a pillow, an eye mask in the scorching heat of rural life, or as a towel to wipe a perspiring face and body. As stories go, “respectable” middle-class homes in Kolkata refrained from drying gamchhas in their balconies to avoid notions of economic ordinariness.
That is perhaps why, today, when as the centrepiece of an ongoing exhibition in Delhi at the Crafts Museum and Hastakala Academy, Gamchha: From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary, the textile has piqued interest across audiences. The show is presented by the Dastkaari Haat Samiti, whose founder-president Jaya Jaitly, former politician and an exponent of Indian textiles and crafts, has long been interested in the gamchha as a politically strong statement with an extraordinary potential as a fabric.
Jaitly, who commissioned gamchha saris ten years back to weavers in Phulia Bengal, smiles big as she sits in the forecourt of the exhibition hall at the Crafts Museum. She talks about the two years it took to get this exhibition out. From Khadi co-operatives to pieces presented at the G-20 Summit in 2023 and special commissions in different regions, she says this is not an academic exercise. It is about speaking up for a social equality symbol. For the empathy, hard work, toil and beauty that the Gamchha evokes. She agrees that she has indeed been rivetted by the Gamchha since her early days in politics in the Eighties when she noticed it being used as a garland to welcome visitors in Odisha.
Ordinary to Extraordinary
More than 250 pieces from 14 Indian states and other South Asian regions—handloom pieces as well as mill-made depicting a realistic map of production–from Tamil Nadu to Kerala, Andhra Pradesh to Odisha, and Northeastern states have been mounted. The show is curated by Suparana Bhalla while architect and origami artist Ankon Mitra has used gamchhas to create two spatial installations. The exhibition includes especially commissioned photographs and videos that narrate the gamchha’s life in ubiquity and neglect. Anecdotal notations bubble with stories from ordinary Indian lives. A daughter reminiscing about a father shelling peas on a gamchha, a Sanskrit teacher from Madhubani in Bihar demonstrating tying the gamchha on his head. These stories surround the display of textiles that were curated by experts commissioned to research them from each of the 14 states. While the exhibition design could have certainly done better with smaller font sizes for written story-telling and subtler ways of placing text instead of on pink circular boards, overall, the exhibition makes a pertinent point. It reminds us that never has the gamchha been seen or recorded as an important part of textile history in India.
Textile artist, researcher and Vriksh designer Gunjan Jain who has spearheaded design development of Odisha textiles for years, wants to draw attention to the realm of skills that surround the Gamchha. She points to temple borders on some gamchhas as small as half a finger nail woven with extreme dexterity. Travelling across the state for research and photographic direction for this exhibition, she said a weaver recounted a heartwarming proverb. “Who needs a friend if we one has a gamchha on the shoulder?” he said. Jain points to the technical possibilities of gamchha weaving beyond a man’s stole. From the sacred cloth of priests in Odisha’s temples with its own specific patterning as angavastras or dhotis, to the saris and dupattas she commissioned using the checks and stripes vocabulary juxtaposed with Ikat, she says the potential is exhaustive. A majority of the pieces at the exhibition, including the pristine whites from Kerala with coloured Ganga-Jamuna borders are smaller—70 inches x 35 inches, but Jain says the gamchha beckons textile designers to step up the game in design intervention.
How Fashion Favours the Gamchha
Several fashion designers would agree. It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the most refined interpretations of Gamchha-centred checkered textiles woven in 100 count or even superior cotton in intense colours have been made by designers who studied at the National Institute of Design (NID). Not to make an absolute statement, but Santanu Das of Maku has used the Gamchha proportioned checks to get fine khadi woven in Bengal in Indigo blue and white. Paromita Banerjee also based in Kolkata has used gamchha textiles in 4-5 collections and some details from them in all her collections since she launched her label 15 years back. All handwoven muslins. Chinar Farooqui of Jaipur’s Injiri, a handloom label that speaks its language clearly through refinement continues to use checkered fabrics from her very first collection till date. One of the brand’s captions reads: “Checks in all intensities”.
All these designers are from NID. It would be remiss not to mention pero founder and designer Aneeth Arora’s (who also went to NID) continuing interest in the Gamchha fabric. Arora has used it as trims, for slips, sheaths and scarves with crafted edges and tassels and as the base fabric of her embroidered creations.
“We visualise the gamchha as a technique of colour blocking on the loom,” says Banerjee, emphasising she uses remnants of the checks and striped textile for patterns on bags and other accessories. Her inspiration began from Victoria & Albert Museum’s archival collection of checkered fabrics including Coromandel checks, Bengal gamchhas and Madras rumaals. There is also a synchronistic relevance because of plaid fabrics and tartan checks, she said.
Farooqui, on the other hand, says that her label Injiri (which means from India) works on historically significant textiles. “It is about celebrating beauty in the mundane. Not everything has to be reinvented which seems to become a trend in fashion,” she said. Farooqui owes her distinctive use of checkered hand-woven (never mill made) fabrics to her training in fine arts at Baroda’s MS University more than her studentship at NID. “The use of checkered and striped fabrics has become so common from Madras lungis to all varieties of mill made fabrics and mass retail labels, that it is important to elevate our work as fashion,” said Farooqui. She uses handwoven Jamdani and extra weft weaving that looks like subtle embroidery in untried mixes of colours to speak Injiri’s language of design.
The use of checkered fabrics with handwoven Jamdani is also noticeable in the work of Pondicherry-based designer Naushad Ali, for kaftans, shirts and dresses. And then, there is ready-to-wear brand Nicobar which also sources handloom fabrics from different parts of India, contemporarising their use for tops, shirts, pyjamas, dresses and kaftans. These instances barely sum up fashion’s abiding interest in the Gamchha.
The last word though goes to Gaurav Jai Gupta, a Delhi-based textile engineer. He identifies the Gamchha as something “everyone” wears in his home state of Haryana from farm work to community gatherings. “It is an item of free will, said Jai Gupta. “A common man’s palla (like the sari’s pallu). It goes from being a safa in Haryana to the Prime Minister’s COVID-19 mask, a Manipuri gamchha because of its functionality. Let’s laud its functional versatility.”
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Photo credits:
Gamchha: From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary exhibition images. Courtesy Dastkaari Haat Samiti.
Images of life and times of Gamchha from different parts of India: Courtesy Dastkaari Haat Samiti
Injiri Images: Courtesy Chinar Farooqui/Injiri
Paromita Banerjee Images: Courtesy Paromita Banerjee
