Launched at a recent exhibition in Kolkata, a treasurable new book on textiles of Bengal navigates through people, culture, trade and geography. Here’s how to find your river bank

Can you judge a book by its inside cover? That supposition becomes a possibility with ‘Textiles From Bengal: A Shared Legacy’. Published by Mapin and launched in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name curated by Weavers Studio Resource Centre (WSRC) that ran from January to March, in Kolkata, the 360-page book is exceptional in its genre.

Conceived as a dialogue, it curates writings by art historians, museum curators, anthropologists, textile practitioners and scholars. They take us through the famed textiles of Bengal from the 16th to the 20th century. It gently resists the bracket of a ‘beautiful coffee table book’ to be flipped through with passing curiosity. History is not just the past as this volume, described as a ‘public history’ asserts.

As the inside cover and first few pages set in the colour of wet clay tell us right at the start, this is not merely an assimilation of well-written essays placed with poignant photos. The dull sepia reproduction in paper on page two, of a colcha, a wall hanging with a triumphal arch made by embroiders of Bengal working under Portuguese commission during mid-17th-century—originally silk chain embroidery on blue silk with cotton backing—holds figurative complexity. You sit up, alerting yourself to make a concerted effort to follow what is being narrated.

Listening in means leaning in; it is not going to be easy—says the book—as it leads you. Who said that a history told through and of textiles, woven thick with people, places, politics, geography, beauty and exploitation will be easy anyway?

Edited by Sonia Ashmore, Tirthankar Roy and Niaz Zaman, ‘Textiles of Bengal’ mixes scholastic knowledge, sharp editing and carefully selected photos—placed under different sections. From the history of undivided Bengal to personal stories. From the tactility of fibres, yarn, dyes, paintings and weaves to the socio-cultural mirroring of the region. It uses chapters on Bengal cotton as a world commodity, embroidered paintings of Bengal to move on to weavers, spinners and then towards ethnic textiles of the Lower Bengal Delta or The Art of Gamchha Weaving in Bangladesh. Those are but a few instances. It pulls you into its vastness. Its depth.

Why Read this Book…

Because we seldom know enough even about subjects that interest us. Because the land of the untapped and unexplored is both an ocean and a delta, especially for readers not educated in textile history. “Textiles from Bengal, which once clothed the world had received little scholarly attention for the last few decades and the region’s famed textile legacy was lost in the fold of national borders, wavering markets and a decaying skill repertoire. The vibrant and dynamic history of an industry whose products travelled not just through the subcontinent but through many parts of the globe, also documents culture, economics, superlative artistic skills and human dexterity.” Those are the words of Darshan Shah, founder of WRSC and the project director of the exhibition and book in the introduction to the project. Once you read it, you understand what Shah meant, when at the Kolkata exhibition, she said the book could not have been less than a global-local scholastic enquiry. It is more.

How to Read the Book

The six sections have 30 chapters and 18 catalogue entries. Readers could pick any of the umbrella ideas the book holds in its folds. Focus only on artistic skills of the region. Or, deep dive into the intricacies of economic power and resultant exploitation of the disempowered. Or, open it as a Pandora’s box to rummage through history—colonial policies about crafts industries, Mughal lineage, Portuguese influences, larger political movements, roles of the Dutch, Danish and French in Bengal. Or, look at it through the prism of South Asian textiles and their impact on global design. Or, find trade routes that connected, for instance, the East India Company to the silks of Bengal, stories of migration of skills from East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh) to West Bengal. Or, put aside the overwhelming scholastic enmeshment between politics, people, economics and hand skills to read the photographs. They speak their own language. You pick up the grammar as you observe. A Dhonekhali cotton sari with a traditional laal paar (red border), or a woven Baluchari sari border inscribed with the slogan ‘Vande Mataram’, a vermillion red chador (shawl) with golden brocade butas on four corners from the royal family of Kunjaghata—all are sign posts, hubs, symbols.

Some are incredible for their beauty—a pahaar, mayur paar (border with boats, plants and peacocks) from Santipur (20th Century) is one. As is another, a printed cotton prayer shawl from 1855-79. There is at least one more route to this tapestry of routes and roots in this book—that of layouts, colours and images. Olive green, dull grey, new clay, dry mud, the warm hue of gur sondesh are used in pages to depict section separation. Then there are the photographs, sketches, letters, reproductions of cloth fragments. Between them, they depict the seas, boats, boatmen, weavers and weaves. The power dynamics between rulers and slaves. Meetings between Indian kings and Dutch admirals. A photograph, for instance, of a newly wedded couple from a Dasghara zamindari (landholder) family is a delight.

In short (and long), a reader finds a view, a world-view, discoverable by land and sea, people and politics. But then we must scaffold it to make meaning.

Finding Your River Bank

Enthralled by personal stories, anecdotal fragments of human life that tell us about the inheritance of loss and gain in an era, a civilisation, a century, a year or a moment through cloth this writer felt particularly “enmeshed”, in Section III. Titled, The World of the Bengali Textile Worker, it personifies the emotional volatility as well as continuity we find in the way textiles are spun, woven, embroidered, dyed, stitched, painted. Textiles don’t need to be narrative or figurative to tell tales. They do so in their thread count, yarn, twist, strength or fragility. ‘The Weaving Memories of Migration’ and ‘The Forced Migration of Skills’ struck a chord. After all, we must find our own “river banks” in life and in a book.

The ‘River Bank’ in narrative psychotherapy is a metaphor for ‘separation, liminality and reincorporation’. Without our individual river banks, we would be swept away. Not just in the flow of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta.

Yet we don’t. So go, find your river bank as you read Bengal.