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| Edited By: Gargi Gupta |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 08:18 AM IST
In the ten years between 1981 and 1991, Indian handloom textiles guru Martand Singh curated seven 'vishwakarma' (master artisan) exhibitions to showcase the best of Indian textile arts – weaving, painting, printing, resist-dyeing from across the country – and to explore the contemporary relevance of these inherited skills. Singh travelled across the country, looking up long-lost traditions, meeting craftsmen, pushing them to look up old pieces, try out new things. 'A Search in Five Directions', on at the Crafts Museum in the capital now, showcases pieces from those exhibitions, as a tribute to Singh who died last year. It has been curated by three of his acolytes –sari expert Rta Kapur-Chishti, who worked with on all the Vishwakarma exhibitions, designer Rakesh Thakore and Calico Museum director Rahul Jain. Seen today, just 35 years on, these impossibly pieces speak of a virtuosity that's rarely, or never seen today.
A rare ikat sari with a verse, or bandha, by Oriya poet Upendra Bhanj woven into it. The bandha is a kind of circuit verse, which ends with the same letter that it begins with, and the weaver depicts it graphically by placing the letters in the body of a winding snake. The bandha is also a puzzle, with a beej, or key, to decipher it. Here it's the exchange of secret messages between lovers, and the sari, conjectures curator Rta Kapur-Chishti, was probably meant as a gift, probably to the wife, or groom's mother, at the time of a wedding. So complicated was the design that it took the weaver about a year to complete the sari.
A magnificent kalamkari tapestry depicting a bamboo thicket. Note the uncharacteristic use of straight lines by the artist –kalamkari prints are usually sinuous designs, full of winding creepers, flowers, leaves, etc. Clearly, the piece, made at the Weavers' Service Centre in Hyderabad, was an exercise in pushing the boundaries of the kalamkari art. But, the curators note, the artists didn't quite succeed in achieving the exquisite, delicate effects their ancestors could – perhaps the materials and tools had changed, were not as fine before, they speculate. Lay viewers, however, can only marvel at the results.
This large tapestry of birds was made as a tribute to the birdman of India, Salim Ali. It's been blockprinted using blocks made from designs from 18th and 19th century chintz cloth. What's noteworthy, according to the curators, is the large scale of the bird-motifs, and the use of several blocks to colour each bird. The background is formed of the same birds, printed in a lighter colour.
Conservation was as much a focus of Martand Singh, as revival was. To that end, he commissioned 'directories' of the blocks used by major printing and weaving centres – Pethapur (Gujarat), Bagru and Sanganer (Rajasthan), Kanchipuram, etc – both as a sort of ready reference for printers, and a historical record. This one, executed in 1986, of Sanganer pattern blocks has 700 unique designs; an earlier, late 18th century 'directory', now in the textile museum in Washington had 1,038 patterns
This sari, made in 1981, recreates a nearly lost heritage textile associated with the royalty of Tanjore, and many Maratha kingdoms. The Kodalikarrupur saris, named after the village in Ariyalur district in central Tamil Nadu, are made using a combination of weaving and dye-printing, which today seems excruciatingly painstaking and intricate. First the cloth is woven using an extra thread - in this case, gold or silver zari - in the weft, to create a brocade-like effect. The weaver does not cover the entire sari in zari, he leaves out bits in the middle which will form the design. These bits are then resist dyed – that is, the entire cloth is covered in wax, leaving out just those parts that are to be coloured, before being immersed in a dye vat. In this specimen, the intricate white pattern comes from a second dyeing where the printer must have worked the details using a kalam (thin pen). Note the 3D embossed effect that it gives the sari.
