By Ines Keane
Turn a kantha over and the story is in the stitches. Small, even, in a line, never overlapping. The Cooper Hewitt museum calls this the kantha stitch, and says the word covers a craft of reusing worn cotton to make household textiles. It is, in its plainest form, a winter blanket.
What it is made from
Cooper Hewitt says Bengali households often strip old sari fabric of its decoration and turn it into winter blankets. Borders torn from old saris can be used unchanged on the quilt, and threads pulled from the cloth can stitch the motifs. Wikipedia describes soft old dhotis and saris layered and joined with simple running stitches, giving the cloth a gently puckered, wavy look. Asian Textile Studies adds lungis to the list of cloth that was recycled.
How many layers
Here the sources differ. Asian Textile Studies says the traditional base was five to seven layers of old cloth, and that modern kanthas sometimes use two layers of coarser cotton. House of Wandering Silk, a page whose author works with an artisan cooperative, also says five to seven layers, with lighter fabrics on the outside. Cooper Hewitt says only that layers are stacked and hand-stitched together. We show the figures as the sources give them. Nobody we read counted a particular quilt.
The stitch itself
Asian Textile Studies says kanthas are made by embroidering the layers together, not by stitching them, patching or appliqué, and that the running stitch, called kantha phor, is worked through all layers, creating a rippled effect that makes motifs stand out. House of Wandering Silk says basting holds the layers in place first, and the running stitch is then worked from one corner in parallel lines. Cooper Hewitt notes that a 19th-century Bengal example at the Philadelphia Museum of Art also uses chain, darning, satin, dot and seed stitches. So “kantha” names both the stitch and the cloth, as House of Wandering Silk puts it, and the stitch is not the only one in the cloth.
Names by use
Asian Textile Studies lists the lep as a large, heavily padded winter coverlet, about 6 by 4½ feet; the sujni as a ceremonial spread or seating mat; the bayton as a square wrapper about 36 inches wide; and the rumal as a handkerchief-sized square about 12 inches wide. Cooper Hewitt names smaller items made from scraps, among them a book cover, a clothes wrapper and a long floor mat for serving food. Wikipedia separates Lepkantha and Sujni Kantha and says Nakshi kantha refers to simple quilts made with kantha stitching, while Asian Textile Studies and House of Wandering Silk both treat nakshi as the figurative kind, with par tola the geometric one. House of Wandering Silk adds that the reverse of a par tola piece stays plain running stitch. A fine nakshi piece, it says, usually centres on a lotus with birds, plants, fish and flowers around it.
How old is the craft
This is where the sources part company most. House of Wandering Silk places the origins in the pre-Vedic age, before 1500 BCE, and then says the earliest written record is about 500 years old. Asian Textile Studies puts the earliest mention around 1557, in Krishnadasa Kaviraj’s Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita. Cooper Hewitt dates one of its own pieces to about the 18th or 19th century, cotton with silk embroidery, appliqué and mirror inserts, 185 by 116 cm, and the Philadelphia piece to the second half of the 19th century. Our reading: the objects held by museums go back two centuries or so, the written record about five, and the earlier claims rest on one page.
Decline and revival are told differently too. Asian Textile Studies says kantha declined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of cheap machine-made textiles, and that Pratima Devi led an attempt at revival in the 1940s. House of Wandering Silk says the tradition nearly disappeared in the early 19th century and was revived in the 1940s by a daughter-in-law of Rabindranath Tagore. They seem to describe the same revival with different decline dates.
Where it is made today
Cooper Hewitt says kantha is practised in Bangladesh and in the Indian regions of Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha. Wikipedia names West Bengal, Tripura and Odisha, and describes Odisha pieces as thin cushions made from stacked old saris. House of Wandering Silk says most production now serves commercial markets in India, Bangladesh and abroad, and that a single piece could take months or even years.
Dates in order
- About 1557: earliest mention, according to Asian Textile Studies.
- 18th to 19th century: the Cooper Hewitt piece.
- Second half of the 19th century: the Philadelphia piece, according to Cooper Hewitt.
- 1940s: revival attempt, according to Asian Textile Studies and House of Wandering Silk.
Questions a buyer would ask
How many layers? Do the stitches run through all of them? Is the thread new, or drawn from old borders? Our reading: those three questions separate a quilted blanket from a printed one with stitching pictured on top. The sources do not tell you how to test it, so ask the seller and keep the answer.
What we left out
Prices, artisan incomes, co-operative figures, and any registered-name claims, which we did not find in a source we could read. We also kept to textiles and left out the historical events that the pages mention in passing.
Quick answers
What is kantha? According to Cooper Hewitt, it is the practice of reinventing worn cotton fabric into household textiles, indigenous to the Bengal region. Layers are stacked and hand-stitched.
Is kantha a winter quilt? Cooper Hewitt says Bengali households often turn old sari fabric into winter blankets. Asian Textile Studies describes the lep as a heavily padded winter coverlet.
How many layers does a kantha have? Asian Textile Studies and House of Wandering Silk both say traditionally five to seven. Asian Textile Studies says modern ones sometimes use two.
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