A Note to the Reader

Mason, Darielle

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Description: Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz...

Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

A Note to the Reader

Author

Darielle Mason (Editor)

PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22910

A Note to the Reader

Transliteration and language: For the sake of accessibility, diacritical marks have been avoided with the exceptions of direct quotations and reprinted material. We recognize the occasional ambiguity this produces, especially in inscriptions, but hope that it is outweighed by easier reading. While we have worked to spell the same words consistently throughout, we have followed no strict guidelines in choosing Bangla versus Sanskrit spellings. In general, familiar names appear in their accepted anglicized forms, while pan-Indic deities and other terms have, for the most part, been rendered in Sanskrit (e.g., ‘v’ as opposed to ‘b’; retaining the terminal ‘a’), while more regionally specific and everyday terms have been rendered with Bangla spellings (although we have utilized the neutral ‘a’ rather than the Bangla spoken ‘o’).

Dating and regional attributions: Very few kanthas are inscribed with their date and place of manufacture; more retain a provenance recorded by their collectors. Because the kanthas in these collections were likely made within a relatively short time span (about a century) and mostly within a relatively small regional range, when neither inscription nor provenance is present, assigning a precise date and sub-regional designation on the basis of style, materials, or technique is extremely problematic. The information accompanying the plates is thus of two types. For pieces from Stella Kramrisch’s collection that she published in her lifetime, we have retained her regional attribution—and often her date—and noted her as the source with “SK” in parentheses. For other pieces, unless inscribed, we have given a generic provenance of “Undivided Bengal,” and the curator has provided a range of dates based solely on her own sense of relative chronology. The designation “Undivided Bengal” refers to the British administrative unit of Bengal between the two partitions (1911–47), the territory equivalent to present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. While not all of these quilts were produced during this time, the term was chosen as the simplest way to indicate the region from which we believe all or at least the vast majority did originate. While Bengal was undivided prior to the first partition in 1905, it included a far larger territory.

Shape/use terms: Terms for specific types of kanthas according to size, shape, and function (e.g., bayton, ashan, sujni, arshilata) were only occasionally recorded from early practitioners and have not been used consistently throughout the scholarship. Thus, while such terms have been retained in the essays as each contributor has chosen to use them, they have not been used in the captions (and rarely in the didactic information) accompanying the plates.

Border and stitch terms: The many Bangla terms for border motifs and stitches are descriptive and often wonderfully evocative. They also vary—and apparently varied—according to a practitioner’s personal lineage, regional norms, and the like. While some of these terms have been discussed, no attempt has been made to standardize them or to list Bangla names for either borders or stitches. However, Virginia Whelan has identified all stitches used on each kantha following the standard vocabulary of Mary Thomas’s Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches (see the appendix following Anne Peranteau’s essay), and her list is included in the caption for each plate.

Inscriptions: The stitched inscriptions on kanthas are often difficult to decipher; missing and ill-formed letters elicit educated guesses that may legitimately differ from scholar to scholar. Likewise, each scholar may differently nuance her or his translation of the same phrase. We feel that these interpretive variations also nuance our understanding and thus have not tried to force a uniform reading but have retained each scholar’s wording in essays and notes, although limited space required the choice of a single reading to accompany the relevant plates.

Plates: Sizes in inches and centimeters accompany each plate, but the images are not reproduced to scale in order to maximize the size of the photograph given for each piece. All kanthas have been photographed from the working side (“obverse”) with the exception of plates 8 (worked from both sides) and 16 (to highlight the later inscriptions on the reverse).

Since the majority of kanthas in these collections display motifs organized radially around the central lotus, choices on orientation were made on a piece-by-piece basis to highlight important or interesting motifs, or those not presented as individual details in other parts of the volume. Unless showing a decided horizontal orientation, rectangular pieces are generally placed vertically to match the dimensions of the volume and thus maximize the size of the image.

All plate entries are by Darielle Mason except for plate 83, which is by Katherine Hacker. Within each collection, the order of plates follows no single logic (e.g., chronological sequence) but was arranged by the curator to emphasize and explore a wide variety of relationships—including iconographic, technical, stylistic, chronological, and visual. There could be (and, during the preparation for this volume, were) any number of orderings, each new juxtaposition making evident a host of exciting relationships. Sadly, books are sequential.

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