Dress up your home while supporting a cause. Here’s how Shamlu Dudeja — known for her role in kantha revival — did just that.

In the early 1980s, Shamlu had her first brush with the rural handicraft at the Calcutta Information Centre. “I was very ill at that point of time with a bout of cancer and I had to give up my profession as a maths teacher. I was desperately looking for something to occupy my mind when kantha suddenly happened to me,” Shamlu recalls.

Her plush Alipore Road apartment now has traces of kantha creations all around, from the sofa cover on which you sit, to the curtains blocking out the sun, to the cushion cover you recline on, to the tea-cosy that warms the tea.

She invited rural artisans to work with her and promised them proper prices and marketing. “We started work on cotton and when they felt comfortable, they shifted to richer fabrics,” remembers Shamlu, who after almost 20 years of work is planning to set up SHE (Self-Help Enterprise), for the 5,000-odd rural women working with her.

From saris, they moved on to cushion covers, quilts, tablecloths and curtains. “In the mid to late 80s, designers like Rohit Khosla and Tarun Tahiliani started taking active interest in this form of embroidery. At the suggestion of my daughter Mallika, we went ahead to embellish everything from cushion covers to Rohit’s and Tarun’s outfits with kantha, that gave the dying art a great boost,” she says.

Soon names that mattered — among them Shobhaa De and Shabana Azmi — began to pick up kantha saris from Tahiliani’s outlet in Delhi and kantha went truly national.

Shamlu worked with designer Sreelata Sarkar, the late mother-in-law of film director Goutam Ghose, who had trained at Kala Bhavan.

“Since I was not a designer or even an arty person, I took recourse to plain plagiary, copying motifs from anything I could lay my hands on, even my geometry books, from which I picked up designs that we still use,” says Shamlu.

The passing away of her husband and son left her looking for more to do outside the home, and her journey into the kantha world intensified.

Why kantha

Shamlu on how to go the hand-embroidered way, and why:

You can have small wall-hangings to start with. They embellish your walls and are easy on the pocket. Even if you pay Rs 4,000 per piece, it is many times less than a painting with the same function.

Don’t think of inconsistencies and stains as defects. The women produce a kantha while cooking, washing and looking after kids. So an odd stain or missing detail is normal. In fact, these have a better story to tell than a perfect one. Once I was showcasing some pieces at The British Museum in London and one piece had a little turmeric stain. When I pointed it out, the authority said I should charge 50 pounds extra because it had better enthographic detail.

Having a kantha is having a slice of Bengali culture with you. Kantha pieces have a very rich look to them. So I think having a kantha bedspread at home, which is always one of a kind, is similar to sleeping on a painting.

Kantha is not just about style and glamour, it’s also about empowering a whole lot of the women in Bengal. So buying even a set of napkins or a tea cosy adds that rich look to your little corner and also supports a family somewhere in Bengal.

For beginners, it isn’t advisable to go to the village to pick up a piece. Retail is better as you can be sure about the quality of fabric and workmanship.

Glimpses

Clockwise from top

• The drawing room is rich in kantha covers all around. The settee is covered by an embroidered off-white raw silk spread. The dominant colour in the embroidery is red and this theme is also followed in the curtains. The covers of the cushions are also in raw silk with heavy work.

• The tablecloth in the dining room is in black raw silk, covered with embroidery. There’s a wall-hanging in black raw silk behind it. The Raj Bhavan in Calcutta houses a similar wall hanging. “Acceptance of their work by dignitaries like the Governor gives these women an impetus to work harder,” says Shamlu.

• This wall hanging is the last piece that Rohit Khosla wanted to buy from Shamlu before he died. The green cotton table-cover has floral motifs all over it.

• The five ft-by-five ft wall-hanging in Shamlu’s bedroom was designed by Sreelata Sarkar. To go with it, Shamlu has chosen a maroon silk bedspread that is likely to leave one poorer by Rs 20,000.

Pictures by Rashbehari Das