A decade ago, community-based art practitioner, curator, and researcher Anitha Reddy was visiting the home of a friend in a village located in the Western Ghats of Karnataka. The friend belonged to the Siddi community. Reddy was drawn to a familiar-looking fabric in a kavand or hand-stitched patchwork quilt, which women from the community have made for generations. She soon realised the fabric was from an item of clothing she had given to the family during one of her previous visits, having cultivated a close relationship with them over the last few years. “I thought about how the family had used my clothing, weaving memories of my visit into the quilt itself,” she reflects. Thus began her association with the Siddi women quilters. Since then, Reddy has been working to bring awareness and new context to this quilt-making practice.
Siddi is an umbrella term used to refer to people of African descent across Karnataka, Gujarat and Maharashtra states of India. While they have adopted different religions, they consider themselves as Siddi foremost. The kavands transcend and literally bind the community. The women use flattened layers of old, worn clothes traditionally gathered from members of their own households to create them, which subsequently hold cultural and sentimental value.
Reddy recollects that her association with the quilters initially arose from pure curiosity. Following her kavand encounter, she set out to discover if someone could make such a quilt for her, accompanied by her friend, Girija, from the community. She went from village to village in North Karnataka, meeting with the quilters, both individual ‘master’ quilters as well as groups of women making them together. This in itself was a journey, given how remote the villages are from one another. She then explored the idea of quilt- making as an opportunity to empower women on multiple levels. “I was a foreigner in that world; they don’t trust people easily. However, I was able to penetrate into the community because of my friend,” she says of her initial attempts to mobilise the women, who struggled to understand why Reddy was interested in their quilts.
Apart from the geographical logistics, women’s personal occupations, including domestic responsibilities and farm work, and whether they were even inclined to quilt, Reddy also had to contend with making the women understand the significance of their quilts and the value of their labour and artistic vision. Akin to embroidery, which was historically considered just ‘women’s work,’ the women quilt-makers had also internalised the notion that what they were creating did not hold economic value. “Yet it’s a space for their expressions, a psychological release for them on an individual and collective level,” Reddy points out.
During the early days of exploration, Reddy gathered twenty women from three to four villages over a few days and conducted workshops, seeing what would potentially emerge from the situation. While she went into the situation equipped with her academic knowledge and physical tools, she discovered it was an unlearning experience. “I went in with tapes and measuring tools only to realise they use their entire body to design the quilt: their eyes to conceptualise the design or their thighs to tuck the quilt under while stitching,” she says. Prior to her approaching them, the women used sickles to cut the fabric. It was Reddy who introduced them to scissors as a new component of their quilt-making process through workshops and training.
One significant aspect of kavand-making is its recyclability. The women use worn clothes collected from the family to create them, ensuring nothing goes to waste. “I wanted to keep that intact, and so had to find my own sources to provide them with material,” she says. The material Reddy now procures is surplus export reject garments and fabric scraps from tailors, garment factories, and boutiques. While the size, shape, and colour of the material organically informs and shapes the design and composition of the quilt, Reddy also strongly emphasises how the kavands are each woman quilter’s vehicle of her unique artistic grammar and language. “The aesthetics and imagery of the quilt she creates is entirely individual, abstracted from her mood and immediate surroundings along with a visual language which has evolved over generations. The women convey their inner landscape through wearable material the way a painter or sculptor does through their chosen mediums,” she says.
Reddy is also particular about the Siddi women quilters retaining agency in their creative process throughout the collaboration. She shares credit with them as artists. She is now able to recognise the signature styles of each woman quilter, emerging as a catalyst to unlock their stories. “For instance, I will ask them what a tree means to them and see what stories come out from the discussions, their associations and memories,” she elucidates.
An opportunity to participate in a show that her professor was curating at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishad, Bangalore, in 2017 led Reddy to a platform that could do justice to the beauty of the kavands. “I hung seven quilts like tapestries on walls, which allowed people to experience them at close quarters and get a sense of the art,” she says. Reddy succeeded in selling all quilts that were on display, subsequently building a niche market for kavands. She wants to keep the operation small and focus on individuals and organisations that appreciate indigenous textile crafts. Each woman making the quilt takes over a month to do so while carving out time from her family, farm and housework. “I don’t want to bring technology into it. I try to find customers who respect what goes into the work: the hardships involved, the generational knowledge which children organically absorb while seeing their mothers and grandmothers working upon it,” she says. Reddy is also particular about the kind of spaces the kavands are showcased in and the engagement they deserve.
Kavands have journeyed to alternative contexts and spaces, such as a show in Germany about the Black diaspora, where Reddy sent in two quilts to be shown. She also received a grant from the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art to create an installation at Atlassian India’s at campus in Bengaluru. For the installation, she created a tree with kavand wrapped around the wood, reiterating the value of women’s handwork. The quilters came down from their villages for the first time to the city to participate in the opening of the exhibit. “I am trying to appeal to museums about the kavands being a cultural moment in the art world. They are also a reflection of the Siddi community’s challenges and struggles of living in India,” she says. She also involves the women in a workshop as to how local arts practised in rural areas can become a basis for teaching subjects at a school level. The quilters, for instance, set a marvellous example of how women with no academic or scientific background can achieve aesthetic symmetry.
She disagrees with the notion that the art of kavand-making is in decline, rather re-framing it as an art that gradually became less practised with the advent of machines that were taking away from the employment of women. Reddy feels that the women are gradually seeing the value in it for themselves, their families and the community. “For them, it is not just to provide warmth for the family. It has come to mean something bigger than themselves and what they’re doing,” she says. In turn, she hopes that it will also place a quilt-making practice from South India on the global map, bringing visibility to it alongside more well-known textile traditions from the rest of India.
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