BEYOND BORDERS

A new showcase hopes to draw eyes to Bengal's diverse textile heritage that has been shaped by tectonic shifts in the region's difficult history

- VINITA MAKHIJA

“ON A TRIP to Kyoto in the early 2000s, I found a piece of fragmented kantha fabric with a private collector. I acquired it, and took it to Hiroko Iwatate (a wellknown textile gallerist in Tokyo, who has over 4,000 pieces from India) for verification. But how did a shredded Bengal kantha arrive in Kyoto?” asks Darshan Shah, who established the Weavers Studio Resource Centre (WSRC) in Kolkata to support learning on crafts and textiles. Iwatate remembered having encountered the same piece on one of her sourcing trips to India. It was a part of a final settlement after a family from Kolkata split their inheritance. “Instead of dividing goods as per value or claim as others do, they had dramatically shattered jewels and shredded textiles in half. This particular piece had presumably been sold during tough times.” The piece found its way to Jaipur via antique dealers and finally to the Kyoto collector. Shah is now intent on finding the other half and uniting the pieces.

World over, museums in Europe and the Americas, built on items looted during colonial times are now being urged to return artefacts to their countries of origin. In June 2023, UNESCO organised a conference to highlight new forms of agreement and cooperation to facilitate reparation efforts. Over 1,400 antiquities valued at US$10 million were returned to India by the US authorities in November 2024 alone.