Chikankari
Author- Paola Manfredi
Publisher- Niyogi, Rs 2,495
This book is a reference for embroiderers, designers, and textile scholars. It documents stitches used in chikan, with a useful grouping together of basic stitches and variations that stem from them, and the names that karigars use for them, writes lAIlA TYABJI
I love Chikan embroidery, and have worked with it for almost four decades. I also love Paola Manfredi, who has been my friend for almost as long! So the conjunction of the two in this fabulous volume is a joy. I am mentioned in it as the godmother who first suggested to Paola that to study the white-on-white of chikan was a natural transition from the white-on-white Ari Tree of life embroideries she was doing with karigars in old Delhi. I was delighted when she became as hooked on chikan as I was. This book is the result of that journey of exploration.
Chikankari — A lucknawi Tradition is a wonderful book. One doesn’t know whether to feast on the exquisite photographs that light up each page, or lose oneself in the stories embedded in its narrative. They weave history, aesthetics, culture, sociology, the past and the present, in a seamless chronicle that is both fascinating and fun to read. How these multiple stitches, some of them characteristic of European white-work, others of similar embroidery done in the Middle East and Persia, others practiced in Eastern India, and some unique to lucknawi chikankari itself, came together to create this exquisite distinctive embroidery style is itself a mystery story; much speculated on but not yet finally resolved.
Weaving rather than embroidery was India’s original forte — with a host of extraordinary and subtle regional traditions in cotton, wool, silk and brocade, coveted and exported round the world. Embroidery techniques seems to have transformed by Indian creativity and skills into distinctive subcontinental traditions. One of the most beautiful and subtle of these many embroideries, reaching its heyday in Mughal times, is chikan. There are many stories of its origin.
My own favourite is that it was the empress Nur Jahan, that discriminating scholar and patron of all that was beautiful and fine, who, making an Eid cap for her husband Jehangir, remembered the white-on-white embroidery of her ancestral homeland(where a similar repertoire of stitches is done in Shiraz and Isfahan on coarse white linen), and decided to transfer the techniques onto our much-prized fine white Indian mull; thus creating the fragile, lace-like chiaroscuro of light and shade, embossed knots, inverted herringbone shadow work and drawn thread jalis that characterises chikan even today.
Its enduring charm can be gauged by the fact that there are still thousands of chikan craftspeople in lucknow alone; women earning their living by that same shadowed tracery of assorted differently worked stitches devised so many centuries before. Using as designs the same floral trellis motifs and paisley butis created by the artist designers of the Mughal and Avadh courts. Paola’s chikankari photographs, gathered with love and detective diligence from multiple personal and museum collections; many reproduced for the first time, are testimony of its beauty. A highlight of the tradition is the way the styling and cut of the stitched garment, the fine decorative daraz hand stitching of seams, and the embroidery itself, are all so exquisitely integrated together.
Paola mentions that sadly most of the surviving chikankari pieces are men’s wear, and that hardly any women’s garments from earlier times remain. I remember reading the account of the French traveller, Bernier, at the Mughal Court in 1663 who said that the ladies of the Imperial Court destroyed their exquisitely embroidered and perfumed gossamer-fine garments after one night of wear — possibly this could be the reasonIJ! Men I guess were more pragmatic, not only re-wearing and recycling their kurtas and angarkhas, but possibly not sleeping in them. Bernier has a charming story of ‘all sorts of fine fabric of which turbans and girdles are made, with flowers of gold; and those ladies bodices which are so fine and delicate that under certain circumstances they do not last them one night, although they are often worth 10 and 12 crowns, and sometimes more when they are the workmanship which I have seen, enriched with those fine needle embroidery.” Surely this must be chikanIJ
This book is not just a beautiful coffee table book. It is also a wonderful reference for embroiderers, designers and textile scholars. It documents the stitches used in chikan, with a useful grouping together of the basic stitches and the many variations that stem from them, and the names by which they are referred to by the karigars. It also illustrates the different generic types of borders, motifs and all-over designs, while pointing out that each chikankarigar interprets the printed motif in her/his own way, using her own choice of stitches to create a distinctive embroidery that is her own.
The illustrations show the many versions and placements of the Avadh fish, the kairi or ambi mango design, the inverted heart shaped paan or betel leaf, that endless variations of the much loved curvaceous ambi mango motif, commonly called the paisley in English. What is intriguing is that while most chikan designs are based on floral motifs, either as individual sprays, or repeated borders and all-over scrolls, they are developed from an imaginary rather than actual botany, unlike the more realistic and recognisable flowers one finds in Kashmir shawls and papier-mache, or those in Rajasthani block printing: Craft traditions at least as as old as that of chikan.
Paola Manfredi’s Chikankari is a wonderful book, but there is still another book to be written about chikan. It is the story of the revival of chikan after its decline, and how the rediscovery and revival of chikankari also became the story of women rediscovering themselves. Hundreds of women in the lanes of lucknow found a new identity, source of income, and empowerment once they entered the gates of SEWA lucknow in the 80s and cast off their burkhas and inhibitions.
The movement spread to other NGOs and to surrounding villages around the city. Today, an estimated 75,000 women earn their livelihood through chikan. Once the finest chikan was done only by men, today women are equally skilled and sought after. Just as chikan is an extraordinary example of the simplest materials transmuted into one of the most sophisticated subtle textiles imaginable, it is also an example of how a simple hand and needle can be the catalyst for employment, earning and empowerment.