Embroidered Quilts from the Adithi Collective
text via University of Illinois at Chicago:
Exhibit at the Library of the Health Sciences, during October and November, 2003*
Adithi is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting women. Adithi’s mission is to empower a diverse group of Indian women living in poverty. The Adithi project is distinctive for its transformation of the traditional kantha (embroidered quilts) into a vehicle for expressing contemporary social and political concerns, including a broad range of health issues.
Since the 18th century, Indian women have made sujuni kanthas or embroidered quilts. This tradition was revived in the late 1980s when the Indian women’s organization, Adithi, joined the Mahila Vikas Samyong Samiti, an organization in the Bihar State, to encourage poor rural women to design, embroider, and sell these kanthas in order to supplement their incomes. The important theme of women’s collective activism appears on many of the quilts and affects the structure of the quilt-making process, where numerous women collaborate to create the designs, embroider, and provide one another community and support. Although they seek to sell their designs, the women have not shied away from difficult themes.
Based near the village of Bhusura, the quilt project has helped support widows, housewives, and the school fees of children, especially girls. The quilts display figures delicately embroidered or appliqued on cotton or locally made silk. Many of the figures are drawn from the lives of the craftswomen, showing their work, their landscape, and their social struggles. Among their topics are women’s work, domestic abuse, rape, forced prostitution. In this exhibit, the kanthas all illustrate the women’s efforts to improve their health care.
For more information see: Sandra Gunning, “Re-Crafting Contemporary Female Voices: The Revival of Quilt-Making among Rural Hindu Women of Eastern India,” Feminist Studies 26.3 (Fall 2000), pp. 719-26.
*countercraft note: After some searching, sadly it looks like this organization is no longer running, but the work it produced is still important and inspiring.
Hi counter-craft,
I happened upon your site and zine tonight with one part insomnia, one part research in mind and I’ve been reading for at least an hour
I’m finishing up a dissertation right now on “craft rhetoric projects” – my main focus is on a South African project Amazwi Abesifazane/Voices of Women similar to the one you’ve highlighted here (a textual narrative accompanying compelling embroidered cloth) – but ultimately I embed it within a larger examination of what these material practices mean – why might they work as public activism? in what ways? to what effects? to what degree are they co-opted or re-folded back into the structures they challenge? and so on…
I worked with the organization in South Africa for a total of six months over a year and a half and have been working with them since to conceive of a community or collective orientation (in distinction to a fine arts orientation) for the project.
You definitely have another reader, but if you ever wanted to talk more or collaborate on a project – I would really be interested. I’m currently in central Illinois right now, but I’ll be moving to Tacoma, WA to start as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the U of Puget Sound in the fall – I’ve started researching craft collectives there since I know Portland and Seattle both have amazing crafting energies. I’ll be teaching a History of Rhetorical Theory course in the fall – I already have a “material rhetoric” unit I’m planning where students will have to “craft” an intervention to an issue of importance. I know your site will be on their reading list.
Take care,
Martha