Let me begin with an expression of deep gratitude to Dr Nasreen Askari and Hasan Askari for their kind invitation to speak to you today.
The birth of any baby is a cause for celebration. They have jointly parented the Haveli that is being inaugurated today. Shahnaz and I, and all of us here, congratulate them on the arrival of their latest godchild – The Haveli Museum.
It is a tribute to their imagination, their creativity, their perseverance and their generosity in sharing their private collection with the public.
The objects that you see on spectacular display in this exhibition of Sindhi textiles – A Coat of Many Colours - are a testament as much to their open-heartedness. They are also a tribute to the skill of the crafts-persons – men as well as women – who produced such masterpieces in miniature.
These items have been assembled over many years by Nasreen with painstaking diligence. They deserve a fitting home, and they have found a home in their home.
Nasreen will be explaining many of the pieces on display herself. It might be helpful, though, for you to obtain a historical perspective of this art-form, that has matured from origins which were domestic to the higher plane of cultural aesthetics.
Embroideries done in our subcontinent attracted attention in western art circles certainly from the early twentieth century. An early reference to Indian embroideries can be found in the 1903 catalogue of the Indian Art exhibition held at Delhi. It refers, for example, to ‘the style of embroidery done by the Hindu ladies of Bhiria near Hyderabad in Sind’. A chaddar of this type was lent for display by a Mr. C. R. Khilnani of Karachi.
After Independence, research into local textiles received an impetus with the foundation of the Calico Museum of Art in Ahmedabad. The scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, in conversation with Shri Gautam Sarabhai (a textile magnate), suggested the founding of a textile institute in Ahmedabad – then the centre of India’s textile industry. The Calico Museum was founded ‘for both the historic and technical study of Indian handicraft and industrial textiles’.
Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the museum in 1949. Only a man of his sensibility could say: ‘The early beginnings of civilization are tied up with the manufacture of textiles. History might well be written with this as the leitmotif’.
Since then, the Calico museum has become the premier collection of Indian textiles. ‘Initially a part of the Calico Mills complex in Ahmedabad, the Calico Museum of Textiles was shifted in 1982 to the Shahibaug premises of the Sarabhai Foundation. These premises, known to the Sarabhai family as The Retreat, included the palatial Sarabhai-ni-Haveli with its formal garden and water features.
The Retreat also included a complex of buildings around an old swimming pool.
Incidentally, Shahnaz and I visited Ahmedabad in 1990 and saw the museum for ourselves. We stood in the well of the swimming pool. Its walls had embroideries on display protected by special plastic. The roof consisted of a huge Mughal tent.
The museum has published a number of periodicals and books drawing upon its superb collection. A definitive study of Indian Embroideries by John Irwin and Margaret Hall appeared in 1973, and twenty years later, on 1993 came Dr. Brijen Goswamy’s monumental Indian Costumes in the collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles.
Serious awareness of the variety and beauty of Indian textiles began with the pioneering efforts of Smt. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.
On our side of the border, the Lahore Museum before 1947, and later after 1947 the National Museum, put on display some Sindhi and Swati embroideries, as part of their ethnographic collection.
In 1968, two private collaborators - an American Manuela Fuller & a Pakistani collector Nayyar Azizullah Hassan - organised an exhibition at the PACC titled ‘Crafts of Balochistan and Sindh’.
Almost a decade later, in 1977, a book on ethnic crafts and textiles appeared under the title Threadlines, sponsored by the Federal and Provincial governments and assisted by private collectors.
Abroad, in 1980, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology Alburquerque (USA) organised an exhibition: ‘Sindhi Tombs and Textiles: The Persistence of Pattern’.
If you had asked anyone in the 1970s and 1980s, who were the most serious collectors of Sindhi embroideries, the answer would have been Justice Feroze Nana and his wife Shireen Nana, and Mrs. Kalyani Rahmat Ali Khan.
In 1990, Shireen Nana published a slim volume Sindhi Embroideries and Blocks, drawing from items in their collection. Sometime later, they donated their collection to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Many items from their collection were included in the exhibition held in 1997-98 at the V & A M: Colours of the Indus: Costumes and Textiles of Pakistan. Nasreen co-curated that exhibition. She borrowed some items from our own collection for display. And that proved to be the first of many meetings with her and formed the crucible of our friendship.
Nasreen then went on in 1999 to co-curate an exhibition at the Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, titled: Uncut Cloth: Saris, Shawls and Sashes. Most recently, Nasreen and Hasan have published part of their extensive collection in The Flowering Desert. Originally published in 2019, it has gone into its third printing.
Sindhi embroideries continued to feature in foreign exhibitions. One at the British Museum in 2001 - Embroidery from India and Pakistan - was curated by Sheila Paine. The conjunction could be justified because the crafts overlapped political boundaries. Phulkaris could be found on both West and East Punjab, and embroideries in Cutch and Sindh shared a strong affinity.
In 2015, Nasreen curated the now famous exhibition A Flower from Every Meadow, organized at the Mohatta Palace Museum here in Karachi. The New York Times described it as one of the ‘must see’ exhibitions of the time. Shahnaz and I lent some pieces from our collection for display there as well.
And in 2020, the memorable exhibition Gaj : Colours of the Rainbow.
It seems appropriate at this juncture to explain how we came to collect Sindhi embroideries. In the 1970s, before I was married, I was introduced to Mrs. Kalyani Rahmat Ali Khan. (Incidentally, I found out that she was the niece of Samarendranath Gupta, whose 1922 catalogue of paintings in the Lahore Museum I had updated in 1966.)
Auntie Kalyani put me in touch with some Hindu dealers of embroideries in Hyderabad. The Super highway had just been opened and so I could drive there and back in just over half a day. There, on the first floor of a small shop, I was shown bags and bags of embroideries - intricately embroidered and vividly coloured gajs, abochnis, yards of parhas or skirts The prices were ridiculously low for such craftsmanship. I dare not tell you how little I paid for them.
A later visit to the village of Thana Bula Khan, sixty kilometres from Karachi, allowed me to augment my collection. So much so, that my friends teased me that I must be the only bridegroom who took his own jahez or dowry with him.
There, in the stark, drab mud alleys of Thana Bula Khan, one found the village women dressed in their unique costumes. One feature each married women sported was a huge nath or nose-ring, suspended from a black embroidered panel, secured at the other end by a silver hook. They wore bone bangles all the way up their arms.
I asked the village elder Mukhi Jamandass why the women were covered so completely. He replied: ‘’Oh, it is to stifle their sexuality.’’
By the time Shahnaz and I got married in December 1971, I had built up a representative collection of work done in Tharparkar, Mithi, and other areas in inner Sindh.
During later visits, the Mukhi and his family shared some of their heirlooms with us, even parting with some pieces they had retained for their own brides.
Sheila Paine, in her catalogue to the 2001 British Museum exhibition, described the conditions in which village women lived and worked: ‘All women have a heavy work load. They normally have many miles to walk to haul water and gather firewood, and in addition, there is corn to grind, bread to bake, meals to cook, children to bear and raise. Embroidery would seem to be a superfluous activity, but in fact it is a social necessity, not least because a woman must present a number of embroideries in her dowry.’
Paine continues: ‘She begins work on them around the age of six…and continues to embroider for most of her life [.] Most women embroider in the winter months when there is less outdoor work to do’. A mundane piece could take weeks to complete, a fine piece months, even a year.
Shahnaz asked the females in the Mukhi’s family whether they continued these traditions. Some did, but using artificial threads instead of the handmade silk floss. Younger girls preferred to use their time studying.
Such embroideries belong to a time not so long ago, yet they are timeless in their appeal and significance. They are, as Nehru said, the leitmotif of our history.
What does one do with such a collection? Well, Nasreen and Hasan have shown us the way. They have endowed it for future generations to enjoy.
I mentioned the Calico Museum founded by the Sarabhais in Ahmedabad. There are hundreds of other examples of such philanthropy throughout the world. The Royal Collection Trust in the U.K., the Wallace Collection in London, the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the Frick Collection in New York, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and of course the Getty Museum outside Los Angeles in the USA. The list is almost endless.
Philanthropy is much rarer in Pakistan, which is why this effort by Nasreen and Hasan is so important.
For years I have been trying to persuade textile magnates in Faisalabad to establish a textile museum there. I have appealed to fashion designers to preserve their best creations and put them on display somewhere. The talent and industriousness of their craft-persons should not be hidden in tin trunks or mothballed.
Let me end with the hope that Nasreen and Hasan’s example of privately endowed patriotism serves as an incentive, an inspiration and a magnet for others to part with their treasures.
They have given us more than their collection. They have given us something equally precious: they have given us of themselves.
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
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