“শুরুও শূন্যে, শেষও শূন্যে
আর মাঝপথটা
বিলাপে বিলাপে ভরা, চমৎকার এক ভাসমান নকশিকাঁথা
পরতে পরতে বুনে যাওয়া।”
— শঙ্খ ঘোষ

Kantha is one of the oldest textile traditions of eastern India. Babies were once wrapped in it; when a daughter married, it was passed down to her, carrying years of memory with it. The stitch at its heart is simple: the running stitch, the plainest stitch in embroidery’s vocabulary. It is the arrangement of that one stitch, repeated and varied, that builds kantha’s complex language. Traditionally a utilitarian craft, made from cloth already worn out and set aside, kantha has always found a way to mark the events of a life even as it served a practical need.

At the Lalit Kala Akademi Regional Centre, the exhibition, Kantha Kathan, looked at this tradition and at how it has evolved overtime, creating new opportunities for income and enterprise. The rich showcase of kantha made by 16 rural women entrepreneurs from Nanoor and Ausgram offered visitors a chance to see the work closely and understand the process behind it.

The exhibition also made space for memory. Under Threads of Memory, students shared photographs of treasured kantha quilts, saris, coverlets, and other textiles preserved in their families and passed down through generations, along with the stories attached to them. Each submission became a bridge between generations, carrying the emotions, traditions, and memories woven into kantha.

Alongside the exhibition, conversations and workshops explored different aspects of the tradition. Titled “Kantha: Woven Words,” the discussion on 12 September brought together Mrityunjay Kumar Singh, Sudeshna Moitra, and Chandrima Roy, each approaching kantha from a different perspective: as literature, as story, as an early form of what we would now call sustainability. Between them, they explored kantha through craft, storytelling, and cultural memory, considering the quilt as a form of unwritten autobiography, a means of passing knowledge through stories, and a way of thinking about dialogue, continuity, and reuse.

The evening opened with the discussion on various literary references in which weaving or embroidery appears across various ancient literature to contemporary works. In the Iliad, Helen sits weaving scenes of the war fought over her, turning the cloth into a record of events she cannot otherwise narrate. In the Odyssey, Penelope weaves and unweaves Laertes’ shroud night after night, buying herself time against a remarriage she does not want. In both, the loom becomes a way for women through which they shape and preserve their own narratives.

Indian literature carries the same thread. Kantha recurs through Rabindranath Tagore’s work, appearing in the story Kripon, where a woman clutches her kantha as her son leaves, the cloth standing in for a life already unravelling. In the folk collection Thakurmar Jhuli, Kantha-buri, the Old Quilt-Lady, spends her days sewing. The tradition surfaces again in Shankha Ghosh’s poetry, in Mahasweta Devi’s fiction, and in Ashapurna Devi’s Subarnalata, where the unsettled young bride keeps stitching her quilt as a way of holding on to herself inside her in-laws’ house.

The Needle in Place of the Pen

Mrityunjay Kumar Singh, Director of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Kolkata, a retired IPS officer, while also a published poet, writer, and Bhojpuri folk vocalist, opened with the idea of ekphrasis, writing that describes or responds to a visual work. Embroidery has always given literature something to look at and describe, and in Bengali literature one of the best known example is Jasimuddin’s 1929 pastoral masterpiece, Nakshi Kanthar Math uses the kantha as a symbol of a woman’s grief and her waiting.

Mrityunjay’s real subject was what that symbol stood in for. For centuries, rural women were kept from formal education and from “the world of words.” However, a lack of formal literacy did not mean an absence of narrative capability. Deprived of pen and ink, they turned to needle, thread, the running stitch, and song to record experiences that were often autobiographical. He told the story at the centre of Jasimuddin’s poem: Saju, married to Rupai, a farmer known for his flute and his skill with a fighting stick, is left behind when a land dispute pulls her husband into a fight that keeps him away for months. Waiting, she stitches into her kantha what she has no other way of preserving: the flowers from the day they met, the wedding, the ordinary life they built. The quilt becomes the only surviving account of it. Jasimuddin gives this image a larger place at the close of the poem:

“কেহ কেহ নাকি গভীর রাত্রে দেখেছে মাঠের পরে / মহা-শূন্যেতে উড়াইছে কেবা নকসী কাঁথাটি ধরে।”

The kantha has become more than a record of Saju’s life; it has entered the landscape of the poem itself.

Drawing parallels to folk traditions across Northern and Eastern India—such as Bihar’s Sujani quilting, Gujarat’s Mata ni Pachedi, Rajasthan’s Phad, Odisha’s Pattachitra, Bhojpuri Janta Saar (grinding stone) songs, and Biraha ballads—Mrityunjay highlighted how women embedded their personal heartbreaks, social anxieties, and quiet resilience into everyday objects, “What did women do when they did not have words? They sang, embroidered, and stitched… these artworks are basically a kind of autobiography of those women who could not write their stories.”

Across all of them, he saw the same practice: making, remembering, and speaking through whatever material was to hand. In this sense, the act of stitching kantha could itself become an exercise in female agency.

The Stories in the Stitch

Sudeshna Moitra, known to generations of children as Golpo Dida, the storytelling grandmother, is a writer and a former teacher. She began with the word itself: kantha may descend from kontha, the Sanskrit word for rags, which appears across medieval Bengali texts. In Krishnadasa Kaviraja’s, the mother of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu sends her son a homemade kantha by way of travelling pilgrims. In Bharatchandra Ray Gunakar’s Annadamangal (1752–53), the kantha appears in the description of the goddess Annapurna and Shiva, alongside the humble objects associated with their lives:

“ঝুলি কাঁথা বাঘছাল সাপ সিদ্ধি লাড়ু॥”

The reference places the kantha alongside the ordinary things of daily life, where its use is practical rather than ornamental.

Lalon Fakir’s songs carry the word too, in “আয় দেখে যা নতুন ভাব এনেছে গোরা।মুড়িয়ে মাথা গলে কাঁথা কটিতে কৌপীন পরা॥” Gauranga is described with a kantha around his neck, tied to the life of the renunciant.

Golpo Dida noted how deeply rooted this practice was in Bengali households, “আমাদের বাংলার ঘরে ঘরে মেয়েরা তাদের সময় কাটানোর জন্য এই কাঁথাটা ফোঁড়টা দিত, এই রান-সেলাইটা করত। এবং এখানে অনেকেই তার সুখ-দুঃখের কথা, অনেককিছুই বলেছে।” She then told a story of her own devising: three children meet an old woman they call Kantha Dida, who shows them how women once drew threads from the borders of worn saris to stitch nakshi kantha, the narrative pattern-work, and explains the quilt’s ordinary place in rural households, where it is also called kyata. Through the story, the children come to see the kantha as something that holds affection, history, and memory. Kantha Dida tells them how the craft surfaces again and again in medieval writing: a kontha “washed and put out to dry” in Chaitanya Charitamrita, Chaitanya wearing one after renouncing wealth in Chaitanya Bhagavata, and its presence in Chandrabati’s Ramayana.

For Golpo Dida, the word kothon (telling, or dialogue) in the title of the series names exactly what kantha is: something made by stitching and by talking at once, carrying a family’s memory from one generation into the next.

From Cloth to Continuity       

“গায়ে ছিল এক ছেঁড়া কাঁথা…
তোখন লয়লে কলেমা পড়ে ঝাড়ি মাথা।”
— জসীমউদ্দীন, সোজন বাদিয়ার ঘাট

Chandrima Roy closed the evening, arriving from an unlikely pairing of work: she teaches Electronics and Communication Engineering and also runs Kobitay Kathalap, a poetry initiative marking its fourteenth year on the evening of the talk. Drawing on Bloom’s Taxonomy and on her own years in education, she noted that in an age of fast-moving information, facts fade quickly, while “গল্প মানুষের সবসময় মনে থাকে।”

She offered a second possible root for the word: kaththa, from Prakrit. Long before “sustainability” or “circular economy” entered common use, she said, kantha was already a working model of both: old cotton saris bound with bright border-thread, stitched with the running stitch, ran selaai, into something durable and, in its way, beautiful.

Beyond the material, she argued, kantha offered emotional repair, a comfort she likened to a mother’s anchal, the drape of a sari pulled close. She recalled Premchand’s regard for his own mother, who ran a household on almost nothing, and Tagore’s poem Nimantran, with its image of a damp, embroidered handkerchief. Where women had little access to education or to public life, sitting together to stitch made a space to talk, to grieve, to lighten a burden: the same quiet concentration that modern therapeutic practice now recognises as genuinely calming.

Reflecting on the layering of speech and stitch, she observed—”একটি পর একটি ফোঁড় তুলে যেমন কাঁথার নকশা বোনা হয়, ঠিক তেমনই কথার ভাঁজে কথা সাজিয়ে কিন্তু মানুষের জীবন, সময়, সমাজ তার একটা প্রবাহমানতা তৈরি হয়।” Kantha, she said, has always done more than hold a design or a livelihood; it holds a story and, often, comfort along with it. In Rajshahi it is still given as a wedding gift. In Chittagong, brides leaving for other countries carry kanthas made by their mothers and grandmothers: a way of taking family and home along with them.

The Craft That Still Carries

Taken together, the evening’s three readings of kantha were less in competition than in conversation, each completing something the others left unsaid.

The tradition is not only historical. In Nanoor and Ausgram, kantha has also become a pathway to livelihood, entrepreneurship, and greater independence. Women artists are moving beyond wage-based work to manage orders, develop products, and work with designers and institutions. Their collective, Peol, brings inherited kantha knowledge into contemporary products and markets, while younger practitioners continue the craft alongside higher education.

The Kantha Skill Development Centre in Agartor, Nanoor, established with CSR support from Coal India Limited, provides space for skill development, new products, and entrepreneurial opportunities. More than two thousand women across Birbhum and Purba Bardhaman now work with Contact Base through such initiatives. Taking cloth that might otherwise be discarded and turning it into memory, livelihood, and a means of carrying life forward: that, in essence, was the evening’s central theme.

– By Saionee Panja

“মাঝখানেতে আছে কেবল পাতা

বিধবা তার মেয়ের হাতের শেলাই-করা কাঁথা।”

— রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর, খাটুলি

In the homes of Bengal, kantha has long been part of ordinary life. Traditionally made from old saris and dhotis, these embroidered quilts and household textiles were assembled from worn cloth, then stitched with thread pulled from discarded sari borders.

Making a kantha was, in this sense, an act of reuse. An old piece of cloth could become something new and useful, and still carry traces of the household it came from. The work varied in both skill and scale. Some kanthas were simply stitched; others were densely embroidered. In the finer examples, the stitching that holds the layers together becomes part of the design itself. White-on-white lines form quiet patterns across the surface, while coloured embroidery brings in flowers, animals, people, buildings, and scenes from everyday life. Lotus forms and other motifs recall alpana designs, though no two kanthas repeat the same arrangement. Each kantha reflects the person who made it and in the designs, one can see a cavalcade of life passing in front of one’s eyes.

Organised by banglanatak.com’s Contact Base, with CSR support from Coal India Limited, Kantha Kathan: Celebrating the Living Tradition of Rural Bengal took place at the Lalit Kala Akademi Regional Centre in Kolkata from 11 to 16 September 2026. Alongside an exhibition and sale of work by sixteen women Kantha entrepreneurs from the villages of Ausgram and Nanoor, the initiative held a series of afternoon conversations built around three themes: fashion, space, and inspiration.

The panels drew together a wide cross-section of people who think about craft for a living, where scholars, architects, scenographers, and fashion practitioners discussed the trajectory of this intimate folk tradition along with the rural women who stitch the pieces. The conversation centred on a shared preoccupation — how can a domestic, generational practice remain rooted in its tradition while finding a place in new audiences, spaces, and markets?

The Cloth of Everyday Life

“সেই ঘরে বসে কাঁথার ফুল তুলবে স্বপ্ন চুপি চুপি লুকিয়ে, ভবিষ্যতের জন্যে।”
— আশাপূর্ণা দেবী

On 14 September, the afternoon belonged to fashion, and the panel Kantha Re-imagined: Designing for Today asked how traditional techniques and visual vocabularies can enter contemporary retail without losing their character. Its moderator, Dr. Sreenanda Palit, is Associate Professor at NIFT Kolkata, and has spent years researching the craft, including a doctorate built partly around it. She began by reminding the room that kantha was never made for decoration alone. “They were all living storytelling pieces… parts of a woman’s life, what she saw around, what she felt, and often as a piece of blessing that got passed on to the next generation.” She recalled the baby quilts in which generations of Bengali children were wrapped, and described the gathering as a conversation about the maker and amidst the maker, one that does not alienate them. She also spoke of a pandemic-era workshop, where she and her team at NIFT interviewed 1,325 artisans to understand the challenges they were facing. The work went beyond documenting those difficulties: workshops were held where artisans were taught how to trace lines, draw designs from scratch, and explore different stitches and forms of expression, while looking for ways to bring their skills into contemporary fashion.

Sunita Shanker, founder of Sunita Shanker Studio, has worked across India’s craft regions for three decades. Her perspective shifted after working in Kutch following the 2001 earthquake, a move she described as one “from subtlety to bloom, to a certain gentle rhythm to vibrancy, to wet to arid.” On commercial viability, she spoke about a single-motif approach. Traditional kantha, dense with stitching across the whole textile, can take months to finish, and the price reflects it. In her approach, isolating one motif on a garment shortens production and brings prices down for everyday wear, and “With that single motif, what happened is that it not only enhanced the craft, but it also upskilled the artisan,” she explained, since a single visible motif leaves no room for error. Comparing the clusters she works with, she found Barasat “quicker, faster, and they’re a little more commercial,” while Nanoor’s artisans have a “big, large vocabulary” of stitches and a deep, personal attachment to their work.

Paromita Banerjee, founder and director of Paromita Banerjee Studio, trained in textiles at NID and has run her Kolkata label for fifteen years. She described her practice as sitting at the “intersection of art, craft, culture, and design,” with craft communities as its foundation, and spoke of taking rooted handlooms into a “global-local context.” She drew on two Japanese ideas: boro, the use of things too good to waste, and mottainai, a kind of regret over wastefulness. Both find an old parallel in layering worn saris instead of throwing them away. For her, this shifts the conversation from recycling to “emotional textiles,” and raises the question of how kantha might move into ready-to-wear without losing its identity.

Malika Dudeja Varma, co-founder and director of SHE (Self Help Enterprise) and director of Malika’s Kantha Collection, described a similar movement from tradition into livelihood. Her mother, Shamlu Dudeja, who arrived in Bengal from Karachi as a Partition refugee, started the enterprise about forty years ago by giving tea-dyed cotton saris to village women for stitching. What started as a revival of three-layer kantha has grown into a network of around 1,000 women who work from home, an economy of “dwar pe rozi.” “It has given financial empowerment. It has made every woman in her house have a say,” Malika remarked. The change shows in what women ask for — once they came for advances for a daughter’s wedding, “দিদি একটু টাকা দেবেন, আমার মেয়ের বিয়ে হবে”, and now they say, “দিদি টাকা দেবেন, আমার মেয়ে পড়বে, আমার মেয়ের কম্পিউটার চাই।”

The conversation then turned to the artisans themselves. Loveli Bibi of Nanoor and Parveen Sultana of Ausgram, both Kantha artists and entrepreneurs, represent their collective Peol, named after a forest fruit that changes from green to red. Of the two, Loveli began at seven or eight, under her mother’s guidance. “তোর বিয়েতে লাগবে, তুই নিজের বিয়েতে নিজের কাঁথা নিজে কর,” her mother told her, warning that a bride who arrived without a kantha could be turned out of her in-laws’ house. Loveli resisted at first, but mastered the traditional S-fast style and later adapted her skills to items like stoles. Parveen, meanwhile, learnt to embroider in secret while still at school, and after she became a mother, a banglanatak.com workshop widened her sense of colour. “যে সবুজ, লাল, কালো বাদেও যে বাইরে অনেকগুলো কালার আছে, সে সম্পর্কে আমাদের অতটা আইডিয়া ছিল না,” she recalled.

Today both make contemporary pieces and work directly with designers and institutions. Their stories showed how design support, applied with care, can turn a household skill into a small enterprise and that it works best when the design leaves room for the artisan’s own skill and agency.

A Grammar for Space

“একটা মোটে ছেঁড়া কাঁথা, তার তলাতে আমরা ন’জন
কাঁথাটার ওপরটায় বেশ নকশা কাটা, সুতোয় তোলা ফুল ফুটেছে।”
— সুনীল গঙ্গোপাধ্যায়

On 15 September, the conversation moved from clothing to architecture, and Kantha in Contemporary Spaces was moderated by Anisha Johri, Partner at Decorage & Associates and Contours Furniture System. Her panel included Scenographer Swarup Dutta and Architect Ranit Maiti. Bina Dey, a National Award-winning Kantha artist, also took part, presenting her own work.

Swarup Dutta, founder and creative director of Swarup Dutta Scenography, has worked with the craft since 2004, and traces his own connection to watching his grandmother stitch at home, and through academic and development projects he has trained more than five thousand artisans. Addressing the history and nuances of stitch and design, he explained that traditionally, motifs reflected religious and cultural roots. “Figurative work is predominantly Hindu Kantha… because the nuances of religion do play into the craft,” he noted, adding that Muslim women traditionally created geometric patterns, and he laid out a rough history by stitch and design—kantha, built on the plain running stitch, is among the oldest forms, and includes nakshi kantha, with figures and narrative scenes, and par tola kantha, based on geometric pattern. There is also the tone-on-tone tradition, and sujani kantha which is closely tied to Rajshahi in Bangladesh and known for undulating floral and vine patterns, though sujni is also practised in Bihar.

He also pushed back on the common assumption that kantha only softens with age. Repeated use compresses its layers, and an old piece becomes “one solid, dense material.” That rigidity, he explained, means it can stand on its own, and the idea of kantha as a soft material is “a bit of a myth.” He added that aged Kantha is “as thick as sort of stitching leather,” opening up possibilities for heavy jackets, structural drapery, wall panels, or three-dimensional spatial forms.

Ranit Maiti, co-founder of Square Consultancy Services, described Kantha as a kind of design grammar. “For us, Kantha is a design grammar,” he observed, one built on repetition, layering, sustainability and visible labour. He cautioned against superficial borrowing: “The first thing which is most tempting is to identify the motifs… We see a lotus, we see a flower… and immediately we want to translate that into probably metal perforated screens.” His point was that designers must translate the rhythm and process, rather than just scaling up a pattern.

He also drew a distinction between two kinds of knowledge in India: the intergenerational knowledge held by artisans, and the formal knowledge taught in design schools. In collaborations, trained designers usually deal with clients and budgets, while craftspersons “come to the project at the end, the time of execution.” To make craft sustainable, artisans must be onboarded from the very beginning, he argued, so that they gain true co-authorship.

When Anisha Johri questioned how effectively Kantha has crossed over into interior design, Ranit described two ways his practice uses kantha: as an abstract spatial grammar, and as a functional material in screens, upholstery, wall panels, meeting rooms or ceilings. He offered possible applications—at the Six Ballygunge Place showroom, a heritage building, kantha or alpana-inspired screens could hide plumbing and air-conditioning lines, at Merlin Nia, near Ruby Hospital, water-ripple and chevron patterns could filter sunlight through a screen, in a luxury office in Alipore, large panels might work as soft art objects, and at a Ganges-facing project in Konnagar, the logic of the stitch could shape a ceiling that suggests river waves, while dense kantha fabric could also serve as an acoustic material in auditoriums. Here, the craft is a source of ideas for solving spatial problems, not a decoration added afterwards.

The conversation then turned to AI, where one concern was deskilling, as digital generation spreads and centuries of physical skill begin to erode. Another view was that AI democratises visualisation, letting designers render complex interiors quickly for clients. As hyper-realistic imagery becomes easy to produce, it may lose its novelty, and value may return to time, labour and the human touch, much as analogue photography and high-end Swiss lithography came to be prized for their handmade qualities. Hand-stitched work may find new worth as a luxury niche, where the maker’s irregularity is part of what makes the object distinctive.

Bina Dey, associated with the Kantha Centre of the Crafts Council of West Bengal, grounded all this in history, presenting her own intricate Nakshi Kantha pieces alongside Colchas—the embroidered coverlets once produced in Satgaon for 16th- and 17th-century Portuguese trading markets. Her contribution made clear that Kantha’s dialogue with distant, global markets is not a recent phenomenon but a centuries-old one, grounded in a long-standing tradition where everyday utility and aesthetic value were inextricably linked. Whether made as a 17th-century export coverlet or used in a modern interior, Kantha bridges functional utility with art.

From Life to Motif

“নকশী-কাঁথাটি বিছাইয়া সাজু সারারাত আঁকে ছবি,
ও যেন তাহার গোপন ব্যথার বিরহিয়া এক কবি।
অনেক সুখের দুঃখের স্মৃতি ওরি বুকে আছে লেখা,
তার জীবনের ইতিহাসখানি কহিছে রেখায় রেখা”

— জসীম উদ্দিন

On 16 September, the final afternoon looked at where designs come from, and Finding Inspiration for Design was moderated by Esha Dutta, Director of Priya Entertainments (P) Ltd., an arts administrator long involved in cultural organising in the region. She spoke of her early experiments designing children’s furniture, and of a government-backed textile revival she had observed in the Northeast. Good design, she suggested, rests on aesthetic appeal and function. “If there’s no function… design kind of loses its purpose to a certain extent.” Kantha’s appeal lies in familiarity, as its motifs come from things seen and remembered, such as men working the fields, elephants and tigers, fish and turtles, soldiers, musicians, lotuses, crops, even steam engines and railway carriages. “I think Kantha is that one form of embroidery where everyday life and a bit of ourselves is embedded.”

Parama Ganguly, designer and founder of Brand Parama, left a decade of legal practice to start her own label. Her first motifs came from her commute to the Calcutta High Court, where flowering palash trees gave her the earliest designs, followed by aparajita, joba and shiuli. Her father told her, “যদি রোজকার জিনিস থেকে ইন্সপায়ার্ড হও, তাহলে ইন্সপিরেশন আলাদা করে খোঁজার দরকার নেই. মানে ডাল-ভাত দেখে যদি ভালো লাগে, তাহলে রোজ পোলাও খাওয়ার দরকার নেই।” She traced her practice back to her great-grandmother, who pulled threads from worn sari borders to stitch quilts long before sustainability had a name. Working in new, commercially produced fabrics, she said, does not mean abandoning that history. “I realized people want to wear something that tells a story.” For her, “emotional connection is what design and inspiration are ultimately about.” She also spoke of dignity: “Dignity comes when artisans see their work being respected and recognized, not just as cheap labor, but as artistic mastery.” When a customer understands the labour behind every stitch, she said, they are willing to pay the right price, and that directly changes the artisan’s life.

Santanu Das, director of Maku Textile Private Limited and founder of the slow-fibre initiative Maku Textiles, argued that craft is a social identity, not a look that can simply be updated. “The craft is not visual. The craft is the handling of the material, the craft is how we process the material, the craft is the socio aspect of the material.” He also stressed its geographical identity, and warned that market pressure and social media, left unchecked, can wear down regional identity, as pop-culture motifs begin to appear on kantha quilts. “If you change the core, you destroy the craft. If you change the application, like turning a Kantha quilt into a jacket, or a lampshade, or a contemporary wall art piece, you are actually giving the craft a new lease on life.” He called on design institutions to work with artisan communities directly, rather than documenting them from a distance.

Today’s buyer, he noted, is different from the grandmother stitching a soft blanket from old saris. The market answers to instant gratification, a garment bought for one photograph and set aside, and that has fed a rise in machine-embroidered imitations, including in places like Santiniketan, which look handmade at a fraction of the cost and speed and put real pressure on those working by hand. “The problem happens when we compromise on the process itself… That is where the dilution happens, and that is what we must educate consumers and creators about.”

He also offered a way to look at unevenness: the Japanese appreciation for handmade textiles and natural irregularity, prominent in design discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, gives one lens on kantha beyond decoration. In kantha, however, unevenness is not simply an aesthetic choice; it comes from the act of stitching, the reuse of old cloth and the accumulated labour of the maker. What is admired as an aesthetic of imperfection elsewhere is, here, a record of use, care and everyday practice.

One practical difficulty surfaced as well: many rural artisans are not comfortable drawing or tracing complex patterns, so detailed design sheets are hard to transfer onto cloth and slow the work. Yet one answer lies close to home—local schoolgirls who can draw might work with fine arts students to form small drafting teams within a cluster, one preparing the drawing, another handling colour, the artisans doing the stitching, so that a production bottleneck becomes a shared local effort.

What Carries the Craft Forward

Kantha began inside the home, stitched in the hours left over after the day’s work. Through skill training, capacity building and design support, it has become a livelihood for more than two thousand practitioners in Birbhum and Purba Bardhaman, in clusters that include Nanoor and Ausgram.

The conversations did not settle on a single answer about where the craft is headed. What they offered was a view of how it is changing, through fashion, architecture, new materials and new kinds of collaboration. The real question is not whether kantha should stay the same, but how it can adapt without losing the knowledge, labour and identity that have carried it this far. At the centre are the artisans, whose skill has moved kantha from the household into new spaces without cutting its thread back to where it began.

–By Saionee Panja

From 5–7 August 2026, the library of Taman Ismail Marzuki in Jakarta filled with people who came together with something that cannot always be found in books: stories carried by people. They came from different parts of Asia and beyond, bringing songs, dances, rituals, memories and ways of understanding the world that have been passed from one generation to another. The Lisan XIII Symposium and Festival of Oral Traditions, organised by the Asosiasi Tradisi Lisan (Oral Tradition Association), brought researchers, artists, cultural practitioners and tradition bearers together to listen, share and explore how these living traditions continue to find their place in the world today.

From the Seminar Room to the Stage

On August 5, the opening programme brought together representatives from the cultural sector and academia in Indonesia. This was followed by a cultural evening featuring Gambang Rancag/Kromong performance, Seraikela Chhau performance from India, and Besutan performance from Surabaya.

This movement between discussion and performance continued throughout the event. The symposium was not structured only around academic presentations. Performances were placed alongside the discussions, allowing participants to experience some of the traditions being discussed rather than encountering them only through papers or documentation.

On 6 August, the festival programme brought together Seraikela Chhau performance, the Papua Yosim Pancar community dance and Silek Harimau an ancient martial tradition. The final evening featured Besutan performance from Surabaya and Wayang Bangsawan theatre performance from Singapore.

The symposium brought together participants from a number of countries and professional backgrounds. Speakers included people working in research, cultural institutions, archives and community-based practice from Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Switzerland, Sweden and Brunei. In one of the panels Ananya Bhattacharya and I  represented India, and our work in Odisha’s indigenous communities and Chhau tradition.

Alongside the main panels, the symposium had a series of parallel sessions, conducted in both Indonesian and English. This created space for participants to present different areas of research and practice, while allowing conversations to develop across disciplines and regions. It was interesting to see how differently oral traditions are approached in different contexts.

Bringing Odisha into the Conversation

For Banglanatak dot com, the event also provided a platform to bring perspectives from its work with Indigenous and traditional communities in Odisha. Ananya Bhattacharya shared our experiences from Koraput highlighting the close connections between oral traditions, everyday life and the natural environment.

Home to several Indigenous communities, including the Durua, Paroja, Gadaba and Kandha, Koraput is also recognised by the FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System for its rich agrobiodiversity and traditional farming practices. The presentation looked at how this relationship with nature is expressed and sustained through everyday cultural practices. Rituals, songs, dances, festivals and customary practices are not separate from the landscape. They carry knowledge about forests, agriculture, seasons, food and community life. These traditions also guide how people interact with and care for their surroundings. In this sense, oral traditions are not only ways of preserving cultural memory but can also act as community-based systems of knowledge and stewardship, connecting cultural continuity with biodiversity and resilience.

What Chhau Can Tell Us About Nature

A similar relationship can be seen in Seraikela Chhau, where movements and palas draw inspiration from the natural world, transforming observations of everyday life into a distinctive performance language. Its movement repertoire takes cues from the gait, behaviour and qualities of animals, birds and other elements of nature, translating these observations into precise and highly stylised movements, postures, footwork and gestures. The use of masks adds another layer to the tradition’s material culture. Traditionally made using soil collected from the Kharkei riverbed and natural pigments, the masks themselves reflect a close relationship with the local landscape and available materials.

The tradition is also closely connected to Chaitra Parab, a festival marking spring, seasonal transition and agricultural renewal, placing the dance within a larger cycle of nature and regeneration. From its earlier martial associations to its evolution as an expressive performance tradition, Seraikela Chhau demonstrates how living heritage can adapt over time while continuing to carry memories, values and ways of understanding the world.

My presentation on Seraikela Chhau was accompanied by a live demonstration by Guru Malay Kumar Sahu and Amit Kumar Sahu, who brought the movement vocabulary and ideas discussed in the paper to life. Their demonstration and explanations gave audiences and participants from different backgrounds an opportunity to experience the form directly and understand the knowledge embedded within its movements, narratives and performance traditions.

What We Take Back

Bringing people from different regions together also showed how many questions around living traditions are shared. Whether working with Chhau in India or oral traditions in Indonesia, Malaysia or Brunei, concerns around transmission, community participation, documentation, changing audiences and continuity often overlap, even when the traditions themselves are very different.

Lisan XIII created space for these connections, between research and practice, documentation and performance, and traditions from different parts of Asia. It also reminded us that oral traditions do not exist in isolation. They are closely connected to landscapes, livelihoods, histories, belief systems, communities and everyday life.

One of the most interesting takeaways was seeing how stories travel across borders and become part of new cultural settings. Indonesia, with its 38 provinces and extraordinary Indigenous and ethnolinguistic diversity, has a particularly rich history of cultural exchange. The Ramayana and Mahabharata, for instance, have travelled across Southeast Asia and been embraced, adapted and reinterpreted through local traditions. Their stories continue to find expression in performance, ritual, theatre, dance and storytelling. The presentation of Sita Haran by the Singapore Opera Group was one example of how a familiar story can be encountered through a different cultural and artistic lens.

Perhaps that is what makes living heritage living. It is not preserved by keeping it unchanged, but by allowing communities to continue interpreting, practising and passing it on. Culture travels, communities make it their own, and traditions continue to find new ways of being relevant.

–By Abheepsha Ghosh

Strings Across Borders: Dialogues On Puppetry

Puppetry is one of the most ancient forms of theatre. The art form breathes life into wood, metal, cloth, or paper, animating dolls into vivid personas. Blending craft, music, and drama, it can be playful, yet it has often served as a powerful medium to speak truth to power. Across time and geography, puppetry has travelled alongside human civilisation. The history of puppetry is, in many ways, the history of humanity itself: it spans across and documents hundreds of years of dynasties changing, technologies evolving, and societies transforming. Yet, despite these shifts, it remains rooted in fundamental human experiences—of storytelling, belief, and shared imagination.

India-Indonesia Cultural Exchange

It is within such cultural histories that Indonesia offers a compelling context. Indonesia is often described as a tapestry of cultures—shaped by centuries of maritime trade, migration, war, and conquest. The archipelago carries layered identities where indigenous heritage, Chinese influences, and Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic philosophies intertwine.

Where traditions converge, puppetry emerges as a language of connection. With this spirit of multiculturalism, an India–Indonesia cultural exchange unfolded in December 2025, using puppetry as its most expressive bridge. The programme unfolded across two interconnected events: ‘Strings Across Borders’ at Bannabagram Baul Ashram and ‘Shared Worlds: India–Indonesia Colloquium on Oral Traditions and Cultural Memory’ at Netaji Bhawan, Kolkata. This wonderful collaboration took place with Asosiasi Tradisi Lisan (ATL), led by Pudentia Purenti. As an organisation dedicated to safeguarding and documenting oral traditions of Indonesia, it amplifies the work of researchers and cultural practitioners.

Wayang Potehi: Glove Puppets of Indonesia

At the heart of the exchange was Wayang Potehi, a form of glove puppetry brought to Indonesia from China in the eighteenth century. The word wayang refers to imagined figures or shadows, while potehi—derived from the Chinese budaixi—literally means “cloth sack performance.” Performed with richly costumed glove puppets, Wayang Potehi is both intimate and expressive, allowing subtle movements to convey complex emotions.

Preserved largely by Sino-Javanese communities in East Java, Wayang Potehi extends far beyond the conventional stage. It continues to thrive as a ritual tradition within temple spaces, where performances are both offerings and acts of cultural continuity. The history of Wayang Potehi is also marked by resilience. During periods of political restriction under dictatorship, when Indonesian-Chinese cultural expressions were suppressed, these performances continued quietly, often in secrecy. This legacy adds another layer of meaning—each performance reaffirms a collective identity. Today, a new generation of puppeteers is working with dedication to revive and sustain this form. Among them is renowned puppeteer Toni Harsono, leader of the Fu He An troupe, who brought these traditions to life during his visit. His performances utilised classic stories such as Journey to the West, where a young Buddhist monk takes a pilgrimage to India, and the legend of Guan Yu from the late Han dynasty.

A Journey Through Indian Puppetry

The Indian side of the exchange was equally rich. At Bannabagram Baul Ashram, Bengal’s Chadar Badar and Putul Naach traditions shared the stage, revealing how puppetry in India ranges from ritual performance to folk entertainment, from village courtyards to modern theatres.

Chadar Badar is a unique form of Santhal puppetry, where the puppets are operated under a canopy-like structure. What unfolds beneath this canopy is folk education, storytelling, and community memory brought to life. Through an inventive lever system, hand-carved wooden puppets dance in unison to the rhythms of the dhamsa, madol, and khorkoto. Several artist clusters around Ausgram, Purba Bardhaman, include dedicated artists, bringing this heritage to life at the event.

Putul Naach artists from Nadia highlighted the string puppetry traditions of Bengal. With handpainted backgrounds of homes and forests, and puppets representing everyday people to animals, Putul Naach bound the audience in fond nostalgia and laughter.

This diversity was also beautifully expanded in the lecture-demonstration by Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee Sudip Gupta and Shreeparna Bhanja Gupta, who took audiences at Netaji Bhawan on a journey across India’s puppetry landscape. From the lyrical Putul Naach of Bengal, to the witty glove puppets of Gulaabo Sitaabo from Rajasthan, and the stylised puppets of Pava Kathakali from Kerala, the presentation showed how each region moulds puppetry according to its language, music, beliefs, and aesthetics.

The events revealed puppetry not as a single art form, but as a family of traditions: each distinct, yet united by stories, craftsmanship, and imagination. Audiences could also find common ground between the forms, be it Wayang Potehi, Chadar Badar, Putul Naach, or Gulaabo Sitaabo. Visual and auditory spectacle aside, puppetry is also utilised across cultures as a medium for social messages—often through humour and satire.

Colloquium on Oral Traditions: Scholars, Stories, and Cultural Memory

Besides occupying its space in theatre, puppetry is also an important oral tradition—transmitting cultural knowledge and values through storytelling. From lullabies and mythic tales to rituals, oral traditions go unnoticed and underappreciated as a form of intangible cultural heritage. When these practices are not passed on within communities and different generations, they may be forgotten, lost forever.

At Netaji Bhawan, the colloquium, ‘Shared Worlds: Oral Traditions and Cultural Memory’ on December 4 deepened this dialogue. Through their scholarship, Indonesian researchers from all over the archipelago explored how oral traditions function as living knowledge systems. These systems not only transmit cultural knowledge, but also operate as an implicit pedagogical tool, i.e. indirectly teach younger generations about social and moral values.

Javanese Puppetry by Eko Suwargono: How can puppet shows be a masterclass in leadership? By weaving lessons about government and ethics into every performance, puppetry helps a community decide what values they want to live by and keeps those traditions alive for the next generation.

The Manguni Myth by Clartje Awulle: For Minahasan communities, the legend of the Manguni owl goes beyond the myth. As a divine omen from the gods, it is a signal for harvests or future danger. However, it also becomes a moral compass, providing a shared set of social rules and surveilling communities.

Nias Marriage Traditions by Ni Wayan Sumitri: Wedding celebrations among the Nias people are special, in that they preserve a rare form of language as part of their rituals. This practice, while dwindling, maintains their roots to Austronesian cultures of the past.

The “Thousand-Legged” House by Donna Sampaleng: Imagine a Thousand-Legged House! Building the Arfak people’s Rumah Kaki Seribu is intense work: it also gives children an important lesson on building character and the importance of collective strength.

Across different presentations, a common pattern emerged: oral traditions are not frozen in time. They evolve, adapt, and respond—however, they also serve important functions in society. Puppetry, myth, and narrative were shown to be tools for teaching values, strengthening social bonds, and maintaining cultural continuity.

Shared Threads

Together, these days of performance, discussion, travel, and informal interaction revealed a simple truth: cultures may differ in form, but they meet in emotion. Whether through a cloth puppet in a temple in East Java, or a wooden puppet in a Bengal village, stories continue to help people understand who they are and where they belong.

Strings Across Borders and Shared Worlds reminded everyone present that cultural heritage lives most fully when it is shared, celebrated, and carried forward together. Here, cultural exchange emerges as a powerful tool. Through sharing the diversity of our traditions, it can build new relationships, and generate a mutual appreciation between cultures.

Chief Guest M.K. Singh, reflecting on the years he spent working in Indonesia, recounted tales of watching Wayang Kulit puppetry performances. He spoke about how myths like the Ramayana and Mahabharata are reinterpreted, blending with local cultures into something unique and beautiful.

In a world increasingly divided, these puppets — guided by hands, voices, and memory — quietly proved that storytelling still has the power to connect nations, generations, and hearts.