When the Women of Punjab Embroidered Trains on Phulkari Cloth
Words by Jamila Siamwalla
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When the Women of Punjab Embroidered Trains on Phulkari Cloth by Jamila Siamwalla
There is more to a Phulkari other than its name’s meaning of being “flower work”. The embroidered cloth of Punjab shows a plethora of embroidered motifs that anyone can imagine is close to the form of flowers, flowering plants and the environment that a flower thrives in—the leaves, the gardens, the people who tended to the flowers, the crop fields and the lawns of the people’s houses. To what the Punjabi women saw around them was finely embroidered through the needle, being the pen to their non-verbal language, on the coarse cloth. But by the end of the 19th century, there came a striking appearance of railway imagery on the Phulkari cloth. Embroidered trains ran at the borders. Narratives of trains and railway stations also reigned on the cloth. Trains being complex machinery of their kind, found their place as embroidered motifs of Phulkaris, which weighs a contemplation on the socio-political understanding of the colonial era in British India.
To embroider Phulkaris was a part of a woman's leisure time and life in Punjab, for those Phulkaris were shawls for wedding trousseau of their daughters and granddaughters and as temple cloths and wall hangings for places of worship. On handspun, handwoven cotton fabric, bright coloured un-twisted silk threads were embroidered using mainly the darning embroidery stitch, i.e. a single-sided running stitch. Other stitches used were the running, chain, herringbone and buttonhole stitches. The earliest material records of Phulkaris are from the mid-19th century onwards and Phulkaris made then and onwards are now categorised by their purposes, designs, stitches and colours.
Bagh, a type of Phulkari cloth, were embroidered densely with no fabric visible; like a garden of flowers on the fabric. Sainchi Phulkaris depicted figurative motifs whilst the Darshan Dwar Phulkaris were meant for the places of worship and had embroidered motifs that pictured doorways to the Divine. Many of these kinds of Phulkaris stand into debates by collectors, writers, researchers and readers like us—that if such categories make a Phulkari a Phulkari. Nevertheless, categorizing Phulkaris has made it somewhat accessible to understand the cloth’s roles in the life of Colonial Punjab. To the women who created these masterworks, the cloth appeared to be a free spread to expression that came about as they simply sat and sang together and embroidered. Literature from Punjab has expressed the relationship between these women and their embroidery, as the course ground fabric being the demanding life of the women in Punjab who takes care of her household and children whilst the rich embroidery in silk being her hopes, dreams and desires. Cristin Ruth McKnight Sethi, who has extensively studied Phulkaris goes a step further to quote, “The motifs of a phulkari are the words and phrases of the composition.” Phulkari enthusiasts now have almost figured out how the embroidery then must be made, but to know why the embroidery with multiple imageries was made so—is and will be a continuous conquest to understand the past, of the embroidery and of the anonymous embroiders who were women and who have painstakingly captured a piece of time. Interpretations of Phulkaris lie at a conjecture and rely heavily on the visual cues of the embroidery, historical environment and eventually the interpreter’s subjectivity, but through this combination, multiple perspectives arise to imagine and decipher closer to the truth of lived experiences of the past. The interpretations of motifs, patterns and colours is an attempt to narrate Phulkari’s visual vocabulary and understand what has been left as a material legacy by the Punjabi women in Colonial India. Most of the Phulkaris that remain now are part of family heritages and personal collections and in museums. The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMOA) houses such a virtual collection of Phulkaris from The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Phulkari Collection that contains embroidered railway imagery.
British Colonists in the 19th century were trying ways to access and control their colony’s resources such as textiles and human labour at strategic locations in India; they saw the region’s cultivable and levelled land as ideal for laying rail lines—in the Punjab Province, which has historically been and is still a source of agricultural wealth. Even Phulkari’s base fabric was obtained from the cottons of Punjab. The eminent historian Bipan Chandra wrote, “British motives in building railways in India that time, were the promotion of the sole interests of British merchants, manufacturers and investors.” In the 1860s, the first railway line of the Punjab Province was laid, which connected important cities from Multan, Lahore to Amritsar. And the region is the source of another dominant crop—wheat.
On Phulkaris, wheat, was embroidered in distinctive forms and placements. Motifs of wheat were usually embroidered in rows across the body of the cloth, but on one of the Darshan Dwar Phulkaris from the PMOA, wheat motifs are embroidered on top of the train compartments. A possible indication that wheat is being transported by the train, with no other people except the train driver. The goods train is made with a dense darning stitch that run between the two temples like gateways. Its steam at the end seems to almost take the shape of the spikes of wheat, swaying in the wind. The embroidered narrative can depict interpretations of many: wheat that provides food and trade to people or the British-run trains filled with wheat crops that rule people’s livelihoods. Do the temples stand to protect the goods trains that maybe carried wheat? Or the train becomes a moving entity in itself… "Trains in India replaced Gods", is what Arup K. Chatterjee boldly writes in his book, The Great Indian Railways: A Cultural Biography. Certainly, the mode of travel that transports one to the Enlightened One has to have certain divinity in it to be able to perform the responsibility.
And trains did so, in another of the Darshan Dwars, where the train’s compartments have peaked roofs that pass through the two large gateway-like structures. Many embroidered trains run at the vertical borders of the cloth. Inside all of the train’s compartments is an embroidered figurative person. Lined next to these golden trains at the border are motifs of wheat crops and birds, painting a scene of rural Punjab; and it may all suggest that trains carry pilgrims from places and far, that run across the fields, so as to being the mode to reach and pray to the Divine.
The trains that crossed the divine landscapes for livelihood, hope and peace did so, only after they crossed the daily shackles of the rural and urban landscapes. British India before the introduction of railways—functioned through the travel modes of cattle, horses and elephants—that had limitations of speed, the number of people the domestic animals could carry in their attached cart and the uncertainty that the lengthy travel could be faced with natural calamities and diseases. Trains gave confidence, of lesser worries, of lesser wait, to reach the destination and to return home.
In an elaborate Sainchi Phulkari from the collection, horse-drawn carriages are shown alongside trains, both being contrasting transportation modes embroidered with their own sets of distinctive wheels. The steam from the train embroidered in multiple colours merges with the narrative of the Phulkari. People in the compartments seem to be performing. Joy seems to fill their ride. One of the passengers seems to hold a hand fan whilst another a strand of wheat. The relative scale of each motif of Phulkari's town is almost the same to make a dense and balanced pattern. Railways subsequently, became objects representing the people, culture and activities around them and showed that they were more than transporting people and goods. Eventually, railway stations were built surrounded by markets. To all of it was the amazement that the trains offered, of children running behind the speeding trains, of the people who gazed at the new technology and of the people who saw an outside moving world from inside the trains. Contrary to the awe the railways fed to the Locals, the trains on the direction of Colonial authorities exported wheat exponentially to England, which was one of the facilitators of the famines of India in the late 19th century which had some of its effect on Punjab. A relationship between trains, the wheat crops and The Divine is speculative, all essentialities of physical and spiritual survival under Colonial rule—and this dominant power that loomed over everything interlaced with the multiple meanings of what meant what, to the Natives.
Just as the power of the two trains that run in opposite directions is eminent through its smoke, in another Sainchi Phulkari. The blackness of an engine and the coal rules the sight, like a streak of darkness in the background of a red sunset. The train driver wears boots and a peculiar hat, whilst the other people in the compartments are barefoot, a historical indication that Indians earlier were not employed in the railways. Often people under Colonial rule incorporated Colonial impacts and images into their own textiles. For women in the Punjab Province, these observations and nuances of railway imagery seem to become a part of their language of adaptation and metaphorical and symbolic vision of their world—to embroider Phulkaris. And to what Phulkaris have remained, Phulkari’s trains are in place, even to see after a century, whilst the train in sight swiftly passes and diminishes away with speed. The narrative is in motion on the cloth yet is firmly held by its embroidered threads. The train’s movement rests on its wheels, energized by the steaming engine. Without the dozens of embroidered wheels, the compartments would lack the imaginative momentum—that unknowingly determines the Phulkaris’s structure, which is never to be folded, as the trains keep on running. The recurring scenes set forever to see that moment of past on the walls.
Until the scenes came to a standstill in 1947, during the Partition of India and Pakistan. Lakhs of refugees travelled in heinous and brutal conditions from the trains to travel to either side of the border. Some Phulkaris travelled across, whilst some could never make it and were lost. The Punjabi women’s Phulkaris had borne the brunt of these dividing lines. It is as though metaphorically, the embroidered trains that ran across the Phulkari cloths carried unfathomable emotional weight, that no longer could be sufficed by the coarseness of the cloth, and had left this fabric of labour and love and of hopes and dreams, torn in pieces.
Credits:
Jamila Siamwalla has studied Textile Design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Mumbai and currently works in research towards fashion sustainability. As much as she works for the future, her curiosity also lies in colonial and post-colonial expressions of textiles. She has worked on an academic research project titled “Impact of India-Pakistan’s Partition on Phulkari” and has presented a conference paper titled “Interpretations of Trains on Phulkari Cloth, embroidered by the women in Punjab, British India” that was funded by the Pasold Research Fund to present at the Textile and Place Conference 2021 organized by the Manchester School of Art.