What I really enjoy about both the carpets is that they are clearly handmade. There are mistakes. They’re not symmetrical, the spacing isn’t perfect, she kind of runs out of space at one point and then squeezes everything together, which all of us, when we’ve written in notebooks, have done when you run out of space on one line.
I have seen the wooden crocodile crouched under my mother’s cousin’s shelf for several years now. This Burmese crocodile can be traced back to Sarat Chandra Chatterjee – the renowned literary figure whose contributions to Bengali literature have been immense, most notably Devdas – who spent years living in Burma, working as a clerk.
One of the few remnants of my family’s connection with erstwhile Burma (now Myanmar), is a lacquerware box, an inheritance from my maternal grandmother. When my mother, Manimegalai, got married, the box was a part of her dowry and is well over 80 years old.
These beaded dogs were made in my grandmother’s natal home in Chabua, a small town in upper Assam, sometime in the late 1960s, most certainly before 1968, the year my grandmother, Shushila Devi Lohia, got married.
Rajkumari Devi had embroidered this map for a school competition in the year 1948 when she was only 8 years old. Her school in Amhara, Bihar was visited by some British officials, who awarded her 10 annas for the extraordinary embroidery she had done, despite her young age.
Receive a new story from somewhere in the Indian subcontinent in your inbox every week!