TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY SANA NAQVI
Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan
The passing of heirloom textile pieces as heritage is a common practice between generations of women across cultures. This gesture gives tangible value to the transference of skill, legacy, generational knowledge, and memory. These objects explain the broader connotations of inheritance, and this distinct way of sharing is not limited to its physical value alone, but rather an entire set of experiences and feelings are transmitted.
I have heard stories of how my mother’s family moved from India to Pakistan in 1965, and the struggles they faced after this migration. The house that we live in and the home that is our body are intertwined by a thin rope of experiences. My mother continues to have fond memories of Delhi and the childhood spent with her grandmother, whom she called amma.
L-R Amma on a rickshaw circa 1940, Amma circa 1960
Last year, as part of my MPhil research, I was studying generational trauma, matrilineal anger and patriarchal neglect. My mother and I had extensive conversations about her time in Delhi till she was fifteen years of age and the challenges they faced in Pakistan. These intimate exchanges about amma led her to pass some of her belongings as keepsakes. The off-white linen pillowcases amma made for my mother when my eldest sister was born in 1971 display an intricate Taarkashi or Drawn Thread embroidery at their centre and have crocheted borders. Drawn Thread is a form of whitework embroidery in which selected warp or weft threads are drawn out and cut off, and the remaining threads are grouped with stitching. It can originally be traced to Egypt but was brought to India by various Christian nuns and missionaries from the eighteenth century onwards.
Other belongings included a steel Uterine Curette, which reminded me of a whole range of grotesque instruments in the shoe drawer of my grandmother’s iron cupboard including sharp syringes, forceps, tweezers and clamps that went missing after my grandmother passed. My aunt also shared with me amma’s brass trinket box, and a Rekordspritze syringe case introduced in 1906 by the Berlin instrument makers, Dewitt and Hertz.
Taarkashi pillow covers made by amma in 1970
Born in Saharanpur in 1901, amma was named Alice David at birth. It is difficult to say if she was an Anglo-Indian, but her mother, Angelica, had travelled from Germany to work for the East India Company. She died of burns when a fire broke out in their house and Alice was just a toddler. The child was taken to a foster home by missionary women and was eight years old when she had to have her left leg amputated due to gangrene.
As an adult, she studied auxiliary nursing and midwifery at a missionary school in Allahabad. Between 1860 and 1910, missionaries were divided into groups catering to upper and lower castes. Schools like the American Presbyterian and Methodist Missions worked with lower castes, and American Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, and Anglican missionaries worked with upper castes. Three-quarters of all Anglicans in Uttar Pradesh, by contrast, were either Anglo-Indian or European.
Amma’s Record Spritze syringe case from Czechoslovakia, trinket box from Saharanpur and her Uterine Curette
Amma resigned from her duties as a missionary in her early twenties. She converted after her first marriage to a Nawab in 1925, and was named Kaneez Fatima but the marriage did not last. In 1930, she remarried my great-grandfather, Hafiz Muhammad Suleman. Her identity of being born to Christian parents remained attached to her, however her literacy in medicine and exquisite skills in needlework were barely recognised by the patriarchal order followed by the Muslim family she married into.
She settled in Daryaganj, Delhi, during the 1930s and raised her children and grandchildren – including my mother – with an amputated leg, which made her almost immobile in later years. She faced many challenges during her married life. Forced to give up on her inheritance by the men in her family, she succumbed to destroying all her documents, passports and assets she received from her deceased parents; sadly, she burnt them all.
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Amma often sang the gospel hymns she remembered from her childhood choirs, trying to delicately and quietly preserve both parts of her identity. However, throughout her life, my mother was frequently reminded of and questioned about Amma’s Anglo-Muslim identity and how it diluted the blood she carried from her father. There are traces of marginalisation and discrimination that I have sensed from my maternal side of the family, towards this racial hybridity and layered identity that has been passed down the generations.
Last year, I found a bundle of letters and postcards wrapped in a linen cloth with borders of Taarkashi, dated from 1966 to 1974, where amma addressed my grandmother and mother, expressing grief and resentment over their separation and the uncertainty of seeing them ever again. This potli also contained postcards from my twelve-year-old aunt, who was left in Delhi to guarantee that the family would return home in less than a month. My grandfather decided to leave her behind as he was already taking three daughters and a son, and accommodating them all would burden his family in Pakistan. Eventually, Gillu Aunty got married at a young age without finishing school and already had a daughter by the time she reunited with her family on her visit to Pakistan in 1970.
Growing up, I remember her frequent visits to Pakistan with four of her daughters. They spent summers at our house every year, and we barely felt the need to address each other with different nationalities. We never realised how our families were displaced and torn apart, because for children, borders do not exist.
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I was intrigued to know why amma decided to leave missionary life, marry a Muslim, yet was unaccepted by society after her conversion. I wanted to study her life through the skills she practised with determination and patience. Stitching on fabric wasn’t the only skill she honed. She tended to many wounds with the same precision she sewed on cloth. Stitching on a body must be informed by the knowledge she gained from learning darning techniques during childhood. The contrast between working on fabric and suturing on the skin using a needle and thread seems stark, and she managed it intuitively. None of the women in my family learnt this craft from her. For them, she was too stern and rigid to pass it on.
Amma, as my mother describes, was extremely particular about inculcating etiquette and discipline to the children. She even observed how the objects like a knife or a needle were handed to her. Her discipline and consistency were rooted in her missionary background. Moreover, the needlework she learned from there was the only remnant of her compromised identity that she kept close to herself. Amma decided to come to Pakistan in 1969. Due to old age and disability, she was carried by the courteous coolies who offered help at every station. She spent her last days in Karachi and died in October 1982.
My interest in the subject developed from my own struggles and emotional dysregulation which prompted me to detangle the complex narrative of matrilineal anger. Figuring out the root cause of my anguish towards the patriarchal neglect, I managed to unpack several layers of silent subservience. These objects reminded me of Amma’s unmet needs and sacrifice, which led to little or no acknowledgement of what she deserved. While sewing the lesions around the generational wound, I contributed to becoming a transitional character, assigning myself a task to process the loss and resume constructing and rearranging the threads from where Amma had left off.
Amazing