Processing the Death of a Young Woman in Kantha Embroidery

Kantha provide a rich material archive to probe women’s engagement with contemporary social, political, economic and religious concerns during the tumultuous decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Bengal. This article gathers a set of stitched vignettes of the 1873 Tarakeshwar affair, involving the seduction and/or rape and murder of a young woman Elokeshi, resulting in sensational court cases. It examines the choices in visualising the events alongside versions in other visual, literary and performative media to ask how their makers may have participated. Did kantha-making offer women space to process this shocking event, as well as many others that went unaddressed in their daily lives? Could these practices foster informal and fleeting sites of support or quiet resistance to dominant narratives? This imagery allows us to ask if pictures in coloured threads served to bear witness to events, experiences and emotions that may have been difficult to verbalise.