Meet Shamlu Dudeja. A revivalist, a mother, a teacher, an author and a revolutionary.
Just like a needle is to thread, so is Shamlu to Kantha: a name now synonymous with this beloved traditional craft of Bengal.
Meet Shamlu Dudeja. A revivalist, a mother, a teacher, an author and a revolutionary.
Not an artist or a designer, but one with great sensitivity towards beauty; Shamlu’s keen eye recognised the need for reviving this dying art, 30 years ago. There has been no stopping her ever since.
Each piece of work, she professes, is a labor of love and passion, weaving, in its patterns, the stories of the lives of simple women, their joys, their sorrows and their aspirations.
It is a matter of great pride for her to have been able to take Kantha from rural Bengal to the rest of the world. Thirty years on, she still maintains her stance, "I live to support Kantha and the women behind it."
Her awards
Shamlu Dudeja, along with her daughter Malika, recognized the need for reviving a dying art called Kantha. Setting up the nonprofit S.H.E (Self Help Enterprise), they trained seamstresses to go to the villages and look for women with sewing skills. The women then re-fashioned their worn out cotton saris into warm quilts by sewing the wad of fabrics with tiny running stitches, using threads drawn from the colorful woven sari borders. The stitches were often so precise that the overall ruche effect made the reconstructed ‘quilt’ an object of unmatched beauty. This was the original Kantha, the tangible cultural heritage of rural Bengal. 30 years on she has managed to elevate a poor man's stitch to the portals of fine art.
