An early 20th century ceremonial skirt parho from Tharparkar, on printed cotton | Arif Mahmood, White Star

| A Flower from Every Meadow: Design and Innovation in Pakistan’s Dress Traditions | Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi | Opened on June 11, 2015

A Flower From Every Meadow: Design and Innovation in Pakistan’s Dress Traditions brings together a mesmerising collection of woven and embroidered clothing and fabrics from all over Pakistan. One of the most spiritually uplifting exhibitions, it is a timely reminder of the meadow we now occupy that we have covered with plastic bags and rags of mass produced clothing.

The exhibition asks the question: Does all this belong to our past or does it have a place in our future? Curator Nasreen Askari leads us to conclude the latter, having invited a select group of contemporary fashion designers to pay homage to the textiles on display with their own creative designs. Pakistani fashion designers have already been incorporating traditional embroidery in their designs and contemporising traditional clothing styles, bringing a Pakistani identity to their work. This has come to be known in the industry as ethical fashion. Originally the brainchild of Bangladeshi model and designer Bibi Russell – who was awarded the Artist for Peace title by the United Nations in 2001 – ethical fashion employs local artisans in the fashion industry, thus ensuring a continuity of traditional skills and creating economic opportunities for the artisans.

However, while ethical fashion creates commercial opportunities for artisans, it also, ironically, threatens cultural heritage. Kala Raksha, – a non-profit organisation set up for the preservation of traditional arts in Gujarat, India – has recognised that “commercialisation insidiously eroded the artisans’ sense of aesthetics and self worth”. In 2005, the organisation founded Kala Raksha Vidhyalaya, the first design school for artisans, as a sustainable solution for the survival of traditional arts and crafts. While this initiative allows artisans space to evolve designs and market products on their own terms, it is, nevertheless, an intervention, introducing new avenues for the commercialisation of textile skills. Traditional rural textiles, such as those on display in A Flower From Every Meadow, are rarely made for commercial reasons. They are usually made by women and men for personal use.

The exhibition very emphatically depicts dress and textiles as being so much more than just skill and creativity. Clothing is an identifier of region, tribe or ethnic group, of family, social hierarchy and, of course, individual personality. The colours, the embroidered motifs, the yards of cloth used, as well as how and when a dress is worn can serve as a cultural and psychological text. When a woman embroiders her own trousseau, she expresses her personality, her creativity and intelligence — it can be a subtle message to her future family. Each piece of clothing becomes unique, with subtle innovations, like an individual’s handwriting. Each piece also, in turn, contributes to the evolution of a community and a region.

Textiles are not only personal expressions: they also reflect the physical surroundings of those who produce them. The materials and styles are determined by the climate: cotton for hot deserts, wool and felt for cold mountains and bright colours for women walking miles in the desert to get water, ensuring their visibility from a distance. Local flora and fauna, similarly, become the basis for the evolution of motifs.

Details from the sleeve of a formal ceremonial jacket worn by the Talpurs of Sindh | Arif Mahmood, White Star

Natural elements and traditional textiles have always had a close relationship. The dyes used are natural: madder, indigofera, turmeric, pomegranate skins. So are the motifs: peacocks, fruits, nuts and flowers. Some motifs are romantic – such as neem leaves, mangoes, lightning and ram horns – while others are quirky and humourous, like billi buto (cat’s face), kuttay payr (dog’s paw) — and sometimes even thorns, as symbols of abrasiveness.

Nature has also been one of the main victims of modern urban life. In the past – as well as in rural life – language has always been closely linked with nature. Colours used to be called baingani, jamni, tarboozi – after fruits and vegetables – instead of being labelled as purple and shocking pink. Embroidery with gold and silver thread was called ganga jamna, in a tribute to the two biggest rivers of the subcontinent. Songs were about nehar wala pull (the bridge on a canal), chaudhveen ka chaand (the full moon) and about standing under a neem tree. During one of my recent visits to the vice chancellor’s office at Karachi University, on a particularly hot day, I greeted the guard and said by way of small talk, “It’s really hot today”. Instead of responding with the usual complaints about electricity outages, he said, “Haan, fasal achhi pakay gi” (“Yes, the crops will ripen well”).

In the halls of the Mohatta Palace Museum, nature is given its due place. As soon as you enter the exhibition, three workshops set its context: Shafiq Soomro’s ajrak printing, Rab Dino’s bandhani or tie-dying, and Shahid Mallah’s khes loom — each with labelled natural dyes and other raw materials. This inclusion of workshops creates an appreciation of the complexity of producing what is mostly everyday clothing. Ajrak goes through 19 different labour-intensive processes; the minute wrappings of bandhani and the exquisite detailing of embroidered motifs in khes, woven a thread at a time, these are some things we remain unaware of when we see the finished products. This attention to detail is especially remarkable given the conditions of poverty and lack of resources among the artisans and is evidence of the importance that textiles and other crafts hold in traditional cultures. The rituals of craft-making overcome isolation and silence; they are an amplification of individual presence in an otherwise anonymous and powerless life of an artisan. I once asked an artisan if he thought of himself as an artist or a craftsman — his reply, after a few moments of thought, was, “Neither. I am a Sufi.”

An idea of the spiritual nature of the work can be gathered from this quote by a young Kachhi woman in American artist and writer Michele Hardy’s study of women’s folk art in western India: “It took many hours of tortured stitching before I began to appreciate the relationship between needle size, cloth texture, and stitch fineness. It wasn’t until much later that I realised my efforts to stitch finely and evenly were being hindered by my reliance on sight. I discovered, quite by accident, late one afternoon as the sun was setting and the light was growing dim, that my stitching improved as I was forced to trust my sense of touch and the rhythms.”

The Flying Carpets exhibit with displays from Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit Baltistan | Courtesy Mohatta Palace Museum

From henna patterns to decorations at shrines, a particular design aesthetic is common to all regions of Pakistan. Walking into the exhibition rooms at Mohatta Palace Museum, I felt connected as much to the exhibits as I did to the architecture — especially the tiled floors. Their warm earthy colours and designs were in some silent conversation with the textiles displayed on the walls. I easily imagined small lantern-lit rooms with women huddled after a 15-hour day, threading needles and stitching motifs of quiet serenity or lanes resounding with the rhythmic clatter of looms, the dull thud of blocks, the various sounds of weaving and printing.

The textiles on display are from private collections. While they represent a wide variety of regions, ranging from Chitral and Swat to the far reaches of Sindh and Balochistan, they only touch the surface of the enormous scale and variety of textiles in Pakistan — 80 per cent of all embroidery stitches of South Asian origin are said to be present in the regions now in Pakistan. Ours is the only country in the world producing all four commercially known silks — mulberry, tasser (tussore), eri and muga. The earliest example of the use of Indigofera as a textile dye also comes from the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300-1300 BC).

In the halls of the Mohatta Palace Museum, nature is given its due place. As soon as you enter the exhibition, three workshops set its context

From the calmness of the patiently-layered fine single threads of gaj (dress-front embroidery) and the warmth of a Balochi gidaan (woven tent), the exhibits cover a whole range of traditional lifestyles. Displayed in between them are the ludi shawls of Tharparkar, felt pattu coats of Chitral, farasi floor coverings of Sindh, khurzeen saddlebags of Balochistan, lungi or turbans of Kalat and Bahawalpur as well as ghagro skirts, doshalo and chupri shawls. These are magical names that reveal so many worlds that remain invisible in our cacophonous urgent lives.

Two installations, a hujra (or males-only drawing room) from Kohistan and a Baloch gidaan, give us a miniscule insight into the daily life of the artisan communities — most probably endangered in their own regions.

Rarely seen Balochi textiles are provided by artist Akram Dost, whose doctorate on Balochi textiles is an invaluable addition to scholarship on South Asian textiles. Other important pieces are on loan from the families of Nawab of Bahawalpur and the Talpur Mirs of Sindh. A 524-panel Kohistani jumlo or female dress and a choprai shawl – that inspired Sheila Paine’s romance with textiles of Asia – are among other important displays.

Balochi workmanship on a hanging, circa 20th century | Arif Mahmood, White Star

Enigmatic in this rich tapestry of colour and pattern is a white burqa. Finely embroidered in white silk thread, it stands as a sentinel, reminiscent of a marble sculpture. A reminder of the dichotomy of hiding and revealing, it also evokes nostalgia for the simple burqa of the old — replaced by hijabs and chadors of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern origins in the post-Zia era.

The exhibition subtly culminates in the works of contemporary designers invited to respond to traditional textiles: Rizwan Beyg, Bunto Kazmi, Maheen Khan, Faiza Samee, Nilofer Shahid, Sonya Battla, Shamaeel Ansari, Sana Safinaz and Saira Shamoon of Khaadi. Their intelligent and creative designs have kept the traditional textile crafts alive and relevant.

Beyg established workshops for women artisans nine years ago. Kazmi’s pictorial embroideries evoke Mughal finesse that created exquisite fabrics, poetically called baft hawa (woven air), aab-e-rawan (running water) and shabnam (morning dew). Maheen Khan has – as can be expected – taken a step further by creating a new label, inviting individual designers to commission work directly from the silk weavers of Banaras, living and working in Karachi.

Textiles have been the backbone of trade in the regions now comprising Pakistan; the Indus Civilisation is believed to be the birthplace of cotton textiles 5,000 years ago. “The Greeks with Alexander the Great wrote of the fine flowered muslins and robes embroidered in gold they had seen in India,” writes Kax Wilson in A History of Textiles. Marco Polo has recorded seeing Indian cloth, which he called the finest and most beautiful in the world. European ambassadors to the Mughal courts were amazed at the fine gold brocades from Banaras and the muslins of Dhaka, 73 yards of which weighed only one pound. Kashmiri shawls became very popular with European ladies. Napoleon’s wife Josephine owned 400 of them. Cashmere (Kashmir) or pashmina shawls were famous for their fineness — they were so delicate that an entire shawl could pass through a ring. All that changed when the British Raj banned all textile production in India with its many Limitation Acts to occupy the market for its own textile mills located in the north of England. The textile industry of India was severely affected and reduced to exporting raw materials.

The exhibition subtly culminates in the works of contemporary designers invited to respond to traditional textiles

Writing in the 19th century, British designer and socialist author William Morris warned that “the Indian or Javanese craftsman may no longer ply his craft leisurely, working a few hours a day, in producing a maze of strange beauty on a piece a cloth: a steam engine is set a-going at Manchester … and the Asiatic worker, if he is not starved to death outright, as plentifully happens, is driven himself into a factory to lower the wages of his Manchester brother worker”. Yet the textiles on display at Mohatta Palace are evidence of the continuity of our rural traditionals that somehow escaped the sway of the Raj.

Historically, the court and courtiers are the first to adapt to a ruler’s lifestyle. Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri, in his book Culture in the Vanity Bag, regards a change of clothes as a desertion and a “transfer of cultural allegiance”. It is further down the social ladder and away from the centre of power that indigenous cultures survive, evolving more naturally within their own needs and contexts.

Rizwan Beyg’s iconic chikankari work on the front panel of an ivory silk georgette kurta | Arif Mahmood, White Star

It must be said that the Raj did not completely succeed in imposing European dress styles in South Asia. This was partly because of a deliberate policy to maintain a distance between the ruler and the ruled. In larger part, however, this was because of the strong roots of South Asian civilisations — which were sophisticated to such a high degree that they could withstand any external shocks.

Women, in particular, have kept traditional clothing alive and maintained their “cultural allegiance”; although in urban centres, where so many cultures meet and there is pressure to homogenise, there tends to be a more eclectic sampling of styles. British anthropologist Emma Tarlo, in her book Clothing Matters, reminds us that clothing – especially in the urban centres of South Asia – is now a matter of choice. A Flower From Every Meadow, both through the traditional textiles and the presentations of contemporary Pakistani fashion designers, invites viewers to consider their choices.

The message of the exhibition is this: the past is still present, still relevant, still a strong inspiration. The importance of this exhibition lies in its invitation to repossess and author our own cultural narrative.

Also read: A new identity by design

This was originally published in the Herald's July 2015 issue. To read more, subscribe to Herald's print edition.