Giving Form to Memory: Drawn Thread Embroidery as Embodied ‘Re-membering’ of Trauma Narratives
Abstract
The enquiry merges textile craft and feminist discourse and methodologies to probe women’s subjectivities and the erosion of agency resulting from separation, assimilation, and oppression at various levels. Through inherited objects and memories, it considers generational wounds and patriarchal neglect as channels for trauma narratives, and explores concepts of transference and healing through material objects as acts of ‘re-membering’. It examines the significance of drawn thread embroidery work or Taarkashi (as it is known in Pakistan and India) as a tangible link between individuals across cultures, generations, and geographies. The juxtaposition of reflective pieces and needlework enables me to experience therapeutic aspects of repetition, manipulation, and deconstruction of Taarkashi as practiced by my great-grandmother, Amma. Simultaneously, the craft becomes a testimony to limitations as it can only be done on an open-weave fabric, horizontally or vertically. This constraint reminds me of how the freedom and exposure of skilled women needle workers in the Punjab Province are gendered, demarcated, and controlled by society through disciplines of various kinds. As such, this essay also draws a parallel between the personal wound (women in my family) and the collective wound (women embroiderers as a group).
Citation: Naqvi, Sana. “Giving Form to Memory: Drawn Thread Embroidery as Embodied ‘Re-membering’ of Trauma Narratives” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2024, www.thejugaadproject.pub/drawn-thread-narratives [date of access]
Women who deal with ‘patriarchal neglect’1 and estrangement in South Asia also fight to fend off identity loss and marginalisation2. In this article, I describe how I use textile craft, the stories and objects I inherited, and my encounters with women embroiderers in the Punjab Province in Pakistan to disentangle the toxicity of oppressive images and expectations, and probe relationships between internalised emotions and traumas from our childhoods as well as the limits placed by prevailing social hierarchies. The objects handed down to me by my mother, including a drawn thread cloth embroidered by my great-grandmother, Amma, help me in ‘re-membering’3 events and gathering pieces of my identity while examining how power, patriarchy, and inherited trauma shape experiences. These objects, whether a decades-old postcard or a family heirloom, help me re-evaluate the importance of agency and autonomy, prompting a deep exploration of what the body inherits and retains.
Figure 1 Hem-stitched calico place mat with woven wheel corners. 2023. Made and photographed by the author.
The art in drawn thread that I make in dialogue with these inheritances, (fig. 1) helps me probe their emotional and social value while asking how we come to associate ourselves with such objects and give form to a collective memory. What narratives define the multivalent value of these objects both personally and through encounters with embroiderers and associated workers? What encoded messages might these objects hold for the generations to come?
Figure 2 Pillowcase in linen displaying drawn thread work along with uterine curette, trinket box, and syringe case. Photo by author.
Deep and intimate aspects of our personality emerge as we interact with objects, particularly heirlooms. My interest in the history of drawn thread work also known as Taarkashi in Pakistan and India, and its relation to female subjectivity expanded when my mother gave me some of the articles that belonged to Amma, also known as Alice, as keepsakes (fig. 2). These included linen pillowcases displaying drawn thread work in the centre with crocheted borders. The drawn thread technique was brought to India by various groups of Christian nuns and missionaries from the eighteenth century onwards; it 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. Other belongings of Alice, who had medical training, included a steel uterine curette that reminded me of the sharp hooks, wires, and suturing needles that went missing soon after her daughter, my grandmother, passed; a brass trinket box, and a Rekordspritze syringe case (fig. 2) introduced by the Berliner instrument makers Dewitt and Hertz in 1906 from Czechoslovakia.
The Story of Amma (1901-1982), my Great-grandmother
Figure 3 Amma in 1960 in India. She came to Pakistan in 1969. Image courtesy of author.
Born in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India, Amma was named Alice David at birth in 1901 (fig. 3). It is difficult to say if David was an Anglo-Indian, but her mother, Angelica, had travelled from Germany to work for the East India Company.4 When Alice was one and a half years old her mother died of burns in a house fire and she was taken to a foster home by missionary women. She studied auxiliary nursing and midwifery in a missionary school in Allahabad.5 Between 1860 and 1910, missionaries were divided into groups catering to upper and lower castes supporting the observation that conversion to Christianity did not necessarily eliminate caste divisions. 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.6
Amma resigned from her duties as a missionary in her early twenties and later converted to Islam. She was named Kaneez Fatima and she settled in Daryaganj, Delhi during the 1930s. She married and raised her children and grandchildren, including my mother, all while struggling with an amputated leg. She faced many challenges during her married life and was forced to pass up her inheritance by the men in her family; she felt the need to destroy all her documents, passports, and assets that she received from her deceased parents and burnt them all.
The Indian independence struggle from the British and the diverse nationalist activities that women could take part in provided some space for Amma to be agentive. She was actively engaged in community service and acquainted with some influential activists, like Aruna Asif Ali, a freedom fighter who was one of the female protagonists of the Quit India movement and the editor of ‘Inquilab’ (Revolution), the monthly journal of the Congress. During these times women needed shelter and nursing care while hiding from British authorities, care that was provided by people like Amma. Her medical training also came into use during times of upheaval when women faced riots, interreligious violence and political upheaval during the partition of India into India and Pakistan. Many women would come up to Amma’s doorstep with life-threatening cases of their young daughters seeking to avoid illicit abortions and/or death by suicide.7
Figure 4 Amma on a rickshaw in 1940 in India. Image courtesy of author.
Looking straight into the camera, seated on a rickshaw, Amma seems to hold her space with grace and dignity (fig. 4) despite her misaligned posture due to a prosthetic leg. I wonder, how could her autonomy be erased, and later exploited by the men in her family? Through my own drawn thread explorations, I rearranged, interlaced and untangled idiosyncratic strings of narratives that I inherited to give voice and structure to the implicit story of loss that deprived not just my ancestors but many other women, such as the embroiderers I met in Multan and Bahawalpur in the Punjab Province over January, 2024, of their freedom to choose.8
Women Embroiderers in the Punjab Province
In feminist literature, embroidery is seen as a tool of reinforced patriarchal constructs, discipline, and subservience. On the other hand, women have used it as a means of rebellion, resistance and subversion.9 Historically, embroidered textiles have evolved similarly to feminism, losing their identity within the art/craft divide and then struggling to find their place in museums. As Feminist artist Judy Chicago mentions in the interview for her exhibition ‘Herstory’ at the New Museum in New York, “There is a totally unknown, female-centred artistic paradigm that counters the patriarchal paradigm that has pretended to be art history. It is this alternative, female-centred cultural paradigm that I have worked out of for decades.”10
The way Amma made her Taarkashi pieces was similar yet distinct from what I found on the internet and in the local markets. The quality of her work kept me searching for what I had already begun to identify as the ‘authentic’ Taarkashi. I reflected on how Amma learned this craft, and how drawn thread and related techniques flourished only in Uttar Pradesh in India and Punjab in Pakistan. My research grew to include questions about geographies, freedom, mobility, separation, and erasure, and I tried to relate personal narratives with collective histories. Amma was also skilled in making crochet borders and knitting, but the discipline in her needlework was singular reflecting perhaps her training in a missionary school. I began to draw a parallel between the displacement of people I have known and the displacement of craft practiced in a region that suffers from war, forgetting, and the need to ‘re-member’ things.
Amma’s passion for needlework, as embodied in her pillow covers, gave me a way to study not only the history of the craft but also the social aspects that affect women embroiderers in this region. A stitch to survive also requires a socially and economically thriving community, and to get some firsthand knowledge of this I met with several women artisans and development workers across Multan and Bahawalpur.
Figure 5 Begum’s samplers with various motifs. Multan, Pakistan. 2024. Photos by author.
During my research trip from Karachi in the Province of Sindh, Pakistan to Multan and Bahawalpur, both cities in the Punjab Province, I gathered insights from women artisans—highly skilled women with limited resources and information about the craft they practiced and how its value was perceived. While visiting Qasim Bela in Multan in 2024 I met Begum, an experienced embroideress in her late fifties, concerned about losing her vision because of the intricate nature of her work (fig. 5), as she is the sole breadwinner of her house. Begum’s granddaughter learned embroidery from her but preferred working in a nearby ‘parlour’ to be trained as a beautician as it was an easier way to earn money. I showed Amma’s Taarkashi piece to Begum and with the help of an interpreter who translated from Saraiki to Urdu I learned the technical details of Taarkashi. Begum made me a sample of the piece I had just started working on, and in turn, to acknowledge her kind gesture and hospitality I gave her my oval embroidery frame, a shape not available in the area.
The women I met lived in clusters where one house opens to another. They displayed resilience and camaraderie but some were concerned about feeding their children, and how the wages settled by intermediarires (bajis) are insufficient for the labour involved. On our way to Goth Miru near Bahawalpur, Shahzad Malik, who I met through the National Rural Support Programme (NRSP), shared his concern about the consequences of industrialisation in the suburbs. These women have been engaged in this craft for centuries to support their families, but the chances of it being replaced by an industry set-up are high. Further, they remain undervalued and underpaid.
Figure 6 Zainab Bibi embroidering borders on a sampler in Khanqah Sharif, Bahawalpur. 2024. Photo by author.
All the home-based women artisans I met, from Begum in Multan to Zainab Bibi in Bahawalpur added stitches to the same open-weave cloth I carried (fig. 6) while sharing their work, life, food, and much-needed cups of tea in the winter season. I was touched by the pieces these women made for their family members. Those intricate hems and necklines were handled with great care and dedication, and I kept documenting the garments worn by the children and women comparing them with the ones done purely for money. I began to collect samplers (some given to me as gifts and others commissioned) as they are prepared with attention to detail and are generally not for sale. Instead, they are intended as archival pieces, a timeless reference to be passed on to daughters who may take inspiration from them to create their own works of art.
On reflection, the home-bound women I met seemed to be sewing a complex story of exclusion from various kinds of power (social, political, and economic). Over the trip and in subsequent reflections, Taarkashi became a powerful metaphor for the possibility of removal of subservience and oppression—the tangled threads of patriarchy could be drawn, re-ordered, and grouped to honour the resilience and struggle of women artisans in a male-dominated industry. Analysing the notion of autonomy and agency helped me draw parallels between the personal wound (women in my family) and the collective wound (women artisans).
Feminist Theory, Epistemology, and Amma’s Story
bell hooks, in her essay, Understanding Patriarchy, expands on the idea of blind obedience introduced by psychotherapist John Bradshaw as the foundation upon which patriarchy stands and how it shapes the values of a culture.11 These attitudes are ingrained in us from our childhood regardless of whether we are in a male-led or female-led home. I was raised seeing my mother as the head of the family, and I barely witnessed my father's presence in the house. However, as hooks describes, many female-headed households may also endorse and promote patriarchal thinking as they do not have an experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles—instead, they end up idealising patriarchal male roles. Even in my father's absence, I was told to act according to his preferences, injunctions that both operated in the space between what I experienced through the truth of my body and a constricted social environment.
We all resonate on different frequencies depending on how our brains frame events. Our experiences are like cymatics,12 varying constantly based on the wave phenomena of sound and visual presentations. We respond to our environment and store information in our brains depending on the intensity of an event. In his famous book Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French philosopher and phenomenologist probed embodiment, perception, and the lived experience, arguing that perception is not a matter of passive reception of sensory data and is, rather, an active and embodied process. By contrast, Edmund Husserl’s precept regarding phenomenology, “back to things themselves”, denies the coincidental nature of science that brings everything to its object value, keeping experiential knowledge aside.13 Science disregards the role of consciousness and spirit with which we perceive and understand the world. Science is meaningful only if it acknowledges the value of partiality in knowledge through which humans make meaning of their lived experiences.14
In understanding how patriarchy shapes the culture and how we learn patriarchal values in our family of origin,15 I find connections between global and local feminist thought, and experiences from my childhood where bodies are shaped and disciplined from a young age.16 An example of this is seen in how girls’ bodies are altered, how teenage girls are conditioned to stay modest by walking with hunched shoulders to literally make themselves smaller and avoid being stared at, to laugh without making a sound, to not play cricket outside even with their brothers, or avoid cycling to keep their insides intact. The mothers and older women who tell them all this seek to avoid confrontation with the men in the family. The result is another form of dismembering as the girl loses confidence in her body and develops a new relationship with it over time through a tenuous sense of belonging.
In her essay “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” Alison M. Jaggar points out how Western constructs of mind and body prioritise the intellectual over the feeling body. Also, the traditional dualist and cognitivist mind-over-body approach remains intact, and the vital feature of emotion, which provides intentionality and action, is overlooked.17 Laura L. Ellingson’s research focuses on qualitative feminist methodologies and she describes embodied knowledge as “grounded in bodily experience [that] encompasses uncertainty, ambiguity, and messiness in everyday life”. This way of knowing resists the Cartesian mind-body split that underlies Enlightenment philosophy and the scientific method and the glorification of objectivity.18
Scientifically, the retrieval of memory depends on a cue or conditioned stimulus. Using memory as a tool can be useful but it is a complex mechanism by which to understand ‘authenticity’ and the retrieval of episodic memory as ‘remote memory’ or memory from the distant past. Analysing feminist discourse enabled me to expand my vision and understanding of gender-based unequal social relations and helped me move from hegemonic male concepts of memory, being, and knowing embedded in both the private and public spheres such as those in the male-dominated legal and academic system. Gradually eliminating and overcoming these along with a persistent Eurocentric gaze became part of using drawn thread work as an act of resistance.
Looking at my positionality as a South Asian woman and my interest in the historical significance of the role of women in my family, my memory and consciousness cannot be detached from the trauma and violence they experienced in the 1947 partition of India and from constant patriarchal oppression. I could only understand and give words, images, and meanings to these concepts by first collecting fragments like letters, objects, and memories, and later processing and writing about them. To conduct research from a practical and gendered perspective, I used feminist ontological and epistemological approaches but this would be very incomplete without Amma’s story, her memories, and her objects.
Figure 7 (L) Bundle of letters from India 1965-71. (R) Letter from India sent by my mother’s uncle in 1974. Photos by author.
I found a bundle of letters and postcards from 1966 to 1974, wrapped in a linen cloth with borders of hemstitch with block stitch and knot motif, where Amma addressed my grandmother and my mother, expressing grief and resentment (fig. 7) over separation and the uncertainty of ever seeing them again. 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, reminded me of how she visited Pakistan every other month, even when she was married with children. 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.
In India, Amma was unhappy to let her daughter leave for Pakistan in 1965 for a couple of weeks, for she feared she would not return; the border was still passable and was not restricted until the mid-1960s. Her purpose in life was to take care of her daughter’s children but this was taken away abruptly, leaving her empty and feeling a significant loss. Upon arriving in Pakistan, the children faced inattentiveness from their father and struggled to receive acceptable living conditions, education, and support. My aunt was married at the age of 13, and my mother married young as well, perhaps as a way to escape the unbearable conflict and financial constraints.
Suturing/Seaming the Layered Complexities of Matrilineal Bonds – One Stitch at a Time
Although born from a white mother, being an Indian Christian of wheatish complexion, Amma had to succumb to the norms of a Muslim household to be accepted and considered respectable. Her identity of being born to Christian parents remained attached to her, and her literacy in medicine and her exquisite needlework skills remained illegible to the patriarchal order into which she married.
In relation, my embroidery practice became an act of defiance when I carefully decided to unravel a thread from the fabric and follow the line vertically or horizontally. Pulling the threads out, decisively, became a metaphor for letting go of the strings attached to my body. The data I collected in the form of textiles, texts, postcards, and letters became a primary source of reference in translating my thoughts and feelings through stitching, dyeing, and darning. Through these acts, I also found a metaphor for repair and remembrance and an appreciation of the universality of textiles that connects us all through generations. Coming across Amma’s objects reminded me not only of her extraordinary abilities but also the unmet needs of self-sacrificing women who, from my perspective, received little or no acknowledgement of their true value and contributions.
Amma often sang the gospel hymns she remembered from the choir in childhood; these things that were part of her life acquired a very different value when narrated by her descendents’ families. My mother, her granddaughter, was frequently reminded of Amma’s Anglo-Muslim identity19 and how it ‘diluted’ the blood she carries from her father. Traces of marginalisation and discrimination that I have sensed from my maternal side of the family seem based on the racial hybridity that has been carried along.20 Families into which the children married restricted their place as ‘others’ making them believe that fitting into the existing religious and power structure would take generations to come.
This fight with ‘re-membering’ and healing, and deciding which parts of our inheritance to hold and reveal and which parts to hide or discard is also part of the heritage process. Our discussions of craft must include techniques and skills but also go beyond them to include these embodied experiences and feelings that shape the makers and their families. Had I not experienced discrimination and dealt with the restrictive aspects of traditional norms in my life, I would never have been able to decode the narratives of struggle told to me, as the battle with agency and autonomy continues even today. The liberty to exercise my freedom has always been abstract, as a woman in South Asian society who chooses to live by her priorities and preferences stands isolated and frequently abandoned. Choosing and deciding what is best for ourselves is still a fraught act that brings about layered consequences in familial, social, and professional relationships.
Acknowledgement
I am immensely grateful to the artisans and associated specialists who aided me in my research especially Ghulam Abbas Soomro, Irshad Bhai, Amina Ghori, and Begum in Multan, and Shahzad Malik in Bahawalpur. I am also grateful to The Jugaad Project editors for their careful work in helping me shape this article which is based on my MPhil dissertation.
Endnotes
[1] Wolfgang Giegerich. “‘Dreaming the Myth Onwards’ C.G. Jung on Christianity and on Hegel” London: Routledge, 2020.
[2] Rahul Gairola, “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s ‘Fire’,” Comparative Literature 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 308, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4125368.
[3] This term is inspired by Deepti Misri’s essay, The Violence of Memory: Renarrating Partition Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers, which analyses the atrocities of violence of partition and how Hindu Muslim mob fights were the reason for so many honour killings. Baldwin’s narration offers a detailed description of this border community, dwelling on the gendered processes of Sikh subjectification and particularly on how men and women are forbidden to “remember” community through narrative and embodied acts.
[4] Parts of this article were previously published in an essay for the Museum of Material Memory.
[5] The initial establishment of a training school for midwives (known as dais) dates back to 1877, led by Miss Hewlett, an English missionary associated with the Zenana Missionary Society. However, it wasn't until 1900 that the Government of India (GoI) took up the responsibility of training dais.
[6] Hayden J. A. Bellenoit, “Between East and West: Orientalism, Representations of and Engagements with India,” in Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860-1920 (London: Routledge, 2016), 76–77.
[7] Mitra Sharafi, “Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A Medico-Legal History,” Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (2021): 371-428. https://doi.org.10.1017/S0026749X19000234. Technically, with the bill to decriminalise abortion passed in 1933, any woman seeking an abortion for “physical, social or economic reasons” could have one.
[8] Chandra T. Mohanty. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” boundary 2 12, no. 3 (Spring-Autumn 1984): 333-58.
[9] Lilith Haig, “Reaping What They Sewed: Embroidery in Politics, Feminism, and Art” (BA Diss., Union College, 2021).
[10] Zöe Hopkins, “How Judy Chicago Hacked the Patriarchy,” Artsy, October 18, 2023.
[11] bell hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy,” The Anarchist Library, July 2, 2022.
[12] Hans Jenny (1904-1972) was a Swiss physician and natural scientist who coined the term "cymatics" to describe acoustic effects of sound wave phenomena.
[13] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Milton Park: Routledge, 1962.
[14] Ibid, ix, “I am not the outcome or the meeting-point of numerous causal agencies which determine my bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive myself as anything but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological investigation. I cannot shut myself up within the realm of science. All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some world experience without which the symbols of science would be meaningless”.
[15] bell hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy.”
[16] Ibid.
[17] Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology,” Inquiry 32, no. 2 (1989).
[18] Laura L. Ellingson, “Embodied Knowledge,” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, ed. Lisa M. Given (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012), 244-245.
[19] Yaqoob Khan Bangash, “Anglo-Indians and the Punjab Partition: Identity, Politics, and the Creation of Pakistan,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51, no. 1 (2023): 124-155.
[20] Ibid.
