Moons, & much else

B.N. Goswamy

During a visit to a craft bazaar in a remote village, I came across a rather exemplary blanket — jet black in colour, woven from wool of the native sheep. The one unusual feature was a white line which traced its path across the length of the black woollen blanket, thin in dimension, stark in contrast and asymmetric in placement.

When the weaver was asked about this most unusual white line (for the black blanket, coarse and woolly, is a common feature of the shepherd community), his reply was: ‘the white line makes the black more black’.

— Jayshree Poddar

Come to think of it, the seemingly casual encounter cited above, is so telling in its own way, for it sums up so much of what Jayshree Poddar — born in a Marwari family in distant Calcutta; trained at the Jadavpur University and then at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, with a person like Dashrath Patel as her mentor; currently design director at the famed Himatsingka Seide textile studios in Bangalore — is like: curious, ready to ask questions, quick to absorb lessons, willing to learn from just about everyone, sensitive to the core, eager to share what she knows with others. In her own words, she had this “urge to mould things … from an early age”, and for 30 years she has been at it: journeying. What she has produced this year is a remarkable book that records her journeys into the world of art and design and textiles. Many Moons is how she has titled it, recalling that objects in the sky are in constant motion, and nothing remains in the same place forever. “The phases of the moon, the cycle of growth, fading and rebirth, speak of the life of creativity. An ongoing quest is a constant, and each end is also a beginning.” The very first look at the book strikes home, for jet black as the jacket is, it features 15 perfect circles cut out to reveal underneath each of the phases of the moon, from the first to the last, woven with silk and metal threads. Feelingly, Jack Lenor Larsen — that much admired ‘weaver for architects’, and developer of the celebrated Long House Reserve, not far from New York — opens his Foreword to Jayshree’s book with the words: “If this large volume with a cover sprinkled with moon dust is heavy, the writer is light and modest.”

Modestly, but in persuasive whispers as it were, Jayshree has filled the book with unexpected riches: great, sensitively taken photographs, freshness and opulence of design, intensive technical details, even actual samples of textiles. The sections unfold gently: from Black & White and Nature, through Wabi-Sabi and Geometry, to Quintessence and Ashram. We see the Buddha, “Painted, then Woven”; a dried leaf inserted in a pocket made of cloth so sheer that one can see every detail of the network of capillaries; the play of light and shadow in a translucent curtain cloth, inspired by but not imitative of a Warli painting, woven with fine silk and linen; layer upon layer of fine silk cut with a blade in the middle, each example coloured so as to be suggestive of the pancha-mahabhutas, the Five Elements, from prithvi to jala, agni, vayu and then aakaash. The traditions of India, and her rich thought, are never far from the minds of Jayshree and of Dinesh, her brother-in-law who runs the Himatsingka Seide enterprise. And yet every now and then thoughts run in other directions: like those that underlie the aesthetics of Wabi Sabi — a ‘Japanese term that embodies the Zen cosmic view which seeks beauty in imperfection and in impermanence’. Abstract designs emerge from a close and intensely engaged viewing of old walls ‘with the grime of years and blackened with soot from tea kettles’, ‘doors in hues of bright blues and fading ochres, with huge gleaming metal padlocks’; ‘worn-out tables and chairs with the patina of time’: sights that one sees every day in the lanes and bylanes of old cities. In contrast, there are designs that emphasise the order and harmony of geometry. There is a search in her work for the quintessence of all things. ‘How does one depict space on the surface of a fabric?’ she asks herself and then, while answering somewhat hesitantly perhaps, ‘As nothingness, all pervasive, ever present, escaping attention’, sets out to design something that captures it.

Woven into all this, somewhere, is a return to ideas that had moved Jayshree in her early twenties: those that emanated from the lives and thoughts of Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother. When she was entrusted, four short years ago, with developing specific fabrics to be used in the dwellings that the two Masters had once occupied in the Ashram, she kept reminding herself of the Mother’s saying: ‘Beauty is the shortest route to the divine’. This could be translated, or interpreted, she told herself, through the ‘luminosity, lightness and purity’ of flowers. It is flowers, therefore, that bloomed on the textiles she designed for the Ashram. Apart, of course, for the woven-in-silk “supramental bird” inspired by Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

Jayshree’s fascination, and reverence, for the figure of Hanumana — “most profound; most able, most sagacious, most illustrious of the race of the Vanaras”, as the text says — resulted in many images that she kept producing. But it found its most brilliant expression in the form of an installation that she created in the vast expanse, and soaring height, of one of the ‘industrial sheds’ of the studios: something made up of sheets of black cloth in the form of a cube around which a complex mesh of coloured threads of orange, red, vermilion, pink, gold and black was ‘woven’ through and around which was revealed the figure of the deity: negotiating the skies, elegant tail brushing the air, carrying in his hand the mountain with the miracle sanjivani herb. All reflected in a square mirror placed on the floor below. 

The effect must have been stunning: echoing in some manner all that is there in this book of many moons.