Mwsing Talam

Textile A: Cotton thread woven on the kontong or back loom.

Textile B: Synthetic threads woven on taat haal (throw loom with fly shuttle slay).

Textile C: Synthetic threads woven on the kontong or back loom.

Parismita Singh's work here presents itself as three textiles, with a written text accompanying these.Three artist weavers from the Koch Rabha tribe of Assam, Apila Rabha, Meena Koch and Utpola Koch have contributed in making these, woven in cotton and synthetic yarn. The ooms used are the kontong or back strap loom and the taat haal. The particular taat haal used here is the throw shuttle loom, traditionally used in Assam, fitted with a fly shuttle slay. 

Both an artist and writer, Parasmita Singh offers here a dialogue between the textiles made by women weavers of the Koch Rabha tribe of Assam, and a text through which she observes and responds to their traditional roles in the community. The woven cloths refer to identity-based political movements of the Sixties and Seventies, and their recently renewed significance as non-verbal tools to communicate resistance in the Kocha Rabha area. The complementary text points to the resilience of an art form that survives as an everyday domestic activity, holding out against a constellation of factors that would have otherwise lead to its demise. In this, women's lives and their personal memories associated with cloth and folklore become a backdrop for traditional hand weaving.

These hand-printed panels draw upon the depiction of the nine planetary deities, Navagraha, as supplementary images in India's temple and ritual cloths. Alluding to the complex and varying influences attributed to the planets in Indian thought, the panels also suggest subtle animation and lucidity of form once seen in Indian pattern-making. The design is inspired by a stock image from modern astro-photography: a time-lapse exposure of the night sky, in which astral bodies leave a delicate trace of concentric rings. The image yields, here, a celestial landscape of spheres that map the subtle passage of the stars across heavens. From a distance, the design appears to be composed of a single sphere repeated nine times across the surface. When viewed closely, however, each sphere reveals itself to be different from the others, recalling a key artistic aspect of India's historic patterned textiles. These panels are unique for their monolithic, non-repetitive design, and for their complex manipulation of large printing screens in multiple colours.