Akshara: Craftworks from the northern region of India

The objectives of the Akshara project are: To enable craftspeople to appreciate a new facet of being literate by exploring their own scripts and cultural stories through their traditional craft skills. To use calligraphy in design to encourage non-literates to embrace literacy and explore the idea of crafting the written word. To develop a series of artistic works, in a variety of materials, embellished with regional scripts, through a collaborative process between experienced designers/guides and expert craftspersons. To demonstrate how the marvels of a computer and the principles of graphic design can combine with indigenous alphabets to highlight their many dimensions. To promote appreciation and interest in the diverse regional scripts of India.

The artists would showcase their art at a series of exhibitions, developing new craftworks for different audiences as they progress. The Akshara exhibitions will seek to inspire even as they instruct, inform and entertain.

Shabir Ali Beigh is a talented embroiderer in the little known kani sozni tradition of Kashmir.

The thick encrusted embroidery of a typical kani sozni decorates two ends of a stole in cream-coloured pashmina wool. Hidden from initial view is a message meandering through the field of flowers. It says talim aadmi ko insaan banata hai, meaning “education makes a man human".

Shabir’s skill with the pen did not match up to that of his needle. However, he agreed to learn to write and embroider some of the names of over 100 different motifs on a cream-coloured pashmina shawl. He added the local names by subtly surrounding the motifs with them to look like part of the design. His brother Ghulam Mohammad ably assisted him in his work.

Artist Sneh Gangal has chosen the Kangra school of painting to fill the spaces within Geet Govind, the famed poem of love describing and dedicated to the deity Krishna written in Devanagari calligraphy.

Inside the paisley are words of 17th century Mughal emperor Jahangir who is famously said to have exclaimed gar firdaus / ruhe zamin ast / hamin asto / hamin asto hamin sat on seeing the beauty of Kashmir. It means, “If ever there was a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.”

For many months Majid and Altaf drew designs on paper, worked out the talim (instruction sheet) to weave the shawl on the kani loom, and came up with single and multi-coloured experiments in calligraphy and calligrams (called as such when letters are artistically placed within a shape, such as of a horse, bird, or deer).

The sentence on the opposite side of the four-sided lamp is agar bheetri batti jale to sare jagat ko prakash deti hai, meaning “If the inner light shines, the entire world is illuminated.”

Ram Soni, Sanjhi artist, cuts the words and images with a pair of specially designed scissors using handmade paper.

Naresh Kumar, a bookbinder and stationery-maker, does all his work by hand. He has bound tabletop accessories in printed cloth with motifs of Kannada letters decoratively arranged within a leaf shape. Knowledge has always been ranked highly in Indian culture with the teacher or sage taking precedence over the king. In rural areas those who cannot read look forward to sharing the news of a daily newspaper at a group reading and the literate often pass a newspaper around from one to the other so that as many as possible are well-informed about important events.

It was a fascinating challenge for them to weave the talim ‘script’ as a pattern since the instruction sheet itself became the design. They had to prepare a talim of a talim.

Another challenge was in trying to create a shawl in the colours of the pigeons that sat on the windowsill outside the room in which they kept the loom. Shawkat tried to capture an image of a pigeon on his mobile phone but the pigeons kept flying away. He was told there were many pigeons at the Maqdoom Sahib mosque situated near the Kohimaran Fort at Hariparbat in Srinagar. There, the caretaker told him that among the large flock of pigeons one had just died after a scuffle with another pigeon. Shawkat gently carried the dead pigeon in a piece of cloth to the dye-master and asked him to dye the yarn for his shawl in its colours. The dye-master examined the pigeon carefully. He then dyed the yarn in a range of grays perfectly replicating the pigeon’s body, with an added salmon-pink shade – the colour of a pigeon’s feet. Embroidery in shades of gray and salmon-pink has been added to the “talim” kani border.

Abdul Rashid Baba, a young coppersmith of Srinagar, reproduces an antique box with calligraphy around the upper edge of its base. In past times such boxes would have been used to store important family documents.

The words are of a love poem in which the lover asks when he will see his loved one who is more important to him than life, and asks his god to fulfill all his desires by allowing him just a glimpse of her: dekhoonga kab use / jo mujhe zindagi se bhi badkar hain / yeh khuda mere dil ke saare armaan poore honge / agar ek nazar use dekhoon.

Copper vessels are lined with an alloy that prevents harm from acidic foodstuffs. They are usually decorated with motifs of flowers, trellises and chinar leaves.

Manzoor chose a prayer to Allah, embossing the words ya khuda mujh par bhi karam farma / uth kar bazm-e-jahan ka aur hai andaaz hai / mashrek was maghrib mein tera hi daur ka aagaaz hain. The supplicant asks his god to direct his pity towards him and give him the care and attention he has given people everywhere.

He did a series of images with verses about women and their suffering when they were subjected to injustice in matrimony. In spite of their visual beauty and his enthusiasm, they did not seem suitable for floor coverings.

He created a design that was more mystical, though still edgy and abstract in thought. It could be interpreted in many ways. The carpet’s elegant calligraphy says bechain shab ve sehr, meaning “restless morning and evening”.

He researched words, songs, poems, phrases, and finally inspired his cousin Shaad Abasi to compose a poem about Kabir for this experiment. Abasi’s poem emerged on the end pieces of stoles woven in Urdu in silk. It says kaaf se kargha bane / kaaf se bane kapaas / kaaf se kapda bane / kapde bane libaas / kaaf se karigar bane / kaaf se bane Kabir.

“Kaaf” is the Urdu letter for the consonant “k”. The Abasi poem plays on this aspect. The word for loom (kargha), cotton (kapaas), cloth (kappa) which turns into clothing, craftsperson (karigar) and Kabir (the poet) all begin with the same letter and are deeply interconnected in this woven work. The many shades of life are reflected in the cream, gold and black of the stoles woven by Shahid Junaid. The white and black lines conjure up the colours on a notebook in which words have been written.

The Devanagari script laid out in an aesthetic manner across the length of the cream silk stoles has two lines of Kabir’s most well-known poem das Kabir jatanse odhi, jyon ke tyon dhar dini. The poem jhini re jhini chadariya expresses life as experienced by the human body with the cloth as a metaphor of life. In these lines Kabir says he wore the shawl without soiling it.