Steven Toms, Financing Cotton: British Industrial Growth and Decline, 1780–2000

Abstract

practice, focusing upon Gaudiya Vaishnava imagery. For her, the visual stories of Krishna, the repetition of other motifs, and the rhythm of stitching combined to provide spiritual renewal and affirm her place in the spiritual world, apart from the earthly realm. While the case studies provide the specifics about kantha as the product of women’s voices otherwise silent in the written record, Ghosh throughout the volume pays attention to kantha not simply as a stable aesthetic work of art subject to formal analysis, as did Stella Kramrisch, but rather as a living entity that embodies intimacy across time and generations through realisation, use, maintenance and gifting. Attentive to the evidence of touch, smell, staining, fading and darning, Ghosh engages with kanthas as ‘textile transmissions’ (p. 64) that embody and shape a multi-generational investment. The physical evidence also evokes the many different functions these textiles provided, from warmth to an altar for puja. Finally, the care and attention to their cleaning, drying in the sun and storage in the off-season all speak to their enduring value. Ghosh’s fieldwork not only in Bengal but throughout different Bengali expatriate communities further underscores their continued value in linking generations across space. Although Ghosh’s volume is an important contribution to South Asian material culture, it should also be required reading for textile historians. It follows Linda Baumgarten’s lead in emphasising the importance of maintenance and refashioning, and quilting scholarship’s interest in textiles as important lenses into women’s worlds. Listening to the voices of the embroiderers as found in the physical evidence of kantha, Ghosh has written a powerful volume that documents the creation of memory through the making, use and care of a very specific textile.