Kasuti, Lambani & Toda: Southern Embroidery Treasures

Three South Indian embroideries worked by three very different communities, all counted by hand without a printed pattern, all saved from extinction in the same generation, all now carrying GI tags within seven years of one another.

In the Nilgiri hills, a Toda woman counts threads on the back of a cotton shawl and remembers a pattern her grandmother never wrote down. Two hundred kilometres north, a Banjara woman at Sandur stitches mirrors and cowries onto a bright red skirt. Another hundred kilometres west, a Kasuti embroiderer in Dharwad counts cross-stitches across an Ilkal saree and builds a temple chariot out of pure counted thread. Three communities, three landscapes, three needles. But all three traditions are counted thread work, memorised by the embroiderer, worked without a printed pattern, carrying identity that another woman in the same community can read at a glance. And all three almost disappeared in the same colonial century, and were saved by the same small coalition of royal patrons, obsessive documenters, cooperative workshops, and the women themselves refusing to drop the needle.

A Morning in the Nilgiris

Muthanad Mund, in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, one morning in the early 2000s. Vasamalli Kuttan sits on a low wooden stool outside a barrel-vaulted Toda hut, a piece of thick cream-white handloom cotton stretched across her knees. Her right hand moves a needle loaded with bright red wool in and out of the cloth. Her left hand counts threads. She is not looking at a printed pattern. There is no pattern to look at. She is counting threads on the reverse of the cloth and remembering, by heart, a geometric grid that her mother taught her and that her grandmother taught her mother. The cloth will become a putkuli, the traditional Toda shawl. It will wrap the next baby born in Muthanad Mund. It will wrap that same girl at her wedding. And if the Toda still keep the old funeral, one like it will wrap her one last time on the pyre. Vasamalli is the first Toda woman to finish a doctorate. She also carries the full counted-thread vocabulary of Toda embroidery in her head, without any written notes. The two facts are not separate.

The Toda are a small pastoral tribe of about 1,500 people whose whole religion revolves around sacred buffalo dairies, and whose whole art form is one extraordinary shawl. Two hundred kilometres north of them, in the plateau villages around Sandur in Karnataka, Banjara women are stitching mirrors and cowrie shells onto bright red skirts. Another hundred kilometres west, in the old temple towns of Dharwad, Hubli, and Bijapur, Kasuti embroiderers are counting cross-stitches across Ilkal saree pallus. Three traditions. Three completely different communities. One idea runs through all of them: the cloth is a language, and the stitch is its alphabet.