These are photos from an exhibition at an art gallery within the Dakshina Chitra "museum" near Chennai last year.
These are photos from an exhibition at an art gallery within the Dakshina Chitra "museum" near Chennai last year.
These were part of an exhibition by Anitha N. Reddy (an artist), who collaborated with Siddi women quilters on/near the west coast of India (who actually made the quilts).
The Siddis are a community descended from east African people brought to India largely as slaves, over hundreds of years, possibly starting as long ago as the 7th century onwards.
I don't know much about their history, but they have no sort of connection to Africa at all, and consider themselves Indians; but because many of them are black and have typically distinctive African features, they are seen as outsiders, and treated as being at the bottom of the caste barrel (of course). Needless to say, they are very poor, and quilting is something the women started doing to reuse fabric for as long as they could.
@amenonsen There's a traditional quilt style of the Seminole whose origin story is that the US government had agreed to pay the tribe in goods including a certain amount of fabric, and what they delivered was the full promised amount—in strips one inch wide.