A Story in A Sar Pallu Phulkari Textile

Before we had cartoon TV serials, we had cartoon comics. Like Tarzan and Phantom and Dennis and Amar Chitra Katha. But before that, we had textiles!

And stories were written in textiles!

Am not sure what’s going on  in these scenes – but that doesn’t stop us from conjecturing!

The scene of the woman with two men – one with what looks like a quiver full of arrows – could this be a depiction of Sita, Ram and Laxman? What are the additional two hands on the woman? What is the man on the right carrying? The woman’s skirt is shown as transparent in such an ingenuous way!

This scene with a man leading a caravan of camels… And a herder with kids atop goats or sheep In Punjab??

The game of dice …. in which one can lose or win kingdoms and wives!

A seller with a portable weighing scale and a basket full of berries maybe? And the seller on the right has a sound-making toy  – both trying to get the attention of the man in the center with the shopping basket?

Two leopards sparring?

What a fabulous way to seed the imagination!  In this case in the absence of the story teller – these are all disjointed scenes – but maybe if I were from that culture, I might have heard the stories verbally and might have understood the event-flow and the ethos of everything that the creator of the phulkari tried to put in.

Maybe this was a documentation of memories?

Or maybe it is all just random scenes without any connection to each other. We shall never know!

More pictures of ATI-818 may be seen here!

jm

Aug 2016