Brigitte Singh
PRINTRESS of the MUGHAL GARDEN Brigitte Singh first came to Sanganer, Jaipur’s hand-blockprinting centre, as a student of miniatures three decades ago. Today, the visual almanac of her work gives us a truly alternate way to read medieval and modern civilisational encounters—through the evolution and transmission of motifs and craft techniques over centuries. Brigitte Singh’s exquisite work with blockprints is a form of re-enacted design history, rendered in visual rather than textual terms. Uncovering and reaching down to the purer forms, to the composite aesthetic of the 18th century, it offers a singular source of access to a seminal epoch in design. This volume illustrates how Singh has approached her craft with an archaeological devotion, peeling off dusty layers from the long-obscured story of blockprinting in the subcontinent. Her work yields a truly Indian aesthetic, fully formed and yet open to influences, full of grand narratives but so dense with detail and meaning that in every telling, something new and essential is revealed both to the raconteur and the audience. This book has been enhanced with five augmented reality videos, each linked to a photograph marked with the
symbol. These videos—available on the
BooksPlus mobile app—document the block carving process; the printing workshop; Brigitte Singh narrating the story of Jaipur print; the stitching process; and Brigitte Singh speaking about her creative journey. To play the videos, please follow the instructions given on the copyright page. With 214 colour photographs
Front cover: The Jaipur print Back cover: Brigitte Singh in her studio
Brigitte Singh
PRINTRESS of the MUGHAL GARDEN
Brigitte Singh
PRINTRESS of the MUGHAL GARDEN
Edited by Bishwadeep Moitra
Mapin Publishing
First published in India in 2018 by Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 706 Kaivanna Panchvati, Ellisbridge Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: +91 79 40 228228 • F: +91 79 40 228201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com | www.mapinpub.com International Distribution Worldwide Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14-17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD T: +44 (0)20 7323 5004 • F: +44 (0)20 7323 0271 E: sales@prestel-uk.co.uk North America Antique Collectors’ Club T: +1 800 252 5231 • F: +1 413 529 0862 E: sales@antiquecc.com • www.accdistribution.com/us South Asia Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd Text © respective authors Illustrations and Photographs © Bishwadeep Moitra except those noted below: National Museum, New Delhi: p. 225 Victoria and Albert Museum, London: pp. 245–250 The Museum of Printing, Mulhouse: pp. 253, 254–255, 256–257 Aleta Bartel: pp. 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 Videos by and © Bishwadeep Moitra All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of Bishwadeep Moitra, Laila Tyabji, Jasleen Dhamija, Sheela Reddy, Rosemary Crill, Michel Biehn, Aleta Bartel, Jacqueline Jacque, Chandramani Singh, Sunil Menon and Pritha Sen to be identified as authors of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-93-85360-24-4 Copyediting: Ateendriya Gupta/Mapin Editorial Editorial Management: Neha Manke/Mapin Editorial Design: Bishwadeep Moitra and Mapin Design Studio Perspective sketches: Margot Heulen-Moreau Production: Gopal Limbad/Mapin Design Studio
This book has been enhanced with five augmented reality videos, each linked to a photograph. These are marked with a symbol in the top corner. The videos document the block carving process (p. 51); the printing workshop (p. 55); Brigitte Singh narrating the story of Jaipur print (p. 107); the stitching process (p. 178, top); and Brigitte Singh speaking about her creative journey (p. 259). To watch the linked videos, download the free app from Play Store for Android or App Store for iOS. Open the app and point your mobile phone or tablet at the photograph in the following pages and the videos will begin to play automatically.
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“
...but for me the artist simply means one who can transform ordinary life into a beautiful creation with his craft. But I did not mean creation strictly applied only to the Arts; I meant creation in life, the creation of a child, a garden, a house, a dress. I was referring to creativity in all its aspects. Not only the actual products of art, but the faculty for healing, consoling, raising the level of life, transforming it by our own efforts. I was talking about the creative will. —Anais Nin
”
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The Printress of the Mughal Garden
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Contents 14 Foreword Alexandre Ziegler 16 Brigitte Singh: Master Craftswoman Laila Tyabji
18 In the Garden of Prints Sheela Reddy
31 Design Sans Frontiers Sunil Menon
42 44 48 54
Printress Colour Blocks Motifs and Prints
54 Cyress 62 Pavot 69 The Grey Iris 70 Tara Poppy 78 Posht Rose Poppy 88 Shah Jahan Poppy 94 Golconda Poppy 102 Jaipur 126 Hibiscus 140 Jal Mahal
148 Tulip Provencale 154 Neem 160 Mehrab 166 Daffodils 182 Lotus 190 Mangal Tulsi 194 Patchwork 200 Moghul Rose 206 Hiran and Friends
224
Workshop Block Printing and Dyeing on Cotton in India
235
Sanganer: Floral Kingdom
245
Early Indian Printed Textiles: Inspirations for Brigitte Singh
251
Mulhouse: An Alsatian Detour
258
Thousand Steps to Enchantment
263
Being French, Becoming Indian
270
Acknowledgements
214
Jasleen Dhamija
Chandramani Singh
Rosemary Crill
Jacqueline JacquĂŠ Michel Biehn Aleta Bartel
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Foreword Alexandre Ziegler
IT was with great wonder that I discovered the work of Brigitte Singh, a French artiste who has for over the last 30 years dedicated her life to Indian textile. The passion that Brigitte Singh nurtures for this art dates back to her first journey to India in the late eighties, when she came to study Indian miniatures and was enamoured by the resemblance of the 17th-century cloth from Provence to the Mughal cloth, made popular by traders who travelled the Spice Route. Brigitte Singh’s art is an act of true humanism in that it emanates from a sincere study of history and traditional techniques, with the noble intent to preserve the living heritage of textile art. Art is grandiose, even if the artist is humble. This art derives from the roots of the Mughal dynasty, reusing its motifs into which the creator breathes new life, and is found in every gesture employed, from the printing seals to the colourful cloths printed with great care and left on the rooftops to dry. Since the inception of her workshop in Amber, Rajasthan, in 1984, Brigitte Singh has been continuously exploring the richness of textile art, surrounded by Indian artisans, guided by a great sense of delicacy and respect for traditional knowhow, which is at the heart of her approach: an approach that is ecofriendly, placing great importance on recycling the water used in producing the colours for her textiles. This book traces the extraordinary journey of this internationally acclaimed creator, and throws light on her great contribution to the History of Art. I offer my congratulations and wishes to the author of the book, M. Bishwadeep Moitra, as well as the publisher Mr Bipin Shah, both of whom are driven by a passion for Indian culture and its place in the world. Indeed, Brigitte Singh is a remarkable source of inspiration, and it is wonderful to witness, through her as through many others, the exquisite fabric of France–India relations weaving itself.
The writer is the Ambassador of France to India.
Brigitte Singh Master Craftswoman Laila Tyabji WHEN I first met Brigitte Singh, she was a comparatively new bride in India and still a miniaturist, presenting the work she had done with Rajasthani painters at the house of a mutual friend in the British High Commission. Behind her diffident, charming, soft-voiced exterior, one could already sense what made her and her work so distinctive: uncompromising perfectionism; a feeling for colour, line and form; a burning passion for what she does; a respect for the craftspeople with whom she works. This was no dilettante expat “passing time” in picturesque India. Bishwadeep Moitra’s Brigitte Singh: The Printress of the Mughal Garden is a visual biography of Brigitte and her work. Expectedly, it’s a joy to look at. Leafing through the sensitively shot, beautiful images of wondrous floral jaals and butis and stunning but subtly combined pinks, aquas and olive greens, set in Brigitte’s own home and workplace, is a sensory explosion. One almost worries that her work will be seized upon to be pilfered by all those countless wannabe Brigitte printers and designers who have made her “the most faked textile artist” in the world. This would be sad, because there is so much to this book beyond the illustrations. Sensitive, insightful essays by Indian and international friends, museologists, textile designers and scholars, such
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as Jasleen Dhamija, Rosemary Crill, Aleta Bartel, Michel Beihn, Jacqueline Jacques, Chandramani Singh and Sheela Reddy, illuminating different aspects of Brigitte’s work and life, have been counterposed with passages where Brigitte herself talks about her work. The latter are intensely rewarding. They are the key to her achievement. Brigitte’s own voice emerging from these pages is an inspiration for those who worry that Indian craft today is so often a derivative, rather tacky, pale imitation of what went before. They explain why Brigitte’s work, so copied, is still so unmistakable and so sought after. The working and reworking of a design until it flows and sings, unbroken by the block, the interplay of colours, with sometimes as many as 13 blocks in a single design. The travel and research, with inspiration coming from old scraps of textile or the edge of a patka in a Mughal miniature. The depth and humility with which she sees herself as part of a continuing stream of craftspeople and design tradition—improving, developing, taking further but not crudely superimposing alien elements. One of my favourite passages is where she describes this process, and how she sees her own role: “But when I find a design I like to make it mine by drawing it with brushes and adding to it. I enjoy that very much. I think if I had been in a miniature-painting
studio with Shah Jahan, I would have been busy with beautiful crafted borders. I would never have been a master. I actually see myself as a cook with many ingredients… I have never seen myself as a designer; I am but a working woman to whom life happens as it does with most of us. There are days when I am more inspired and days when I struggle, many days when I don’t design and introduce new products. I really try to do my work as well as I can. My friend Judy Frater once said that you can be a beautiful calligraphist but that doesn’t make you a good writer. So if you are good at what you are doing, keep it there rather than give it grand names.” Central to her work is this view of herself as a skilled technician and professional, part of an ongoing cultural tradition, rather than a proprietary “designer”, someone taking as many pains in the exact transferring of the design to the block, tipai, as in its initial conception. Something all of us who work with living craft traditions and craftspeople should absorb. And this is why, even when she develops (or in her own words, “fakes”) a new floral buta such as her daffodil, it is absolutely in harmony with her trademark Golconda poppy dating back several hundred years. Conversely, her interpretation of that Golconda poppy is as fresh
and vibrant as if it were minted today. Her magpie eye for detail and an eclectic ability to integrate this seamlessly into her pieces is best shown in the kangura-peaked edging of her sari pallus, the jaali seams and the delightful “moon pockets” on her waistcoats and angarkhas. Brigitte Singh’s journey from a Parisian art student to an internationally acclaimed textile virtuoso has not come easily. Her marriage into an aristocratic Rajput family and an entirely different culture, her struggles to establish quality and work ethics in a declining craft tradition, the logistic and physical hurdles of setting up a business in Rajasthan as a single foreign woman, her refusal to accept the “chalta hai, unnees-bees ka farak toh hoga” attitudes that had become the norm in Indian craft practice, and the rivalry and resentment of her competitors could have discouraged a lesser person. Sustained by her inner vision, a love for India and her craft, and a refusal to settle for anything less than the best, Brigitte Singh has emerged triumphant and unique. Still understated and relatively unsung, at least in India, her work is the pinnacle of Indian handcraft, showing us what can be achieved. Like the cypress that is one of her signature motifs, each Brigitte Singh piece soars: delicate, exquisite, unmatchable and reaching for the sky.
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In the Garden of Prints Sheela Reddy Your garden is ravishing—I don’t want to leave! …I love how it is block painted in the style of the masterful block printress.” * BEGIN with the Buddha. In ancient Gandhara, he was endowed with a curling tache and sinewy Graecian proportions by those unknown Yavana sculptors. Span a couple of thousand years, right down to the 19thcentury colonial memsahibs woven into the ethnic landscape, depicted on Shekhawati haveli murals. And in between, pollen from the West that wafted right into the teeming, formative matrix from which Mughal images arose. These speak of a fact not widely recognized but valid intermittently through history, a fact that perhaps deserves to be whispered: Europe has been a silent presence in Indian visual art. As a young Paris art student at the close of the seventies, a bit of a misfit amid all that radical chic, Brigitte Baudin could not have imagined that life would find a place for her on that shaded portion of the fabric where circles overlap. Yet, in retrospect, it was natural. The leftist intellectual environment of her Paris art school, the ENSAD, perhaps had little space for the old-world sense
of balance, harmony and proportion that moved her. Brigitte dropped out without finishing her graduation. She had undoubted skill with her brush and a sharp eye for colour but did not know as yet what to do with her talent. The only daughter, among three sons, of an engineer father and a homemaker mother who was a fine hand at stitch work, Brigitte’s one aspiration was to create something beautiful with her hands. Quietly, not on a grand canvas. The pull of Eastern miniature painting, therefore, was logical. She was in need of a teacher who could impart its techniques and mastery of detail to her, who was in touch with the humbler aspects of the craft, a master of the brush who could also ground the pigments by hand. At first, it seemed impossible. Not because there was no such master alive but because the two centres of miniature art in the world she had dreamt of going to were both inaccessible in the early eighties. One was Isfahan, in Iran, and the other Herat, in Afghanistan; one had just been taken over by Ayatollah Khomeini and the other had plunged into war post the Soviet invasion. However, as chance would have it, she met a friend recently returned from India; he had heard of a miniature tradition there! For Brigitte, that was enough
*Vivian M. Russell, professional garden photographer, in a letter left behind for Brigitte Singh
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ENDURING RELATIONSHIP: Poppy remains Brigitte's signature print
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to get started. A foreknowledge that the journey would be one of fits and starts and full of unexpected twists, as all journeys should be, may still not have deterred her in that youthful quest of adventure. But without it, she had plenty to put down to experience. Within days, she got in touch with the Indian embassy in Paris and shortly after, found herself a two-year scholarship to learn under a master in Jaipur. Within a year, she was on a plane bound for India. She arrived in Delhi with a trunk full of art equipment and not much else, except the naïve optimism of an untravelled 25-year-old from France. What little cash she carried was thrust on her at the last minute by her mother, who had come to see her off; Brigitte was that certain of being received by someone in authority who would hand over her scholarship money and send her safely on her way to Jaipur to start her new life. No one was waiting for her at the airport. The future was in hiding. She finally took a taxi and got to the French embassy on her own. Even there, Brigitte found no one who could tell her what to do. Only a cultural attaché who, on hearing she had come to study Indian art, duly sought her opinion on a painting he had just bought. Eventually redirected to the office of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, she was yet to encounter the deeper end of the nightmare. At the best of times, to find your way through the maze of Indian cultural bureaucracy is not easy for anyone, let alone a foreigner, just off a long flight, without even a glass of water to drink. After being passed around from officer to uncomprehending officer, holding on stoically to her composure, Brigitte finally lost it. That’s when the faceless bureaucracy sprang to life. Her scholarship money materialized swiftly and miraculously, and she was offered an escort to organize her bus journey to Jaipur. What remained of that first day in India passed in euphoria,
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so great was her relief at having survived the toughest challenge of her life so far. She had also taken the precaution of getting in touch with her future teacher in Jaipur. The heroism lent a special aura to that first evening in a strange city: a small hotel near the New Delhi railway station, the dim lights, old Hindi film songs playing in the background, eating her first Indian meal, alone, reading a book on Indian art. She had survived her first day; how much worse could it get? But of course there was more to come. At Jaipur, 1,000 km away from home, she got off at the wrong bus stand. That did not faze her, taken in as she was by all the sights and crowds, but she was soon hopelessly lost. After riding around for what seemed like hours in an autorickshaw, with only an address scribbled on a piece of paper and no language to make herself understood, she found herself before a locked door, with servants sleeping by it, instead of the art academy she was expecting to find. By this time, her practical sense had taken over and it told her—to the autorickshaw driver’s alarm—to seek help at the local police station. At least they would know how to get her to her teacher. When she finally reached the state-run Lalit Kala Akademi, unharmed, there was no teacher waiting for her. The man she had been in touch with, who had claimed to be a master miniaturist and Akademi secretary, was missing. Another man, with dyed black hair and chewing a betel leaf, was in his place. He assured her, calmly, that her would-be guru, Sumahendra, had retired; he was the new secretary. This was not quite a fine arts school, Brigitte realized at this point. Finally, Sumahendra was summoned to clear up the confusion, which, it seemed to her, was entirely in her own mind. He arrived with a broad smile, not at all discomposed by what his economy with facts had wrought. Exhausted, she asked about the
accommodation he was supposed to have arranged. A long walk through campus ended at the women’s hostel, where there was, miraculously, a helpful official and a room booked for her! At last, things seemed to have settled down. Sumahendra even took her home and introduced her to his wife. A cup of masala chai later, in her relief and gratitude, Brigitte pulled out the gift she had brought for him. An expensive paintbrush, the highest tribute she could pay her teacher. One look at his face was enough to establish its real worth; to this day, Brigitte laughs when she recalls her naivete in producing a gift worth less than Rs 100 in India and the expression on his face as she offered it with such pride as if it was made of gold. The next morning brought another jolt, this one far less amusing. At Sumahendra’s studio, the first thing he made her do was to start tracing a painting from a book. She realized at the end of a few days that his idea of teaching art was essentially to teach how to make copies. She simply had to look for another teacher. The search was harder than she had imagined. There was of course no dearth of miniaturists in Jaipur; nearly everyone she met knew of one they thought would fit her standards. But all of them turned out to be skilled copyists, making ersatz versions of authentic ancient miniatures and prints to feed the local market. After six futile months, Brigitte gave up. But she was by no means dispirited or ready to go home. There was so much to do and learn in this city she had arrived at by default. She had by now shifted out of the women’s hostel, finding its atmosphere unbearably stifling, and moved to a tiny terrace apartment: a barsati. Using a bicycle to get around, she managed to get by on her less-than-modest scholarship. She knew, for her own growth, she might have to move soon, to Japan or maybe Australia. But for the moment, she lingered on, content to be just drawing by herself and making new friends. Then, serendipitously, destiny took a turn. Through Cookie, a friend who went to a yoga retreat, Brigitte found the teacher she had stopped looking for. Their lives would probably never have crossed but for the fact that he used to visit the ashram because of his diabetes. Bannu Sharma or Bannuji, as he was known, belonged to an old family of miniature painters. He and his wife would stay overnight at the ashram, leaving in
the morning for his home in the old city and returning in the evening. Brigitte’s friend had a room next to his and insisted that she come and meet this renowned miniaturist. Brigitte was sceptical but agreed to go. At first, she took him for nothing more than a nice man. Soon, however, she discovered his old lineage, and the extraordinary technical skill he had with a brush; he did originals as well as restorations of old paintings for art
GURU DAKSHINA: A portrait of Baanu ji by Brigitte
dealers. Above all, he had a refined mind, an aesthetic that had nothing western about it. She jumped at his offer to come and work with him in his ancestral haveli in the old city. The haveli was like him, small but proud of its ancestry. No English furniture at all, just white sheets spread over mattresses and piles and piles of books everywhere. Brigitte spent days with him, watching him as he worked, absorbing every detail, admiring his refinement, the way he arranged his pigments on an enamelled tray and put fresh rose petals in the water, in which he used to dip his brush. She had found a dream teacher. As if this was not bliss enough, or reason enough, to stay on in Jaipur, she then met someone who bound her to the city forever. It was her future husband Surya Vijay Singh of Nawalgarh, known to everyone as Sunny, whose father Kumar Sangram Singh was a Rajput aristocrat and one of the world’s best-known collector
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BRIGITTE IS SINGH: Marriage with Surya Vijay Singh of Nawalgarh, Sunny to friends, binds Brigitte to Jaipur.
of Rajasthani miniatures. Besides his collection of over 1,500 paintings, he also had a studio that he ran like a traditional atelier. Full of skilled painters making meticulous copies of works in his collection, not fakes but a sort of authentic recreation, with pigments ground by hand. Sunny too came into her life through her new friends. During her stay in Jaipur, she had met two Swiss girls trying to learn music from Manmohan Bhatt, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s father. Out of curiosity, she joined them for a while, though she enjoyed the conversations with the elderly musician much more than the singing. Once when Sunny was coming to visit them, they invited her to meet him, knowing their shared interest in miniatures. This was to inaugurate a new, more vital phase. Brigitte began frequenting his studio, spending time there when not with Bannuji. To her, the studio was paradise, surrounded by painters, some busy with their brushwork, others grinding pigments, as she too honed her craft: all this in the constant company of Sunny and his father, two of Rajasthan’s most cultivated art connoisseurs. Kumar Sangram Singh was extremely generous, showing his collection and sharing his knowledge with students, scholars and amateurs alike. Within a year, she was married to Sunny, helping father and son run their studio and with their exhibitions. At the studio, she worked closely with supervisor
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J.C. Mahindra, with whom a long and exceptional association lay ahead. This is where the dice rolled again, this time decisively. A visit to Paris loomed; Sunny had to be introduced to her parents and larger family, and Brigitte was naturally keen to take a few gifts. To find something affordable in Jaipur was not hard. But for someone with her instincts, planning the gifts became a full-fledged creative project. She decided to take home custom-made scarves, hand-printed the traditional way. This meant a special trip to Sanganer, 13 km from Jaipur, with a friend, Sheila Rana, an expert on block prints, who had been put in charge of designing textiles for the prestigious India exhibition to be held in London later that year. She had also hosted Brigitte and Sunny’s marriage, her husband Bharat Sinh Limdi a dear friend of Sunny’s. Once inside the printer’s shop, Brigitte was transfixed by two cracked frames hanging on the wall; they held swatches of prints from the 18th century. She at once determined to have that very print; nothing else would do. Luckily for her, the patriarch of the family was manning the shop that day, not one of his sons, who would certainly have tried to dissuade her, if not refuse outright to make a design that delicate. No one made wooden blocks any longer for designs that fine; it was simply not worth the labour involved, even if one had the skills. But this man belonged to the old school and took her up on the request. The result was all she expected it to be. The very first people she gave one of the scarves to— Bob Alderman, one of the few witnesses at her wedding with Sunny, and Mark Zebrowski in England, both experienced collectors who knew their Indian textiles— were stunned by the quality. A new print and yet an almost exact recreation of the medieval. The scarf was passed around to be admired and praised. Before she left England for France, she had received a business proposal that was hard to refuse. The premier furnishing house of Colefax and Fowler wanted her to print more and send the printed scarves to them as yardage.
This was an ideal project for her. Besides affording her a line of business entirely her own, it gave her a new creative avenue. Only gradually did it dawn on her that she had found her real calling. For years, she had been agonizing; she had the skills, but something was amiss. Being a mainstream artist of the modern sort called for the making of big statements, which she dreaded. In fabric, she found both refuge and liberation, diving into the archives, encountering images from another time and most joyfully recreating them. This called for a high degree of fidelity but afforded a whole world of freedom within that. Like a virtuoso violinist bringing a lot of their self into the bound text of notated Renaissance music. Unnoticed, within this circumscribed space, she could play around as she liked, expanding her palette of skills. There was a time when she used to be terrified of using colours, preferring just to draw. Now, her inhibitions vanished, and her sure eye for colour became her strength. She still used her brush to draw— it was too precious a tool to give up—but she now dipped her brush in ink and not paint. She was prolific as she had never been before, drawing inspiration from anything and everything around her—Mughal miniatures, vintage prints, books, architectural motifs and even, on one occasion, a 19th-century photograph on a calendar. As her confidence grew, she found she could take anything and turn it around to produce a masterpiece of the most exquisite precision. Her true vocation emerged like a print on blank canvas. After the first year or two, when that first flush of exhilaration, experimentation and free play of talent had been given full reign, she settled down to find her own groove, a balance between being loyal to the vintage aesthetic and bringing her own refinement to it. Her inspiration came mostly from Mughal-era miniatures and prints. Brigitte soon understood why. With
her academic interest growing apace, she had learnt that at a time when Mughal art was evolving, part of its formative genes were the many engravings and etchings that came to India from the West. Mughal artists had been influenced by the flora and fauna, the types and the style of European rendition, and this inevitably seeped into the whole ecology of art, right down to weaving and printing. (And hence, the very identifiable flowers in so many crafts, including block prints.) Her exactitude soon attracted a small but select clientele who enabled her to go on creating in the slow, painstaking way she had adopted to master this intricate, arduous craft. Her new vocation may have come to her by accident rather than conscious design, but in retrospect, it is hard to see her determining any other identity for herself. Everything about her tastes, inclinations and influences dictated that she work with the old rather than the contemporary. That she should choose the difficult end of the printing craft, going for those intricate, richly detailed patterns reserved, even in the olden days, only for those with pockets deep enough to afford them, was but natural for someone of her discernment. There was, to begin with, her aversion to shortcuts and the methods commonly used by printers to flood the market with cheap, shoddy products. She aspired to the standards of earlier generations of artisans, who found sublimation in their exacting craft. On that first trip to England, she was already consumed by a desire to try and recreate the vintage textile prints she saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Invited with Sunny by Robert Skelton, the curator of the museum’s India collection and an old friend of Sunny’s father, she marvelled at what she saw: the perfection and skill of these craftsmen from so many centuries ago. She simply had to try and reproduce those standards of craftsmanship with whatever tools were available now,
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making use of a tradition that was fading but still miraculously unbroken. A singular source of inspiration also came along. Her father-in-law gave her an antique textile piece, a poppy print that he knew would delight her. Deeply stirred by the sheer artistry evident in the printing, she immediately set off trying to figure out a technique to reproduce it. For the next few years, she experimented with countless versions of the poppy, trying it out in different colours, on its own or with borders and complementary floral designs, until she finally settled on three versions, printing them over and over again until the blocks wore out. Despite this, she did not tire of it but had new blocks made with the same design. It became something of a signature motif for her and, to this day, Brigitte periodically goes back to her poppy. This enduring relationship received a tribute in 2015, when V and A showcased a Brigitte atamsukh coat with a poppy print similar to one in their collection of antiques; she was to donate her atamsukh to the museum. Within a mere couple of years of those encounters, her reputation was travelling. An early highlight of her career and her first big public success came in 1986 with the help of her eldest brother, Dr Patrick Baudin: a 15-day exhibition of paintings and prints at the Heritage Festival in the medieval town of Angers, hosted at an old abbey, the Abbaye du Ronceray. Sari-draped garden grid mannequins stood like ancient pilgrims under the vaults of the abbey, the stained-glass windows lending a magic touch to the assemblage. So many people came for the exhibition that some got stuck in the oldest medieval spiral stairway leading to the exhibition! This now led to a business partnership crucial for her professional development. BÊatrice Jaunet, a childhood friend, was so taken with Brigitte’s works that she proposed opening a shop in Paris to sell her creations. Le Jardin Moghol (the Mughal Garden), a boutique of furnishings, was a success from the start. The partnership suited both of them. Brigitte received a carte blanche on design, and freedom from the pressures of marketing while she occupied herself
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FRIEND, LATE JULES KILCHER, photographer and painter, captures a rare moment with printer Bhagat ji taking instructions from Brigitte in Sanaganer, c. 1983
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joyfully in her craft. The economics enabled her to work at her own pace, not putting her under pressure to produce too much too quickly. However, factors outside her control nearly shut down the shop three years after its opening. So far, Brigitte had managed to regularly meet the orders that came from Paris—tablecloths, cushions, curtains, quilts—employing one tailor and two seamstresses. For the printing, she had found a fine hand in the old city: Durga Das, a man willing to devote time and attention. She would take her blocks, carved by a skilled block maker, and sit with him, monitoring, especially when he was beginning a new work or she wanted to try out a new colour. Things were going smoothly, but just when she thought she had found a groove for the rest of her life, she was jolted to the reality of working in India. There were riots in Jaipur that year. The repeated curfews made it impossible for her to send any consignment to Paris for a couple of months. Brigitte’s partner understandably panicked. The crisis did not last long, but it led to a mutual decision to call off the exclusivity of their arrangement with each other. Brigitte’s partner would henceforth be allowed sell other goods in her shop, while Brigitte was free now to look around for more distribution points. Surprisingly, this worked even better. She was beginning to find some renown around the world, and it was not difficult to find new clients. In fact, her problem, even in those early years, was to figure out how not to grow too fast. She was afraid, and rightly so, that unless she controlled her growth, she would end up compromising on quality. The more successful she became, the more difficult she could afford to be, throwing herself into challenging work regardless of whether it made commercial sense. Yet, in a happy paradox, the more she shunned
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commercial success, insisting on manufacturing only for connoisseurs, the richer the rewards turned out, materially as well as in terms of artistic repute. In 1993, hardly a decade old in printing, she went to Angers for a solo show, at the invitation of the regional government of Maine et Loire. It was hard work, involving months of preparation, but well worth it. Brigitte roped in Christine Delpech, an architect friend, to put it all together; a block maker and printer accompanied her for week-long demo sessions. Then came the prestigious Galliera Museum show (November 2000–March 2001), where the young curator called three contemporary textile designers to participate in a large exhibition showcasing the history of cotton and fashion since early times. Brigitte put up a large panel displaying stages of block printing, along with a video recording by Luc Getreau, done earlier for Angers. Separately, a panel showed the Red Tara and an original 18th-century fragment that inspired it. A great hit was Ananas, her recreation of the famous pineapple print, an early Toile de Jouy. Brigitte had made two garments for the show out of the print: an Elizabethan jacket and a wraparound skirt, which was actually a modified version of an 18th-century-style apron. The museum bought the jacket for its collection, a tribute that meant more to her than all the money in the world. Garments now form the mainstay of Brigitte’s business, making up nearly 80 per cent of her overall production, but she wishes it was not so; it was not her real métier, and her heart had never really been in it. Fashion did not interest her; even as a young woman, she does not remember ever buying a fashion magazine. Besides, making clothes is even harder to get right than printing fabric. However, increasing pressure forced her to start her readyto-wear line on a small scale. She had always loved fabric itself and tailored her own dresses, a skill she learnt from her mother.
She decided that if she was going to make clothes, she would lean towards tradition and create the kind of clothes she enjoyed wearing: attire of such classic simplicity that one never tired of them, thus ensuring they never go out of style. This of course meant her garment designs would be inspired by costumes from east and west alike. The reason she gravitated to the traditional was fascination with the idea of dresses having adapted over centuries, so in tune with local material, weather and body type as to become a kind of calling card for the culture itself. They could even be put aside like heirlooms, an idea she loved because it respected their inherent beauty, elevating them beyond mere functionality. In her tryst with garment design, she was helped by three professional friends: couture modellist Julien Cristofoli; Gaëlle Choveau, who makes costumes for theatre and opera and garments for children; and textile artist Lucy Goffin, who worked on the Lucy Bag and Padma Jacket for her. Their expertise enabled her to ensure utmost quality in the product cuts. The garments were a hit from the start. People who once bought a Brigitte were hooked, even if they had to forego some other luxury in order to afford it, finding that combination of J.C. MAHINDRA: Manager exceptional comfort and beauty unbeatable. “He was my guardian angel on earth, my confidant, my most The success is pleasing, of course, and precious friend too, a great and wise support through the thick she enjoys making clothes that people and thin. I will miss him.” love to wear. Yet, a part of her would rather —Brigitte on Mahindra’s passing away in June 2014 have her creations admired than loved, especially when loving means wearing The line is equally blurred when it comes to deciding them until they are worn out and discarded. There is what is common to all and what legitimately belongs enough of the artist in her to wince at this inexorable exclusively to her. Traditionally, a block print was line that divides art from craft, but she is happily on limited to the village where it was printed, with a printer the side of those anonymous men and women who making different block prints for different castes, and create articles of everyday use, unmindful of their prints remaining within a clan for generations. As a immemorability, using their artistry in the service of result, there is no concept of copyright in printing even making life more beautiful and bearable.
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today, with printers freely borrowing designs from each other, and guarding one’s artwork becomes next to impossible. For years, because of her phenomenal success abroad, printers in Jaipur blatantly copied her designs until it became part of a common vocabulary. At first, it did not matter much to her because she did not sell in India, and abroad, her designs were protected under copyright rules thanks to the efforts of her Paris business partner. And though she’s loath to claim so, the general conclusion among connoisseurs is that while anyone could fake her designs, no one could match her class when it came to colour or precision of design. Her customers mostly never deserted her for the cheaper imitations. The real blow came when she discovered that the son of her printer, with whom she had worked closely for more than two decades, was using her drawings and blocks on the sly to print for others. Her first block maker, Rashid, too, had done this, going as far as actually opening a shop in Jaipur called The Mughal Garden. She was aghast and saddened but did little more than issue him a stern warning, afraid to sack him because it was easier to put up with his theft than to train a new printer to come up to that quality, even in a city where multitudes of them boast old lineages. Brigitte stuck to him for all of 23 years, meeting all his demands. His payments increased as her work piled up, and he too expanded as her business grew, adding more tables and building extra rooms to take on all her work. It is a vital partnership, a designer and her printer’s, more codependent than most. It is the printer and the other ancillary craftsmen, the toolmaker and block maker, who translate her design from the drawing board to cloth, a complex process requiring utmost skill. It is the printer who ensures the beauty and perfection of her blueprint is not jeopardized by the many things that can go wrong in the interim stages, mixing
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colours to just the right consistency in order for it to flow smoothly, without clogging the etching on the block, watching over his workers at their tables with a hawk’s eye to prevent their attention from slipping even for a split second, for one error could mean ruining the entire work and having to start all over again. And it is the printer who knows, with his unerring instinct, just when to put the newly-printed fabric in the curing chamber, for how long, and at what temperature, so as to fix the colours to the cloth. She needed him for her kind of exacting work. Yet, six months after her warning, he was still pirating her work. Worse, he had started taking orders directly from a businesswoman, siphoning off Brigitte’s latest creations despite her threat of sacking him and finding herself a new printer. Clearly, he did not believe her or had grown arrogant enough to believe she could not do without him. It left her with little choice but to act on her threat. This was in 2004. It felt, almost literally, as if she had chopped off her hands. For a full two years after that, Brigitte did not print, somehow stretching what stocks she had to meet the pending orders from her clients. However, she had also become the mother to a daughter, Lilah Victoire, and all her free time was happily devoted to her. Other interests developed along all these years. One project that had her engrossed for a whole year in the mid-nineties was building a beautiful haveli away from the noise and bustle of the city. This haveli would bring her expanding business under one roof and provide her with a workshop. This was to be her home too, the kind of gracious, sprawling space where she could surround herself in beauty and wander around her garden when she was not busy with her workshop. It fell into place like everything else, almost by itself. In 1994, Mahindraji found a piece of land in Amber, which he thought she would like because it
had a ruin on it and was secluded enough for the garden she had always wanted. After she bought the place, she immediately started drawing up plans, only taking it to an architect for approval after she had conceptualized every room to the last detail. She thoroughly enjoyed the whole process, very much as if it was one of her printing projects except on a larger scale. It took all of 1995 to build the ground floor that would house her workshop and a residence for her precious manager, Mahindraji, whom she had met back in 1982. He performed that role until his demise in 2014, at the age of 87. It was years of sporadic evolution before the whole complex took its final shape, rising up as her business grew, almost organically. She built her living quarters upstairs two years later, finally able to live amid her work and her garden “in the mist of the hills”. One little structure was created when her parents started visiting in winters, which later turned into her shop; the manager’s pad was integrated later into the workshop complex as she built a home for him. In those two years after 2004, the final jigsaw piece was fitted; all her workers would be under one roof and under her wings. For months after the printer had left with 23 years of printed samples—he had kept archives of his own— she had been so overcome with rage that she seriously considered suing him and his client for copyright infringement. Her friends dissuaded her, saying legal action would only be a waste of her time and money. Her mind began working in another direction, trying to figure out a way of preventing theft. The only solution seemed to be to keep the printer under her direct supervision as long as he worked with her blocks. Hence, an integrated printer’s workshop. The old system where she had worked on trust had left her bruised. Now, the printer would come to her rather than the other way around. Once she started, her urge to work with things just kept growing. Her engineering mind was at work, something she says she might have inherited from her father, who loved tinkering around with tools in order to figure out how to meet a technical challenge. Holding
pride of place among the various innovations she introduced in her printer’s workshop are a custom-made curing chamber to fix dyes after printing and a filtering plant system to clean the waste water, designed by an engineer from Pune. It is her way of imposing some level of certitude on a process riddled with uncertainties. The workshop itself is a solid, factory-like building in mortar and stones; the space inside is filled with long tables over which the fabric is stretched and pinned and over which the printer’s team works. Slow, precise work, with no room for error. No one talks; the only sound in the workshop is the rhythmic stamping of block on cloth to the music of Hindi film songs playing on the radio. The printing stage is potentially full of nasty surprises. The suspense begins with the printer preparing the colour paste, a mix that he then gives to his workers in trays. These are the same chemical dyes used in industrial printing, the only difference being they are mixed by hand, with some added oils, to get the right viscosity. This in itself is a subtle art, open to risks: if the paste is too thick, it will clog the fine etching on the blocks and smudge the printing; too thin and the colours will run into each other and make a mess. This unending tension of never knowing how the final product would turn out eventually drove Brigitte to try and find a technical solution wherever possible. While she can do little at the manual printing stage, her machine with its adjustable temperature takes out some of the uncertainty, at least at the curing stage. All the printer has to do now is set the time clock and wait. Yet, despite Brigitte’s best efforts to impose order on a chaotic process, there are days when accidents happen. The printer may be distracted by some thought, perhaps a personal problem, and may forget to turn the knob to the exact temperature or keep the fabric in the machine for too long, resulting in the print coming out burnt, casting Brigitte into utter despair. She has been working with the present printer Matinji for 10 years now, and is fond enough of him to say he will be the last printer she will work with, and yet, inevitably, there are moments when Murphy’s Law takes over, and a
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despairing Brigitte is ready to close down her business! But she is over it by the next day, ready to throw away the ruined yardage and start afresh, in pursuit once again of her holy grail. It’s a quest that has taken a major chunk of her life, over 35 years, and still continues. At 62, she is able to look back in wonder and gratitude at the rich rewards of devoting a lifetime to her craft. When she received the Prashasti Patra award in 2011 from the Rajasthan government, it meant much more than empty formality for her; official recognition in India connoted total absorption into a traditional space in which she was a naturalized citizen. Her faithful and enthusiastic Indian clientele, with their innate responses to old forms of beauty, she values equally. Acknowledgement from peers in the world of craft and art is another source of satisfaction. A few years ago, she was asked to refurbish the entire zenana quarters in the Nagaur fort in Rajasthan when it was being turned into a luxury hotel. Lady Hamlyn, a British aristocrat friend of the royal family who owned the fort, was in charge of the project. Someone with experience in renovating historic buildings in Europe, Lady Hamlyn was also an admirer of Brigitte’s work and was very keen to have her. The committee in charge of funds in Nagaur tried to bring Brigitte down on her terms, a bargaining process that ended up with Brigitte deciding to drop the whole proposal because by the time they eventually cleared it, she had less than four months remaining to get the whole work done, an impossibility as far as she was concerned. It was only when Lady Hamlyn personally stepped in, urging her to do at least nine of the 27 rooms she had originally asked her to do, that Brigitte agreed to
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come on board. She accords some importance to the freedom to be as difficult as she wants to be, because it is a professional and artistic imperative. This was not the only time Brigitte sacrificed an offer because there was not enough time for her to create quality work. Being able to produce very little compared to others was a limitation she had learned to live with long ago, even if it meant foregoing a dream project or two. Brigitte’s has been a strange and solitary journey: born and raised in a French Catholic family, breaking away from home in pursuit of her own goals and making a successful life of it in, of all unlikely places, a rustic Rajasthani village, an exceptional historical site that is now, much to her regret, becoming a part of the advancing city of Jaipur. Yet, it is a journey that has brought her closer to her roots, much more than she would have been had she stayed back in France. There is the ancestor has discovered, for instance, six or seven generations ago—Charles Schoessler, born 1810—who worked in calico printing and miniature painting like her. The grandmother whose portrait hangs on her office wall, who collected odds and ends in a special cupboard that she threw open for her grandchildren when they visited her. She was good with her hands, like Brigitte, who too collects every little scrap of material from her master tailor’s table to use in either her patchwork quilts or handbags or, if nothing else, little shoes for babies. Now, her ancestors would be pleased to know that France has bestowed on her the Ordre National du Mérite (in 2015), and the sixarmed Maltese asterisk insignia has joined Brigitte’s garden of symbols, like a laurel joined in a shower of floral blessings.
Design Sans Frontiers Sunil Menon LET’S arrive at the conclusion first. A world moved by the laws of a visual logic is no different from the verbal universe in one respect: it is discursive in nature. Harken to the fancy words one encounters in the textile design lexicon: mehrab, spandrel, ogee, cartouche, trellis, chevron… words from mural, architecture, calligraphy, ceramics, dance, what have you! Scan the field attentively; you see fabric artists incorporating motifs originating in other visual languages, even simulations of other textile processes such as weave, embroidery, tie-and-dye—ingesting, amoeba-like, to nourish their vocabulary. A singular element’s very genetic code carries marks of the teeming plurality beyond it. There’s more. Ever thought soil conditions could bring about a design aesthetic? Not by transmitting its colours or the mood of the landscape but materially. Proceed upward on the organic chain, from soil to the botanical, the cotton variety, the relative fastness of dyestuff. One gets to an infrastructural plane that makes specific things possible. On top of this moves the aesthetic world, its provincial flava, design motifs native to habitat, the fauna, the tree, leaf and blossom that come to reside on cloth. Even at this basic level, everything about form—the very word recalls forming— gestures at something outside. There are no borders. It’s this nomad-like spirit that animates the Brigitte Singh story. It’s the act of writing the subsequent chapters, with all the wonder of a neophyte, that teased the genie out of the lamp for me, by way of a series of heuristic discoveries. The ajrak draped on the Harappan priest–king’s shoulders, which tells us that this yarn stretches as far back as Indian history goes, to those river valley cities. (The Indus craftsmen were already dirtying their hands with mordants and plant dyes, five millennia ago.) Indian textile fragments
from Fostat, Egypt, telling of Late Antiquity trade. The grand Mughal-era fusion. The early modern presence of Europe and its lexicon. Chintz, calico, muslin, chinoiserie, paisley… words that carry the fragrance of mutually exotic geographies, opening up windows to so many microhistories and their byzantine arterial maps. The visual evocation of Aurangzeb’s encampments in the Deccan via a Masulipatnam tent-wall hanging, quite a different thing from reading contemporary French accounts of it. South Indian craftsmen of the 18th century incorporating Chinese and Persian motifs for a new western clientele. Indian imports inspiring European styles, a distant child of which returns as a pilgrim. The history wrote itself like a weave of Indian fabric but as we shall see, with a rich cosmopolitanism. Sanganer was where this very global phase in medieval history survived as local subculture, a curious caesura, at once archive and lifeworld! It was to become the source-field for Brigitte’s research and practice. In the opening pages, she talks of that first spark, how she tended the fire, respecting tradition the best way possible, by helping to keep it alive. After chapter-length reflections on two key elements—block and colour—we arrive at motifs. This is the heart of her work, the recovery and creative appropriation of a design practice itself live, morphing, protean. Thematically, we see her draw on her first love: Mughal art and its tropes. Its stylization coexists so elegantly with naturalism that it takes us to the provenance of motifs. Where, incredibly, the cypress of the northern hemisphere leaches into a Rajasthani art-soil. We see her as an artisan, immersed in tradition, yet leaving an immaculate signature. Like those old mariners, we see the observer become an actor, a participant in an unfolding Indian epic. One whose ancient scenes play out above the interlocking stems of Persian, Chinese or European foliage.
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Bishwadeep Moitra is an independent graphic designer, photographer and a writer–editor. He has worked in the news media for the past 25 years as a visual journalist, launching and relaunching major magazines and newspapers in India. In 1995, Moitra was among the founding members of Outlook, Asia’s most influential weekly news magazine, and served as its Executive Editor till 2016. He was also the creative chief of all other magazines of the Outlook group, from travel to personal finance. He is best known for designing magazine covers—he has designed close to 1500 published magazine covers across genres; as well as many illustrated books. Brigitte Singh: Printress of the Mughal Garden is his maiden venture as anthology
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editor of an illustrated book. He has lectured frequently on design and visual story-telling at the IITs and other universities in India. Moitra travels
Nominated for RL Shep Ethnic Textiles Book Award 2017, Textile Society of America
widely, photographing independent and commissioned projects alike. He is an advanced practitioner of hatha yoga for the past 15 years.
video ity
CRAFTS brigitte singh
Printress of the Mughal Garden
Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema
Edited by Bishwadeep Moitra
Paper Jewels
Postcards from the Raj Omar Khan
The Uprising of 1857
Edited by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones
Indian Temple Sculpture John Guy
Mapin Publishing
www.mapinpub.com
Printed in India
276 pages, 214 colour photographs 9 x 11.66” (229 x 296 mm), hc ISBN: 978-93-85360-24-4 (Mapin) ISBN: 978-1-935677-81-9 (Grantha) ₹6950 | $150 | £99 2018 • World rights
Other Titles of Interest
$70 | £50 ISBN 978-93-85360-24-4
www.mapinpub.com