›Nanga Kapda‹ (The Naked Cloth) is a research-based performance that focuses on the question of choice and freedom associated with weaving practices and women’s bodies. As a retake on feminist history of »performance as resistance«, ›Nanga Kapda‹ examines the link between movement and the material presence of textiles and their long history of production in India, a work principally done by caste-oppressed women. Made by Chhapa technique using hand block printing on cotton in various cities of India, the fabric was then used by colonizers in the triangular slave trade as exchange currency, as is visible from various diaries of these traders (fabric called Chintz or Les Indiennes). 
 

These and other pre-colonial textile designs based on the interconnections of Southern Asia are still present today. A lot of artisans of this technique are located in Jaipur, Rajasthan where I reside. These artisans move on a long table, with their hands rising and falling in unison – one after another. My artistic study of these movement patterns informs my final performance to recreate the phantom limbs of the colonial interruptions in another body.

›Nanga Kapda‹ engages from an Indian societal perspective, where the question of women’s agency to choose what to wear seems to be contingent on local customs, religion and politics. On the other hand, Indian women have been historically part of weaving, crafting and designing of textiles. Shouldn't the woman’s body have the freedom to choose what it wraps around itself? The Mediaeval Indian poet Kabir has a body of songs that creates analogies between traditional textile and bodies. I combine these subjects in this performance to explore the question of choice and freedom, especially for women in India across religions, customs and gender binaries. 
 

Manipur, a state in the North-East India is an example for both: a deep history of textile weaving and a history of exorbitant violence on women’s bodies. The recent cases of heinous violence took place in North-East India where women have been paraded naked in the streets. During the Channer revolt in the southern state Kerala, Nangeli fought against the imperial tax for covering breasts for lower caste women and cut her breasts in protest. In Rajasthan, where I grew up, various historical feminist figures like Meera fought against the Goonghat mandatory veil. Recently, a ban was imposed by the then islamophobic regime on Hijab in Karnataka. Various heinous comments against women’s clothing that invite rapacious violence have been made by politicians regularly in India. 

This performance unfolds how the materiality of the body, which is a feminist subject, works with or interrupts the materiality of commodities. It intersects women’s desire for freedom expressed through textiles with contemporary feminist perspectives on visibility, moral policing, and communal violence.
 

Photographs: Julius Brüntink