Common Ground: Meera Mukherjee and the carpet makers of Muzaffarpur

Meera Mukherjee (1923 – 1998), best known as a sculptor of bronzes, was committed throughout her career to an understanding of art and design that travelled outside the confines of the academy and into the interiors of the country.

To further her own practice she had learned metalworking techniques in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, and, indeed, had been engaged by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to document the work of communities in the production of metalwork. At the same time, Mukherjee was driven by a powerful political commitment to help in the upliftment of marginalised communities. This was allied to her interest in teaching and her parallel career as a writer of children’s stories.

Many of these interests coalesced between 1986 and 1991, at a time when she had founded a small school in a village outside Calcutta (Dhankhet Vidyalaya), where her bronze casting took place. Inspired by watercolour drawings produced by children of the school, Mukherjee worked with women in the village to realise the same imagery in the form of Kantha stitch-craft. This was an unusual and innovative attempt to improve the lives of poor village women. In an act of creative relay, the resulting stitch paintings formed the spark for her to commission a series of hand-woven carpets in collaboration with out-of-work carpet weavers from Muzaffarpur. Mukherjee was able to achieve a patterning for each of the carpets that allowed them to be seen in the round: the carpet weavers repeated the sprightly compositions of individual Kantha stitch-paintings and, as they did so, they changed the orientation of the imagery.

Mukherjee sold these whimsical objects to her patrons in order to raise funds for the carpet makers. At the time of their production there was little understanding of quite how innovative the artist had been in forming entwined networks of sympathetic creative forces. Looking back from the perspective of 2022, Mukherjee seems to anticipate the models of community design projects as well as design collectives and, in this way, marks her as a pioneer in India’s design history.