Geetanjali Krishna: The story-telling magnate

As a student of anthropology, I have always enjoyed listening to stories. Story-telling is, to me, the most vibrant and entertaining way through which a culture expresses itself. But while I’ve seen stories being told orally, through song or through paintings — 39-year-old Unesco (2006) awardee Sanjana Devi of Muzaffarpur, Bihar recently introduced me to a whole new medium of story-telling, Sujani. This is a form of folk embroidery practiced by village women in Bihar, in which they tell stories through the motifs they embroider on cloth. “In the villages of Bihar, women had little opportunity to leave their homes even for a few hours. So they didn’t get a chance to interact a lot with one another,” explained Sanjana Devi when we met, “Sujani has offered them a chance for self expression in a socially-acceptable way,” she said.

In the olden days, Sujani was a prosaic, functional skill that women used to make coverlets and spreads from old and otherwise unusable saris by layering and quilting them together “I learnt it from my mother,” said Sanjana Devi, “and after marriage, decided to put it to good use.” She got a job with a local NGO and honed her skills. “I became interested in the stories that women told through Sujani. The running stitch is a very flexible medium and it was easy to embroider pictures and scenes using it.” Traditionally, women embroidered stories about gods and goddesses, festivals and suchlike using running stitch and chain stitch. “Today, we interpret Sujani as a way of telling any sort of story,” she said.

Sanjana Devi’s stories are simple, but they all contain social messages. For example, one recurring theme in her work is the everyday lives of ordinary village women. “They work hard throughout the day for their family. Through my Sujani, I want to celebrate their lives and tell their stories to the world,” she said. Another theme that is close to her heart is the customary practice of having too many children. “This is very bad for women’s health. So I embroider stories about women who have completed their families and go in for sterilisation. I show them happy and fulfilled to encourage more women to be like them,” she said.

Today, Sanjana Devi and her well wishers have created a good market for Sujani in India and abroad. “As we participate in many exhibitions, we have substantial orders for the entire year,” she said. They have also started selling in the UK through Crafts Council. Sanjana Devi has organised the women of her village into self-help groups under her NGO, Sujani Mahila Jeevan. Her self-help group has 60 regulars and over 200 woman workers in all.

The earnings from this (regulars earn between Rs 1,500-2,500 a month) are still small by urban standards. However, what sets this project apart is that it empowers women economically as well as socially, while allowing them the flexibility of working from their homes, on their own time and at their own convenience. As I watched her needle flying across the homespun cotton cloth, I mused that this simple technique gave two huge opportunities to oft-disempowered village women — it enabled them to achieve a measure of economic independence as well as offered them a traditional medium to express their inner feelings. Sanjana Devi agreed: “I feel that Sujani has changed my life. And I can’t begin to describe the joy I feel when I’m able to tell my little stories to people.. .”