Adventures of a Desi KnitterAn academic juggles knitting, sewing, and other crafts in Kolkata

Sewing stories I

§ July 14th, 2009 § Filed under Other crafts, Sewing § 10 Comments

This simple, shapely and harmless-looking contraption is currently my new love, and my nemesis.

I laughed out loud when I read Swapna’s comment a couple of posts ago about the sewing machine roaring away at the slightest provocation. Mine (or more precisely my cousin’s) is still similarly untamed, which is to say I am still a dunce at using it. There is one little manoeuvre required to get it going: gently rolling the wheel forward with your right hand, and then pedaling with your feet to keep it running in that direction and thereby setting the whole contraption down to the bobbing needle into motion.

Sounds simple, except that the smaller hand-wheel keeps wanting to turn away from you, thereby promptly breaking the thread and requiring continuous swearing re-threading. If the wheel-pedal coordination is off even slightly, it’s twang-clap-snap-thut. When you see a veteran doing it, it’s very difficult to figure out just what the hell they’re doing to keep it going in the right direction, and of course they can’t really tell you what they’re doing because it’s second nature to them, and they can’t understand why you’re making such a fuss about it. Rather like when you are learning how to drive a stick-shift car, and just can’t get the hang of releasing the clutch just as you press the accelerator, and the car keeps stalling. Or like you thrash about and swallow a lot of water but the correct freestyle action to stay horizontal and swim somehow seems impossible to do. Until one moment you suddenly you can accelerate, or strike through the water, or start sewing in the right direction, and you cross over to the other side. There are setbacks, of course, but then it goes on to become second nature. Right now I’m somewhere between a setback and second nature, as I try to shape the neck of my very first own-sewn kurta.

There is a distinctive sound to the running of the old mechanical sewing machines, especially the ones with the foot-pedal. For me the clickety-clack of the wheel and the needle immediately conjures up two distinct themes. One is the ubiquitous neighbourhood tailor shop. Dyspeptic tailors bent over in a line in the poorly lit back of the shop, the air suffused with a mix of machine oil fumes, the smell of freshly cut fabric and sweat. Little triangular scraps of cloth litter the floor, sari blouses and kurtas line the walls above the bent tailors, and the main tailor-master, standing behind the counter that doubles as shop-front, cutting table and dogeared pattern library, tries to persuade the reluctant auntie customer to break with her regulation U and try a new octagonal neckline.

The other is an image of the ever-suffering and consumptive, but hard-working and morally upright mother in old Hindi films, played with melodramatic gusto by actors like Leela Chitnis, Sulochana and, of course, Nirupa Roy. All these women fought great societal and financial odds to bring up their children singlehandedly in film after film with one important weapon in their struggle for self-reliance and middle-class respectability: the humble sewing machine. It has been part of countless scenes where a) Ma weeps and coughs as she adds yet another seam and worries about the rent; b) Ma chastises wayward younger son for profligacy and truancy even as she has worked her fingers to the bone to pay his college fees; and c) the hero bursts into the room as Ma is working at it, announcing that he has passed his BA or got a job, thereby implying the machine’s impending redundancy.

Hindi film moms in the last decade have shed their widow whites and have become a lot more glamorous and trendy. While their acquiring of colour and joie-de-vivre, even sexuality on occasion, is entirely welcome, I can’t help thinking that the vanishing of the sewing machine from screen is part of the broader evaporation from Hindi cinema of working class and lower-middle-class lives, characters and stories in favour of globalised, consumerist and insanely wealthy settings. Dress-making, though, continues to be a gendered sign of self-reliance and respectability – young heroines in films and TV serials often have their own fashion boutiques as a business. I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen a sewing machine, vintage or electrified or computerised, in any scene, though…

To return to the saga of my own sewing, my seams need some sobering up before they can walk in a straight line:

But hey, that ghostly apparition is my own-sewn, completed and freshly washed salwar, waiting for its kurta to be done so it can be ironed and worn (yes, it fits!):