Return of the Madras checks, Siddi version

CHENNAI: What does it mean when a fabric that once travelled the world returns to its origin, re-imagined by hands that history displaced? Can cloth speak for communities whose voices have been silenced? These are the questions that drive the exhibition ‘Threads of Confluence: Madras Checks, Siddi Dialogues, and Journeys Across Continents’, curated by community art practitioner Anitha N Reddy.

Opening at the DakshinaChitra Museum on September 21, the exhibition explores an unusual dialogue between Madras checks (globally travelled textiles) and the Siddi community that was forcibly brought to India from Africa. It is a story of outward journeys and inward displacement and of trade and trauma.

Anitha has worked closely with the Siddi community in Karnataka, not simply as an academic or curator but as a community collaborator. “I have witnessed how Siddi women turn fabric scraps into meaningful pieces, fragments into panels that carry both resilience and voice. Even though they’ve learned to live in this country, they are still discriminated against because of how they look, because their history isn’t written. These are the questions I carry while working with them,” says Anitha.

When she decided to bring Madras checks into this dialogue, Anitha was not interested in simply tracing the cloth’s global legacy.

She wanted to connect it to a local history that had been erased. She sourced contemporary scraps of Madras fabric from The Original Madras Trading Company in the city and introduced them to the Siddi artists she works with. “The cloth, which had journeyed outward for centuries, was now returning, not as a finished product, but as fragments. In the hands of these women, those fragments became something new.”

The resulting textile panels are not simply decorative. They are visual essays, emotional documents, and living archives. “The structure of Madras checks with its straight lines, repeating squares, and geometric logic contrasts with the improvisational, expressive language of Siddi patchwork. But when brought together, they resonate. These panels are where displacement meets design and where forgotten memory finds form,” she shares.

This exhibition is about two kinds of movement. One is the outward migration of cloth through trade. The other is the inward migration of people through force. “Madras checks became global. The Siddis were made invisible. By bringing these two together, I wanted to stitch a conversation between what left India and what was brought in and what remains behind.”

The exhibition does not shy away from uncomfortable truths. It acknowledges the deep-rooted caste system in India and the discrimination the Siddis still ace. It also critiques how artisans from marginalised communities are often displaced or exploited in the name of design or fashion. Anitha is clear that the project is not about appropriation or aesthetic extraction. It is about letting the community lead its own creative expression.

“We often talk about sustainability and economic empowerment, but we forget that true empowerment comes when artists are not displaced from their own identity in the name of someone else’s design. This project is about allowing the Siddi women to tell their stories, not just to an audience, but to themselves,” adds the art historian.

The collaborative process was organic. There were no imposed designs or patterns. The women responded to the fabric as they wished. “In doing so, they reconnected not only with their own craft but also with the ancestral memory of movement and survival that connects them, however distantly, to African textile traditions and global trade routes. Art doesn’t come in isolation. It comes through community, through storytelling and through interaction,” she adds.