Being someone who loves greenery, I used to be fascinated by the facade of this two-storied house on Gulshan Avenue (circa early 80s) that was wrapped in a leafy cover of perfectly maintained creeping fig.
After I met Zein Ghuznavi I realized this was the residence of his parents, Ruby and Farhad Ghuznavi, a well-known and liked couple about town.
Their extensive collection of music (in vinyls and cassettes), films (VCR tapes) and books was meticulously collated and spotlessly kept. My introduction to the early films of Woody Allen along with some European auteurs was through this treasure trove.
Some time in the mid 80s I accompanied my mother-in-law to an exhibition of "Ruby Ghuznavi's vegetable-dye saris" at the Kumudini outlet then housed within the Pan Pacific Sonargaon.
That first collection of saris were all hand block prints on local silks. The print patterns took inspiration from local crafts, like kantha stitching, bamboo and basketry weaves, as well as recognizable architectural forms and elements. By combining familiar decorative motifs with the muted colours of natural dyes she had created an absolutely groundbreaking new style that was at once sophisticated and folksy.
As we ooh-ed and aah-ed with appreciation, my mother-in-law launched into the entire family history of the Ghuznavis, of which all I remember is, Ruby Ghuznavi was for a short while in the early 50s her senior at Dr. Khastaghir's School (Chittagong) and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was Farhad Ghuznavi's great-grand aunt.
In the late 80s I started attending Naripokkho's weekly meetings and here my perception of Ruby Ghuznavi evolved.
From a friend's mother and a patron of the arts she became Ruby Apa -- quietly friendly, elegantly understated in both mien and words, a sister in the women's movement with a penchant for addressing all of us as “Ai meye.”
I shall return to her as a vital force in Naripokkho but first I want to share some personal anecdotes that helped me see Bangladesh's textile heritage through Ruby Apa's eyes.
Naksha and Aranya
By the early 90s she had formed her own company Aranya Crafts, with Its flagship store in Banani and a smaller outlet in Dhanmondi, where vegetable dyed hand-loom cotton and silks became her brand.
Around that time I, with an aunt, had a tiny company making embroidered men's panjabis/kurtas for private exhibitions. Taking our cue from Ruby Apa, we wanted to use local patterns but we found them hard to recreate. We eventually discovered Ruby Apa's book, Naksha and it became our ultimate go-to for design ideas.
A Ruby Ghuznavi sari using basket weave patterns in vegetable dyes CourtesyI am yet to see a better researched and more comprehensive compilation of decorative patterns from different regions of our country and distinct in style from those originating in India. The logo she chose for Aranya is also shown in Naksha as a traditional motif signifying the tree-of-life.
She was a visionary before her time and her vision was as wide as it was deep. As a result, she could see several steps ahead of where she was at.
For instance, she was on a quest for a vegetable mordant -- a natural ingredient that would bind the dye to the fabric and make it colour fast. She was sure there was such a natural mordant in use until as recently as the first quarter of the 20th century because samples remaining from that era showed how colour-fast the dyes were, but that knowledge was now lost to us.
A purist to a fault, she lamented the tendency of mixing chemicals with natural dyes, embellishing woven fabrics with frilly-bits or coming up with new Jamdani designs.
On one occasion, seeing her in an exceptionally pretty sari, I accused her of keeping the best for herself. She hung her head and replied: “I wish! I wish this was something I could make.”
It was a vegetable dye block print sari on half-silk from South India. So why was it something out of her reach? She pointed out every colour in a particular motif required a separate block to complete it (which is the case in all forms of printing).
When a particular pattern has four separate colours over the ground of the sari, the printer would have to stamp by hand 4 different, finely carved woodblocks on the same spot of the fabric to complete one portion of the pattern. Her best printers were yet to achieve two colours on a motif.
Another day she was preparing a talk and let me read a bit of her notes written in her angular spidery handwriting. Here she mentioned Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, who had described the quantity and quality of the cotton produce of Gangaridh/Gandaridae (information garnered from whatever could be deciphered from the fragments of his original text titled Indika).
She also quoted Pliny the Elder's account which validates our understanding that cotton production in these parts can be dated back to at least two millennia and that the British Raj deftly put an end to it in less than two hundred years.
She described the quality of the Jamdani woven for the 17th century Mughal court, saying if you were to run your hand blindly across the fabric you would not be able to tell the motif from the plane ground of the material. I had never seen, leave alone touched, a weave so fine.
Whether it was about current advances in textiles or lost traditions, she opened my eyes and made it patently obvious that we, the people of the lower Gangetic plains, had always been clothiers to the world -- we have always been producers and manufacturers of textiles.
She made me see we always were and continue to be adept and reliable partners in international trade.
These observations made me so proud of my heritage and explained so much about ourselves that I still cannot fathom how our school history books (and teachers) only spoke of the lost glory of muslin in terms of how a whole sari could be folded into a matchbox or passed through a ring.
While she will always be the lodestar in the revival of natural dyes, she can also be credited for countless contributions in promoting deshi crafts, specially bringing back the old glory of the Jamdani, and in a very unassuming way, for mentoring others working in the field.
For women
Many tributes to Ruby Ghuznavi started pouring in upon her passing on January 14. One thing that struck me as missing was any mention of her as a stalwart in the women's movement of this country.
Some of her major involvements in Naripokkho included protesting environmental calamities, and she successfully campaigned against the docking of a ship with radioactive waste in our harbours.
One of the issues closest to her heart was the issue of the Birangona and over the decades she kept telling us we needed to reach out to them.
Ruby Apa had worked in a government rehabilitation centre set up for women in post-war Bangladesh. These centres took care of women who had lost everything in the war, their homes, family members, and/or had been victims of war rape.
She worked as a counsellor to women survivors of war rape who were opting for late term abortions as well as those who had to give up their babies (as per policy) for adoption abroad.
CourtesyShe saw how it was mainly male guardians who accompanied young women to these centres. Some abandoned them there and others said the girl could not return home with the baby.
These centres also provided skills training and job placements for women in various offices and homes. Those with no reading or writing skills were encouraged to stitch kantha blankets and shawls, while others were taught to embroider or weave mats and baskets that were then marketed through various government-run retail points.
In Dhaka, Ruby Apa was involved in setting up a government-run handicrafts shop called Karika. A portion of the handicrafts sourced and marketed by Karika came from women trained at these centres.
It wasn't until 2011, as Bangladesh entered its 40th year (and nearly 30 years since Naripokkho's founding) did we reach out to survivors of 1971 war-rape.
We heard about the work of the freedom fighter Safina Lohani from her daughter Emi Afsana Chowdhury and niece Tamanna Khan Popy.
Like Ruby Apa in Dhaka, Safina Apa too had worked at a rehabilitation centre in Sirajganj. After the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family, the program came to an abrupt halt and the Sirajganj Birangonas scattered all over their locality.
Stigmatized and pilloried, they found it hard to fend for themselves and soon landed up at Safina Apa's doorstep seeking refuge. This resulted in her establishing the Sirajganj Mahila Uttaran Shangstha.
Ruby Apa along with Dr Perween Hasan, Tamanna Khan Popy and myself trooped over to Sirajganj for our first meeting with Bangladesh's war heroines, our Birangona sisters, under this organization.
Our intention was to document and visibilize women's histories of the 1971 war but at this introductory meeting with 21 Birangonas, now well into mid-life, we could not deny the urgency of their medical and financial needs.
Over the last four decades they had suffered many levels of persecution, they had been abandoned by their families and made into social pariahs. This was the first time any of us had seen tears brimming over in Ruby Apa's eyes as she walked out of the room several times during that encounter.
Later when she recounted the meeting in Naripokkho, she pointed out how the behaviour of our Birangona sisters was singularly dignified, they did not ask for or expect anything from us and when one person spoke, the others listened with a quiet empathy that was palpable in their entire mien.
For Ruby apa the greater good was always at the core of her raison d'être and she had a way of bringing people together whenever the cause was bigger than personal or organizational capacity.
At Naripokkho we believe women's rights can only be realized through policy and social movements. Our movement is not a charitable one, but that meeting with our Birangona sisters made it plain, we could not wait for legislative changes to turn in their favour, we had to act immediately to address their individual needs.
She helped us reach out to Bangladeshi business women in order to raise funds for our Birangona sisters and when we pushed aside ideological differences to collaborate on policy with other organizations, she felt more at ease.
My sister Firdous was recently reminiscing about how it was Ruby apa who put her foot down when arguments ensued in Naripokkho over how to achieve all this. She was irritated with all the overthinking and sternly told us to JUST START.
It struck me that those two words somehow sum up Ruby apa's general attitude in life: if no one else is addressing a recognisably urgent need, then it becomes our moral imperative to get on with it!
Safia Azim is a member of Naripokkho, a psychologist by training, and a self-taught photographer.
