Course Reflection

‘Reading Cloth’ as a course has given me a glimpse of how to read information, analyse it and draw up my own assumptions and conclusions. It has taught me to not only use websites as sources of information but also read up articles by scholars, look at museum collections and of course books which are more reliable sources. The lectures carried out in each class were informative and made me not only retain the knowledge but also raise the questions - WHY, WHEN, HOW, WHAT and WHO. With my first attempt at reading a cloth, I was not fully aware of how to carry out the process. All I managed to gain was a basic understanding of the techniques, material and community behind its creation, without really delving deeper into its history, origin, how the materials were procured, how the techniques were learnt etc. With the second attempt, I looked at the Balotra block printing technique. Here I looked and studied the motifs and their meanings as well as the techniques and where the raw materials came from. In my third attempt at reading a cloth I narrowed it down to one particular cloth from a collection, instead of a technique. I could see an improvement in my methods of research. I raised questions from the information that I found and looked up multiple sources to back up my assumptions. Though I still see scope in asking more questions until I am completely exhausted of information on the topic, I see a change in my methods of extracting information and I have gained a new outlook on the concept of reading cloth.