Woman's head cover

Embroidered textiles such as this, called phulkari (“flower embroidery”), are traditional to the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities of modern India and Pakistan’s Punjab region. The embroidery’s characteristic look comes from untwisted silk floss applied in a straight stitch in many different floral and geometric patterns. These cotton textiles were made by women as head coverings or shawls for various rites of passage in a woman’s life: marriage, birth, death, and other ceremonial occasions. Typically, a girl’s grandmother, mother, or mother-in-law would embroider a phulkari for her bridal trousseau. It is a dying art today.

Lively motifs drawn from everyday village life are distinctive to phulkari of the eastern Punjab region. Here we see a train, wrestlers, a water carrier, a chaupar (Parcheesi) gameboard, children at play, riders on an elephant, a camel, and a horse, along with domestic animals, peacocks, and other birds.