 This show we put together is a group of barks and vulgaris from my collection. They show the wedding shawls and other shawls which were embroidered by women in Punjab and most of them were done pre-petitions, so pre-1947. We don't have records of who actually made a lot of these pieces because they were made by women as domestic embroidery, but luckily we have sort of records of various shows which were taking place in India at the time of the show in 1881-82 in Lahore on Arts of Punjab and they actually list the makers who made various objects. So from that we can see from the list a lot of women made them and also some men embroidered them. It's also interesting to see how women are described who are the makers. They're listed as a woman, Punjabi woman, female, Dhola's wife and so forth. Also it's really interesting to see what we learn from these domestic embroideries about role of women in 19th century India because globally a lot of working women's lives were not recorded anywhere, so they provide a really important record of what women were seeing around them, what they were embroidering, what they were choosing to put on the embroideries they were making for themselves, for their families. As a lot of them were made for weddings, so we see a lot of wedding jewellery being put on them and in the show we've actually installed some of the gold nuts which are embroidered on a number of the bags and also you see the development of industrial revolution taking place. There are some with trains depicted on them and steam engines, so those provide an amazing visual record of what was happening in India in 19th century. Another interesting element of designs in bags and polkaries are the nazar booty. Nazar basically means something towards of the evil eye. So the way it's depicted in bags and polkaries is often you would get even a slight change of the stitch or a block of color which is totally different to the rest. For example there's one in the show, the whole ground is golden, but there's one block of blue and the another one we've got in display in a cabinet where they put some beads, glass beads, so you have that quite important element about making it not perfect so nothing should be perfect which is very interesting part of the whole designs and aesthetics of bags. A lot of the museums in the West made their collections in 19th century and often they were made by male curators going out to India and other parts of the world and buying objects. So they could only buy things that were on the market and they had no access to domestic embroidery and as these are domestic embroideries I don't think most of them would have even seen some of these wonderful pieces. So we see these gaps in museum collections of domestic embroidery but it's really important that if we're going to tell a story of community, what they were doing, what they were using, that we represent the whole picture and also show the work that women and young girls were doing at the time. So it's really beautiful and poignant to me to see that some of the pieces that have survived for well over a hundred years whereas women have used needle to put their hopes and dreams onto the fabric using silk.