mokshpath

2025, Mashru fabric (100% silk front, 100% cotton back), indigo and turmeric dye, alum, salt sack, plastic washed up on salt pan, climbing rope, organza, acacia seeds, lime leaves, rose buds, black salt, rock salt, pink peppercorns, mother of pearl coins, fishing line, gauze, kumkum (vermillion), 5.5m x 4m

Mokshapat, meaning Path to Liberation, is a tapestry on Mashru, a single weave of pure silk on one side and pure cotton on the other. Mashru was invented as a trick, so muslims could continue to wear the gleam of silk without disobeying the Quran, which forbids silk from touching skin. The material now comes to symbolise a unity between Hindu and Muslim weavers, a friendship forgotten in the recent decades of communal violences. The word Mashru means “permitted” (from mashry in Arabic) and “mixture” (from misry in Sanskrit). The tapestry mends the partition and fragmentation created by the salt hedge, a colonial barrier intended to suppress the ingress of salt, which was colloquially called the ‘permit line’. Instead, it insists on the same difference.

The tapestry - while referring to the film the hedge of halomancy, the smugglers that climbed it and the courtesan’s haveli with three holes - is a boundary, a membrane, a unity of duality. It is loosely based on the board game, Mokshapat, brought to England from India in 1890, (re)christened as ‘snakes and ladders’.  The original game was used as a divination tool with dice, charting the different paths towards enlightenment (or entrapment in eternal cycles of rebirth). The British adapted these Indian philosophies to Victorian moral quotients. The tapestry upturns the idea of liberation as based on karma. Rather, its sutures suggest that freedom may be found in repair. When we consider the self as the other, the snake might help us off the ladder. 

Mokshapat was commissioned by Tate Britain for Art Now: Hylozoic/Desires 2025. 

Woven by Sarfuddin Sheikh and Samim Bano

Dyed by Nasir I Khatri

With thanks to Shalini Singh and Devesh Danai

Embroidery and Embellishments by Himali Singh Soin, David Soin Tappeser and Annika Thiems