My friend Neelanjana Ghosh, Khuku,passed away today, after a very brief illness. Even as I write these words, it feels unreal, as if she has merely stepped away for a moment, perhaps into another room filled with fabrics, books, and sketches of trees that she would later bring to life in kantha stitches.
I first met Neelanjana in Santiniketan, through my cousin, Premananda. I was then in my first year at St. Xavier’s College. She was finishing her Master’s in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, and even in those early days, she possessed a luminous mind; sharp, curious, and endlessly generous with what she knew.
It was Neelanjana who first introduced me to world literature beyond the English canon. She opened doors to African writers, Spanish poets, and the rich expanse of global voices. I remember a long, passionate session with Professor Manabendra Mukherjee on Wole Soyinka; she had taken me along, insisting that I must listen, that the world is wider than we imagine. It was an initiation into ideas, art, and empathy.
When she married the filmmaker Gautam Ghosh in 1978, her life took a new turn. She became deeply involved in costume design for films, translating her literary and artistic sensibility into fabric and form. What she created was never mere clothing; it was character and narrative woven together, each piece telling a quiet story.
But cinema was only one part of her creative journey. The other, perhaps even more profound, was her lifelong devotion to the kantha stitch tradition, a legacy she had inherited from her mother, Sreelata Sarkar. What began as a domestic craft, she turned into both art and social mission.
Through workshops and collectives, she gathered women, mostly from middle-class households and encouraged them to find purpose, dignity, and joy in their work. Under her gentle guidance, what might have been a modest livelihood became a form of expression. Yet her own kanthas transcended the boundaries of craft; they were artworks in themselves.
The Tree of Life fascinated her. She would return to it again and again: reimagining it, unbinding it, giving it new form and meaning. In her work, the tree was never static. It breathed, branched, and connected; its roots deep in tradition, its leaves touching the sky. To her, it symbolized continuity, creation, and compassion; the eternal rhythm of life.
Her early education at Visvabharati University had shaped much of that sensibility. The open skies of Santiniketan, the rustling sal trees, the quiet harmony of art and nature, they lived within her. She carried that spirit wherever she went.
Even as illness came suddenly and took her away, I cannot think of her as gone. Her stitches remain, in the soft folds of old kanthas, in the shimmering textures of films, in the minds of the women she empowered and in the hearts of those who learned from her.
For me, she remains that luminous presence from Santiniketan days; the young woman with bright eyes, a notebook under her arm, speaking passionately of Soyinka, Neruda, and Lorca. She had the rare gift of transforming everything she touched: fabric, word, or life into art.
Today, I say farewell not in grief alone but in gratitude.For the worlds she opened to me. For the tree she planted in so many hearts. And for reminding me, always, that life, like art, must grow, evolve and give back.
May your spirit continue to bloom in the eternal tree you so loved.