Entertainment is usually associated with art but sometimes the use of art leads to empowerment. This piece focuses on how art can be used to create change in the lives of women who are in need of assistance. This impact occurred in Dhaka, Bangladesh by Surayia Rahman. Surayia always loved art, it was the one thing she excelled at while in school and her one true passion. Although she was unable to attend art school, she continued to work on her own. Married at the age of 17, she moved to Dhaka from her hometown Kolkata, India, with her husband and her work would catch the eye of those who encountered her pieces.
Surayia’s art gets noticed while working as the staff artist for the Women Voluntary Association, she painted, embroidered and knitted, created wooden dolls among making other pieces. Her work led her to be part of the Canadian NGO, Skill Development for Under-privileged Women (SDUW) where her art was used as the foundation to assist and empower women. More than 200 women were employed through the organization, the women learning the traditional embroidery Bengal style of kantha to bring life to Surayia’s paintings. Unfortunately after working with the Canadian project for four years, the relationship between the SDUW and Surayia deteriorated, which created a new path for her to establish her own organization, Arshi (“mirror” in Bengali).
The women who were part of SDUW, where the pieces created with Surayia were their source of income joined Arshi as SDUW crumbled without Surayia. Through word of mouth, women from all over went to Arshi looking for a means to help themselves. Whenever a piece was completed, the names of the women who worked on it was placed on it along with Surayis’s name. From 1986 to 2008, Surayia assisted hundreds of women through her art, and as her health deteriorated she wanted the organization to live on and ended up giving her organization and designs to the Selisian Sisters in Dhaka. The Selisian Sisters continue Surayia’s work, creating her designs into tapestries and assisting the women of Arshi.
There are various means of empowering women and sometimes it is tapping into a talent that we already have. The women of Arshi were able to earn a steady income, using what they earned to invest in rice cultivation, buy land, and build homes for themselves, among other things. A needle and a thread established a means for them to be independent. Hundreds of women in Bangladesh were impacted by the love of art by one woman, sometimes it is the most unexpected love that leads to change.
If you would like to learn more about Surayia Rahman and her work:
http://www.handeyemagazine.com/content/accidental-saint
http://newber.com/anil/journal/myfiles/short-bio-surayia-rahman-ameneh-ispahani.pdf