Life, after Life: Textile Crafts in India and Communities of Practice

History of Textile Crafts in India and its Complexities

The Special Issue was conceptualized in/from India because of and at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 that overturned the equilibrium of lives and livelihoods in every community in the world, with the second wave in 2021 being especially tragic for India. As some of us debated the consequences of lock down, virtual commuting, and work from home on mental health, we also remained acutely aware that this opportunity was not available to all. The diminishing livelihood of people, whose domestic and work lives were structured around organized labor networks involving on-site, collaborative work, with very specialized equipment and materials, was borne out in stark relief. India saw one the “largest human displacement that the Indian subcontinent has seen since the India-Pakistan Partition in 1947,” as people involved in contract work (also known as waged labor) in cities were abruptly laid off, and many embarked upon very difficult journeys (often unassisted by any private or governmental aid) to their hometowns, seeking refuge, safety, and above all, dignity (Bansal 2021, 54). At the same time, people and communities engaged in various creative industries, especially traditional textile crafts in India, struggled to make ends meet. As textile goods and services were not considered essential services, the textile industry at large as well as the associated artisanal communities were adversely affected (Kanupriya 2021).

Textile traditions of India is a vast and complex cultural, historical, and political domain. To understand to the cultural history of Indian fabrics, the words of Pupul Jayakar (in the 1956 publication titled Textiles and Ornaments of India, of the 1955 exhibition at MOMA) are particularly evocative, as she explained that “textiles have rarely been concerned with fashion or individual separateness and uniqueness; rather, garments have always been only one part of a complex ritual of life, one aspect of a preordained milieu in which man [sic] is born, grows to stature, and dies (1956, 15).” Jayakar noted this tradition was developed through “generations of unconscious creative impulse,” in “hereditary guilds” that upheld the “integration of creative endeavors with livelihood,” wherein “each productive act was spontaneously linked with the stream of man’s [sic] life, a dynamic symbol of man’s [sic] endeavor to express universal human emotions and interests (15–16).” The immense geographical/regional diversity within this tradition, for the purposes of the Special Issue, may be classified into four categories. First is a set of techniques of production of textile, texture, motif, which involves processes of weaving, dyeing, painting, printing, embroidering and so on. Second is dress and clothing, and what we are calling adornment practices concerning the transformation of the body into a “cultural artifact,” with respect to age, gender, class, caste, ritual, and climate. Third is practice of art in textile media, which includes art forms like the Pattachitra of Bengal and Odisha, the Phad scroll painting of Rajasthan, and Mata ni Pachedi cloth painting of Gujarat (Nair 2018). Fourth, is the use of textile in objects of everyday use and spaces of dwelling, which form an extension of self into the world.

Textile traditions in India have a troubled history, within the context of trade and subsequently, colonial rule. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy explain how the manufacturing and trade of Indian textiles created a robust intra-Asian, and eventually a “global network (2009, 6).” However, with the growing involvement and power of the British East India Company, this changed. Weavers who once worked as “independent artisans…in a buyer’s market based on price and not as waged workers” became more vulnerable as their bargaining powers were truncated (Subramanian 2018, 58, 59). By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, East India Company became less invested in textile trade, as “exports of low-cost fabric and imposing tariffs on imports of Indian cloth enabled Britain’s textile industry to grow rapidly but severely hampered the development of India’s own industry (Subramanian 2018, 71; Victoria and Albert Museum 2016).” The seriousness of this was also captured in Karl Marx’s 1853 article titled “The British Rule in India,” which condemned the colonial rule for “attack on the decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics” and for destroying the “union between agriculture and manufacturing industry (Marx 1853/2010, 128).” After India gained independence, the government took steps to ensure that textile traditions are protected as well as revived—through the establishment of the All India Handloom Board (1952) to encourage textile crafts; National Institute of Design (1961) to assist in the modernization of this tradition; and National Museum and the National Museum of Art for preservation of cultural heritage (Wheeler Jayakar 1956).

To understand the traditional textile crafts in India today, however, we need to confront the politics of our anthropological gaze, and the tendency to romanticize ideas of authenticity and continuity of crafts, on behalf of “others.” Ken Botnick and Ira Raja correctly argue that “we in the West fetishize the object, while in the developing world we romanticize the humble craftsman and his [sic] poor condition,” while there is unwillingness to look “past the artifact (as either fetish or commodity) (2011, 43).” We need to be objectively aware of the real conditions of the craftsperson. To this end, Timothy J Scrase mounts an excellent critique of contemporary artisanal culture, as he brings focus to the already “precarious, fractured and marginalized existence” of artisanal communities (2003, 449). Scrase argues that “despite the West’s fluctuating interest in all things “ethnic,” “traditional” and “different,” the daily life of the Third World artisan remains one of struggle, poverty and exploitation,” due to low pay, rising cost of materials, relentless commodification, entrenchment of gender divide and discrimination, increasing competition in a globalized economy and a market that is flooded with cheaper, mass-produced alternatives (2003). The already fragile position of these communities is worsened due to disasters like the current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as those in the recent past such as the 2001 Bhuj earthquake; the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami; the 2018, 2019 Kerala floods; and the invisible but very real global financial crisis of 2007–2009 that impacted the trade and export of handicrafts (Imtinungsang Jamir 2020).

Life, after Life

While disasters are events, trauma is a substantive way to describe the effects of disaster. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue: “Trauma has become a major signifier of our age. It is our normal means of relating present suffering to past violence. It is the scar that a tragic event leaves on an individual victim or a witness…It is also the collective imprint on a group of a historical experience that may have occurred decades, generations, or even centuries ago (2011, xi).” It is also “unheralded and unprecedented (Lahoud 2010, 17).” Adrian Lahoud explains how trauma is the articulation of something that it fundamentally new, unsupported by any previous experience, and the past is no longer reliable a “test for the future.” Such events arrive “unrecognisably and without warning, an inassimilable event that shatters the very coordinates of our experiential landscape, leaving us adrift on a sea of excessive sensation. In the moment of trauma, you are exiled from your own psychic landscape, a foreign intruder in an unfamiliar land (17).” Traumatic events tend to erase not just physical infrastructure but also social and emotional infrastructure, often irrevocably, which seriously affect the continuity of communities. These events may happen abruptly, or they may happen over a period of time, of which colonization is one which has had enduring effects (Lloyd 2000, 214; Lazali 2021).

Even as communities are rebuilt, from within and without, rebuilding remains a complex premise. For many reasons, it may be to an image different to the original identity. First, competing interests of stakeholders, who may be external to the communities with different priorities need to be negotiated. Second, craft traditions are not inert and unchanging, and with disaster related migrations, these traditions may get productively contaminated over time, imparting existing traditions with a sense of hybridity, and sustaining the identity and the integrity of multiple traditions. Third, existing craft traditions may transform to register and recall the trauma, such as the work of Ambika Devi, an award-winning artist from Rashidpur Bihar whose Madhubani paintings show sacred figures wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing at village markets. Furthermore, Maru Meghval women artists of Kutch, Gujarat who collaborated with Nina Sabnani to transform their experience of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in the form of narrative scrolls made with applique and embroidery (Sabnani and Frater 2012). Fourth, new craft traditions (and maybe even new communities of practice) may emerge because of disasters, such as the Tsunamika dolls made of cloth scraps as a reparative response to the devastation brought about by the tsunami. With some of these issues in mind, we envisioned the Special Issue, which was fundamentally focused on discovering stories of emotional, economic, social, and physical resilience—a sentiment that is registered in the title Life, after Life: Textile Crafts in India and Communities of Practice.

The Fabric of Resilience

As our contributors remind us, textile artifacts are significant as a cultural register and archive, which absorb, aid, remember, represent responses to traumatic events. Recalling the tumultuous times of late nineteenth century Bengal, Debarati Sarkar’s “Glimpses of Comfort: Embroidering through the Changing World of Late-Colonial Bengal” is a moving account of kantha embroideries—women’s art produced within the domestic space, intersecting with the public and political life. Kantha, argued Sarkar, is a “reparative site,” which not only repairs old fabric and gives them new life, but it is also a vehicle of recuperation, and “self-making and world building” through embodied storytelling. Building further on the idea of domestic textile artifacts made from old and waste fabric and storytelling, Shovit Dasgupta’s “The Story of The Karuna Textile Doll” is a cultural history of an NGO led initiative, which was to support women in the face of loss of livelihood. Embodying the essence of karuna (empathy and compassion), these dolls, which were intended as keepsakes and as a representation of regional craft and cultural identity of the different states in India, served to further the message of resilience and hope. Other textile artifacts like the cloth mask, a ubiquitous symbol of the pandemic, has become a narrative opportunity, after its initial introduction as a purely functional “gate pass,” and a pre-condition for civic presence. Nina Sabnani’s “Masked Narratives: Manifestations of a Disaster” suggests that that which masks also tells a story, of the invisibility of the virus, and of a pandemic that has not ended. Sabnani demonstrates that artisans from different regions have used the mask as their new canvas, employing metaphysics and traditional iconography to produce new meanings—creating public awareness on one hand, and mediating grief, anxiety, and fear, on the other.

The issue also focuses on the village of Bagru, Rajasthan, which is internationally known for its natural plant based dyeing process, and hand wood block printing (Needleman 2018). Oinam Bedajit Meitei and Tanveer Ahemad’s “Communication and Challenges of Capacity Development: A Case study of Bagru Hand Block Printing” brings focus to the intergenerational wealth of tacit knowledge and skill in the Chippa community, and the fact that the craft and the community has been under threat since the 1970s. This has now worsened due to systemic issues like labor relations that are not pro artisan, and mechanization of print making processes, which has made available cheaper alternatives. Meitei and Ahemad highlight the ethical role of the higher education industry (in this instance Manipal University Jaipur), as a facilitator of relationship building between Bagru craftpersons and other important organizations. They highlight the importance of participatory communication, as a strategic path to awareness, empowerment, change, and capacity development. Pratibha Mishra’s Dialogue, “Story of Pharad: In the words of the Artisan,” casts a slightly different light on this, as it captures the conversations Mishra has had with the Titanwala family in Bagru during the pandemic. Mishra’s conversations reveal that the lockdown brought not just adversity, but also the time and space to return and experiment with older methods of dyeing and printing, and even reinstate older motifs.

While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted livelihoods, they also activated the structuring of new communities, and relational ways of managing disasters. Mahfooz Alam’s quantification of the impact of the pandemic on the carpet industry in India in “Economic Effects of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Indian Carpet Industry Policy” is timely and eye opening, not just in terms of the sheer size of the industry that is reliant on migrant labor, but also in terms of glaring gaps in policy with respect to rights of the workers. Malavica Shreewatsav and Vaseem Anjum Sheriff’s “Coping COVID-19 Karur in the Past, through the Present and into the Future” is a pandemic micro-history of Karur, a historic town in Tamil Nadu in the south of India, known for its handloom products and which has recently become an important textile hub. Through their many case studies, Shreewatsav and Sheriff highlight the resilience of Karur, as a town, as communities, and as people, who not only rose to the national challenge of producing PPE kits and masks but who also supported each other, collaborated, and adapted to the changing nature of their own textile work. Amishi Vadgama’s “The New Normal: Textile crafts in India amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic” recounts a similar tale of resilience in Kutch in the face of Bhuj earthquake (26 January 2001). The village of Dhamadka (known for its ajrakh production) was destroyed, and as it could not be reconstructed quickly due to constant aftershocks, the village was rebuilt twenty-five kilometers away, through international funding as Ajrakhpur. The Kutch artisans rebuilt their craft even stronger after the quake, and not unlike the Titanwala family in Bagru, they too faced the pandemic lockdowns head-on. While some used the time to experiment with the new patterns, others took the time to further explore natural dyes.

Systemic stresses on communities involved in textile crafts are ever present, but they are also often invisible. Highlighting some of the issues foregrounded by Scrase, Shubha Mahajan’s “Challenges and Scope of Development: A Case Study of Paithani Weavers of Maharashtra (India)” sheds light on the complex weaving process of the Paithani sari, as well as the collaborative and interconnected nature of these processes, and the various skilled communities involved in the production of a single sari. Mahajan argues that these communities, which are part of an informal economy and do not have creditworthiness for financial institutions, struggled even more after the introduction of demonetization (2016) and Goods and Services Tax (2017). These issues are further highlighted in Vaibbhavi Pruthviraj Ranavaade’s “Sustainable Craft Design Systems for Handloom Weavers,” where she makes an excellent point about the need for communicating textile processes and authenticity, in support of slow fashion and consumers making mindful choices that respect and value craft-based work. Ranavaade proposes a systems-based approach to ensure that the communities involved in handlooms (weavers, and all other allied people and artisans in the handloom value chain have a sustainable livelihood. The idea of livelihood is furthered through Toolika Gupta’s paper “Traditional Woolen Namda (Felted fabrics) from Tonk, Rajasthan,” which looks at the possibility of giving the de-contextualized craft of felting a new life and creating new craft communities that will drive women’s empowerment and financial independence. In doing so, Gupta suggests something quite unconventional, which is that while craft is sustained by intergenerational communities of practice, it is possible (as well as desirable) to enable the establishment of new, agile craft communities that will collaborate with the market through greater product innovation and diversification.

The Special Issue focused on textile crafts in India because craft economy in India is “second only to agriculture in the provision of livelihoods,” and textiles “as an area of employment has been particularly significant (Shrivastava 2018, 3).” The pressures on traditional textile crafts in India have a long history, dating back to colonization, and subsequently industrialization. Traditional textiles are also positioned in an unregulated and globalized market marred by the proliferation of fake craft products, and lack of support at the government level, which manifests as lack of data on the size of the crafts industry, and identification of crafts as an informal economy that remains unsupported by financial and policy interventions (Shrivastava 2018). These systemic stresses are worsened by natural disasters. The rebuilding of lives and livelihoods takes years, and often people choose to not return to their previous life and work.

Almost all the stories told by the contributors to this Special Issue emphasize that the process of healing from traumatic events is always relational and collaborative. Such events may give rise to new cultural artifacts that take on the role of storytelling. It is also argued that the idea of “disaster preparedness” is in fact embedded within the reality of having experienced such events and being agile in adapting to change. The contributions not only highlight the glaring policy gaps in government, but they also bring focus to the ethical role of higher education institutions (HEI) in articulating responsible pedagogies, and that of HEIs and non-government organizations as facilitators of networks of information and resources. The contributions also make visible the creative labor, the interconnected communities, and the many minds and hands involved in the making of a single artifact. And above all, the generosity of detail in many of the papers—of the mundane, the procedural, the tedious, the factual, the descriptive—does well to challenge the elite romanticization of creative handwork.

Postscript

As the Editor of this Special Issue, I found an interesting, if unconventional, trajectory to my scholarship on John Ruskin’s theory of creative labor, and textile and architecture. Ruskin’s interest in textile, dress, and drapery; his argument that creative work was the expression of the body, soul, and intellect, all working together; and imperfection as a critique of the machine, and the machined, always remained in the background. I am immensely indebted to Catherine Harper for her intellectual and emotional support and encouragement, as we struggled to stay optimistic during the tragic second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India; all reviewers for their timely, insightful, and constructive comments and feedback, which really enriched the scholarship; and above all, the authors who persisted through this difficult period to shape their valuable scholarly contributions, which makes this issue historically significant as well as poignant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anuradha Chatterjee

Anuradha Chatterjee is an Indian-born Australian feminist academic practitioner in architecture and design based in Australia and India. She has Dip. Arch from TVB School of Habitat Studies (1998), Master of Architecture (History and Theory of Architecture, 2000), and PhD in Built Environment (2008) from the University of New South Wales. For close to two decades, Chatterjee has taught at and has held leadership positions in premier higher education institutions in Australia (University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, University of Tasmania, and University of South Australia); China (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University); and India (Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, and Pearl Academy). She was the first Dean Academics at Avani Institute of Design; and she is the Dean of the Faculty of Design, Manipal University Jaipur. Chatterjee is an internationally known scholar who has published three books - Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques, and Practices in Art, Architecture, and Design (Cambridge Scholars Publishing); Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney (Copal Publishing); and John Ruskin and The Fabric of Architecture (Routledge) - and is the Area Editor (Asia) for fourth publication, The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015, eds Karen Burns and Lori Brown (Bloomsbury, April 2022). [email protected]