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ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on recent developments in the pedagogy of craftspeople. Beginning with an overview of post-Independence national design institutions, the essay focuses on more recent textile craft schools and training centres for hereditary and new craftspeople. These are staffed and often managed by hereditary craftspeople. Corporate philanthropy at various scales funds these institutions. Students learn to analyse hereditary craft, make it contemporary, learn about marketing and business practices. These organisations mark a shift in the terms set by colonial, statist and welfarist approaches to craft. Notions of ‘authenticity’ recede as pedagogy becomes dialogic and focuses on innovation. This creates a contingent sovereignty based on recognition and entrepreneurship. This study allows us to offer an art history of contemporary textile craft and an ethnography of the way gender, community, practice, labour, market and philanthropy are configured in such learning programmes.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. de Silva, “Women, Handicrafts, and Entrepreneurship in the Postcolonial World.”
2. WomenWeave website: https://www.womenweave.org/our-women-vision.
3. Rao and Shulman, A Poem at the Right Moment, 49.
4. For rich discussions of colonial-era craft and design, see Mathur, India by Design; Dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty; and McGowan, Crafting the Nation.
5. Lutgendorf, “Chai Why?”.
6. Deshpande, Contemporary India, 64–65.
7. “Mitra suggests that Gandhi’s original vision of trusteeship … was a challenge to contemporary concepts of private property and competition. Arundhati Roy, in contrast, in her introduction of B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste suggests that Gandhi was actually ‘capitalist’ in his orientation, given that though he did sound like a socialist, he did at no point ‘ever seriously criticize or confront an Indian industrialist of the landed aristocracy’. See Godfrey, Branigan and Khan, ‘Old and New Forms of Giving,” 686.
8. For a detailed discussion over the nuances of economic policy and the textile industry, before and after liberalisation, see Oberoi, The Textile Industry in India.
9. McGowan, Crafting the Nation, 7.
10. Williamson, “Modern Architecture and Capitalist Patronage in Ahmedabad,” India 1947–1969. passim for a detailed history of how the city’s textile barons configured their patronage of tradition and modern architecture.
11. “The main axis around which hegemony is built and which also explains the peculiar centrality of the middle class-is the developmental state. In the early years of independence, the transfer of legitimacy, power, and moral prestige from the middle-class leaders of the freedom movement to the masters of the newly autonomous state was almost seamless. As is well known, conditions of colonial backwardness produced a remarkably inclusive consensus on the need for state-led, industry-based investment programs on a massive scale.” Deshpande, Contemporary India: A Sociological View, 140.
12. See McGowan, “Mothers and Godmothers of Crafts.” These women’s positions were also vulnerable to masculinist party politics.
13. They were asked to retrieve old designs, such as disused woodblocks or paradoxically, when pressured to industrialise, adopt power looms in areas without adequate electricity The artist Manu Parekh, who worked for Weavers’ Service Centre till 1975 and then worked for Handicraft Handloom Export Corporation till 1989, recounted in conversations with Annapurna Garimella in 2008–2009 how he saw a bundle of wood blocks in an attic at a printer’s house in Bagru, Rajasthan and once they pulled it down, he was thrilled by their quality and encouraged the printer or chippa to reuse them. This experience of rediscovering craft in the craftsperson’s world happened many times during his 25 years of working at the Weavers service Centre. In the 1970s and 1980s, at Bhagalpur, Bihar, weavers struggled between the vagaries of electrical power and the market. For example, see Jha, “After the Carnage: Relief and Rehabilitation in Bhagalpur,” 20. Since 2008, weavers have been committing suicide in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu (https://www.dw.com/en/the-art-of-weaving-dies-a-slow-death-in-india/a-6686399).
14. See McGowan, ‘Mothers and Godmothers of Crafts,’ for a discussion of how Jayakar and others gained positions in the handicraft sector as it was especially suited for women, who knew patterns of domestic consumption better.
15. Bhatt, “Baua Devi,” Vernacular, in the Contemporary 2, 91–92. She painted ‘Bhaskar Kulkarni Taking a Photograph of Villagers,’ (2005, Devi Art Foundation) to memorialise this moment.
16. See Garimella, “Interview with Manu Parekh,” 65–68, passim.
17. K. G. Subramanyan, The Living Tradition. The modern artist-activist Jagdish Swaminathan was not so much concerned specifically with craft and making but with the status of tribal communities and the terms on which their imagination and art could be contemporary. See Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers.
18. Letter from K.G. Subramanyan to Lola Basu, 6 December 1968. Letter from Subramanyan to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, 25 May 1970. Letter from Subramanyan to Member Secretary, All India Handicrafts Board, 5 May 1972. These are a few examples accessible in the AAA archive. https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/k-letters-and-correspondence
19. See Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, on the women’s question and tradition.
20. There were exceptions. See Garimella, “Interview with Manu Parekh,” where he discusses the way women like Sita Devi and Baua Devi became Madhubani artists. Women historically painted on houses but with Kulkarni and Parekh’s facilitation, they incorporated paper into their repertoire.
21. Deshpande, Contemporary India, 140.
22. Ibid.
23. For the purposes of this essay, we are not deeply engaging with the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University’s history of faculty and students interacting with craftspeople. FFA’s engagement with craftspeople and craft was to construct them as ‘living tradition.’ The artist-teachers K.G. Subramanyan, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Jyoti Bhatt were oriented to making craft available as a resource, in terms of imagery, skills, materials, ideas and identity in shaping students’ individual visual languages and solving artistic problems. The new craft schools do not appropriate craft knowledge in this dislocating fashion.
24. Da Costa, “Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India,” 8.
25. Balaram, “Design Pedagogy in India: A Perspective,” 17.
26. Ibid., 12. The written text for him refers to both the classical and the modern while the orality of the caste-community stands for the vernacular.
27. The 2009 Abbeville Press publication, Handmade in India by Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan, a former NID faculty, is a compilation of student documentation on crafts which circulates globally and functions as a ready reckoner for anyone seeking to find crafts to work with. The publication embodies the museological and instrumental approach of NID pedagogy.
28. Balaram, 20–21.
29. Garimella in conversation with Manu Parekh.
30. National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), form one type. NIFT’s program for artisans and children of artisans was announced in 2021. NIFT is different. Its programs are geared to train personnel that can be employed in different sectors of the fashion industry. The curriculum incorporates the study of different handicrafts and handlooms and the use of traditional craft skills and materials. Following NID, students conceptualise and design their products based on a focused study of a Craft Cluster. A government education institution, it reserves seats for Other Backward Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Castes. In 2021, it began a program for ‘Artisans and Children of Artisans.’ It is unclear whether hereditary crafts people are meant to come as a living Craft Cluster and facilitate the promotion of crafts or they are meant to leave their craft behind and enter product development. The lack of clarity represents any pedagogy that celebrates craft without acknowledging that the craftsperson is not just an instrument of inherited design but has full agency in the creative process. This engagement with the artisans and children of the artisans intersects with the Government of India campaign of Make in India project.
31. Another example of such a project is the Kalhath Institute’s artist residency with T. Venkanna, facilitated by and shown at Mumbai’s Gallery Maskara in February 2022. https://gallerymaskara.com/exhibition/i-am/overview, https://www.facebook.com/KalhathInstitute/
32. https://rotaryclubofbombay.org/karishma-swali-and-monica-shah-founders-chanakya-school-of-craft/
33. The interview does not specify which industries are visited by students.
34. https://www.vogue.in/fashion/content/dior-and-indian-artists-madhvi-and-manu-parekh-came-together-for-the-most-exciting-fashion-collaboration-of-2022. https://news.artnet.com/style/dior-haute-couture-ss22–2065759
35. Jean inherited a grand legacy and a lineage of 19th-century French fine embroidery from his grandfather, Albert Lesage, and father François.
36. Garimella, “A Pedagogy of Breath and Posture,”
37. Kumar, “Vastrakala,”
39. WomenWeave. https://www.womenweave.org/our-women-vision.
40. Ibid.
41. Handloom School. http://www.thehandloomschool.org/page/aifw-2017.
43. Akaaro, Antar-Agni, Eka, 11.11/Eleven Eleven, Good Earth, Neeru Kumar, Nicobar, Pero, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Rohit Bal, Sanjay Garg, Suket Dhir and Urvashi Kaur. http://www.thehandloomschool.org/page/aifw-2017.
44. Sayan Chanda. https://www.sayanchanda.com/about-cv; Neha Lad website: https://nehalad.com/pages/about.
45. The sugar baron of the Western India, and an educationist Shri Karamshi Jethabhai Somaiya founded the K.J. Somaiya Trust that established and supports 34 educational institutions. Somaiya Kala Vidya is the latest initiative of the Somaiya Trust, to educate and empower the Kutch artisans.
47. Garimella, “Crafting a God, Living a Tradition,”
48. Historically all craft is an ensemble, borrowing from Annapurna Mamidipudi ’s idea of ‘the handloom ensemble’ which includes cotton and silk farmers, spinners, washerman, middlemen, shops, consumers and so on. Any pedagogy, even ones that seeks to augment the sovereignty of artists, cannot encompass an entire ensemble in fragmented markets.
49. Judy Frater does recognise that ‘craft is a family creation; it can’t really be done by individuals alone’. See her post at https://www.instagram.com/p/ChTpysfvWwL/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=. The goal would be to better incorporate this reality into the pedagogy of the individual artisan-designer.
50. The promotion of the craftsperson-designer or artisan-designer is gaining traction. See the NID-trained textile designer and curator Mayank Mansingh Kaul’s recent interview: https://lifestyle.livemint.com/news/talking-point/future-of-textiles-the-craftsperson-designer-is-here-111660399510916.html. Interestingly, he does not comment on the Handloom School or Somaiya Kala Vidya though he mentions Chanakya School of Craft.
51. Tolerance gains political teeth, makes intercultural understanding an obligation, not an option, and recognises the independent value of dignity separate from the idea of redistribution. Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” 62–67.
52. Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs A.
53. See the account of one bandhani family’s evolving connection to SKV on one hand and their craft on the other. https://www.instagram.com/p/ChWMG8ovROC/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
54. See the post on weaver and HS graduate Monika Verma, https://www.instagram.com/p/CgbthGxP5Gj/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
55. Ramaswamy and Osella, “Charity and Philanthropy in South Asia: A preamble,” 1.
56. Bishop, “Philanthrocapitalism: Solving Public Problems through Private Means,” 473–490.
57. Irani, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, 2.
58. Ibid., 3. Frater’s Instagram post (see endnote 49) points out the ‘challenges’ of ‘breaking into markets filled with well established enterprises, and contending with expanding corporate craft ventures’. The CSR initiatives of the Tata Group and the Aditya Birla Group in textile craft stock Taniera and Aadyam, which are commercial ventures. They too use the language of heritage and salvage to elevate their products and programs. See examplehttps://handwoven.aadyam.co.in/
59. The actual amount fluctuates over financial years as national budgets are made.
60. Birla, “C=f(P): The trust, “general public utility”, and charity as a function of profit in India,” 133. She is citing Bansal and Rai, ‘An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility Expenditure in India’
61. https://culanth.org/, the website for the Society of Cultural Anthropology, carries a series ‘Green Capitalism and its Others,’ edited by Ivan Rajković. The editor notes that ‘as the urgency of anthropogenic climate change unfolds in front of us, this collection takes a moment to reflect on the political, socioeconomic, and ethical work done in its name’.
62. Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs A. 24.
63. Ramasamy and Osella. See Chanakya website: https://www.chanakya.in/
64. Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs A. 30.
65. In concluding her discussion on counter-ethics, Pinto turns to the contemporary artist Shazia Sikander’s work ‘to close Mrs A.‘s case by opening it further’, because ‘if counter-ethics has a shape, it is this’ because the closing of a shape is its new opening. Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs A, 208.
66. Kuldova, Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique.
67. Wilson, “Eleven Propositions in Response to the Question,” 7–10, especially Proposition Six on page 9.
68. Li, “Shopping for Change,” 459. He tells us that unlike purchase-triggered philanthropy, consumption-oriented philanthropy removes the consumer product altogether by reformulating the needs and stories of aid recipients as symbolic commodities.