Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

CRAFT: March 21, 1999

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Craft in contemporary design

Geeta Doctor

Contemporary Indian craft has an inexpressible vitality. Like the many heads of Ravana you cannot keep the Indian craft tradition down. No matter how battered the crafts may get, due to poor quality, lack of material, greedy middlemen, unimaginative governmental patronage, the hands and eyes and hearts and minds of the Indian craftsmen and women continue to create small marvels, almost defying reason.

Aditya Dhawan

The fashion for a revival of the craft tradition comes in cycles. The craze for "ethnic" is something that adds an artificial rural touch to our mundane, mechanical lives. Just like Granny's secret recipe for colic, or indigestion, the "chatti-chattai-charpoy" formula of mud pots, grass mats and string beds, are added liberally whenever there is a need to make a statement about tradition being an important part of the way we present ourselves. No hotel lobby, no airport arrival lounge, no MD's grandiose granite-lined waiting room, modern villa masquerading as a farm-house, or designer wedding, could possibly survive without some reference being made to the craft tradition.

If not the urli, or the flat, round, bell metal container from Kerala, with floating marigolds, or a tall kuthuvillaku (oil lamp), there is sure to be a pillar or two, standing on a carved stone pedestal supporting the thin false ceiling, or a decorative wooden lintel from an old family house, or there are the baby cots masquerading as side tables and most popular of all, kitchen utensils, farm implements and bathroom accessories, buffed, polished and exhibited in their pride of place. Indeed, just one brass lota (tumbler), vegetable slicer, or an oil container from the past, will show what a vast change there is from the crafts that were made in the past and that were designed to be used in the daily lives of the people and in the facile imitations of today. There is plenty of craft awareness, but little use for design.

T.Tharani: Crafts Council of India,
Chennai/Wilderfile
Monkey, bamboo roof carving, Nagaland.

There are so many craft fairs, melas, bazaars, festivals and neo-craft villages that are being organised all over the country; so many seminars and workshops where craftspeople are exhibited like live performers in a circus, while scholars enthuse about the glories of a 2000-year-old tradition, that it is not difficult to imagine that crafts are in a period of unlimited popularity. It would not be wrong to say that what we see today is a period of Gothic craft revival. It is part of a rejection of the design tradition that began when Gandhiji's austere mode of homespun values was incorporated with the socialist ideal of making cheap, but well designed objects, in the stark, spare, bare modernist style of the Fifties, for the New India. This led to a period where Khadi furnishing fabrics were over-printed with cubist shapes and scenes of happy village folk going to the well. The furniture which imitated the International Bauhaus style made use of aluminium, plywood, steel pipes and rexine. The two charismatic persons who dominated the crafts scene were Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar. Each of them brought a highly personalised sense of aesthetics to the crafts world. If the one was responsible for re-discovering and documenting the diversity of the Indian craft tradition, the other was able to distil its essence into a finely balanced mixture of the ethereal and the earthy.

Since then contemporary craft design has been in a free fall. There has been a return to the heavy, over-wrought Victorian style of furniture, with hints at Chinnoiserie in the mock Far Eastern motifs that have been made available in the neighbouring shopping emporia of Singapore and Hong Kong. Or the colonial style with Lutyens inspired sofas, leather upholstery, panelled walls, combined with etched glass, imitation Tiffany lamps and windows, wrought iron, or molded metal furniture painted white, crystal and gilt chandeliers, stainless steel and cut-glass accessories. In this context it is not unusual to see a piece of traditional Indian soapstone carved to resemble a chunky piece of Steuben glass.

Courtesy Crafts Council of India,
Chennai/Wilderfile

At its best this mixture of tastes can revitalise a dying craft, as in the case of a famous entrepreneur who was able to take the humble cotton dhurrie, that had been woven for centuries in the villages of Uttar Pradesh and make it a major design statement by a judicious choice of colours, a better combination of the traditional patterns, but most of all by marketing it in the West, as a hand-made product. Since then the Shyam Ahuja line of furnishing accessories has proved how stunning the Indian textile tradition can be when packaged to meet contemporary needs. Not only that but a whole range of floor coverings in jute, sisal, kora grass, and other natural fibres, besides the discovery of other areas in the country that make their own dhurries in cotton, wool and even waste materials, have been part of this trend.

The craft of embroidery, an allied part of the textile wealth of the country has also been reinvigorated by the designers, who have worked with traditional craftsmen. If not the revival of Kashmiri crewel embroidery for tapestry by Rajeev Sethi, who has created a whole range of interesting products with the craft traditions in the area; the Lucknowi type of embroidery work popularised by Laila Tyabji through SEWA; the many strands of needle-work from Gujarat that was popularised by Prabha Shah for a cooperative called "Sohan" and also through Gurjari, the Gujarat State emporium for handicrafts in its early days; the Kantha, or quilt-stitch work from Bengal popularised by Meenakshi Mukherjee, the well known sculptress, the cut-work and patch work from Orissa and the sumptuous zardozi work favoured by fashion designers such as Ritu Kumar and Rohit Bal are just some of the well known success stories.

Kamal Sahai

As Jean Christian, a young French designer who has set up a unit at Chennai for making very exclusive embroidered items to be custom made for his clients in the West, says, "Indian craftsmen are among the best in the world, but patronage is another matter. No one is concerned about quality here. The emphasis is on getting something done very fast at the cheapest price."

Starting with the introduction of "Delhi Blue" by Gurcharan Singh who single handedly revived a centuries old tradition of pottery in the late Fifties, there has been a big growth in the numbers of potters and workshops producing allied crafts that provide distinctive items of every day use. Some of the credit must go to the "Golden Bridge" pottery at Pondicherry, started by Deborah Smith and Ray Meeker. They set the standard. They inspired others along the way and trained aspiring young artists to become potters. More than anything else they showed how you could combine a very high quality product with an affordable price. Since that time there has been a steady growth in the variety and style of ceramic ware, terracotta ware, Kal-chatti, or turned stone-ware from Tamil Nadu, all of which are being made for the table and as household items.

Dinesh Khaana

These are examples taken from just three areas. They serve to demonstrate that crafts need to be given a direction, through the eye of a gifted designer, an artist, or an entrepreneur with vision. It is not enough to allow market forces to shape artistic trends, for there is a tendency for whatever is vulgar and crude to surface, as can be seen from the type of art and craft that is displayed through the numerous government sponsored melas. There has to be a continual upgrading of design, of products and ideas and some way of bringing together the artisan and the user. Without this interaction the result is the proliferation of ugly, dysfunctional craft items that gather dust in the innumerable State handicraft emporia, or in our airport souvenir shops. It is also important to design clasps for silver chains and semi-precious bead necklaces that can be decorative as well as useful. To provide hooks, buttons, hinges, stoppers, threads that do not bleed, buttons, beads, nylon string, and all the other accessories that go into making a craft item something that can beused, rather than kept as a showpiece.

There is also a need to study and evaluate crafts either through a regular publication devoted to Indian crafts or through a system of recognising the skill of the individual as they do in countries like Japan, where a master craftsperson is described as a Living Legend. Though there are certain institutions that recognise the importance of the individual behind the craft, many complain that once a design school graduate has collected all the data and published his or her thesis, once the workshop is over and the scholars have retreated to their air-conditioned destinations, the craftsperson is back on the dusty track, with a small bundle of belongings, on the road to nowhere.