Journal Archive

I am never fed up with being asked to make noises in the field of design in craft development. There are many organisations feverish with activity, reinventing wheels we had used a long time ago and discarded because they did not work or were unacceptable to producers themselves. . One subject which is very sensitive and would be difficult to address is that of apparent stagnation of ideas for new ways to work with artisans. A generation of indigenous craft support NGOs, (ATOs, FTOs) with whom I worked when they were establishing themselves have now matured. Some of them merely continue with policies and systems developed in the 1970s and 1980s on models established with their customers, the foreign NGO/ATO/FTOs, who were and still are their trading partners. Each NGO has its own philosophical criteria for partnership, some of which exclude artisans from being involved. Some NGOs provide training only in skills which consolidate the relationship between producer and NGO, not developing producer capability for independent operation. Each layer of NGOs adds a percentage to the price of products, reducing competitiveness in the final marketplace. These methods and systems do not necessarily help producers become independent, sustainable or self-sufficient enterprises in either export or domestic market terms. . The international development agencies, who control the bulk of money available for development, never truly managed to develop coherent policies and strategies for working with artisans. Differences between agencies about which of them was and is responsible for what aspect of craft development have led to both duplication as well as gaps in enterprise management knowledge at recipient level. One agency does training, another marketing, another deals with craft as a cultural issue, yet another tries to become dominant by muscling in on another agency's activity. This is not helpful, and there are those in many countries like India who mutter that their assistance didn't really reach artisans either. . National craft development agencies are similar, having differing agendas and support roles, some of which are impenetrable to producer and outsider alike. . Fair Trade is the ideal, but the global trading world is never really going to let it become dominant without a prolonged fight. Meanwhile many artisans will continue to suffer exploitation simply because they have no knowledge of the processes and systems used in international trade. They have not the skills to develop products nor find customers in their own countries. Export marketing is frequently a futile nightmare they would do better to avoid altogether. Yet export business skills can play a role when producers in, say Assam, are trying to find markets in far away Chennai or Mumbai. So many artisan groups rely on middlemen, some of whom are benevolent; but we all know that the word itself has a pariah status among development workers. . There are new individuals and agencies on the block these days. They are trying to work with artisan groups, experimenting with ways of assisting that do not result in artisans becoming dependent upon them in the long term. These individuals do not necessarily wish to become another one in the layer of NGO/ATO/FTO intermediaries between them and the market. . They have difficulty in obtaining funding for their projects either because they do not wish to be beholden to the donors' development criteria, or because their proposals/applications are not written electronically in the language or correct format insisted upon by funders. There are private enterprises who fund creative development activity, but I think there is sufficient publicity about private enterprises who are or have been approached successfully with project proposals for crafts. Perhaps there is a need to develop a directory of private individuals and enterprises who see a value in investing in crafts development. Perhaps such a directory exists, I don't know.

We have gathered in this ancient city to seek a role for the designer in the last quarter of the 20th century. Our hosts tell us that design in Ireland takes place "in an old country where the tension between recent industrial development and pastoral traditions is set in an environment whose beauty and integrity still survive." How easily could one transpose this description to my own country at the other end of the globe. The beauty and integrity of one of man's most ancient design traditions survive in India amidst the struggle to guarantee for our citizens a square meal or two each day, adequate clothing, shelter, relevant education and opportunities for employment. As for the majority of mankind. These are still dreams for most of my countrymen. Yet the only reason we exist as India's National Institute of Design is the faith that our new profession may prove capable of bringing these dreams to more rapid fulfillment. It is a tribute to the vision of this Council that while the majority of its membership represents industrially advanced economies. ICSID has recognized that the real test of industrial design will lie in the quality of its contribution to the development process. This recognition comes at a time when few developing lands have yet felt or articulated the need for design as a motive force in their economic improvement. Therefore as India's Minister of Industry has pointed out in his message of greeting to this distinguished gathering, ICSID is at the threshold of a great opportunity to bring the service of industrial design to bear on the development efforts which are going to determine the course of history in the last quarter of our century. It is in this context that India's experience may be of interest and of use, both to designers in advanced economies who are seeking to learn how best their profession can assist the developing world, and to our colleagues in the development task throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America who have yet to organize design education within their economies. The Beginnings In a culture with an unbroken history of 3000 years and one in which product and graphic forms have in the past achieved such perfection and played such an immensely important role in human development, it takes a measure of audacity to speak of design as a profession new to India. The experience which I share with you this morning concerns the period following our independence in 1947. In the early years of this period, rapid changes were taking place in economic and social objectives, in production processes and within the Indian environment. New technologies were. beginning to enter the remotest corners of our sub-continent. It was a change in kind, and not merely in degree. The integral understanding of form and function that was the foundation of India's traditional production process now began to fragment and decay. It was in this setting that in the late 1950's, the Government of India invited Charles and Ray Eames to recommend a programme of design to serve as an aid to small industry. In their recommendations, from which the National Institute of Design was born, the Eames called for "a sober investigation into those values and qualities that Indians hold important to a good life and that there be a scrutiny of the elements that go to make up a standard of living." The Institute, in Eames' words, must generate "an alert and impatient national conscience that is concerned with the quality and ultimate values of the environment." Looking back on the enormous problems which preoccupied India's planners in the first years after independence, it is fortunate indeed that there were at that time minds sufficiently aware that the nature of the development process demanded such a reinvestigation of the postulates and resources that determine a design structure and philosophy. They under-stood that design, to retain its relevance to Indian culture, would have to renew its ancient perceptions and wisdom. In this process, many outer forms and objects, the fragments of which had become imitative and which no longer sustained the social ethos, would need to be discarded. To assist this process of renewal and discovery, the National Institute of Design was established in 1961 by the Government of India as an autonomous national institution for research, service and training in industrial design and visual communication. It was to be concerned with providing as comprehensively as possible a multi-disciplinary approach to design, to satisfy the complex problems of India's changing environment. The Institute spent its first years in faculty development. The future teachers of design in India were selected from backgrounds in applied art, engineering and architecture as well as from international design schools. Advance Level Programmes were tailor-made to these backgrounds by trainers from overseas who came to NID and later extended. Their assistance through facilities made available to our trainees at design institutions and studios in Europe and the United States. Simultaneously, with this long process of faculty development, other graduates of NID's training courses set out to establish themselves as India's first industrial designers. The creation of physical resources for a teaching institute was naturally a parallel activity. with the development of human resources, and was greatly assisted by the assistance we received from the Indian Government, the State of Gujarat, our city of Ahmedabad and the Ford Foundation.

NID's PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION PROGRAMME

NID's experience in faculty development and post-graduate programmes pointed to the need for more broad-based and basic training. Nine years after its founding. the Institute commenced its under-graduate Professional Education Programme, in 1970, drawing in students immediately after secondary school for a programme which extends across 5.1/2 years. A unique contribution by NID has been the integration of real life, professional situations within this design curriculum. The stress on the reality of the market place has distinguished NID's experiment in design education, and in Indian education. This experiment has been a challenge to the caliber of NID students and faculty and it is this participation in the real which world is enabling us today to seek greater relevance in the Indian context through sustained experimentation. Since 1976. Graduates of this programme have begun to move out as the vanguard of a new cadre of fully trained Indian designers. I DC In 1969 another centre for design education commenced in Bombay at the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology with senior faculty and graduates of NID. This was the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) which has established post-graduate design courses to provide an extension to engineering learning at the IIT, The educational programme developed at NID was adapted at IDC to suit the requirements of engineering students. It is now being expanded with inputs of visual communication and environmental design. These pioneering attempts at NID and IDC have helped to create the beginning -of a national awareness of the industrial designer and of what he can do, and the two institutions are working mutually to reinforce their training programmes. The Challenges Design education has a yet merely touched the surface of Indian requirements. Although design is a real need in our society, it is not yet a sufficiently felt need. Those who most need design seem least aware of its significance. But we are already at the point when those who have been made aware of the design imperative are throwing 'questions and challenges which, at this early stage in our history, demand s reappraisal of the disciplines and curricula which we imported from the West to transplant into our ancient and problematic soil. How effectively we respond to these challenges will in my view determine not only what happens to the design profession in India during the next few decades. It could also greatly influence the growth and progress of design in neighboring countries and throughout the developing world. It is important the fore that through ICSID our experience and our problems, our successes and our and our failures, should be shared by the international design community. Indian design represents a unique problem and a unique opportunity. If we can define our role in designing the future of 600 million people, the majority of whom are still denied the basic elements of a decent life, surely these answers would be valid reference points for ICSID and for many other societies which may now have embarked upon the same process which some 20 years ago led to the establishment of a National Institute of Design in India and to the important experiments in design education which have taken place in my country since that time. The challenge to our curriculum and methods of teaching comes surprisingly enough from areas in which we have been able to make some of our most effective contributions. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean. The problems of traditional craft are major areas of concern for NID. Since the beginning of this century, the pressures of industrialization have wrought havoc on the economic, social and cultural status of the crafts in Indian society. Since independence, official support to craft traditions has sought to link their revival with new marketing opportunities outside the village community. Thus. NID's involvement began with assisting the development of craft exports. This has brought us face to face not only with the extraordinary problems of adapting old traditions to new markets far removed from Indian needs, and light years away from the traditionally self-sufficient village economy, but it has also made us aware of the urgent need to protect the integrity of the crafts, and to help restore to the craftsman a measure of his self-worth, so battered by the influence at urban markets flooded with plastic imitations of foreign products and life-styles, of souvenirs for emporia, catering to tourist demands and to the whims of overseas buyers on whose interest and support so many Indian crafts are now almost totally dependent. In this confusion, there is a real danger that the industrial designer may become yet another factor for destruction and loss of identity. As relative newcomers in a design environment vastly older than any-thing we acquired from the Bauhaus and its successors, NID is learning that our main task may well be to act, as ICSID recognizes we must, as communicators between peoples and institutions. In the Indian context, the discipline of relating ' function and need to materials and processes enables the industrial designer to act as a channel through-which the crafts can once again be returned to people. And not as colorful trash for a quick tourist dollar, but as functionally beautiful forms which serve real needs both in our society and in the export markets where India is attempting to establish a foot-hold. In the process we are finding that the disciplines which we borrowed from this part of the world can be of relevance to our society only when w re able to adapt them to serve the needs of a predominantly rural society. Over the recent past, India's small communities of industrial designers have been al-most totally preoccupied with the requirements of urban markets. Here the competitive demands and access to high-level technology provide situations which closely resemble design challenges in the most advanced countries. While we cannot and do not minimize the legitimate demands of the industrial sector, it is apparent that the future of our economy will depend upon the success which attends efforts to generate small-scale nod rural industry, to create employment opportunities for more than 480 million pairs of hands in the rural sector and by so doing to help stem the headlong rush from rural India to urban India and the horrors which are its inevitable result. Our first attempt to find these answers has taken place in an area not far from our home city, in a part of India which is drought or flood-prone and which has very little arable land and irrigation, and little in the way of surviving craft activities. We have begun to work within a community of about 200 villages and populations of 85000 people. We are part of a team which includes managers, teachers, technicians, bankers, craftsmen and scientists. The objective of our effort is to make the villagers self-reliant and capable of resisting exploitation. We hope that the participation of the designer can help link education to economic opportunity, a link which has been tragically missing all these years and which has converted so much of education in our country to irrelevance and contempt. The activities we gave undertaken so far include weaving wool and cotton products, wool spinning, leather tanning and fabrication of leather products. Our designers are learning to put their hand to problems of rural banking, animal husbandry, horticultural production and marketing. We are learning that there can be no watertight division of skills and labor if we are to render effective service to our rural clients, and that design is indeed the total environment. Attempts are made to get school teachers to work with us and thus to involve the design project in the total learning of the village community. The village itself is the school, and in it the designer is both pupil and teacher. In another equally deprived area, we may soon be working on a team which will subject our communication skills to an unusual test. It is an attempt to see whether we can assist a tribal community which is fast losing its cultural roots, to communicate with itself once again and to regain its confidence and identity, which alone can shield it from continued exploitation. Once again, we will be learning much more than we can teach: our skills of audio-visual documentation and design can be useful only as a support to oral and social traditions far richer and more complex than any design technology we can place at the service of this. Designing a Future Experience does not suggest that our curriculum is irrelevant in these challenging circumstances. Far from it: we have been greatly heartened and encouraged by the fact that the designer's problem-solving methodology can be of direct relevance and utility to the solution of basic concerns, and that problem-solving is greatly enhanced with a trained designer on the team. In another example, NID was recently asked to project the future of our city of Ahmedabad into the year 2000. This was a daunting task for an institute without any pretensions to futurology. We suggested to the Government of India's Department of Science & Technology that we be allowed to study what has happened to our city over the past 25 years and to seek from the past guidelines to assist projections into the next twenty-five years. Our objective was to see whether design as we know it could have influenced Ahmedabad for the better: would the city have been in any way a more viable place had the design profession been in existence when Indian planning commenced soon after independence in 1947 P The data which our students and faculty have gathered through this exercise has been astonishing. We have not yet been able to recommend design solutions but we have been able to highlight the enormous gap which exists in our city, between the views of the past sod present, held by planners and administrators on one hand, and by Ahmedabad's citizens on the other. It was design methodology and a design investigation which revealed this critical gap in communication between planners and people. And we are perhaps a little wiser now as designers for urban environments. We know that if we are to help improve the future of a city, we must commence by assisting a more ration-al dialogue between planners and those whom plans are intended to benefit. It is only this that can bring about a true awareness of real problems and, therefore, of correct design priorities. An Indian Idiom It will be clear from what I have said that NID's basic task is to create an Indian idiom of industrial design and visual communication: design disciplines relevant to the needs of a huge economy which embraces every stage of industrial development. The solutions to our problems of relevance lie less with developing new curricula tailor-made to India, than with the constant exposure and testing of our teaching and learning methods to the realities of Indian fields, streets and work-places, Our concepts of classroom, course, teacher and student have to be capable of withstanding constant redefinition. This is our basic challenge: not whether industrial design is relevant to India. but how best to put it to work in our conditions. The future of Indian design will depend very greatly on NID's ability to find a rational approach to these matters of relevance. The difficulties are enormous. In our country, much at education is still locked within the rigidities which-we have inherited from Macaulay and 19th-century Britain. We are seeking students and faculty who can rise above this inheritance and flourish within a framework which is constantly changing and is not always predictable. There are other difficulties. We teach product design using reference and teaching materials identical to those used in design schools of the West. We have not yet been able to fund a systematic documentation for teaching of product forms which have been developed in India through the centuries: furniture, utensils. architecture, textiles, garments, toys. If we continue this way, design as we teach it may stress the needs of westernized, affluent communities in urban India, increasing their own-alienation from Indian society and accelerating rather than arresting the drift away from the re-discovery of our roots and values for which NID was founded. In visual communication, we face a similar dilemma: no documentation exists for design education in Indian traditions of symbology, colour, form, and calligraphy - all the elements which our society has used to communicate with such power for several thousand years into the present day. All of this is still outside the scope of the Indian designer's formal education. We realize that it is not our purpose to bring s new design culture to India, but rather to reinforce, reawaken and quicken an ancient tradition and attitude which is in total harmony with the contemporary view of design not as luxury or art, but rather as the human environment. To achieve this, we have much to do to relate teaching materials to our own environment. A Quest for Priorities Equally important will be the degree of wisdom which attends our choice of design problems for demonstration and solution inside our educational framework. We must learn to choose our clientele with great care. Like most educational institutions, we face problems of severe financial stringency. It is, therefore, a great temptation to choose as clients the large industrial houses whose consultancy fees allow some margin toward our educational expenditure. But real needs, and therefore our real clients, are often unable to cover even basic expenses. So the choices are difficult ones: does our textile designer work for a giant mill, or for a small group of weavers in a distant village? Should the product designer turn his attention to a new range of office equipment or to the untapped resources of cane and bamboo in the remote north-east of India? As our services come into demand in a national scarcity of design talent, how best can we foster the spirit of humility and ser-vice which is essential to the future of a truly Indian design movement? How can we encourage our students to take on careers in areas of need which may not offer high financial rewards? There are other questions to answer. How best can we evaluate our past design solutions and current curricula in terms of present needs? How will current needs be affected by the rapid technological changes which are taking place in our country through such innovations as satellite communications and the computer? What is the balance we must strike in an economy which is equally concerned with space technology as with improving the centuries old bullock-cart? In vast areas of activity relatively untouched by our experience over the last sixteen years, such as agriculture and education aids, how and where do we commence? Can the experience of the developed world help us to leap-frog experimental stages into immediate areas of relevant work? How can we as designers stimulate participation in our society, and not accelerate the alienation and drift which has become the hallmark of our industrialization? Is there a lesson at all that other countries can take from India before commencing their own programmes of design education? It is with these questions that we join your deliberations today and it is in seeking these answers that we in India invite your participation and experience. While the direction in which NID must travel is clear, the route ahead of us is uncharted. The activity which has won for the institute I have the honor to represent ICSID's first award for design in developing countries is token of our earnest. At this point we have more questions than answers to share with you. Yet our experience in design in developing society over the.past sixteen years is unique and unparalleled. We place it unreservedly at the service of ICSID's objective today of reviewing progress and of taking fresh bearings. The fact that this great Congress is being held to discuss these issues indicates dramatically that the similarities between design in our various societies are far greater than the differences. Proposals You have asked for our ideas and we offer you these specific proposals:

NID is now engaged in forecasting India's design' requirements over the period of our Sixth Five Year Plan which ends in 1984. The needs we foresee include many areas in which we. require assistance in terms of data and training opportunities. These include design for education, water usage and conservation. low-cost energy resources. Design far public health, for the handicapped and for disaster relief. The Indian situation in these sectors varies in many important respects from conditions in advanced societies. Yet your experience will help us move ahead mote rapidly and to adapt existing know-ledge to our realities.
In many of these areas, an information bank is imperative to help us draw quickly on documented experience. The development of teaching aids is one such example. There is vast design experience available outside our country. How best can we tap it?
Much of our work concerns assistance to the small-scale and craft sectors. Our ancient craft traditions are in urgent need to keep abreast of progress in design technology, materials and finishes which is taking place in the hand-craft sector overseas. This is particularly vital to successful export marketing of our crafts. Areas of such need are furniture systems. metal-ware for domestic use, hand-blown glass, leather and the treatment and fabrication of cane and bamboo. We need your experience in the development of educational aids. in experiments with new building materials and with recycling of waste. We have functioned all these years without adequate support of ergonomic facilities, which we are attempting to improve. We need assistance to do so. We need to strengthen cur work in animated films by keeping abreast of new developments and particularly of advances in low-cost technology and the use of animated films for education and industrial training.In all these areas we need to draw on your experience. We suggest that ICSID make available a number of Fellowships for graduate students and far design teachers from the developing world who could work in these areas of need that I have mentioned, and bring back to India and elsewhere the technology which our designers need to supplement their own experience. ICSID should also provide grants which would enable us to bring to our countries, for training purposes, designers proficient in these spheres on short-term assignments. An ICSID capital fund to provide such 'seed' expenditure would be of great assistance to institutes like ours which are constantly handicapped in seeking such technical help due to chronic foreign exchange difficulties. (I may add here in parenthesis that our annual membership subscription to ICSID is equivalent to our entire budget for research and for fellowships.)
In turn we offer you our own experience of 16 years in design for development. We are open to suggestions as to how best our facilities can be made available to other lands. Inter-design programmes in India, in some of the areas which I have discussed would be one immediate way. Sharing our documented material could be another.
NID would be happy to consider providing facilities for faculty training to assist design schools in other lands. Here our unique experience may be of particular importance and relevance to their needs.

Finally we invite you to consider India as a venue for ICSID's activities. Our tradition of hospitality is as old as our tradition of design. I need hardly say how welcome you would be, or how important it now seems that a gathering of this kind should take place within an environment which reflects the development priorities which ICSID is pledged to assist. Address delivered at the UNIDO-ICSID Conference held in Ireland in January, 1979

C G Road is Ahmedabad's pride: a new shopping boulevard that turns its back on the crowded bazaars of this medieval city. Steel and glass store fronts, coffee shops, Pizza Hut, the latest in home entertainment, sportswear, fashion and ethnic chic: international brand names from India and overseas, flashing in neon to attract Ahmedabad's affluent youth to a 'happening place' that demonstrates the power of what is emerging as the largest consumer market in the world. It wasn't always this way. When I arrived in Ahmedabad in 1975, 'happening' meant sampling the street life of Manek Chowk, the heart of Ahmedabad's tradition as India's textile capital, around which revolved a rich pattern of community living and craft activity. It was in these lanes and marketplaces that Ahmedbad's craft and merchant guilds flourished for generations, giving the city a reputation that rivaled 16th century London. Seven bridges span the dry riverbed of the Sabarmati River which separates Manek Chowk and old Ahmedabad from C G Road and the high-rise sprawl of the new city. The traffic hurtling back and forth-handcarts and camel carts, and an occasion elephant, to compete with the city's passion for the newest in two-, three- and four-wheeled speeders-is symbolic of India's passage to and from modernity, of its search for a confident identity that can link 5000 years of history with a future in which change is the only certainty. It is within this experience of transition that design in India takes its meaning. Mahatma Gandhi, arriving in India from South Africa almost a century ago, established his ashram retreat along the banks of the Sabarmati. His "experiments with truth" began in Ahmedabad, experiments intended to bring freedom to his subjugated people and to build a society that could "wipe every tear from every eye". Self-reliant systems of design and production were inherent to Gandhi's mission. They were directed at serving basic needs through a demonstration of social justice and a respect for nature's balance. Symbolic of this quest was Gandhi's campaign for the boycott of British textiles and for the home production of handspun, hand-woven "khadi", the livery of freedom which was to evolve into a handloom revolution that is in itself India's greatest achievement in contemporary design. A few kilometres down the riverside from Gandhi Ashram is the campus of the National Institute of Design. Established here some 40 years ago, NID was one of several specialist institutions of contemporary knowledge created by free India to ensure that its youth were at the frontiers of knowledge, harnessing it for the development needs of giant democracy mired in post-colonial poverty. NID was the first attempt by any developing country to use the design disciplines inherited from the Bauhaus as a tool for national regeneration. The catalyst for its creation was an extraordinary one. Barely a decade after freedom, India invited Charles and Ray Eames of Los Angeles to suggest how design could assist the growth of Indian industry. Government officials were expecting a feasibility report. What they got was an extraordinary statement of design as a value system, as an attitude that could discern the strengths and limitations of both tradition and modernity, and as a profession that could use the wisdom of such insights to make wise decisions for India's future: "In the face of the inevitable destruction of many cultural values-in the face of the immediate need of the nation to feed and shelter itself-a desire for quality takes on a real meaning. It is not a self-conscious effort to develop an aesthetic-it is a relentless search for quality that must be maintained if this new Republic is to survive".(1) Four decades later, if one is to search for the impact of design on contemporary India, C G Road may offer an easier vantage point than Manek Chowk. Graduates of NID, and of the other design schools that followed it, are part of the international look and the product excellence showcase in the shopping malls of every Indian city. Indian brands that Indian designers have helped build compete successfully at home and overseas: from machine tools, automobiles and watches to an astonishing range of textiles, garments, entertainment and media products, and crafts redesigned for contemporary need. All this represents a sea change from yesteryear. In the early years of NID's founding, India's market was carefully protected to encourage local production and discourage imported competition --- a policy that reflected the urge for self-reliance that had marked the freedom struggle under Gandhi's leadership. Indian planners were attempting to blend Gandhian and Marxian principles with the nation's multi-cultural ethic, and to do this through centralised planning. The market would be tolerated but not allowed to reign supreme. Entrepreneurship and the profit motive (which the Indian diaspora had taken across the globe) were discounted at home as something vaguely disreputable. Industry, public as well as private, had difficulty in comprehending the importance of design in an environment where consumer choice was deliberately limited. Designers struggled with the contradictions of advocating excellence in a marketplace that did not appear to need it, and in social sectors which needed convincing evidence (which only a competitive marketplace could provide) that design investments were worthwhile. When India's first design graduates emerged in the mid-1970s, the business climate most often regarded design as a postponable luxury, or as an option to be applied after product development was complete rather than integrated into the very process of development. Not surprisingly, the first career opportunities came where competition existed: in export industries, in working with traditional crafts threatened by mass production, and in the advertising industry. Traditional crafts, conservation of cultural heritage, exhibitions to communicate the Indian experience at home and abroad, service to small and medium enterprises looking for new markets, programmes for health and literacy --- these were the demonstrations that won for India (and for NID) the first international recognition of design for development. In 1979, this recognition brought the United Nations, through the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Vienna, to NID's campus in Ahmedabad for the first-ever UN conference on design. It was an effort to share the Indian experience with the global community, and its outcome was the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development. The Declaration articulated a global mission for design: that "designers in every part of the world must work to evolve a new value system which dissolves the disastrous divisions between the worlds of waste and want, preserves the identity of peoples and attends to the priority areas of need for the vast majority of humankind." The conference suggested actions essential to the achievement of the Declaration, and these were endorsed by UNIDO. Several national and international institutions used the opportunity to reinforce the thinking that had begun to emerge through Europe's Green Movement, pointing out that the 'world of waste' was being rejected in the very societies that spawned consumerism. The 1979 Declaration should have been a watershed event for design in India, inspired as it was by the Indian experience. Yet the Declaration in India remained largely a statement of intent, and less one of achievement. It came at the opening of a decade that was to reject the socialist paradigm, and what many regarded as its Gandhian baggage. Instead, national policy turned toward global and domestic competitiveness, and to measures that could stress international market success as a new hallmark of self-reliance. Design began to move into the centre of corporate strategies, and with that movement came a profound semantic shift. Sometime in the 1980s, the term 'designer' moved from noun to adjective, and the image of a good Indian life from Gandhian austerity to one of "Just Do It". The new consumer culture accelerated as part of a young Prime Minister's decision to throw open India's doors to the winds of globalisation. Rajiv Gandhi took the first steps of dismantling protectionism. With that, design awareness accelerated at a speed that would have been impossible to imagine at the time the Ahmedabad Declaration was signed. Designers who had been urging industry for years to acknowledge the centrality of their role were now challenged to deliver design at a speed and of a quality entirely new to their experience. India's own IT revolution took off in the engineering campuses that had been created soon after Independence as India's technological frontiers. The computer began to impact every aspect of design training and service, opening vast new horizons of application. A gigantic media boom hit India, with a proliferation of products and channels that convincingly demonstrated design as the cutting edge for market survival. Soon, the fashion industry stormed in, challenging concepts of identity treasured by generations of Indians with its relentless promotion of an 'international' (read European and North American) look, and an equally relentless demand for speed and quality. Media hype essential to a fashion culture quickly made it the most obvious expression of design in India, and design education was soon re-defined in the public mind as a passport to glamour and wealth. Liberalisation and globalisation became the gospel of a new generation of international managers from India, leading an expanding middle class that was young and increasingly affluent. Their dreams of a First World lifestyle would soon be fueled along the CG Roads of an India busily re-defining itself in the language of global trade. Despite massive swings in the world economy, the market for design has expanded rapidly, and young professionals emerging from design schools are quickly absorbed by industry. Using design to build 'Brand India' as a global presence is a job that Indian industry is doing well. Watching the shoppers rush by on C G Road, can one say that Indian design has arrived at last, and that the mission which began with the Eames' report is well on its way to fulfillment? It is often said that whatever generalisation applies to India, the opposite is equally true. Design is no exception: its success is in the organised marketplace that caters to a middle class as large as all of Europe, and to expanding prospects overseas. Its contribution will be essential to the role India now demands of being taken seriously as an economic power. Design capability is reflected n the the improved competitiveness ratings accorded to India by the World Economic Forum’s annual surveys, including its report for 2002-2003. The UNDP’s development reports tell another story. Here, India ranks among the lowest in the world. The reality is that the vast majority of India's one billion citizens live in rural settings and urban slums that remain well outside organised systems of commerce. For them, the quality of life remains abysmal, touched only at the farthest fringe by interventions from designers motivated by the early inspiration that defined a new Indian profession. For the visionaries who created NID, the marketplace was an arena of interaction to be treated with great respect. It was here that quality had to be demonstrated, made practical, and given the power to change attitudes and behaviors. Market success was thus essential to demonstrate the value of design to the broader needs of a quality of life. Today, it is often seen as its only value. The challenge is to innovate a client system that can harness design skills toward products and services that must finally deliver a freedom from want for all Indians. Such a system cannot reject market mechanisms. Instead, it must use them with the highest degree of managerial competence to build new sources of support for development priorities that can be sustained without total dependence on government programmes. If this is to happen, Indian design must evolve strong partnerships and networks with institutions of civil society. Tomorrow, it is these institutions that can become the prime clients for design for development. In the years of centralized planning that followed India's Independence, government was the prime engine of social change in India. That is no longer so, and recent years have seen a strong movement away from official controls and patronage, to demands for decentralisation and decision-making and problem-solving at local levels. In the current period of transition that marks India's new fascination for market economics, government is withdrawing from the "commanding heights" it once occupied, leaving a social vacuum that private enterprise cannot be expected to fill. The case for design, carefully built over the years, had just begun to impact planners when major shifts in policy took place. Planners in New Delhi and the state capitals are now preoccupied with new priorities, and the case for design for development will need to be made elsewhere. The answer may be found in the newly empowered civil institutions. Building their understanding and support for design can then be used to restore real needs to the centre of design education and training. If this is to be achieved, it is India's design schools that will need to assume the responsibility for forging the partnerships that can provide a client system responsive to issues of real need. This must be accepted as a marketing job, one that will require articulating the case for design with the highest level of professional skill. Support must come from funders-governments, international agencies, industries-currently besieged with competing applications. Potential donors must therefore be attracted by hardheaded proposals, carefully prepared with budgets, timelines and indicators for monitoring progress. These are skills that the social sector often lacks, but without them no one will listen. An immediate step could be to document key experiences in design for development from the past: documented to demonstrate the design process as a proven strategy for poverty alleviation. The case must be built to demonstrate economic and social impacts, cost benefits, extension and replication opportunities, both the barriers and the opportunities for sustainability, as well as the possible cost to India of not involving designers in efforts for social change. Indian designers have made important demonstrations that could now be used for advocacy: the regeneration of crafts, the protection of fragile ecosystems and environments, the conservation of scarce materials, aids for the less abled (India has the largest population of such persons in the world), communication and media efforts that have impacted campaigns for health and for human rights (particularly those of women and children), the generation of new opportunities for sustainable livelihoods, educational materials that help enliven the bleakness of India's classrooms, and the application of ergonomics to the reduction of drudgery, fatigue and occupational ill-health in India's workplaces and homes. Social scientists, particularly economists, and professional managers need to be recruited to help make the case for design credible and watertight. Critical to the success of such an Indian effort will be to link it with global efforts toward sustainability. Perhaps the most important of these emerged from the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 as Agenda 21, with its urgent demand for alternative patterns of consumption that are compatible with ecological sustainability. Despite all the disappointments of the past decade, the power of Agenda 21 has been demonstrated again at Johannesburg in 2002, and it remains the most important element in re-thinking lifestyles and development patterns in the industrialised North as well as in the developing South. Another key opportunity for integrating design has come through the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in New York and its new system of Human Development Reports. This system transforms the traditional understanding of living standards as confined to measurements of gross national product and per capita income. Instead, the HDR approach defines development and progress in terms of a quality of life that can enlarge people's choices and their capacity to fulfill them. In 1998, the HDR investigated consumption from a human perspective-consumption for development-in what could be interpreted as a charter for design in the new millennium. Other opportunities have emerged. These include movements for the empowerment of women and for consumer protection, the new respect for the knowledge and wisdom of indigenous traditions, the revival of crafts worldwide, the search for alternative patterns of income generation and employment to meet the needs of expanding populations, the growing respect for institutions and professions that have a capacity for inter-disciplinary teamwork, and the search for values more enduring than brand names. All of these forces represent major opportunities for demonstrating the power of design. None of them was as strong or as clearly organised as they are today when the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development was ratified in 1979. Each force suggests an opportunity to communicate the experience and contribution of designers around the world, brought together in a collective strength that can help take their efforts to scale. Charles and Ray Eames in their India Report spoke of design as an ultimate expression of "dignity, service and love". Contemporary design in India began with that message. Almost half a century later, can India help ensure that the message remains as the non-negotiable heart of design as a 21st century profession, in India and in every part of the world?

Design research in and for India has a history. The 1958 India Report by Charles and Ray Eames - from which flowered design education and the development of a contemporary profession of Indian design - underlined research, training and service as overlapping, supportive and mutually corrective. The Eames’ brilliant meditation on the lota with its 20 questions (“But how would one go about designing a lota?”) was perhaps a first example of what design research should be: a systematic investigation into the dimensions of the creative process, to help establish facts and options as well as to suggest new conclusions. Perhaps there is an even earlier example – the spirit of enquiry with which the late Pupul Jayakar and Charles Eames reflected on what a 1955 exhibition of Indian craft at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) actually represented: were these great crafts about the past or about the future? It was those conversations that were to bring Charles and Ray Eames to India. Their visit would lead to the India Report and on to the founding of the Nation Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) as the first experiment of its kind. Early Year Around this time, in the 1960s, design research was emerging as a recognizable field of study at the Imperial College in London. A 1962 conference led to the Design Research Society in 1966. Four years later the Department of Design Research at the Royal College of Art was founded under the late Prof Bruce Archer. He would emerge as one of NID’s most important mentors and champions. It was at that early stage when Prof Archer predicted influences that would later transform design education: “The most fundamental challenge to conventional ideas on design has been the growing advocacy of systematic methods of problem-solving, borrowed from computer techniques and management, for the assessment of design problems and the development of design solutions”. Prof Archer encouraged educators in India to recognize the primary importance of firmly integrating research into the process of design. This emphasis would emerge again when the global design community met under UN auspices to understand the significance of India’s experiments in design education. The UNIDO-ICID-India 1979 conference culminated in the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development. It recommended research as an essential element toward stronger design policy, promotion and actions essential to building design practice in societies still new to the discipline. Years later, senior educators and design professionals surveying the spread of design education in India would in 2014 see the critical need for a research agenda that could reframe familiar problems, engage with stakeholders, encourage prototyping and testing, explore alternatives and vision future scenarios in a setting quite transformed from the seminal developments in the 1950s and 1960s. What had not changed over these years was the understanding of research as hands-on investigation linked to the delivery of actual service. India Models Some of the earliest examples of design research at NID came through investigations of craft knowledge and wisdom. Traditions in the northeast were an early example. Published outcomes became models for future research and documentation in handcrafts, the foundation of Indian design. This has continued into the present and includes documentation efforts demonstrated at NID and other design schools as well as through agencies such as IGNCA (New Delhi). In the corporate sector the Godrej Design Laboratory in Mumbai has been anticipating the research skills that may be needed for understanding future market cultures. 3M Innovation at its Bangalore R&D unit also researches customer psychologies as well as how sustainability can be built into design policies. The challenge of transforming waste into wealth and of moving production processes toward protection of natural resources is engaging research attention at several design centres including those of architecture and technology. The National Innovation Foundation’s padyatras across India have investigated grassroot technologies, demonstrating not just the enormous range of field research now on-going throughout the country but also the need for collaboration and partnership to take research into collaborations which can culminate in marketable products and services in sectors still outside corporate agendas. 1919/2019 A century after the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany is an appropriate milestone to remember the importance of research as the foundation of design knowledge. More so at a time when such vigorous efforts are afoot to control teaching and research and to replace knowledge with information. Simultaneously, the rush of students ‘learning by googling’ is a warning. It suggests the need to go back once again to the patient and diligent process of investigation into problems and options which is the legacy of the Bauhaus and Ulm masters and of the great schools of design which they nurtured. What distinguishes the rigour of that model of research is the relentless emphasis on ‘learning by actually doing’ and by extracting as well as sharing the learning that emerges from real experience. Through role models like Bruce Archer at RCA and H K Vyas and M P Ranjan at NID, research was once the unstated core of learning from the real world -- not a separate stream but integrated into every step of the design process. Little need was seen to identify research as a distinct element in its own right. Instead, action research was itself the very process of design. A great example of research understood in this way might be the experience of designers and artisans working together over almost 50 years in Jawaja block of Rajasthan. There, design has been part of understanding issues of poverty and deprivation in rural India, testing contemporary knowledge and disciplines toward lifting communities out of discrimination and neglect, moving them toward greater self-reliance through applying design to existing skills, finding new opportunities and new markets, and learning to overcome new challenges. Yet in all these years the term ‘research’ has seldom if ever been used in this partnership of communities and disciplines. Jawaja might recall the efforts that Rabindrannath Tagore initiated at Santiniketan in 1919, the same year that Walter Gropius began his Bauhaus experiment. Tagore seldom used the term design, and certainly never ‘design research’. Yet his step-by-step investigation into rural opportunities for a self-confident life was perhaps India’s first demonstration of design as a systematic investigation into immediate problems and into undreamt opportunities. As institutions of design teaching today bring research into their pedagogical centre, the challenge may be to avoid drifting into theoretical models. Instead they can take strength from past demonstrations that define research in ways that are unique to Indian experience. While such examples exist, few have been documented. The extraordinary experience which NID had in the 1980s to work through National Technology Missions on issues of reproductive health, drinking water and sanitation were research experiences. They have been largely lost because they were not documented as systematic investigation or as outcomes --- not even the huge achievement of eliminating guineaworm disease from India. The cost of ignoring the need to document experience is evident: few of the lessons learnt the hard way through the Technology Missions are remembered in today’s massive Swach Bharat Abhiyan. With yesteryears’ learning forgotten, past failures are repeated and past achievements fail to inform and strengthen today’s effort. The lesson is not only to do research and documentation, but also to apply, and to record the results. 2019 is also the year in which we mark 40 years since the first United Nations conference on design culminated in the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development[1]. It was a call to “work to evolve a new value system which dissolves the disastrous divisions between the worlds of waste and want, preserves the identity of peoples, and attends the priority areas of need for the vast majority of mankind”. The importance of research within the quest for a new value system was a key recommendation: research activities that could disseminate information and awareness and could reflect investment in documentation, publication, resource collections and facilities for material research as well as prototype-testing and making. Forty years later those priorities remain. They take renewed urgency in a world still struggling with early challenges, now made more urgent with all that has since been learned about building better societies and protecting the earth’s limited resources. Design research can now move the thinking of 40 years ago into the 2030 Vision of the United Nations, endorsed by all its members and comprising 17 goals for sustainable development for the world community to achieve within the next 12 years. In design terms, one goal stands out: ‘Responsible consumption and production’ (Goal 12). Together, the SDGs breathe new life into that early hope of design as an ethic of “service, dignity and love”[2], and into that early call from Ahmedabad to reduce global waste and want. Science, technology, integrity and poetry come together here to express a quality of life that is about caring for each other and for the earth that is our shelter. In 2019 that quality may be the hope on-the-ground design research that can help resolve the challenges of our time rather than mystify them in distant ivory towers.

https://youtu.be/yO3HPO6kt90

The landscape that Raj and Romesh Thapar tended through Seminar was a space inviting discourse, respectful argument and consensus around values essential to a ‘plural and intellectually energetic India’. For the Thapars, Independence had brought responsibility. New generations should flourish in an India ‘Where the mind is without fear... where the world has not been broken up into fragments...’ Raj and Romesh gave their lives to these liberating concepts, today under siege. Yet, the era which their memory evokes was not a halcyon time. Upheavals and suffering were witnessed on a scale not experienced since, demanding resilient vision and courageous analysis. Partition, wars, the Emergency, rebellion, corruption and repeated betrayal of ‘trysts with destiny’: Seminar debated them all with an integrity that remains the finest Thapar legacy. All that Raj and Romesh cherished and did together was measured against benchmarks of freedom and justice. In the midst of screamed abuses and military tanks offered as inspiration to young minds, we are reminded today of the perilous cost of neglecting the landscapes of freedom and hope. Seminar indicates each month that we have not lost them all, and yet we may. My first encounter with Romesh Thapar was on a sweltering Calcutta afternoon in the early sixties in my cramped office at the Metal Box Company above Chowringhee Road. Seminar had moved out of Bombay’s sophistication into what was then dismissed as village Delhi. Romesh’s immense frame filled my room, matched for size by his escort, Santi Chowdhury, film maker and partner with Romesh in one of India’s early media collectives. Santi had sent a message that Seminar was in need of support, and would my company please take a sympathetic view? Romesh was clearly uncomfortable soliciting ads from ‘boxwallahs’ (the dignity of CSR still decades away), and made it clear that Seminar was doing me a favour by offering a uniquely influential readership: take it or leave it. My boss Jim Lindsay, an unconventional Brit, had already sent word that Seminar was one of two journals (the other was Sachin Chaudhuri’s Economic Weekly) that Metal Box must support as causes, ignoring dark whispers in some circles that Romesh and Raj were ‘commies’. Conversation soon moved to other things: Sunil Janah documenting the lives of our factory workers, a film planned in Kerala to promote packaged seafood that I was making with Hari Dasgupta, the Thapar’s Bombay connection with the Dasguptas and Roberto Rossellini and other luminaries in theatre and cinema, the voice-of-god Films Division commentaries that made Romesh familiar to every moviegoer... and why Calcutta boxwallahs needed windows on other worlds. For that, I was invited to meet Raj over coffee when next in Delhi. So there it was, the Thapar worlds laid out: journalism, industry, the arts, the economics and politics of Five-Year Plan India, and the importance of discourse toward intelligent choices. Friendship begun was soon cemented in New Delhi. I would quickly discover that if Romesh was the Thapar flame, Raj was the spark that ignited it. Their exchanges across a desk they shared in Malhotra Building were the warp and weft of a fabric rich with ideas and imagined alternatives. Our conversations would bind years and careers, a thread that would stretch from Calcutta to Washington, New Delhi and finally to Ahmedabad. Raj and Romesh understood what took me away from corporates into international civil service, the holiest of grails in the troubled sixties for anyone seeking escape. They understood why I was soon reporting a sense of irrelevance from the IMF in Washington, and they approved when I shared an intention to return to desi chaos. In those years, Romesh’s ‘Capital Diary’ in the Economic Weekly would arrive by airmail. Each installment was a menu of New Delhi intrigue, concluding always with portends of worse to come. These would be repeated to me whenever I spoke to other South Asians of my urge to return: ‘You must be crazy. Didn’t you read in EW...?’ Scribbles from Raj on white Seminar postcards would share other tidings: ‘Don’t worry, Ashoke. Romesh has some better news coming.’ It finally came, but not in EW. It was an offer that Romesh knew I would not refuse: to work with him and a team he had assembled at the India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) of which he was now Chair. ‘Here is your chance to do something really different,’ Romesh wrote. ‘It will draw on what you know and can do. We will use Indian talent and Indian design as a strategy for promoting this country as a destination, and to professionalize tourism as an industry. It’s going to demand new ways of working, within and outside government. You know Sunil Roy who heads the Department of Tourism, and Gerson (da Cunha) is communication consultant. We have the PM’s complete backing – this is all about quality in the public sector. It’s a great chance. So pack up!’ It seemed an auspicious constellation for change. Socialism was the unquestioned mandate, with government at the commanding heights. Romesh believed that the public sector had the highest responsibility for demonstrating quality. Tourism was then low profile, and ITDC seemed a nonthreatening space to demonstrate management professionalism and design as a development value that went well beyond aesthetics. For this, professionals would need to take charge, their ranks enriched from every source. The Thapars had access to Indira Gandhi’s ‘kitchen cabinet’ and their friend ‘Tiger’ (Dr Karan Singh) was Tourism Minister. The mix was almost too good to be true, if that is what it would finally turn out to be. The Thapar strategy was a brave experiment to free the public sector from bureaucratic and political meddling, and to establish standards that others could follow. Romesh’s audacity was symbolic of the time. Pacesetting ‘temples of development’ were all government driven: great dams at Bhakra Nangal and Damodar Valley, new steel plants in the East, HMT in Bangalore under Thapar friend ‘Bill’ Mathulla, and soon nationalized banks and airlines. Raj and Romesh held an implacable belief in India’s capacity for excellence, which they advocated with conviction to Indira Gandhi. Their Bombay years had brought some of India’s brightest innovators into the Thapar circle, now mobilized to link aesthetics, heritage, craft and design to scaling a new industry as an engine of growth. Earlier precedents were studied, including those set at Air India, the Taj Hotels and in publishing. A cadre of Indian professionals was incubated at ITDC to meet world standards. New regions and facilities, neglected as unprofitable by private operators, were opened up. The South welcomed international visitors through its first five-star hotel at Bangalore and at Kovalam, India’s first beach resort created by Charles Correa. Award winning publicity campaigns for ‘destination India’ reflected a galaxy of talent that included Gerson da Cunha, Pratima Shah, Kersi Katrak, Shekhar Kamath, Mitter Bedi, Shyam Benegal, Zafar Hai and top media agencies. Others helped develop remote circuits as new tourism experiences that included pilgrimage and wildlife itineraries, new cuisines and performing arts. A neglected concrete structure in Chanakyapuri was transformed by artisans, designers and managers into an aesthetic experience with path breaking influence: the Akbar Hotel. Romesh’s faith was vindicated. Public sector India could set standards in what was already the world’s largest and most competitive industry, and do so with cultural sensitivity and a confident grip on new domains. To establish smooth succession as a management principle, Romesh stepped down as ITDC Chairman, handing over to M.S. Sundara, a seasoned expert from the Indian Railways where organized Indian tourism had originated. As seminal demonstrations spread around the country, Romesh remained the corporation’s friend and counsellor, encouraged now by recognition from the travel trade for the strategies he had innovated. Praise would prove a poisoned chalice. Global recognition became too bitter a pill for those having to let go. Ministry bureaucrats resented cheeky newcomers moving into their spaces. Private operators wanted quick handovers of anything that ITDC was proving profitable. Cozy arrangements between private players and bureaucrats were being disturbed, and politicians were denied perks and patronage. They expressed outrage and set about to prove the ITDC experiment as yet another white elephant. Unions resenting pressures to perform were encouraged to get into a sabotage act, as was the CBI. When resistance became shrill, Indira Gandhi’s ‘complete backing’ vanished. Romesh and Raj were dismayed, offering the Seminar office as refuge for battered professionals wondering why demonstrations of quality had invited such hostility. To them, the Thapars recalled the opportunity which had brought an unusual team together: professionalism and design as agents for change, confronting established structures with tested alternatives. If the opportunity was a privilege, that privilege now demanded its price. In their Bombay years, Raj and Romesh had participated in the city’s churning of new ideas. Patwant Singh, a friend, had stared Indian Builder and then Design to host early conversations on contemporary expressions symbolized by Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh and the handloom revolution engaging another friend, Pupul Jayakar. Through her, the Thapars met the renowned design team of Charles and Ray Eames on their visit from Los Angeles in 1958. It would lead to the founding in 1963 of the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad by two other visionaries in the Thapar circle: Gautam Sarabhai and his architect sister, Gira, back from the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. When Seminar moved to New Delhi, design engaged discussions in Malhotra Buildings and at regular gatherings of talent and fame at home on Kautilya Marg. In 1966, Romesh sponsored ‘Design for Living’, a project at the UNESCO International Round Table on Jawaharlal Nehru. It debated ideas on ‘a new value system capable of nourishing the disciplines which we need... Only that change is worthwhile which humanizes man,’ warning that, ‘We are thrusting into the future without any clear idea of the quality of life we want to give ourselves... We have failed to create this value system of our era. The next year Romesh brought together a galaxy of thinkers who could influence a design agenda for tomorrow. Among them were Pupul Jayakar, Mulk Raj Anand, L.C. Jain, Charles Correa, business leaders and educators from IITs and schools of planning and architecture. Romesh set a challenge: ‘There is in India today a situation of existential complexity. A country with centuries of traditional memory faced with the shattering of symbol, form, function and meaning. A situation where there is want and unharnessed resources, degradation and dignity, ignorance and illumination, violence and the capacity for immense peace.’ There was a need for a ‘multidimensional and multidisciplined approach for educators, designers, scientists and communicators to question anew the problems and values of man and his environment.’2 Institutions linked to national planning should emerge as valuedriven catalysts for ‘a new design for living and development’, a concept which Romesh would foster in the public sector through ITDC and later, at the fledgling NID. In the early seventies NID faced challenges similar to those threatening ITDC. Design as a problem solving methodology was little understood. Only the bravest parents and students could risk NID’s system of learning that challenged every norm of India’s higher education. An administrative crisis led to the sudden departure of the Sarabhais from the campus they had built from scratch. Another brave experiment was threatened, this one with closure as Parliament struggled with disturbing reports from a distant campus where goingson seemed suspiciously ‘foreign’. Intervention was needed from the top. Indira Gandhi knew the Sarabhais. At NID, she had worked on the ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and His India’ exhibition, created there by the Eames as an experiment in design training and then as an exercise in design diplomacy which would go on to win acclaim in world capitals. Pupul Jayakar was Indira Gandhi’s confidante, and was now NID Chair. To help resolve the institutional crisis, they turned to Romesh. The outcome was a report by the Thapar Review Committee which painstakingly endorsed NID’s experiment, pointing out why design must be acknowledged as a capacity indispensable to India’s future. What NID needed at this critical juncture was understanding, and a new director. With the ITDC effort unravelling, Romesh asked me to move on to this other daunting prospect. I had read unsavoury news reports of campus turmoil and heard rumours of how zealously Ahmedabad’s merchant princes guarded their territories. ‘They will swallow you with sev and ganthia,’ warned one contact with years of experience. Raj put it another way: ‘It’s a bit like medieval Florence. The seths are Medicis, patrons of great taste and unforgiving of interlopers. But don’t worry. Ravi will be there to guide you.’ Professor Ravi Matthai had just stepped down as the first Director of the Indian Institute of Management and was now handholding the NID community through its difficult transition. ‘Try it for a couple of years, Ashoke,’ Raj urged. ‘You have nothing to lose and we all have to come together.’ No sooner had a ticket to Ahmedabad arrived, so too did midnight news of the Emergency. The Thapars would now pay yet another price in defence of quality: Seminar closed rather than bow to censorship. Visions, values and partnerships were betrayed. ‘It’s a good time to get out of Delhi,’ said Raj, ‘the farther away the better to get anything done.’ Those couple of years extended to twenty-five. An Indian experiment in education, the first of its kind anywhere, would achieve global recognition, and then pay its own price for being in an India ‘without any clear idea of the quality of life we want to give ourselves. My years at NID5 were as difficult as they were pricelessly rewarding. Design education and practice had to claim its space, inch by inch and step by step, and do this without support from conventional frameworks. Educators and students had to cope with shoestring budgets and deny themselves facilities their peers took for granted. In a protected market, design had to demonstrate quality without the oxygen of competition. Industry had to understand the difference between design and mimicry, ministries to comprehend a problem solving discipline that could be easily misunderstood as engineering or fine art – and somebody somewhere had to pay a living wage to young designers emerging as young professionals with real life evidence of their capacities. The hostility toward change experienced at ITDC was now mirrored in the mocking of an educational experiment that offered no guarantees. Through all the challenges, Malhotra Building could be counted upon for counsel, tea and sympathy – as well as pressure to endure. ‘Make sure the NID experiment is recognized by designers abroad,’ Romesh urged, ‘you’re going to need that to convince your own country.’ When the institute received the first international award for design in developing countries, Raj and Romesh offered more than congratulations, urging that NID now invest in reaching out to the country, region and the world and to risk this investment without waiting for resources. Romesh shared his ‘Design for Living’ experience with UNESCO, and NID carried that message to an award function in Dublin. It would lead to the United Nations organizing its first design conference at NID in 1979. Delegates came to Ahmedabad from every continent, and heard Romesh Thapar’s keynote call: ‘A comprehensive view has to be nurtured about the society that we are designing or to put it another way, about the value system which must underpin it. An ideology for the designer? Well, yes – in a way. You cannot escape it. An attitude of mind, a framework, a series of guidelines ... but all rooted in the reality around. The design practitioner will have to take positions on what is to be preserved and what is to be destroyed. The conscious selectivity is vitally important... Unless the designer links the peoples aesthetic with modernization, he is wiping away their identity... The attempt to interpret modernization in one stereotyped model must be defeated.' Forty years on, how would Raj and Romesh assess the journey of Indian design, amidst the stereotypes that mark modernity in India 2017? Design education has spread to over 300 listed institutions, and as many tuition shops at every urban corner. NID is now a degree-awarding ‘institute of national importance’ recognized by the Parliament that once considered it wasteful extravagance. Entry into design careers is prized across the country. A national design policy encourages the promotion of design as ‘Make in India’, ‘Skill India’ and as other symbols of current aspiration. Fashion has taken over as the first image of design in the public mind. Indian designers are established in global markets as role models, and design careers can bring celebrity status. And ideology? A recent research estimated that the profession today serves 2% of India’s real needs, joining the widening divides within a culture of consumption. How should India’s design community respond to the opportunities of a market driven economy on one hand and the shrinking spaces for development discourse on the other? Perhaps by recalling Romesh in 1979: ‘We survive on the immense richness of our traditional sources of creativity, salvaged and nurtured by a few highly aesthetic and devoted individuals who were given the political patronage necessary to build authentic design foundations...The need for urgent and conscious intervention ...cannot be left to the whims of individuals who can easily be overwhelmed by the waves of vulgarity that sweep our world...Vulgarity in all its frustrations, its duplicity and imitation, has the propensity to return with redoubled fury...on the basis that “variety is the spice of life” ...dressing bad taste in modernization, making it fashionable and competitive... We will have to draw upon the great heritage of world knowledge and experience to create a discipline of modernization which dissolves the divisions between rich and poor, the contrasts between waste and want, and the repetitive patterns of ugliness and beauty which constitute the violated environments of our planet. The only weapons we have are our sensitivity and creativity. Let us recognize them, sharpen them, and mobilize for engineering the societies of tomorrow.’ This was Romesh, anticipating the Earth Charter twenty-one years before it was signed, and the Sustainable Development Goals almost forty years before they were ratified by every UN member. Both agendas call for ‘an alternative value system which has been carefully worked out, justifiable in humanistic terms, capable of providing answers to the challenges posed by our massive entry into the era of science and technology.’ The sensitivity and creativity which Raj and Romesh had advocated through many of India’s tumultuous years is now its official mandate in a new millennium. Yet, the values they championed for tomorrow’s India may be hard to find in corridors of power. Instead, it is the young in every corner of our land who today reflect the courage of the Thapar vision and its capacity to engineer a ‘new design for living and development.’ They are the heirs. With them is the hope of reclaiming those unforgettable landscapes of freedom where the mind is without fear and where the world is not broken into fragments.

Issue #002, Winter, 2019 ISSN: 2581- 9410

"Craft is an antiquated way of producing goods, I don't see why Indians need to waste time preserving crafts when more important issues like poverty, corruption and education demand attention" - a participant at a recent meeting on craft, design and technology.

The same participant believed that technology was the primary tool that could help solve the issues of craft in India. In his view, a romantic preoccupation with history as embedded in crafts would do nothing to help chart the nation's future directions. He postulated his defense with an aggressive question: "Ask any craftsperson if he wants his child to continue being a craftsperson?" Another posed the efficiency argument - "What is the need to have primitive patterns of production in this day and age - why should cloth take so much effort to weave when we have easier, faster, cleaner ways of making it?" So, what to do? "I think the only thing we can do is turn this (crafts) into a tourist attraction - make some money by 'branding' craft, culture and local wisdom". As a parting shot - "I do like beauty and admire the human endeavor of using hand skills to create. But, give me a break; most of the stuff in the emporia is kitsch. As a discerning Indian, I have to either go to a fancy designer shop or abroad to buy a great craft product." There were, however, also those with positive voices. Even though they sounded tentative in the face of such strong opposition, they were heard. One NGO working in the sector of income generation through craft stated emphatically "Craft is a viable livelihood option - it is dignified and fulfilling, and it needs support". Other views ranged from "The craftsperson is a respected member of any community and fulfils basic needs - especially in the rural pockets" to "Gandhi got it right, we need the village economies to be robust if our nation needs to grow". In spite of a healthy debate, there was no resolution on how one could address the complex nature of the issues raised by the dissenting side. To summarise the points made against craft -

Craft is an old, inefficient way of production.
Craft is not and should not be an important item on the national agenda.
Technology is the most important tool we have to "solve" our problems not craft.
Craftsmen don't have a great image of their own work (perhaps of themselves too?) they wouldn't want their children to work as they do.
The best thing to do is to turn it into a tourist attraction - nothing more.
Current Indian craft is mostly kitsch, non-utilitarian.

This list highlights a perception shared by a large group of people as well as the policy makers - it seems to be the current construct in India surrounding craft. The trend is for the Government and NGOs to involve designers and design firms to 'spruce up' the craft sector, to move from 'traditional' products to 'contemporary' products, packaging, and so on. The implication - the 'old' will not hold. Design is used to apply ideas like 'brand' on this sector; this has spawned the 'designer' product that is said to be successful in urban markets at home and abroad. A good example is Khadi. "An impressive exhibition of Khadi garments titled Khadi: The fabric of freedom has just concluded at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. The exhibition will now go to other metropolitan cities including Kolkata and Bangalore. This exhibition, sponsored by Volkart Foundation, Switzerland, features ensembles by the seven leading fashion designers including Ritu Kumar, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, Manish Arora, Asha Sarabhai and Raghavendra Rao. It is the first one to be held on such a large scale. Khadi: The fabric of freedom has culminated after two years of extensive research by Rahul Jain, a well-qualified textile technologist from India. More than hundred different varieties of both refined and coarse Khadi from Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, UP and Bihar are showcased in this exhibition." [http//apunkachoice.com Bureau (2002)] Better packaging, incorporation of new technology, and product design all constitute this current approach to craft - an approach aligned with the thinking of our dissenting participant. Yet, nowhere is the craftsperson mentioned. Ironically Khadi: the fabric of freedom seems to do little to create 'freedoms' for the people who make it. The development and design of this product seems to exclude real participation of some stakeholders; whereas, as Amartya Sen (1999) says, we need to include them: "An adequate approach of development cannot really be so centered only on those in power. The reach has to be broader, and the need for popular participation is not just sanctimonious rubbish. Indeed, the idea of development cannot be dissociated from it." I have been there, done that myself. As a designer I have worked with precisely this approach in the past - 'contemporizing' craft - thinking that it held promise for the sector. The assumption of this approach is "good design is good business." And one assumes that good business translates to better standards of life. However, such an oversimplified generalization does not allow a real examination of the issue of craft and its development. This assumption needs to be questioned. "The idea that good design is good business is a ridiculous statement, most often trotted out by designers who are trying to prove that whatever they do - which they frequently have difficulty articulating - must be really central to business because somebody said this a really long time ago and it sounded so pithy at that time. This is delusional. I'm convinced that, when it happens good design rises above, surrounds, and is vastly more important than trivial things like commerce. That's why it's really crazy for designers to have concerns about articulating the relationship between design and business." [Keeley (2001)] I started asking questions like - "Is there a different way for design to engage with craft?" "What can design contribute to craft - apart from just 'packaged designs' for others to thoughtlessly reproduce?" I recall Chambers' caution: For learning, power is a disability; all who are powerful are by definition uppers, sometimes uppers many times over, others relate to them as lowers. In their daily lives multiple uppers are vulnerable to acquiescence, deference, flattery and placation. They are not easily contradicted or corrected: their word goes [Chambers (1997)] A designer, a government official, a development professional, a cultural academic, is an "upper". To explore what design can do for the craft sector, let us look at some popular myths. Remember, "… powerful professionals can impose their realities" [Chambers (1997)] - designers are as responsible as others in perpetuating these myths, and must understand their position. Myth 1 "Craftspeople can't be expected to design contemporary products; they need to link up with someone who has an exposure to the urban and international markets". At the face of it this seems a logical and reasonable stand. So the trader, the design house, the merchandiser emerge to apparently support and help the crafts community. Then slowly a lucrative market compels the industry to move to the next scale of manufacture and without real freedom or scrutiny the crafts community is sucked into a social change the consequences of which are not foreseen and very often de-stabilizing. This is the real problem - the change uses inequitable processes and decisions very often don't include the craftsperson's point of view. The nature of such change does not allow the crafts community time to become informed and equal in knowledge to make judicious, long-term choices. But of late years these handicraftsmen, for the sake of whose works the whole world has been ceaselessly pouring its bullion for 3000 years into India, and who, for all the marvelous tissues and embroidery they have wrought, have polluted no rivers, deformed no pleasing prospects, nor poisoned any air; whose skill and individuality the training of countless generations has developed to the highest perfection; these hereditary handicraftsmen are being everywhere gathered from their democratic village communities in hundreds and thousand into the colossal mills of Bombay to drudge in gangs, for tempting wages, at manufacturing piece goods, in competition with Manchester in the production of which they are no more intellectually and morally concerned than the grinder of a barrel organ in the tunes turned out from it [Birdwood (1880)] Note the word "democratic" used to describe the way products were produced. Urban guilds, and village community manufacture was governed by strict rules and laws that made sure there was a distribution of work and protection of the weaker members interests. The societal framework allowed for what, nearly a hundred years later, Fisher (1970) says was an egalitarian framework - "In the co-operative egalitarian society there is fear of the independent self-reliant person as well as of the "bossy" person. Strength and success are achieved by unity of approximate equals, who must be regarded as powerless alone, for if someone felt competent working by himself he might not co-operate with others when needed. Moreover, since directions for work are given on the whole as subtle suggestions rather than as firm commands, a strong trait of obedience and responsiveness to the wishes of others is highly valued and useful." The crafts community has always lived on the above premise, of "approximate equals" but now in the face of globalization and free market economy thinking, this social structure has given way to fierce competition, loss of quality and the firm establishment of the "upper". So the myth that the craftsperson cannot design is sustained. Government policies and development projects reinforce this notion of "inequality". For example, in 1998 the Government of India commissioned me "… to … develop new designs which should be easily marketable in the Global market." This project involved a community of traditional lamp makers in southern India. Note the language - I was not asked to "facilitate a process of design", I was asked to "provide designs". The implied notion here is that the craftsperson is a passive recipient, and cannot be a co-creator. The designer-as-facilitator Charles Eames in his report back in 1958 hoped that designers leaving the new institute of design would- "…leave with a start towards a real education. They should be trained not only to solve problems - but what is more important; they should be trained to help others solve their own problems. One of the most valuable functions of a good industrial designer today is to ask the right questions of those concerned so that they become freshly involved and seek a solution themselves." [Eames (1958)] Has Indian design, in 50 years of the country's independence, empowered the crafts community to become 'freshly involved' and 'seek solutions themselves' on how to resolve this problem of designing for new markets? Have designers asked the right questions of the crafts community to lead to such empowerment? Perhaps it is now time to do so. With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help each other. They need not be seen primarily as passive recipients of the benefits of cunning development programs [Sen (1999)]</i So the point is not that craftspeople don't need links with experts - it's about the quality of that link. Is the link exploitative or authentic in its equity? Design needs to be seen as a powerful tool that can create and nurture this equality - by the institutions, the policy makers and the designers themselves. Myth 2 "Craftspeople need to be trained in skills and new technologies." Again, a plausible and reasonable statement. Without doubt, the pace and intensity of change requires inputs in new skills and technologies. This is such a universal need in today's time that it seems ridiculous to state the obvious. Yet, is the training effective? Doing things right is 'efficiency' but 'effectiveness' is about doing the right thing [Drucker (1974)]. Does the current method of training create an empowered craftsperson through new learning that integrates both the technical and the conceptual? Is design contributing to the effectiveness of craftspersons' training? Traditionally the craftsperson learnt through apprenticeship - every boy born in a working caste of necessity learns his father's handicraft, and when he has mastered it, at once takes his place as a hereditary freeman of his caste or trade guild… [Birdwood (1880)]. Learning still continues through this way where there is hereditary craft practiced. Added to this are numerous Government run training programmes and NGO's who train people to learn a craft to provide livelihood. And yet, creativity, the mainstay of this profession is not addressed through this or any other process. Crafts people cannot create strategies for innovation; competence is seen only as a mastery of one or other technical skill. The craft sector has no institution dedicated to learning, training, and growth of the people involved in it. There is no broad and long-term focus, and a dearth of good trainers in this field amplifies the problem. Most training programmes for craft are dull, lifeless and do not tak learning styles or needs into account when being structured. In today's plural society subjects like design, semiotics, branding, history, politics, philosophy, cultural studies all need to be made accessible to the craftsperson. To paraphrase Neil Postman "Can a nation preserve its history, originality & humanity by refusing craftsmen access to creativity, innovation, knowledge and fun?" [Postman (1992)] Training with a difference To demonstrate what design can do to change this I designed a training programme for craftspeople that was not Balkanized along lines of material or skill set. I used design and art pedagogy to 'teach' creativity, reflection, critical thinking, analysis, exploration and experimentation. Also it relied heavily on visual language, movement and doing rather than talking and writing. I realized that in facilitating knowledge creation in this sector, a designer has to tread very humbly; I knew fully well how easy it is to destroy the objective by being insensitive to method, language, myth, symbol and style. This 5 day residential workshop was called Aagaman - listening to craft. The ideas and work generated at this workshop by craftspeople, engineers, students of design, government officials, and NGO's demonstrated the importance of creating invigorating and challenging learning environments to generate innovation through collaboration. On another project, I transported a bunch of fifteen students from different disciplines of design to a craft cluster, utilising a traditional government funded training program. The students, the craftspeople and I engaged with the notion of design and the design process through a collaborative approach. Students and crafts workers talked together of sustainability and ways of seeing, clarified lexicon, participated in hands-on-classes on urban markets with discussions on form, styles, movements, ergonomics, selling, and myths. At the end of the programme I was convinced that design schools can contribute significantly to the formulation and delivery of effective training in the crafts sector, resulting in win-win positions for all the parties. To quote Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya - "… the pride the craftsperson derives from his creation and the delight in the perfection of his finished product sustain him. It is this knowledge that is enshrined in our faith in crafts". Most craftspeople do have an inherent pride in their work, if their work was accorded the due credit, remuneration and status it deserved, and they had training opportunities that would really empower them to face the onslaught of our changing times, they would encourage their children to continue in the trade. Creation of this kind of opportunity would also open up employment options for other people. With a really 'fun' place to learn, which then enables the earning of a livelihood, we can attract people towards a career in crafts. Compared to the professionalism, ambience and culture in our corporate offices, a typical government craft center looks and feels depressing - this needs urgent change. So the solution to address failing performance in craft is not to "let craftspeople have training". Mediocre, rote or one-dimensional training is primarily responsible for the kitsch that fills our emporia. We ought to be preparing them for the future by developing their capacity to cope with the pressures of ambiguity and change, and empower them with resilience and creativity. Yet, who will bell that cat? Myth 3 We must gear up to increase export - it is finally the best market for Indian Craft (look at our software industry) Government policies in the last 10 years tend to see globalization as an opportunity for economic growth and the buzzwords are "craft for export" or "income generation through craft export". We are urged to follow the examples of our neighbours further East - Bali, Thailand and China. The Export Promotion Council of Handicraft extols the few "houses of craft" that have become supply houses to the retail chains of Europe and USA. They are held up as the models to emulate, models that can be applied across every situation. India had a 3.8% share of the world handicraft trade 3 years ago and this year it hopes to corner 10%. Das (2000) shows the link between this Myth and the earlier ones - There is an old idea in economics…that if a rich and poor country are linked by trade, their standard of living should converge in the long run. It makes intuitive sense, because standard of living depends on productivity, and productivity, in turn, depends on technology. When a poor nation is connected, it merely adopts the technological innovations of the rich one without having to reinvent the wheel [Das (2000)]. While everyone is happy (I am too) that India clocks another 100 million rupees in the export turnover of handicraft - we need to ask if it changes the relationship of the craftsperson to his craft? This question was raised at a recent panel discussion on the future of craft, held at Bangalore, India. Some interesting insights emerged… Prem Chandavarkar, an architect, said - "Craft objects were originally objects of use as well of contemplation. A coconut scraper is a coconut scraper but it is also shaped in the form of a horse head. The thinking and making of an object was always interlinked." Today, when we talk about making new designs or responding to markets we are slowly separating the thinking and doing. The work of a craftsman was rooted in a place or a community and related to the worldview of that community, which expressed itself in that craft. It was bound by its context. Today with globalization craft is viewed in non-contextual boundaries. A craftsman in a village may be producing for a consumer in Mumbai or New York and hence the act of creating is grounded in 'market perception' and not a particular worldview. Prem also added, " Craft really is a rooted tradition - it is a process by which a community reflects on its condition - this sort of reflection is actually a search for identity. The more we move craft towards 'market' and 'customers' the more we move it away from its greatest source of renewal. That is not to say customer requirements are not important; rather there is a need to dialogue with craftsmen about ways of dealing with these concerns." "We come back to the perspective of capabilities: that different sections of the society (and not just the socially privileged) should be able to be active in the decisions regarding what to preserve and what to let go" [Sen (1999)] If pushing export implies the basic relationship of craft to craftsman and society is put under pressure, it would be appropriate to seek solutions that counter such an effect. When designers provide the craftsman access to larger markets through design inputs they also have to be responsible to provide the concomitant tools and strategies that allow him to relate to the context, and thus greater control. Design as a tool to decision making So export means great markets, yet the sense of identity must be protected. Design can be used to help make decisions, both to articulate possibilities and futures as well as weigh costs. With the new opportunities, craftspeople must also be provided with the means of relating to the new contexts, and thus freed up to make 'right' decisions. In the words of Coomaraswamy (1924) - "The heart and the essence of the Indian experience is to be found in a constant intuition of the unity of all life, and the instinctive and ineradicable conviction that the recognition of this unity is the highest good and the uttermost freedom." I see design as the integrator, the bringer-together, the crucible within which to create opportunities for dialogue between customers and craftspersons, between buyers and exporters, between the markets and the villages. Design can empower the individual craftsperson to create balance between these forces, and thus make 'right' decisions. Myth 4 Craft is antiquated - needs to get in line with the 21sth century If the attributes of a decent livelihood were to be drawn up - then income, work conditions, growth and development opportunities would figure as the basic minimum. Craft scores on all counts and is therefore often used by NGO's to create livelihood options. On my wanderings, I met Maruthi, who studies law at a small town called Channapatna in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. His father was a craftsperson who used a hand lathe to make turned wooden products - utilitarian, ritual and decorative. Maruthi also turns wooden beads in the morning in the verandah of his village home - before he leaves to catch the bus to college. Asked if he would like to make craft his career, he thought a bit and said he saw no reason why he can't do both - law and craft. Every time I talk to craftspeople who highlight this flexible aspect of their work, I contrast it with the struggle the corporate sector is having with this idea. Social scientists tell us that we are living in the age of "flexible economies". In this age of networked connectivity corporations advertise their workspace as "flexible" to attract employees. Flexibility is often portrayed positively as a way of creating work that is more meaningful and holistic for individuals. But in actual practice the transition of a capitalistic industrial society into a post-industrial flexible economy can create "work environments and social structures that are elitist and divisive, with autonomy, discretion and more meaningful work being reserved for small technical elites while the remaining workforce is relegated to work that is low-grade, ways." [Hargreaves (1993)] Here in India craft is practiced most often in "flexible" scenarios. The craftsperson follows work methods and processes that are not standardized but are integrated into his life and the rhythms of the community. "Simultaneous", "non-linear", "networked" are ways of thinking that come naturally to this community. It is part of their inheritance. It is a way of life. They don't need to learn about "flexibility"- they live it. It is ironical that this very strength of this type of production is perceived as a weakness - both by themselves and the world they interact with. The government tells them to standardise, the designer tells them to upgrade, modernise and change, the market tells them to make things they never have before. They don't know which is the appropriate way to respond. Design as tool of creating a bridge I can see design used as a tool to clarify these issues and create ways to strategize and leverage the situation for the benefit of craft. The time seems appropriate too - the world seems to be turning around to value traditional materials and processes, not spurn them. "Fortunately for the Indian weaver, while he slept like Rip van Winkle, the world has come a full circle, and having soared the skies plucking fabrics out of thin air, has now returned to earth, and is seeking its roots in earth-borne products. Western cultures are slowly turning away from the glitz of synthetic fibres and wash-and-wear clothes and are reaching out for natural fibres and dyes that do not pollute the earth. The devastation of nature has brought humankind to its senses, and there is growing realisation that we are of the Earth and we destroy ourselves when we destroy nature." [Ramani (2002)] Craft could teach the citizens of the 21st century a thing or two about life and living. We need to listen and encourage, not condemn and force-fit. Design then could be the means of creating this bridge. The role of design schools The design school in India is a relatively new entrant in historical terms. It is not like an engineering college or a management school. It is not like a Fine Art school either. It combines the right brain with the left in its approach to pedagogy, itself a novelty in a culture like ours. It is this space that can and must take on the task of building bridges between the traditional and the modern, the technological and the mythical in our culture. Why do I say a design school and not a design office or studio? A design school has many advantages:

First, because of the available resources of young energetic designrs-to-be. They are the ideal ambassadors of such a process. They do not carry sufficient authority to intimidate craftspeople, yet they still have the required training and thinking associated with design. If the school also teaches facilitation skills, then the design student could collaborate with all the stakeholders concerned to visualize solutions.
A design school can spend longer periods of time on projects, with a component of research and engagement that purely commercial setups have trouble doing. Craft needs that kind of time.
Also a school is a space where multiple stakeholders can converge, and since its primary function is learning the environment is right for experimenting, investigating and making mistakes. It is the ideal platform for multidisciplinary teams to begin the job of designing the frameworks and materials that would solve the problems of the crafts sector search for identity, freedom to make decisions, ability to face globalization and change and growth in the future.

In conventional terms design has so far been seen only as a contributor to the economics of craft. This narrow and shallow engagement is one of the reasons why the dissenting voice seems reasonable and true. Design must redefine its boundaries to go beyond the rather limited and circumscribed role to be able to contribute to the development of this sector.

"In looking for a fuller understanding of the role of design we have to take note of: Its direct relevance to the well-being and freedom of the craftsperson its indirect role through influencing social change and its indirect role through influencing economic production." [Sen (1999)] And I believe the design school is the right place for this process of 'role realisation' to begin. References

http//Apunkachoice.com (2002), Khadi is back in vogue, 01 May, http//www.apunkachoice.com/scoop/fashion/20020501-0.html

Birdwood, Sir G (1880), Industrial Arts of India, London

Chambers, Robert (1997), Whose Reality Counts?, Intermediate Technology Publications, London

Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish (1924), The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., London

Das, Gurcharan (2000), India Unbound, Viking, N Delhi

Drucker, Peter (1974), Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Harper & Row, NY

Eames, Charles (1958), The India Report, A report written for the Government of India, N Delhi

Fischer, J.L. (1970), Art Styles as Cultural Cognitive Maps, in Albrecht, Milton C., Barnett, James, H., and Griff, Mason [Eds], The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd, London

Hargreaves, Andy (1993), Changing Teachers, Changing Times, Continuum International Publishing Group, London

Keeley, Larry (2001), Facts, Forces, Fog: Reckless Guesses in a Time of Change, Keynote address at Aspen Design Conference, June, Doblin Inc [published subsequently in Blueprint, No. 186, Aug 2001]

Postman, Neil (1992), Technopoly, Alfred Knopf, NY

Ramani, Shakuntala (2002), Sari: The Kalakshetra Tradition, Craft Education and Research Centre, Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai

Sen, Amartya (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

“……. It would seem that the author of nature, as a set-off against other advantages which Europe enjoys, has granted India ingredients, and above all, certain waters, whose particular qualities have much to do with beautiful combination of painting and dyeing presented by Indian cloths.” -Father Coeurdoux Wisely spoken words draw many a comparison of the geniuses of Indian craftsperson in the whole world. Their mastery on the colour is truly appreciated by the wearers of colourful textiles who look equally mesmerizing to the novice eyes of the foreign land. Versatility of the fabrics produced in India can be estimated by the classification done by John Irwin in his article titled, “Indian Textiles in Historical Perspective”. He divides the cloth manufactured in following categories; (a) clothes that are woven & dyed by professional skills of craftsperson’s of India; for local communities, (b) articles of luxury made under court patronage or in the court tradition, (c) embroidered textiles and (d) fabrics of indigenous tribes. Here the dyed articles in first category also include the printed textiles. Printing and dyeing are the two techniques that go hand in hand in India. Of Indian Art, printing constitutes a large part of textile art manufacture of India. Printing being done on almost every textile base, it has attained the highest level of perfection. Printed cloth is a cloth of commoner and there is no single village in India where one can’t find bright coloured fabrics all around. Of all the states, Rajasthan constitutes the most number of styles of printing. Each region has its own specialty. Most of the uniqueness is based on the different techniques applied. From direct block printing to discharge and to resist style of printing all are practiced in the state of Rajasthan. [gallery ids="162561,162562,162563,162564"] There has been a shift in the technology with the changing economic, social and political environment in Rajasthan. The state has seen numerous successions from ancient times of anarchy to the modern day state government. All these exchanges had a direct influence on the make and shift of the cultural traditions. What is visible today is the coalescence of the changing convention.

Tracing the culture of Rajasthan

Rajasthan covers 10.41% of the Indian Union. In terms of total area Rajasthan takes only 2^nd place next to Madhya Pradesh. The state of Rajasthan covers 26 districts of which Jaipur comes 7^th in terms total area. This pink city is the capital of the state and also represents the culture of this region to its extent. Jaipur constitutes 4.11% of the total area of the state. Rajasthan, the name of the state has leaded on through slow successions from ‘Rajwara’, ‘Raethana’, ‘Rajputana’ or ‘Rajpootna’.

Physically the Arravalli Range can distinctively divide Rajasthan state into two geographical parts. This divide brings about a major cultural variation amongst the two parts. The western part of the divide is dry and arid and constitutes The Thar Desert and Eastern part, not devoid of flora and fauna is hilly and rocky. There is an interesting exchange of material and philosophical ideas between the two regions. To trace the origins of present Rajasthan’s culture of craftsmanship it will be a mountainous task for there was no one group or community that stayed long enough to prosper. It was the continuous invasion through Iranian plateau that one community swiped another successively. This resulted in the amalgamation of different cultures. Each invasion brought new traditions, which were imprinted, with the older ones. From Persians to Arabs, Mughuls, Mauryans, Aryans did not resulted in much of civilization than continuous successive possession of land. The reasons were simply to exploit the resources of the land. Rajasthan is rich in mines of minerals and stones. The craftsmen of Rajasthan therefore use natural mineral stone colours wether it is for meenakari (enamelling), lacquer work, dyeing and printing of cloth, pichhwais of Nathdwara, Phad paintings etc. It is only with the rule of Mughal’s that some stability was seen in the land. The first ruler of Mughal Sultanate, Babar was a descendant of Changhez Khan and Temurlane. He, with his every succession spared the skilled craftsmen, artists and men of learning. He would either send them off to his homeland or bring his craftsmen to the newly conquered land to build new craft centers. At this era we could say that a stability in the community brought evolving culture of craft. Of Rajputana history, at about 500 A.D. Huns who were the descendants of Turks of Transoxiana, complete barbarians from the Iranian Plateau overthrew Gupta’s. They were also based on tribal communities. The Gurajara tribes of the Huns adopted Hinduism and their leaders were responsible for the origin of Rajput families. As terrain of Rajasthan favoured resistance, the enclaves of the old culture survived here more easily than in other parts of the country. The weather conditions on the other hand also played a vital role in the favouring of certain resources than the others. Due to climatic conditions, cotton cannot be grown in this area. Therefore weaving of cotton is quiet uncommon. The only loom operation that happens around is the manufacture of blankets from locally produced wool. Probably that is the reason why Rajasthani craftsmen have excelled at surface ornamentation technique. Block printing, tie-dye and embroidery are the basic techniques, which gives Rajasthan its distinctive character. Decked in bright colours like red, yellow, green, blue & black, men and women of Rajasthan, make the most colourful picture of arid and dry land. [gallery ids="162591,162592,162593"]

Blocks for printing

Before probing further into the background of printed textiles it is necessary to know what printed textiles mean. A textile on which a pattern is produced after the completion of weaving, the pattern achieved through dye-stuff and wooden blocks of design. The wooden hand blocks are used to make patterns of design on the fabric. In Rajasthan following processes have been in use for decoration.

Direct application of the colour and design; hand blocks were used earlier. Today silk screens have mostly substituted hand block. Hand block printing is not obsolete though but very few craftsmen are practicing the same.
Resist process, which means application of colour at first stage; resist application at second stage and again second application of the colour. Resists like gum, clay and wax have been used in Rajasthan. Resist is stamped with the block in place like Bagru near Rajasthan. The resist is named as Dabu which is made of mud or clay.
Mordant process or the modern discharge process is used when the direct application of dyes is not possible. Most of the printers in Rajasthan have started using this style of printing using synthetic alizarine.
Pigment printing with gold or more commonly known as Tinsel printing. This style of printing is most commonly found in Jaipur. Also known as Warak/Gold leaf printing this style is also used in Pichhwais of Nathdwara.

S. Demand in relation to printing has accounted that, “Two methods of decorating fabrics are of ancient origin. These are block printing and resist dyeing, which in the Mughal period were brought to a high degree of perfection and combined with painting.”

Today also the processes and technique remain the same except the change of raw materials. Natural dyes have been replaced by synthetic dyes. Materials like natural wax, gum have been replaced by their counter parts in synthetic and man-made materials. Hand block printing has been replaced by silk screens.

Printing in history

Studying the origin and development of printed textiles is a difficult task. There are no hard evidences to support the beginning of textile printing industry in the country. As we go down the history lane there are many evidences that prove printing to be an art for appreciation since long time. The word ‘Print’ comes from old French preinte ‘pressed’ or from Latin premere, ‘to press’.Motichandra in the text from Journal of Indian Textile History V had mentioned Chitrapata in 11^th century source as a possible form of printed Calico. Further the word Chimpaka for a Female calico printer and chhipa for a calico printer in 14^th& 15^th century source respectively.The term chhapa for calico printing has been evident in Jaisi, 16^th Century. An 18^th century text named as Bahar-i-Ajam has accounted ‘chhapa’ to be a Hindi word for printing block which in Persian is known only as chapa. Old Sanskrit literature refers to words like ‘phuttak’, ‘pushpvat’, ‘hansalakshyukt’, ‘dhukul’ and the text written by Gorochan known as ‘kadambri’ talks about printed and painted textiles. Use of ‘Hans’ motif in printing of textiles in ancient India is visible through the paintings in Ajanta and Ellora caves, Jain miniature paintings and fragments excavated from Fostat. ‘Chhint’ the Hindi word was modified/adapted to ‘chit’ in Persian which is also indicative of the primacy of Indian block printing industry. Words like ‘chints’, ‘printed’, ‘calicoes’ and ‘pintadoes’ were quiet in use for the Indian textiles during the middle ages. Also words like uchho (printing industry) and chimppayy (printers) were prevalent in the dictionaries in middle ages. This denotes that printing of textile was an evolved industry during that time. Printed cotton textiles from India were known with various names like chidneys, chites, scriltores, toiles, peintes, indinnes, palampores and salampores which also prove that Indian textile were not only famous throughout India but there demand was indispensable in the whole world. We can say it is though very difficult to find the exact source of origin and date of printing in India but it can be surely said that printing industry did existed from a very long time. Few examples mentioned above promote the existence of printing industry and that too in a much evolved state. Though there is no physical evidence available in India due to the weather conditions which could not conserve the old textiles but fragments found at Fostat provides us with enough proof for the same.

Evidences of Significance

The earliest specimen of the Indian resist dyed cloth is said to be discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in 8^th century which was a fragment of cotton cloth with a floral motif. Silk specimen of block printed style was also discovered by Sir Stein in Central Asian sites. Long standing tradition of dyeing and printing in Rajasthan can be seen through the evidence of an old printed cloth found in Jaisalmer Jain Bhandar. The cloth was probably made with madder process and found wrapped around a manuscript. The design of the cloth was found similar to the stylized boota found in Egyptian Tomb which dates back to 12^th century A.D. The printed fabrics found in Central Asia made in resist techniques probably dating 8^th century A.D. were said to be produced in India. Old banner paintings from Tibet were coloured in Indian red, black & yellow a very common colour combination found in India and the design patterns seem typical contemporary Sanganeri designs. The most noteworthy and exemplary evidence of printing history of India is the madder dyed fragment pieces found in Al Fustat, Egypt whose origin is sourced to India. The earliest specimen dates back to 12^th century. It provides with an ample proof that by 15^th century block printing and dyeing were the two arts that Indian craftsmen excelled at. Not only were they being used in home but they have reached the outer world through trade. The analysis of these fragments mentioned in the book, “Les Toiles Imprimees De Fostat” authored by R. Pfister gives an impression that the fragments were originated in Gujarat. Gujarat port however catered to all the near-by centers for printing like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh. By observing the prints visually it will be difficult to decide the exact provenance of the specimen. [caption id="attachment_162594" align="alignleft" width="335"]

Fragments of printed textile at Fostat Place of Manufacture: Gujarat[/caption] These specimens allow the textile historians to speculate the origin of the printing in the world. Some scholars argue the origin of printing to China but the claims are not confirmed but it is established that first paper printing was practiced in China. Sir Aurel Stein had discovered Chinese hand printed silk dating from T’ang dynasty (7^th century) in the “Cave of the Thousand Buddhas” at Tun Huang in Chinese Turkestan. R. Pfister recorded that printing was practiced on silk by Iranians in 11 the century. It is also been claimed that it is from China that the art of printing spread to middle Asia and Persia. From Persia hence it travelled with Muslims to Western India. Although an account by Chardin (1666) opposes this argument claiming that Iran’s cotton printed textiles were not as fine as that of India. Irfan Habib in his article ‘The Technology and Economy of Mughal India’ has also mentioned two methods of pattern dyeing as basic to Indian craftsmen in 17^th century. These were application of resists to confine colours and of mordants to take colours. Various anecdotes and accounts ascertain that printing existed in India even before the arrival of Mughals. It can be attested to the favourable conditions in India like water resources that printing has reached its zenith. Though there are no evidences or fragments available of wooden block but there is one stone block from 5^th century as mentioned by Dr. Motichandra in her book titled, “Jain miniature painting from western India”. The Ajanta and Ellora caves are very significant to the textile historians. Some of the frescoes in Ajanta are illustrative of block printing of cottons. “In an illustration of the Mahajanak Jataka from Cave I, the chowri bearer has an upper garment decorated with the “hamsa” motif- similar motifs have been found both in Fostat specimens and in costumes detailed by Dr. Motichandra in his book on Jain Painting.” Not just the historical architecture but travelogues and accounts of famous foreigners have mentioned the art of hand block printing. There is a reference of export of cotton printed goods from Coromandel coast to Baruch in Gulf of Cambay in a book named “Periplus of Erythrean Sea” written in 1^st century A.D.From the anonymous Greek text it is clear that the trade from India to Roman Egypt included spices and aromatics, gems, ivory and especially textiles, in exchange of which were sent metals, wheat, glass and silver, but also linen from the Nile Delta. It is interesting to note that Duarte Barbosa who was serving the Indian government in 1500 AD, almost 1500 years after wrote about the same export centres; Gujarat, Coromandel Coast and Bengal. The centre’s were producing patterned textiles for export since then. Megasthenes in 4^th century writes about the costumes of Indian’s.

“Their robes are worked in gold, ornamented with precious stones; they wear flowered garments made of finest muslin.”

Francois Bernier in his famous work of “Travels in Mogul Empire” has mentioned of his meeting with Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in his tent which was beautifully lined with hand painted cotton manufactured in Masulipatnam. “The outside was red and the inside was lined with those chittis or cloths painted by a pencil of Masulipatnam, purposely wrought and contrived with such vivid colours and flowers and flowers so aturally drawn, of a hundred several fashions and shapes, that one would have said it was a hanging parterre.” Frenchman Jean Baptiste Tavernier talks of cotton floral printed canopies. He has used the words chintz and calicoes for the printed wall hangings and bed spreads used in the Mughal times which were exported from Coromandel Coast. Memoirs of kings and queens also form a very important source of historical evidence for textile researchers. Abul Faizal’s, Ain-i-Akbari which is an account of the Mughal king Akbar’s life has mentioned printed textiles of 16^th century. There is a mention of printing of cotton textile too.

“…….in stuff as zardozi, kalabatun, kashidah, qalghai, bandhanun, chhint, alchah, purzdar to which His Majesty pay much attention.”( Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari translated by Ibn Mubarak)

Records of East India Company show the trade of printed cloths of Baharanpur or either pintadoes of Masulipatnam as curtains and quilts to western countries. Various trade records of different places have illustrated the chintz of Ahmedabad and Pintadoes of Baharanpur and Surat which proves the 17^th century existence of printing industry in India. Thevenot, a French traveler in his account of Agra from 1666 has mentioned the use of printing block for direct colour impressions. He also mentioned the same process being used in Iran but further mentions that the cloth used to come from Indies.

Development of printing in Rajasthan

Of how the printing centers were developed in Rajasthan we only have speculative data. As discussed earlier Rajasthan was dealing with various excursions by foreign rulers as well as tensions from domestic front. The social upheavals that occurred during the wars of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb during the mid17^th century, followed by incursions of raiding Marathas, must have forced the Gujarati printers to abandon their land and shift to Rajasthan. Therefore we can say that Gujarati and Rajasthani designs have so much of similarity in terms of colours and designs and yet they manage to sustain their individuality with the course of time. With new avenues and resources available the printers settled at various places in Rajasthan. Slowly and gradually each printing center developed its own unique style of printing. There is also a story related to how printing actually started in Sanganer region of Rajasthan. The elders recite the tale of Sant Namdev.

Sant Namdev an otherwise popular saint of Maharashtra has been known to be a son of a textile printer in Maharashtra who gave the knowledge of dyeing and printing as he travelled towards north-west region of India. Other story relates that one night Sant NamDev had a dream about the processes of dyeing and printing, which he conveyed to his friends and relatives in the morning. In this way the process of dyeing and printing came into practice. Ajmer: The uniqueness of the printed cloth had pale background in light pink or cream, designed in delicate floral designs, which were outlined in black giving it a bold appearance. The patterns were further detailed through shades of red. Bed covers, quilts, bed spreads were designed in large floral patterns while the borders were in pure white colour and the scrolls made on this ground were either of hibiscus type or Palmyra types in an expanded form. The flowers were alternately of dark and light red. The end pieces of clothes like saris had pillars panelled and flowers in cusped arches.Traditional patterns and designs are still in existence in Rajasthan. Each center of Rajasthan has its own unique style of printing. We can clearly distinguish the centers of printing with their unique styles in terms of colours, techniques and designs. Barmer: This region forms the desert circuit with three other regions namely Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Bikaner. Amidst the arid desert land, Barmer brings out the most brilliant of printed cloths in bold patterns. The katar buti design is actually famous from the region. The technique followed in Barmer is Ajrakh done on both the sides of fabric. It is done on both the sides of the fabric in the usual blue and red colour combination. Balotra is another centre of Barmer region known for Ajrakh printing as well. Jaisalmer: Here we can find the oldest designs and techniques. Wax resist printing is famous for Jaisalmer region which is done only in three to four months of winters and that too at night time. The cold weather cools off the hot wax immediately on the fabric. The cloth is then dyed which causes the resisted area to take lighter tone of the dyed colour. This technique creates effective tonal end result on the cloth. Udaipur: It is home to famous Nathdwara Temple of Lord Krishna. The influence of Nathdwara painters is quite evident on the printers of Udaipur. Many of the distinctive designs have found Pichhwai to be the source of inspiration. Cloths in white or almond colour background were seen printed with sandalwood blocks which leave behind sweet fragrance after printing. The cloth was decorated either with dark red colour or if dyed in lighter background it was decorated with bands of green colour and flowers on it with yellow colour. The printed clothes mostly included dupattas and odhanis. Kota: This centre is known for its yet different style of printing. Dabu is applied on a white cloth which is then dyed in red or blue colour. Kota though is more famous for its unique woven fabric which has its name from the place itself; the kota fabric. Block printing is done on this fabric mostly in Indian red and indigo. Today the market is flooded with the fabrics of Kota. The products are mostly stoles, duppattas or odhanis and dress material. [caption id="attachment_162600" align="alignright" width="296"]

Mendh Printing, Akola[/caption] Chittorgarh: This district has numerous small printing centers one such is called chhipo ka Akola. This center is famously known to print ghaghra for local village women. Also one of the largest printing communities of Rajasthan, the ghaghra printed is usually in dark blue indigo with a famous traditional mirchi buta design. Jaipur: is one of the most popular printing centre. Being the capital of the state, this pink city portrays the entire culture of Rajasthan. Two famous printing centers of Jaipur region are Sanganer and Bagru. Both the places are known for distinct styles of printing.

“The Sanganer town of Jaipur State must, however, be regarded as the very metropolis of the calico-printing craft of India so far as art-conceptions and techniques are concerned” – Sir George Watt.

Sanganer is known for intricate and detailed floral design done in direct style of printing. While Bagru is known for dull coloured clothes designed in single buti design done in resist paste. Mostly earthy colours are used in this style of printing. Established by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh printing succeeded after settlement of printers in Jaipur. Sanganer was already producing printed clothes but there is no evidence. Kaladera, another centre of printing near Jaipur prints pharad on bue background whereas Jairampura centre prints in red and black colour. Bassi near Jaipur was known for printings of bed sheets but today it also produces garments. The center’s so mentioned became popular and sustainable for some reason. It is the available resources that make this printing industry viable in some centers only. For example, Dhund river of Sanganer and Nargaasar river of Barmer had special minerals in the water that produced brilliant colours. Being a desert state, Rajasthan weather influenced the use of bright and bold colours. Availability of raw materials also caused the development of printing in few centers only. Most of the raw material came from the tribals who travelled between Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan for food and resources. They bartered the wax, gum and wood like material with essentials like food and grains. Another very important reason for thriving of the industry is consumers. Most of the tribal population of Rajasthan wore printed textiles. In eastern Rajasthan Meena, Jat and Gurjar men wore white sash and Meena women wore Mein pharad or Jammardi pharad. Today Meena and Jat women both wear the ghaghras of Mein ki pharad. Pipad, in western rajasthan produces textiles for village population of Mali and Bhishnoi community.

Significance of printing in Rajasthan

Textile printing had enjoyed the royal patronage in centers like Sanganer and Bagru. After the beneficial alliance between the then Raja of Amber, Raja Bharmal and the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1562, the royal court adopted the Mughal style administrative system. 36 karkhana workshops were established of which two were rangkhana; that supervised the dyeing and chapakhana; that managed textile printing. The royal collections now available in Indian museums and private collections were collected through various ways. Some of them were gifts from the clients or subordinates while some were a part of military-political alliance. The finest example of this type is what is called ‘khilat’ or the robe of honour. Craftsmen worked for the three types of patrons; nobility, courtiers and temple devotees and everyday clients or commoners. The depiction of exotic flowers in a most exquisite manner was the emphasis on courtly cloth while the everyday client’s cloth was adorned with flora, fauna of local habitat. The temple textiles included red coloured duppatta’s that were offered to the diety along with the sweets. These gifts to the diety were then offered by the priests to the prominent devotees. As an act of veneration craftsmen printed naamwali textiles. The artisans would chant ‘pancha namaskara chants’ while stamping the cloth in a unison. The court patronage provided with all the facilities to the artisans. These artisan printed clothes as per the royal demand only. The independent printers were not supported by the royal courts and they were not facilitated by the perks which were otherwise available to printers associated with the court. Conclusion Rajasthan till date is the most extensive printing center in India. The charm of the bright colours still finds place in the hearts of people of Rajasthan, compensating for the otherwise dull terrain. Printing happens in almost all the places in Rajasthan. Though many centers are now obsolete due to lack of demand and availability of resources but some centers like Sanganer have flourished beyond the boundaries of India. The printing styles so unique to their places are known by the place only. ‘Sanganeri’ is one such example. Other styles are ‘Daabu’- the mud resist printing, ‘mendh’- the wax resist printing, ‘Ajrakh’- a complicated yet beautiful printing style. Hand bock printing industry faced a blow with the introduction of mechanized systems of printing. Screen printing overtook hand block printing at most of the printing centres. The speedy new method in combination with modern pigment inks enabled large scale factories to produce enormous quantities of inexpensive patterned cloth. This had a three way damage of the industry. Consumers shifted to less expensive products, printers were gaining more profit through cheap raw materials yet marginal profits even in cheaper good they sell and decline of the age old traditional skill. The demand increased with the increase in production. In recent years there have been issues of increasing environmental concerns. The trade of artificial dyes started in around 1980’s in Sanganer region. There was also an introduction of pigment and binder systems for screen printers. The 1990’s witnessed the introduction of discharge printing methods and newer forms of pigment systems including revolutionary new Procion colours which were highly reactive and specially made for screen printing. This easily availability of cheap raw material triggered the printing activities and therefore increased the levels of pollution in the rivers. Hand block printing is dependant on clean water supply. Pollution in water causes the changein mineral water content and it effects the dye uptake on clothes. There has been no awareness about environmental concerns and the situation is getting worst every time. In the census done in 2009 it was established that screen printing units outnumbered the hand block printing units. There were 350 block printing units in comparison to 423 screen printing units. There has been an effort by the government and private organizations to change the disappointing scenario. In 2003 All India Artisans and Craft Workers Association (AIACA), a membership group of craft NGO’s established a Craftmark to educate the consumers and establish the local craftsmen in the global market. This branding has helped the printer community in improving their sales enormously. United Kingdom’s fair trade organization, Traidcraft, in partnership with AIACA, is working on the ‘Switch Asia Project- Promoting Sustainable Consumption and Production’. The project is exploring environmental concerns as well as issues like ethical work standards, labour laws, health and safety standards etc. The future of the industry therefore stands in the hands of block printers community and the efforts of private and government organizations in creating a sustainable environment for hand block printing industry. This review paper was a part of the Ph.D course work written under the supervision of Dr. Simmi Bhagat, Associate Professor in Department of Fabric and Apparel Science, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi. References

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Websites Visited http:/www.fibre2fashion.com/industry-article/40/3982/bagru1.asp

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The structural-change policies adopted in recent years as part of the trend towards globalization have accelerated the liberalization of world trade through the creation of trade zones, free-trade agreements and common markets. This has had strong effects on national economies, the agents involved in such economies and international trade flows… From UNIFEM’s report “NAFTA’s Impact on the Female Work Force in Mexico”

As an employee of a donor funded organization, the sway that funders hold over organizations often seems daunting. Non-profits without clear goals and objectives, and a strategy to obtain those goals, risk getting caught up in the funding game where priorities are deferred to dollars. Even organizations that have defined ideas of their future must put aside those goals due to a lack of funding in a certain geographic region, sector or timeframe. This was recently brought to my attention after the current US administration announced an integration of the goals and objectives of the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). These two departments, especially USAID, are key players in the development field and have much influence on how, where and when American development organizations work. The alliance of the State Department’s foreign policy and USAID’s resource allocation, highlighted, for me, the way which government policies can affect every facet of a nation’s economy. Now, this point may seem obvious but it started me on a path to uncover how policies outside of direct development objectives impact artisans and crafts around the globe. From trade agreements made in regional alliances to transitional, post-communist nations struggling to create pro-small business laws, policy plays a major role in the formal and informal crafts sectors. Even trade agreements that may seem to immediately benefit artisans and workers in developing nations can ultimately be detrimental to their standard of living. Take NAFTA for example. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed between Canada, the United States and Mexico in 1994. It opened up trade between all three countries with the idea that the agreement would create jobs in the least developed nation (i.e. Mexico). Initially some jobs were lost and then recovered with a small margin of growth in the number of jobs. However, as an UNIFEM report studying the impact of NAFTA on women workers in Mexico shows, “In the textile and apparel sector women were able to recover the positions they had lost in previous years, but that was fundamentally due to the sharp drop in wages.” The report also stated that due to the changing face of industry, many women workers moved to small companies or cooperatives where they received less stable work, no benefits and were more susceptible to exploitation. As in Mexico’s case, women workers, often the bearers of craft and cultural traditions, are usually the hardest hit by globalization policies that aim to open up trade or by policies that put up barriers to creating small businesses. As the UNIFEM report points out, “Even in countries that are successfully taking part in the world economy, the benefits of economic growth are not being distributed fairly among the population…these include women working in agriculture and traditional industries, and had led, among other effects, to a substantial increase in informal activities and unemployment.” An interesting point to emphasize though is that policies like NAFTA don’t just negatively impact developing nation and their women workers. The Crafts Report April 2006 issues published an article highlighting a different side of NAFTA. The article titled “Ingrid’s Woven Rugs: Old Techniques Still Roll Up Technology Driven Competitors”, profiled a small second generation workshop in rural Texas run by Reinhard Schoffthaler. The workshop makes custom woven rugs and blankets for locals and customers that pass by the shop on their way through Texas. Although the shop is still successful, when NAFTA was signed Schoffthaler was forced to lay off more than half of his employees and the business has never fully recovered. Schoffthaler is only one example of a small, US-based textile business that was hit by NAFTA. All of these points may seem redundant, over played or just plain apparent, but trade liberalization doesn’t appear to be slowing down or stopping anytime soon. With this in mind it’s important for development workers, scholars and artisans to pause and take a historical look at what these agreements have done in the past so that we can be more prepared for the policies and agreements of the future. The poverty divide has widened in past decade and while some nations are able to negotiate access to global markets and trade expansion, many developing nations are finding it increasingly difficult to compete. References: NAFTA’s Impact on the Female Work Force in Mexico, United Nations Development Fund for Women, Polanco, Mexico, Crafts Report, April 2006 issue, pages 28-31

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Curator communicates with visitors through exhibition, which is the most essential activity of any museum. Putting up the exhibition, whether permanent or temporary, depends on two things, space for exhibition and understanding of exhibits. For the exhibition space, which is usually the infrastructural matter, curator's say is less in compare to understanding of exhibits, where curator's role is more crucial. Understanding of exhibits means the physical character of the artefact and its historical value, on which the exhibition's success or failure depends. Physical character means the material, texture and volume of exhibits, while history refers the historical background and cultural context. Curator weaves a story around exhibits by understanding all these aspects. Most of the art objects lost their cultural context once entered the museum. Therefore it becomes essential to understand; research, analyse these artefacts first and accordingly successful exhibition can be planned. This is one of the challenges for curators, while planning exhibition of any type of artefacts, whether sculptures, paintings, coins or decorative arts. Each category of artefact is different from each-other and has its own challenges while exhibiting them. However, exhibiting decorative arts artefacts is the most challenging and moreover less talked also, in compare to other type of artefacts. The reason of difference is that it deals with multiple nature of material, which is different not only from other category of artefacts, but within its own group. From soft to hard material and small to big, these artefacts always places challenges at the time of display. Before discussing the challenges exhibiting the artefacts, it's better to understand what a decorative art is.

Decorative Arts

'Decorative Arts, is a subsidiary category of the fine arts' (1) All those artefacts, which are aesthetically created for the purpose of utility and decoration, are generally categorized as Decorative Arts. Motif, design and decoration are the prominent features of these artefacts which were usually created by hand with different type of materials. (2) These were crafted for daily, ceremonial or ritualistic uses like; wooden panels to decorate architectural dwellings, metal or ceramic for crafting utensils and decorative objects, clothing and jewellery to ornate the images of God-Goddess and human being,, etc. Display of each of these wide-range artefacts need be thought, plan and execute differently as each of theme are diverse in nature, size and material. Display of types; textile and wood carving, have been discussed detail here. 2. Textiles and Costumes The group of Indian traditional textile is vast from the point of view of material, type and nature. Traditionally three base materials; cotton, silk and wool, have been extensively used for creating two broad group of textiles flat and three dimensional or stitched costumes. Since textiles are organic and fragile in nature therefore in display related problems have to be understood first so that adequate preventive majors can be taken in advance. Light, dust, moisture, humidity, temperature and pest are some of the core problems of textiles. Objects have to be examined and problems have to be identified so that accordingly these can be addressed with consultation of textile conservators. The fluctuating temperature of the gallery is harmful for any kind of artefacts especially the organic material. First thing is to control the monitoring climate of exhibition hall and of showcases, as per the international norms. The museum's standard environment {temperature 23° (±1°) Celsius and relative humidity (RH) 55% (± 5%)} is recommended for gallery and light exposure should be limited to 50 km. Most of the museums in India exhibit the flat artefacts either in frame or within showcase and costumes on either mannequins or without mannequin. 2.1. Display of Textile Artefacts Two things are important to consider before displaying the textile objects; preparation of artefacts and designing the showcase. Textile artefacts, especially the flat ones, need to be given full lining support, which should be preferably starch free cotton and dyed with natural colours in matching shades. While displaying the textile artefacts inside the showcase, objects should be placed flat on the even surface from the warp side. The small pieces can be placed on the flat surface, which should have little slope and for the bigger object wooden board can be used on which object may be stitched and the board can be placed angularly inside the showcase (Plate No. 1). This kind of display gives good angle of viewing the artefact as well as safety to the objects. This is the usual practice used for displaying textile objects internationally. Working in the National Museum gave me the opportunity to renovate and re-design the textile gallery and put up few temporary textile exhibitions. Time to time different type of showcases was designed in-house to display various types of textile artefacts, as per the requirement, with the consultation of conservators. Few of them are like table showcase, big or small size flat wall showcase with lower depth and big size showcases with deeper depth, besides stretcher and mannequin. 2_2. Table Showcase New type of table showcase was developed for the safety of artefact and its better viewing. These wooden 3' x 3'/ 4' 4.5' table showcases with acrylic covering on top were different from the traditional table showcases. The base and top remain flat and straight with glass covering is the design of traditional table showcases. Often it was observed that viewing from top gives visitor's own reflection, which disturbs the proper viewing of artefacts. Keeping this aspect in mind, slight slope of 45° was given to the base of table showcase. This helped in displaying the object flat and better viewing of object was achieved without any kind of disturbance. Top acrylic cover of around one foot height provides protection to the object and also gives its better viewing without any reflections. The coarse cotton cloth was used inside the showcase, to minimise the handling of the textile artefact. This helped in displaying the textile artefacts without stitching or nailing (Plate No. 2). Placing textile artefact flat in the showcase also provide it full support and makes the artefact safe from any kind of intervention. The most delicate and fragile objects were displayed in these types of showcases without stitching or nailing. The lighting was used externally for such cases. 2.3. Big or Small Size Flat Wall Showcase with Lower Depth Usually museums in India have standard type wall showcases, which are full length and high roof almost covers the entire wall. However it was observed that much of the space is left un-used, as textile does not need much depth. Moreover textile objects displayed in the high roof showcases need to be looked from distance. Therefore flat wall showcase with low depth was developed in two sizes big or small, so that maximum space of the showcase can be utilized. These showcases were of different size, as per the size of artefact which can be hanged on wall horizontally or vertically (Plate No. 3). The size of bigger showcase was 8' x 4' x 8' and smaller case was 5' x 2.5' x 6'. Such acrylic covering wooden showcase was fixed on wall as a single case. Another experiment was attempted by fixing two cases vertically from the centre in 'v' shape, like open book in standing position. Another provision is also possible to give extra depth to the showcase, so that it can be used from both the sides. The best aspect of such showcase is that it gives the full support to the object, to remain safe, provides better viewing and also creates sort of inquisitiveness for the visitors what is next in the case. The lighting was used externally for such cases. 2.4. Big Size Showcase with Deeper Depth Another type of showcase was the usual big size of 8' x 6' wide and 6' high showcase having broad depth, glass covering and inbuilt lighting system. The slight curve was given to the background panel and slope to the lower base (Plate No. 4). Big size hangings or quilts were displayed angularly in these showcases. Since the artefacts to be displayed here were too big, therefore little alteration was also done to improve the lighting system. For the big showcase both, tube and spot, type of lights were used so that even lighting can be provided to the artefacts. Tube light was from inbuilt top, while spot light was given from outside. 2.5. Stretcher The stretcher or frame, like mounting the miniature painting or oil painting, is usually recommended to display the hanging or coverlet kind of textiles. Conservator recommends good quality wood, i.e., teak or deodar, for making of frame or stretcher. The good quality wood is essential especially in topographical country like India, as it has insect or moth repellent qualities. To display a painted Jain Gyan Chaupar from Rajasthan in the Decorative Arts Gallery No.1, deodara wood stretcher was made, as per the size of artefact. The object was stretched and the lining portion was pinned at the back of frame. Once the object was stretched, then frame was covered with mount board, which was acid free handmade board (Plate No. 5). Such display is safe for the artefacts, as it gives support to it, without any tension to the artefact. 2.6. Costume/Accessories Display The stitched costumes or 3D artefacts should be displayed on mannequins as per the international norms. Therefore the custom made headless mannequins with lots of flexibility was introduced in the National Museum after a careful study and due research. Heavy gauge metal, which is powder coated, was used for manufacturing the mannequins as per the standard size of male and female costumes. The headless mannequins have adjustable height, movement of hands, heavy base, which have wheels with locking system and flexibility of using additional padding on shoulder or waist portion. To make it more secure, these rustproof good quality steel mannequins were covered with stretch free coarse cotton fabric and now few zari brocaded male costumes have been displayed on them in the textile gallery. The stitched caps have been displayed on acrylic stand and also placed on slopped table showcase. In both cases proper cushioning with soft tissue paper have been done. The zari embroidered leather shoes have also placed on block, which were properly cushioned with tissue papers. 3. Wood Carvings The term 'wood carving' is used for all those aesthetically carved wooden objects, which were made for utility and decorative purposes. Artefacts of this category are of various size; on one hand decorative arts department have huge temple chariot or architectural dwellings and on the other hand tiny toys or palm leave manuscript cover are also there. 3.1. Temple Chariot Displaying each of the artefacts need to be worked out as per the size, shape and utility of object. For example 22' tall five tier temple chariot cannot be displayed with in the gallery; therefore it was thought to display it in open area. Considering the weight and height of chariot it was decided to display on raised platform and within covered case (Plate No. 6). Four stone pillars were made on the raised plinth to hold the complete weight of the chariot, which includes beams, wheels and hundreds of panels. The help of old photographs have also been taken for assembling these small panels in the five tiers of the chariot. Once all the tiers were assembled, chariot was covered initially with acrylic and later on, in glass covering. However, little space has been left between the roof and walls of the glass covering so that some air circulation should remain in the case. 3.2. Framing Set of palm leaf manuscript cover has been displayed in the wood carving gallery. First these covers were fixed on the wooden board in cut out and framing was done similar to the framing of painted Gyan Chaupar framing. Another style was used to display ten small panels within broad wooden frame, in place of displaying each panel separately. All these individual panels of Dashavatar incarnations of Lord Vishnu were fixed within one broad frame to create a single panel (Plate No. 7). To display many such wood carvings, different type of display techniques were used.

These are some of the methods used for displaying the wood carvings and textiles artefacts in the National Museum, which is a collective effort of display and curatorial staff with consultation of conservation departments. One ideal design for all type of artefacts is not possible, as each of the artefacts needs to consider its principle guidelines and accordingly display has to be worked out, which itself is very challenging.

Plate 1: Big Hanging stitched on Board, Art institute Chicago, USA

Plate 2: Table showcase displaying pashmina shawl, Masters of the Cloth exhibition, at National Museum, New Delhi in 2005.

Plate 3: Big or small size flat wall showcase with lower depth, Masters of the Cloth exhibition, at National Museum, New Delhi in 2005.

Plate 4: Big size showcase with deeper depth displaying Hanging in Masters of the Cloth exhibition, at National Museum, New Delhi in 2005.

Plate 5: Gyan Chaupar stretched on frame in Decorative Arts gallery I, National Museum.

Chariot displayed within the glass case near the entrance gate of the Museum.

Ten small wood panels fixed within frame displayed in wood carving gallery, National Museum

Notes and References

The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol.-III, USA. 1975. p-427.
Decorative arts deals with materials like wood, ivory, bone, metal (brass, bronze, bidri, iron, copper, tin, silver and gold), glass, crystal, jade, agate and other semi-precious stones, paper, paper-machine and textiles (cotton, wool, silk, felt, metallic thread, glass beads, gold leaf), etc.
These hand woven and hand ornamented textiles were made for daily, occasional or ritualistic uses. These handlooms are created throughout the length and width of the country by using different type of techniques. Some of the prominent ones are woven, ikat, tie-dye, printed, embroidery, etc. Often these are decorated with various type of material i.e. mirror, glass beads, pearls, peacock feather, metal, etc. These are either flat textiles (like saree, odhani, etc.) or the vast range of arched costumes (from human to furnishing, etc.) Jain, Rahul, Rapture The art of Indian Textiles, Delhi, 2011, Bhatnagar. P., Overview of Indian Traditional Textiles, Chandigarh, 2009.
Ultra Violet (UV) rays of light, artificial or natural, are crucial for textile artefacts, as it reduces the life span of are act in terms of colour fading and weakening of fibres. Therefore the lighting system for exhibits and exhibition hall has to be controlled and monitored regularly. Practice of rotating the textile artefacts in every three months is also recommended by the textile conservators internationally. This helps in minimize the finding of colour and good for visitors also as they will be able to see more artefacts. The exhibition area and showcases have to be dampness proof and dustproof. For more detail pl. see: Landi, Sheila, Textile Conservator's Manual, UK, 1999.
There is no ideal condition, which is applicable to every kind of problems. As the climatic conditions varies, so as the textile objects, therefore these things should be kept in mind, before planning the display the textile objects.
Stitching on wooden board or nailing or using the Velcro, all these methods depend upon the strength of textile. Some of the exhibition designer prefers to use the Velcro to fix the textile on wall or in showcase. The use of Velcro is good especially for displaying the heavy textile objects like tapestry or carpets, as it gives the good fall to the artefacts. However before using the Velcro one has to be very careful about the strength of fabric as pulling the fragile fabric with Velcro needs pressure, which can damage the artefact.
The renovated permanent textile gallery was re-opened for public in 1996 (Pathak. A., Marg, Vol. 50, No.1, 69-71; Gupta, C S. The Indian Magazine, January 1997, p-61) and time to time showcases were also re-done. Some of the important temporary exhibition mounted in the National Museum were; Malay Textile, Masters of the cloth and Pichhwai.
Pathak, A & Rajesh Prasad, Planning and management of temporary exhibition: The Malay Textile Exhibition at the National museum, New Delhi. Icon Journal, Vol. II, No.1, March 2006, New Delhi, pp. 99-115.
Lennard Frances, Textile Conservation, UK, 2010.
Mid-19th century Temple Chariot from Tamil Nadu was purchased in 1965 and first it was displayed on the left side of the museum building against the side wall in late 1960s'. The services of sathapati's (specialist carpenters for making the temple chariot) were taken for construction work of chariot. It was dismantled in hundreds of small panels and kept in reserve storage in 1980s'. Later on, museum authorities thought of displaying it again in the beginning of 2000 near the entrance gate of the museum, which took around two years; one year for planning and one for execution. For more detail please see, Temple Chariot Tradition In India: With special reference to Tamil Nadu's temple chariot, in Kala Chintan, (Ed.) Subhasini Aryan, New Delhi, 2008, pp. 152-161.
Initially it was like a zigzag puzzle, to construct the chariot, which was kept in ten racks after dismantling in 1980s. Panels were identified with the help of blow ups of old photographs and placed in sequence by the dedicated team of in-house museum carpenters. Now each panel is marked with accession number and all kind of record; documentation and display process, had been prepared and preserved.

First published in Journal of Indian Museums November 2013

The handwoven textiles of Odisha are famous for their intricate weaves, bold colours, diverse designs and a large repository of motifs. This is the land of Chariphulia, Bhanumati, Bichitrapuri, NakshtraBhushan, Panchabati, Manihare, Muktamala, Bijoymala, Priyatama, Madhumati, Rajashree, Suchitra, Muktapunji, and several such creatively named textile designs. Textile historian Ghosh suggests that the art of weaving in India was developed and mastered first by the fishing communities.It is also believed that it was the spider, the weaverbird and myriad ways of nature that inspired human civilization to weave nets, mats, baskets and ultimately textiles. In Odisha, where we find an unbroken thread of craftsmanship that maps the history of human civilization, from the Paleolithiccelts and cave paintings of Kalahandi to neolithic boat workshops of Chilika,and numerous rivers and rivulets including the mighty Mahanadi, a four hundred fifty kilometer long coastline and verdant rainforests of the Eastern Ghats,both theories of the origins of weaving can be said to be valid here. It is learnt about the thriving trade between Kalinga and the South eastern Asian countries during 1-7^th century BCE from Buddhist texts i.e., Ceylonese Chronicles, Dathvamsa, Dipwavamsa, Mahavamsa, Nikayas, Jataka Tales, Brahminical sources viz. Bharatmuni'sNatyashastras, Arthashastra by Kautilya, Raghuvamsha and Kumarsambhav by Kalidas, Skandapuran, VayuPuran, Mahabharata andRamayan etc. besides the accounts given by foreign travellers like Xuanxang and Meghasthenes. The history of textiles is dynamic and very often contentious due to the lack of corroborative evidence, as textiles hardly survive the span of history itself. References to textiles in ancient and medieval paintings, texts, and sculptures are therefore the primary source of locating & mapping textile history. One of the earliest references of Orissa’s textiles happens to be Kautilaya’sArthasastra (350 BC), which mentions of thriving textile production and trade in Kalinga. It was after the conquest of Kalinga in 261 BC, that the Mauryan Emperor Ashok embarked on a mission to spread Buddhism across the world. The celebration of the popular Bali Jatra has its origin in the trading movement by the brave seafarers from Kalinga known as the Sadhabas, to Java, Sumatra, Bali, Borneo, altogether forming Suvarnadvipa or Indonesia.The 4^th century poet Kalidasa’sRaghuvamhsa speaks of the Sadhabas as the ‘Lord of the Seas’ and in the folklore of Odisha the Sadhabasare known to be weavers as well.This could possibly explain the similarities in the various textiles found in these regions and Odisha like Ikat. It is difficult to locate the origin and direction Ikat spread.The similarities between the Kalingan textiles of the Phillipines, the ikat of Bali and others with their counterparts in Orissa like Bandhacould possibly be because of the maritime history of Kalinga. In the 7^th Century CE, the Chinese traveller Xuanxang visited PushpagiriMahavihara, a Buddhist university complex in central Odisha and made note of the textile production in the region apart from the various port towns and thriving trade. The 12^th century Jagannath temple in Puri has several references to various textiles that are still used in rituals. It is said the 12^th century poet Jayadeva had his Gitagobinda woven on fabric using the Bandha (ikat) technique.The 14^th century Maithili poetJyotirishwar’sVarnaratnakara, written in the early fourteenth century in Maithili, mentions Bandha weaves like Suryabandha and Gajabandha.The 14^th century poet Vatsa Das describes textiles from the region in the KalassaChautissa and the Mahabharata of Sarala Das, the 15^th century poet,makes elaborate descriptions of the clothes adorned by the characters in the epic. The portsof Odisha gained popularity across the world for excellent fabrics available like "Chandrakonaa" and "Sanno" that were produced in the coastal region. In 1633 the first contingent of Englishmen arrived in Orissa and after clashes with Portugesesettlers they made their base at Jagatsingpur and started export of fabrics from Orissa to Britain. At that time three thousand weavers were residing inJagatsinghpur, a major coastal center of handloom weaving. It was here that the Britishers built one of their first commercial settlements and then at Balasore, with the beautiful muslin and chintz from this regionbecoming very popular in England. Around this time the coastal districts of Orissa like Puri, Cuttack and Balasore produced about 90,000 tonnes of cotton to meet growing demands from the Western traders. But the greed of the colonisers ultimately led to the death and downfall of the weavers and their art. By 1785, Britain started producing its own muslin and levied heavy taxes on weavers in India who produced muslin. Colonial history reverberates with inhuman atrocities perpetrated by the Britishers against the weavers. They were tortured, imprisoned and their properties were confiscated. The glorious tradition of artistry and craftsmanship of Orissa’s weavers was finally broken after centuries. It is the resolute strength of the people that despite such tragedies of the colonial regime that many of these age-old traditions have remained alive. The arch nemesis of the British colonisers in Orissa was the Kondh tribe who waged several rebellions that were quelled with brute force. Even today the KutiaKondh tribe of Koraput and Kalahandi districts spin cotton yarn and weave course scarfs as their winter garment to face the severe winters of the Eastern Ghats.The women of the DongriaKondhcommunity, embroider their creation myth of Niyamraja (hill god) on thick handwoven cotton shawls called ‘RektiKapdaGanda’ in bright vivid colors depicting their dongars (hills) and fields. These shawls are usually made for their personal use and rarely sold outside the tribe. The patterns are a pictorial declaration of their belief in giving back to nature as much as they take from nature. Male weavers of the Dom community weave the shawl in the basket weave. The body of the shawl is off-white in colour and primary colours are used for embroidery.The women wear this shawl over a white sari with a red border. Unmarried boys give the shawl as a token of a proposal to girls of their choice, If she accepts the proposal she keeps it. In Koraput district the women of the Bondatribe use their native loomsto weave the Ringa, a hip wrap, 8” to 10” wide and 2 to 3 feet in length.Originally the ringa was woven with bark of the kudhei and sisal tree in the weft in simple stripe pattern. These days it is woven with thick cotton yarns in multicolour stripe pattern.The women of the Gadaba tribe of Koraput also weave their own version of the Kerang and in their custom a woman is considered marriageable only if she knows weaving. In the same district is Kotpad, where the Panika tribe practices the age old tradition of dyeing with a natural dye ‘aal’ extracted from the root bark of the Morindacitrifolia tree which belongs to Rubiacea family. The bright red colour achieved from aal varies from bright terracotta reds to maroons to deep browns and black. Aal dyeing is a tedious and a time-consuming process. Similar aal dyeing and weaving is also practiced in the bordering district if BastarinChattisgarh. Originally the Panika weavers producedpatas, similar to saris, usually four meters long and one meter wide draped by women of tribes like Muria and Dhurua. Usually the body of this cotton sari is off white with aal red borders in three shuttle technique and small motifs as ornamentation woven as supplementary weft. Other textiles like Pheta and Angoccha (turban and shoulder cloth) are woven for men. The fabrics are woven on a basic pitloom known as mangtha or haathabhandi in coarse cotton. The motifs are largely inspired by nature and other significant objects of daily use inspired by the animals, insects, birds, fishes, human figures etc in extra weft. The ‘maelugdatarappata’ worn by the bride’s mother, especially at weddings and the kansabandhi are the prime examples of the single colouraal dyed saris.The local demand for aal dyed fabrics has been on a decline due to easy availability of cheaper, powerloom woven synthetic alternatives. Women have started wearing polyester printed saris. The Kuli and the Koli are tribes of Orissa whose primary occupation was weaving. The Kuli live in the districts of Bolangir, Sambalpur, Phulbani, and Nayagarh.The Kolis are settled in the districts of Koraput, Phulbani, Boudh, MayurbhanjGanjam, Sundergarh, PuriKeonjhar and Cuttack. The weaving practices of Odisha’s tribes is relatively lesser know than the several other major weaving communities like the Bhulia, Kostha, Dera, Srabaka, GaudiyaPatra, AsaniPatra, Tanti, Gaudiya Tanti, Rangani, etc. In western Odisha the art of Ikat is called Bandhaand is practiced bythe Meher community,comprising of theKuli, who are labour class Mehers, the Kosta who are tassar weavers and Bhulia weavers who weave cottonBandha. In central and Eastern Odisha theGaudiyaPatara,AsaniPatara and Srabaka of Eastern Orissa weave Bandha. The Kosthas are experts in reeling and spinning yarn from silk cocoon. Silk cocoons are known as Kosa both in Orissa and Chhatisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh and it is believed that their knowledge in reeling silk yarnis the reason they are known as the Kosthas. Unlike the weavers in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, the OdishaBandha artisans usually do not draw designs first and rather weavestraight away from their imagination. What is most revealing in Bandha is the technique of using other extra warp/weft elements to create reliefs and highlightsin the patterns. The fusion of the two is highly evolved and effective, as can be seen in the traditional Bandha cotton saris of Bargarh/Sambalpur districts and silk Bandhasaris of Sonepur district.Bandha can be distinguished by intricate, curvilinear designs and conversational motifs unlike Andhra ikats which are mostly bold and geometric.From coarse variety to very fine mercerized cotton quality upto a hundred and twentycounts are woven. Efforts have also been made to weave tussarikat fabrics. The traditional ikat design is an integration of conventional motifs deriving from Buddhism and Jagannath cult, like Shankha( Conch Shells)& Chakra ( Wheel). The other dominant motifs in Bandha are Macho (fish),Phulo (flower) Singha (lion), Mayura (peacock), Padma (lotus), Baulamala (string of flowers), and Harina (deer).In fact many of the motifs used today have been inspired by the various carvings and sculptures found in the various temples of Odisha. For instance the SInghabandha (Lion motif) is an imitation of the Lion gate of Jagannaath temple and not the natural Lion. Bandha weaves used to be typically dyed using natural colors extracted from plants, flowers, leaves and barks of trees but not anymore.Borders are usually adorned with Kumbha (temple tower) motifs. TheNakshtraBhusanis made of coarse as well as fine fabrics comprisingmulticolouredspotted motifs.The Muktajhariis another typical design with animaland floral motifs, woven in a mix of rich contrastingcolours. The Saptapadi or Saktapaarand Bichitrapurisaris, from the weaving looms of Sambalpur, Bargarh and Sonepur are identifiable by the double ikat checkerboard pattern (passapalli) and extra warp border. The similarity with the square Teliarumals of Andhra can be seen in Bandha checkerboard warp/weft yarn resist intypically red, black and white colour combination. The SaptapadiSari has weft bandha for the pallu, warp bandha for the border and a combination of the two for the body. In addition to the bandha, Sambalpur saris frequently use supplementary warp patterning to provide an elaborate additional border between the two existing borders. These woven borders, known as phulia, incorporate a number of rows of the flower motif in the border, ranging from one to twelve.Sonepur is the other district where cotton and silk saris in contemporary elaborate extra weft designs on drawlooms and Jaquard looms are produced. One of the popular motifs is the konark chakra woven in extra weft technique on the pallu (end piece) of the sari. The popularity of these weaves is evident from the thriving business in the traditional handloom haats of western Odisha. The biggest such weekly market is the Balijodihaat in Bargarh district held every Friday. Held on an open field, the weekly haat sees weavers from Odisha and neighboring states sell items such as yarn, saris, dhotis, dress material, bed covers, etc. Business begins in the early morning when traders arrive to snap up items in bulk and continues through the day. The turnover of the market is estimated to be between Rs. 1- 2 crore every week and apart from doing roaring business, the sense of pride among small sellers there is palpable - with direct access to the market, it's also an important platform for feedback and encouragement. As theentire revenue flows back into the same area where the products are made it strengthens the local economy, and the haat's decentralized model - right from producing yarn down to selling the products - is one of the key reasons for the popular Sambalpuribandha to still survive. Like theBhuliaMeher, even the GaudiaPatra and AsaniPatra weavers of Odisha are known for single weft ikat technique both in cotton and silk.The Gaudia and Asani are primarily located in Tigiria area of Cuttack district and have ancient ties with the Jagannath temple in Puri.The legendary GitagobindaPhetafabric is still woven by the Gaudiyafor the Jagganath temple in three main colours – yellow symbolizing salvation, Green symbolizing life, and red symbolizing creative power. The weavers here unanimously agree that their ancestors came from Bengal. Ghosh suggests that legend describes they have come to this areas from Nabadweep of Bengal.Even the term Gaudiya explains their origin being Bengal, Gaud being the original name of Bengal. Their surnames Aash, Guin, Dutta, Paramanik, Naha, Raha, Akhit, Das etc. also supports their story of migration from Bengal, since most of those Bengali surnames are absent in Orissa. Some of them believe that they were invited by King of Puri sometime during thirteenth century. History of Bengal shows that there was frequent clashes between Hindus and Muslims in one hand and Sakta and Vaisnav cult on the other from ninth century onwards which perhaps was the reason for migration of Vaisnav people to migrate to Orissa. A small number of Buddhist weavers also live in the Tigiria called Srabaka or Saraka. The largest concentration of the Srabaka is found in Nuapatna and they are also settled inBanki, Regadi, Maniabandha, Mahammadpur, Resarasikpur, Khurda etc. in the districts of Khurda, Cuttack and Puri.They are highly skilled in tie and dye ikatdesigns besides other weaving designs like booty, checks etc. Theycan weave cotton cloth using yarn up to 100 counts besides weavingof silk and tassar. The Srabakas also produce silk yarn from cocoons bythigh reeling or spinning of waste cocoons. Their weaves like Khandua, Tarabali (large and small stars), Maniabandhijodo etc., have earned a great reputation. The primary motifs in their designs are the Buddhist Gajja (elephant), hiran (deer), sua (parrot), padam (lotus) and other flowers, lata (creeper), kumbha (small triangles), danti (tooth-like) etc patterns. The glossy KhanduaPattaare single weft Bandha patterns woven on silk and cotton fabrics. The Srabakaweavers have mastered the art of producing very fine curvilinear designs in weft bandha. The tussar belt of Odisha lies mainly in districts of Mayurbhanj, Baleshwar, Keonjhar and Jajpur. The Adivasi communities practice sericulture and the women in tussar weaving villages still thigh reel their own khaditussar yarn and weave into cloth. Tussar silk is produced by the larva of the insect AntherareaMylitta. The silk is spun by the silk worm in a single shelled oval cocoon with a fine grained hard non flossy shell. These tussar cocoons are mainly collected from local trees like Sal and Arjun. The present day tussar weavers of Jajpur claim to have migrated from Bardhamandistrict of Bengal similar to the Gaudia and AsaniPatras, though it appears tussar weaving in Orissa has a much longer history. TussarSaris would predominantly have plain body in natural tussarcolour (beige) with dobby borders and end piece woven in stripes of repeated motifs inspired by marine wildlife like fish, tortoise, florals etc. in combination with simple geometric patterns inspired by everyday objects like tooth and grain in supplementary extra weft technique. These days many ethnic saris are more colourful than in the past as synthetic dyes have broadened the range of possibilities. Unfortunately there is only one weaver today that continues to weave pure khaditussar sari using thigh reeled khaditussar yarn for warp as well as weft, with three shuttle Kumbhaborder and rib patterned end piece that was designed for the Vishwakarma exhibition in 1982 and still has a niche market demand. A large section of weavers produce plain tussar cloth and ahimsa tussar cloth that is sold in the markets of Champa district of Chattisgarh. Tussar fabrics have special religious significance in Orissa and are widely used in Jagannath rituals. Orissa is known for its distinct temple architecture and stone carvings like Mutkeswar, Konarka, etc. It can be said that stone craft and textile craft have influenced each other entirely. Templeor kumbha /deulmotifsare found in almost in every Sari, either on the border or the anchal. There are several kinds of cloth specifically produced for daily rituals as well as special occassions in the Jagannathtemple. The deities are adorned with tussarPataduring theRathayatra, BoiraniPata is made from cotton yarn and worn by the Lord round the year, Chehelimatha is red dyed tusssar cloth that the deities wearon special occasions,and there are several other such with their unique function like the Tadap, Uttariya, BaralagiPata, Patani, Sirakapada, GitagobindaKhanduaPatas, Boiranisaree, BoiraniPheta, Kenduli or PattaniSaree, GadiPheta, Chemedi, Mulmul, NetaPhuta, Cheheli, DakhiniSaree, Kala Khadi, TrikhandaPatani, Phulapadachadar, KavariKachheni, KodaPahada, SutaGada, SutachulaPheta, SutaKodaPochha, SutaKodaPachhoda, KhadiPachhoda, Tuli, ChadarGada, SuklasajaGada, BaulaPata, PataDhadiPanchi, SutaDhadiPanchi, Srimukhota, TanaKohosa, RathGhera, ChandanGuda, BibhaPanchi, Surya Boiranipheta, Chandra SekharPheta etc.The Jagannath rituals also use colourful crafts made with the famous Pipiliappliqué art. Berhampur patta are heavy textiles woven in mulberry silk in extra warp and weft patterns in Berhampur district. Among the popular textiles produced in fine silk yarn is the ‘Jodo’, dhoti and gamcha (shoulder cloth and unstitched patloon for men) with ekphulia border (one row of fish and rudraksh) typically in ‘ganga jamuna’ borders, one side border in red and the other side border in purple or black.Thesemuch sought after textiles are woven by a community called Dera, also known as Debangasand are settled in Berhampur, Chatrapur,Parlakhemundi, Bomkai, Digapahandi, etc., of Ganjam district and around Jeypore in Koraput district. Some of the Deramigrated to Sonepur of Bolangir district as well. The Deramen and women are competent weavers andonly recently some of them living near urban areas switched from pit looms to shuttle frame looms. However they weave better on their traditional looms. They use silk, cotton, spun silk, etc.,both of lower and higher counts to weave cloth. Their designs are usually simple and use dyed yarn for designs. The Dera of Bomkai village produced a type of sari with embroidered weaving design that resembles brocades. They have kept alive the original thick coarse cotton Bomkai sari woven on a basic pit loom. The weavers have inherited their colour and design sense from their ancestors who, like the most modern of designers, were inspired by their immediate environment. The weavers participate and dance in the annual Thakuranijatra which begins on the last Tuesday of the month of Chaitra. The male dancer in the red bomkai sari represents Durga and the one in black, Kalika. The Thakurani icon is a conceptual combination of Durga and Kalika with a headdress adorned with seven snakes. Today, only three weavers are left in the village of Bomkai who still weave their beautiful thick cottons with extra weft designs inspired from their environment depicting bitter gourds, peacocks, parrots, trees, flowers, fishes in glowing colour. The others have migrated to Tamil Nadu and other states to work on powerloom or given up weaving altogether. Today the story of weavers migrating as unskilled labour and the death of theirheritage weaveshas become common affair in Odisha. The ones who do stick it out find every year more and more discouraging but stick it out of stubbornness and pride in their creative heritage. One of the only three surviving original Bomkai weavers once said, ‘I prefer weaving in my house with my family over breaking stones and/or operating machines for 15 hours like all those people migrated to Surat and elsewhere for better salaries. All I ask for is fair wages for my weaves.’ The BauriTantisare Dalit weavers settled in coastal Orissa and normally produce Gamchha, dhoti etc.There are numerous weaving centres spread over Odisha in districts like Nayagarh, Kendrapada, Khurda, Cuttack,etc where cheap coarse cotton saris, lungis and gamchas are still woven in simple ikat designs and supplementary warp/weft designs for the local market. The weavers of Jagatsinghpur continues to weave cotton saris in non mercerized cotton which offers a light and free drape compared to mercerized cottons that tend to stick to the body. There is another weaving communityknown as Matia, mostly settled in Cuttack, Puri and Balasoredistricts. TheJolha are a group of Muslim weavers settled in Cuttack district. The Dhalapathar village in Khurda district offered the most exquisite handwoven tapestries in cotton. Two decades ago almost every Odia household displayed Dhalapathar curtains proudly. These curtains were woven in thick coarse cotton with different elaborate large size designs like the PuriJagannath temple, motifs inspired from temple paintings and sculptures like Navagunjara, Gaja-Singha etc. Today, there are only two weavers left in the village who have the knowledge of this rare weave. There have been attempts to revive these beautiful tapestries in the form of pure cotton and tussar silk saris. A village called Siminoi, tucked away in the district of Dhenkanal highlights a classic case of migration. There is not a single weaver left engaged in weaving the once desired thick cotton Siminoi saris in simple extra weft patterns. All have migrated to different cities in search of odd jobs or shifted to power loom.Maximum migration has taken place in Berhampur of weavers and farmers – migrated to surat and working on powerloom in extremely poor and unhealthy conditions.The unbroken tradition of art and crafts that originated in the Paleolithic era cave paintings have come a long way but have reached the crossroads. The future is uncertain and no effort is enough to promote and preserve this glorious legacy of human ingenuity. Bibliography or Reference A History of Ancient & Early Medieval India by U Singh Early Agriculture in Orissa by E.L. Harvey, D. Q. Fuller, R.K. Mohanty& B. Mohanty Kalinga & China: A Study in Ancient Relations by Dr. B. Patra Maritime Relation of Kalinga with Sri Lanka by Dr. K. Patel History & Historians in Ancient India by D.K. Ganguly Viharas in Early Medieval Eastern India by A. Jha Warfare in Pre-British India by K. Roy Kalinga’s Relations with Indonesia by P. Sahoo Maritime Trade of Ancient India by Dr. P.C. Mohanty Kalinga, Kalinga, Kalinga by B. Mohanty& I. Jena Indian Culture & Cult of Jagannatha by B. Misra Situating VirajaKsehtra and its Environs in OdishanHistography by Dr.A.C. Pradhan Handloom Industry in Action by U.C. Patnaik and A.K. Mishra Indian Textiles: Past &Present by G.K. Ghosh and ShuklaGhosh Ikat Textiles of India by G.K. Ghosh and ShuklaGhosh 19^th Century Ports of Balasore by M.K. Sahoo Lord’s Fabric: Handloom Fabrics used in ShriJagannatha Temple by S.K. Patra KhanduaSarees& Fabrics: Tradition & pride of Orissa by P. Nayak, T.K. Rout, P.K. Samntaray and P. Dash European Trade and Colonial Conquest Vol 1 by B. Dasgupta Fabled Orissa: From Glory and Grandeur to Colonisation by S.K. Rath Castes and Tribes of Southern India by Edgar Thuston Traditional Indian Textiles by John Gillow and Nicholas Barnard Indian Ikat Textiles by Rosemary Crill The Sari, Styles, patterns, history, techniques by Linda Lynton Ikat Fabrics of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh by Bijoy Chandra Mohanty Design Sutra, Nift Saris of India: Tradition and Beyond by RtaKapuChisti

Handmade in India, edited by AditiRanjan and M.P. Ranjan

Being part of the first graduation of the Kalaraksha Vidhyalaya crafts design students in November was an extraordinarily moving experience – fun, awe, pride, introspection, …Those four days, and the Vidyalaya itself, answered and raised so many questions – about the nature of craft and design, urban and rural, tradition and modernity, market-led and individual creativity…. Kutch and its craftspeople have been part of my life since 1978 – almost 30 years. I went to Kutch as a young, very urban designer, with no experience at all of working with craftspeople in rural situations, or how to interface my own sensibility with design traditions going back hundreds of years. In my 6 months in Kutch working for GURJARI, I struggled initially to integrate my own professional design vocabulary and working style with craftspeople totally unfamiliar with scale drawings, cross sections. Ways of measurement, words for colour, were all different. I blush to remember asking in one remote village whether they had tracing paper! They didn’t even have ordinary newsprint, and certainly NEVER felt the need to draw their designs before making them. The lives, needs and tastes of the consumers for whom I was developing products were so alien to those of the crafts producers themselves – how to bridge the differences and create something that was relevant to both sets of cultures and lifestyles? Working today with young student designers going out to tackle crafts projects for the first time, their dilemmas and dissonances are no different. And yet when this partnership of dual skill sets DOES work - as a real partnership, rather than patronage on one side and passivity on the other, it results in something amazing. The Urmul, Jawaja and SEWA Lucknow experiences, Brigette Singh and Faith Singh working with block printers in Jaipur, the Kolkota zardozi craftspeople’s interaction with Varsha Mehta of Ritu’s, Madhvi and Manu Parekh and Orissa ikat, Lakshmi Narayan and Lambani craftswomen, Sarika Malik with tussar weavers in Bhagalpur…. In the ensuing 3 decades since my first Kutch sojourn, and the 25 years of Dastkar’s interaction with craftspeople, these issues have resonated over and over again. Every time I work with craftspeople – in Lucknow, in Ranthambhore, in Bihar, Banaskantha, Kashmir, Karnataka or Ladakh - with bidri, chikan, basketry, leather, patachitra, dhokra - they express in different ways their need for design know-how, but also their discomfort with the way it is usually applied. Artisans talk of doing “mazdoori kaam” mainly because the urban designers treat them as “mazdoors” – passive and in some way inferior. One has longed for some institution where craftspeople could get the basics of a design education, without it cramping their own individuality and tradition. Despite hundreds of student diploma projects and documentations, NID and NIFT or even the Crafts Institute Jaipur, have not really addressed this need, and only a bare handful of students from crafts backgrounds have made that conceptual and cultural leap to being “professional” designers themselves. 20 years ago, a Mithila craftswoman, Shiva Kashyap, bewailed that “We may be wage earners but we are still walking on someone else’s feet. Because we lack the tools of education and language we are still dependent.” It is a cry that many otherwise skilled traditional craftspeople have echoed. So Kalaraksha Vidyalaya is truly an answer to a dream; not just mine, but of hundreds of craftspeople. Hopefully it will be a module for many other similar local design schools in craft pockets all over the country. I think it important that it is local rather than national, serving students who come from a specific region and linked craft traditions, so that the vocabulary and vernacular remains one. I also liked the fact that the academic calendar is broken up into short two-week segments that allow the students to go back in between to their homes and working environment and test and apply their learning to the practical knock-about of work and marketplace. And of course this means that even women students, running homes and families, can also attend. I really enjoyed the confidence their year that Kalaraksha had given all the craftspeople. For several of them it had resulted in a real leap forward, creatively and conceptually. As Chaman Vankar, the prizewinning shawl weaving student, said, “Before, people came and told me things: you told me to make one thing, another designer said another, another buyer had a third idea, I tried to please everyone, and ended up with a khichdi, confusing and pleasing nobody. Now, I understand that these are suggestions for new directions, not specific orders. I can listen to everyone and work out my own ideas and designs. I understand how important it is to have my own unique style”. Phrases like “coordinated ranges”, “collection” “colour story”, “theme board”, “proportion”, “marketability” “contrast”, etc suddenly have begun to make sense; used with aplomb by the Rabari women as they explained their work. There were some question marks and some sign posts for future structuring of the course – the theme board “themes” for instance seemed chosen to be as unrelated to the craftspeople’s real experience as possible - did this lead to creativity and challenge or was it just bafflingly irrelevant? Rather than impose similar bags and garment shapes on all the embroiderers, couldn’t they be taught to adapt their own traditional garments and accessories to contemporary use – as Kalaraksha itself does so well? The bandini craftspeople did not seem to have utilised their learning as effectively as the other 3 groups. Each craft obviously responds differently to contemporisation, draughtsmanship, and how to work out concepts on paper, or read others designers' drawings, seem an area that needed to be strengthened, despite the craft people’s initial distaste. As they realized later, it liberates them and allows them to plan. Costing remains a problem area - how to realistically price your own skill and costs, while keeping your products competitive. How to source raw materials from the market and develop things with a distinctive “look” is an important part of design development and the embroidery students should be exposed to a wider choice than the Kalaraksha storeroom! It was lovely to see the students designing their own visiting cards and catalogues, and sending emails, but they should be taught about Spell Check and proof reading to avoid errors that spoilt the look and professionalism of the end result. I cannot end without complimenting Judy Frater on this extraordinary venture, and the love, attention to detail, sensitivity, passion and commitment, with which she has engaged on it. I am sure she has been rewarded for her hard work by the results. The sight of those Rabari women striding down the ramp to receive their diplomas moved me to tears. March 2007 Update

Issue #002, Winter, 2019 ISSN: 2581- 9410 Abstract Natural dye has become very popular particularly in the foreign countries owing to their eco-friendliness and environment-friendliness. A few Indian traders are doing their export business exclusively on exportable handloom products dyed with natural dyes considering the fact that the price of the products may not be affordable for common people of our country. Before the synthetic dyes were introduced about 175 years back, natural dye was the only colorant in the world. It is very painful and unfortunate that popularity of natural dye has not yet reached the common people mainly due to the standard of washing and light fastness required for day to day laundering and drying. Though the dullness of natural dye is its inherent elegance, but is not liked by a class of people. Not only this reason is deemed as its drawback but also supply of raw materials for dyes as well as lengthy process of dyeing of natural colour are other reasons. Considering all these factors for the common interest of the silk exporters and customers of the country, the project was taken to develop the drawbacks by using only Lac & Indigo dye because of their beautiful colour and fastness quality and plenty of availability of the sources in nature. Natural dye product is very good for skin and it is used largely in baby care, health care, medicare and now it has become an aristocracy in fashion in the entire world. Natural dye application is best suitable for silk & wool industry. Country like Japan, Korea, England, America, Italy and Germany are much more interested to import the silk yarn particularly dyed with Indigo and Lac dyes especially from India. Introduction It is known to all that natural dyes have very few colours mainly Yellow, Brown, Ash, Black, Orange, Pink and Blue. The best quality pink comes from Lac the resource of which is insects. Blue colour comes from Indigo which is a vat class dye and the resources are leaves of Indigofera tinctoria which is also known as Neel. Both the dyes are cultivated in huge quantity not only in India but also in other countries all over the world. These two dyes are also fulfilling the export criteria regarding the fastness properties and others. Lac is a natural resin of insect origin, which is non-toxic, biodegradable, and its sources are renewable. The basic raw material for lac industry is stick lac, which is obtained by scraping lac incrustation, deposited on certain host trees. Stick lac, apart from lac resin, also contains water-soluble lac dye (laccaic acid upto 1%). Lac dye is used for dyeing of wool and silk fabrics and yarns. Since it is non-toxic, it is also being used as food colouring material. It is reported that Japan, China and Thailand are using pure lac dye for colouring beverages and products like ham, sausages, beers, jams etc. The present consumption of pure grade lac dye in Japan is reported to the tune of 5-6 ton per year. India at present produces about 20,000 ton of lac annually. Considering this annual production, nearly 200 ton lac dye is lost in effluents during washing. Thus, an enormous potential exists for recovery of the dye as by-product of lac industry. Even if half of the potential is exploited, it will be possible to turn trade of lac dye into highly profitable business as an exportable item with an assured foreign market. A variety of plants have provided indigo throughout history, but most natural indigo was obtained from those in the genus Indigofera, which are native to the tropics. The primary commercial indigo species in Asia was true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria, also known as Indigofera sumatrana). Lac dye is mainly used in Textile, Food industry and Pharmaceuticals. India was also the earliest major center for production and processing of Indigo. The Indigofera tinctoria variety of Indigo was domesticated in India. Indigo, used as a dye, made its way to the Greeks and the Romans, where it was valued as a luxury product. Indigo among all the dyes is the oldest one used for textile dyeing and printing. Many Asian countries, such as India, China, Japan and South East Asian nations have used indigo as a dye (particularly silk dye) for centuries. The dye was also known to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Britain, Mesoamerica, Peru, Iran, and Africa. India is believed to be the oldest center of indigo dyeing in the Old World. It was a primary supplier of indigo to Europe as early as the Greco-Roman era. The association of India with indigo is reflected in the Greek world for the dye. The Romans Latinized the term to indicum, which passed into Italian dialect and eventually into English as the word indigo. Indian silk industries should step forward and take the challenge for global demand of natural dye. It will also help the other small and big manufacturers of natural dye in India.

Properties, History and Structure of Indigo dye

Lac is one of the most valuable gifts for mankind and is unique material of animal origin, being secreted by the tiny insect Laccifer lacca. The crude lac (Stick lac) contains 1per cent dye pigment. The colouring substance is the lac dye of the scarlet pigment present in the live, pre-emergent lac insects, which contain water soluble compound, laccaic acid.An article “the story of shellac” revealed that, during certain season of the year the host trees are prone to bear lac insects. The insects suck the sap from the host plants and the sap undergoes a chemical transformation in the body of the lac insects and this sap is eventually extruded through the pores. On contact with air, it forms a hard shell like coating which is known as ‘stick lac.’ The whole life span of these tiny insect is approximately six months and is completely devoted for eating, propagating and creating lac as a protective covering from their larvae.Lac dye is based on anthraquinoid type of structure and composed of laccaic acid and erythrolaccin. Laccaic acid is water soluble compound whereas erythrolaccin is water insoluble. The insect lac, Laccifer lacca or Kerria lacca belongs to family Lacciferidae. Lac insect is soft-bodied, round tiny creature, which completes its life cycle on host plants viz., Kusum, Palas, Ber, Moduga and Cajanus. The insect survives on the succulent green branches of these plants and completes its life cycle within six months. During the life cycle it secretes reddish brown gelatinous substance around the branches of host plants, which gives stick lac. The stick lac having gravid female is ready to produce larvae. Stick lac harvesting is performed by cutting off the twigs before the emergence of larva. These pregnant lac insets contain high amount of laccaic acid which is the main colouring substance in lac dye. These gravid insects are killed by exposing the stick lac to direct solar rays, (http://www.fao.org). Stick lac is used for various purposes such as production of shellac; seed lac as well as lac dye. Commercially, shellac and seed lac are the better economic earning products than lac dye. Lac dye is usually extracted from the by-products of shellac industry. Stick lac is made into shellac by thoroughly washing in plain water. From the water soluble dye pigment, laccaic acid is taken for further extraction of lac dye. Lac dye is acidic in nature, soluble in water and other solvents such as methyl alcohol, amyl alcohol, acetone, acetic acid, formic acid, but insoluble in ether, chloroform and benzene. Since lac dye is acidic in nature can safely be applied to protein substrates such as wool, silk and other animal hair (Indian Lac Research Institute, 2006).


Picture 1: Lac Stick in Tree

Picture 2: Lac dye in cake form

Properties, History and Structure of Indigo dye

Indigo dye is an important dyestuff with a distinctive blue color. The natural dye comes from several species of plants, but nearly all indigo produced today is synthetic. Among other uses, it is used in the production of denim cloth for blue jeans. Indigo has a frequency range of visible light from 440 to 420 nanometers in wavelength placed between blue and violet. The human eye is relatively insensitive to indigo frequencies and some otherwise well-sighted people cannot distinguish indigo from blue and violet. A variety of plants have provided indigo throughout history, but most natural indigo is obtained from plants in the genus Indigofera, which are native to the tropics. In temperate climates indigo can be obtained from woad (Isatis tinctoria) and dyer's knotweed (Polygonum tinctorum), although the Indigofera species yield more dye. The primary commercial indigo species in Asia was true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria, also known as Indigofera sumatrana). Indigo is a dark blue crystalline powder that melts at 390°–392°C. It is insoluble in water, alcohol, or ether but soluble in chloroform, nitrobenzene, or concentrated sulfuric acid. The naturally occurring substance is indican, which is colorless and soluble in water. Indican can easily be hydrolyzed to glucose and indoxyl. Mild oxidation, such as exposure to air, converts indoxyl to indigo.Several simpler compounds can be produced by decomposing indigo; these compounds include aniline and picric acid. The only chemical reaction of practical importance is its reduction by urea to indigo white. The indigo white is reoxidized to indigo after it has been applied to the fabric. Indigo treated with sulfuric acid produces a blue-green color. It became available in the mid-1700s. Sulfonated indigo is also referred to as Saxon blue or indigo carmine.Indigo is a challenging dye to use because it is not soluble in water. If it is to be dissolved and it must undergo a chemical change. When a submerged fabric is removed from the dyebath, the indigo quickly combines with oxygen in the air and reverts to its insoluble form. When it first became widely available in Europe in the sixteenth century, European dyers and printers struggled with indigo because of this distinctive property. A preindustrial process for dyeing with indigo, used in Europe, was to dissolve the indigo in stale urine. Urine reduces the water-insoluble indigo to a soluble substance known as indigo white or leucoindigo, which produces a yellow-green solution. Fabric dyed in the solution turns blue after the indigo white oxidizes and returns to indigo. Synthetic urea to replace urine became available in the 1800s. Another preindustrial method, used in Japan, was to dissolve the indigo in a heated vat in which a culture of thermophilic, anaerobic bacteria was maintained. Some species of such bacteria generate hydrogen as a metabolic product, which can convert insoluble indigo into soluble indigo white. Cloth dyed in such a vat was decorated with the techniques of shibori (tie-dye), kasuri, katazome, and tsutsugaki. There are different methods for the direct application of indigo were developed in England in the eighteenth century and remained in use well into the nineteenth century.


	Picture 3: Indigo Cake (Extract from indigo leafs)

Fig-3: The compound found in the leaves of the indigo plant that is used to make indigo dye.

Specialty of Our Dye Generally natural dye application is very time taking process. Because raw resources need to be crushed, then boiled and finally filtered. Our natural dye is special kind of dye. It is water soluble and ready to use for dyeing as well as printing in most innovative method and most important it is that the dye can be stored more than three years without any growth of fungus which is the main enemy for spoiling natural dyes kept in storage.

Dyeing Process

Materials This experiment has been done by using some eco-friendly and nontoxic organic compounds specially manufactured. Mulberry silk yarn has been used as the main raw material for dyeing. Chemicals and Reagents used Soda ash, Glauber’s salt, Sodium Nitrite, Sulphuric Acid, Alum, Ferrus Sulphate, Acetic Acid, Sodium Hydrosulphite and Hydrogen Peroxide (all of commercial grade) have been used. Degumming Process of Silk Yarn The raw silk yarn was degummed with our special degumming agent Scourex 10 gm/lit in addition of 5-10 gm/lit of soda ash at 75-80˚c for 30 minutes. Sodium Hydrosulphite 10g/l was added in the same bath for bleaching at 60˚c for another 15 minutes. If necessary for better whiteness, an addition of 2gm/lit Hydrogen Peroxide may be alternatively used in the same bath for another 15 minutes in the same temp for more delicate or light shades of the silk. Silk yarn is now washed in cold water and 2gm/lit of Acetic Acid is used for softening the silk yarn and to remove alkalinity. Now the yarn is ready for dyeing. Dyeing Process of Lac dye 30gm/ lit lac dye is taken in a dye bath and the temperature of the bath is raised at 50˚c. Then silk yarn is put into the bath and dyed for 20 - 30 minutes at the temperature of 80˚c with addition of 2gm/lit Acetic acid for better dyeing and absorption of dye. Dyeing Process of Indigo dye 50gm/ lit Indigo dye is taken in a dye bath and the temperature of the bath is raised at 50˚c and silk yarn is put into the bath and dyed for 20 -30 minutes at 60˚c with addition of 10gm/ lit Glauber’s salt and 25gm/lit Sodium Nitrite in the dyeing bath. Mordanting and Development Mordant class natural dyes need a metal salt to create insoluble coloured lakes inside the fiber according to necessity of shade. These salts are known as “Mordants”. Only Alum AlK(SO₄)₂, and Ferrus Sulphate (FeSO₄) have been used here to get different shades. The quantity of mordant salts is taken 1/6^th of lac dye used at 60˚c for 15 mints. The mordating process should be post mordanting to get the best result. It should be remembered that the premordanting and simultaneous mordanting processes are totally unsuitable for silk industry. There is no question for mordanting in Indigo dye as it is a vat class natural dye. Only 10gm/lit Sulphuric Acid and 10g/l Glauber’s Salt at 50˚c is required for developing the blue shade of indigo. Hydrochloric acid and common salt should not be used for developing the blue shade of Indigo dye in case silk material. After treatment process of the Silk The silk yarn should be after treated with non-ionic detergent. It is a necessary procedure to remove remaining surface dyes and chemicals after dyeing. First cold wash then soaping with 1gm/lit Non-ionic detergent for 10 mints at 50˚c is normally done. The dyed yarn should be dried in shade particularly for natural class dyed materials. Softener may be used for better finishing, if required. Result and Discussion Fastness properties are tested both for the Lac and Indigo dyed materials and the result were observed very good. Washing fastness of the Lac dyed materials is found 4-5 in ISO-2 method and Light fastness of the same is observed 5-6 both of which are very satisfactory for exportable standard. The washing fastness of Indigo dyed materials is 5 in ISO-2 method and Light fastness of the same is 6 both of which are in exportable standard. The breaking strength of the dyed yarn is also very good due to use of special degumming agent and procedure. Different shades of color and tone can be obtained on the silk yarn by changing the ratios of mordants when taken in combination. Indigo dye is not suitable for mordanting as it belongs to Vat class dyes. Conclusion The dyeing process of natural dye should be very simple as well as scientific for implementation in Textile Industry. Natural dye has now been survived not only in cottage sector but also tends to enter medium size Textile Silk Industries. Hence training workshop and awareness programme on natural dye are necessary to be undertaken. Governments of all countries are encouraging to take some initiatives to save the heritage dye because the dyes are not only eco-friendly but also environ-friendly and will be helpful to balance the green-house gases due to more cultivation of plants and trees

Noah Seelam/AFP All over social media these days, people are making 100 Sari pacts to wear the elegant garment at least 100 times this year. It's a curious sad irony that, just as so many women seem to be rediscovering the sari, the government seems bent on putting an end to its handloom incarnation. A move is on to repeal The Handloom Reservation Act, which since 1985 has been protecting traditional handloom weaves, especially saris, from being copied by their machine-made and powerloom competitors. It was a small but important protection for handloom weavers, who otherwise struggle to survive. Their yarn, their designs and their markets are under attack. Now the powerful powerloom lobby is agitating to have this Act withdrawn. Meetings and consultations have been held, largely without the inclusion of handloom-sector representatives, and our representations and queries have gone unanswered. One powerloom lobbyist at the meeting allegedly said that "we have progressed from the firewood chula to gas and electric stoves. If we need to hang on to technologies from our grandparents times, it is a mark of regression. Our children will laugh at us." Another claimed that "the customer prefers cheaper powerloom sari". We need to challenge the statement that handloom is not viable in the market. This ignores the facts. Obviously the market has shifted from rural to urban, but it is a growing one, and we have figures to support that. This despite problems faced by weavers in yarn procurement and market access. Over the last five years the sale of handlooms has actually increased. Huge sales and eager footfalls at exhibitions organised by Dastkar, Sanatkada, and the Crafts Councils bear witness. Globally too, as understanding of the ecological properties and design virtuosity of hand-spun and hand-woven textiles grows, more and more international buyers look to India as a source. How tragic that instead of investing in this potential we are seeking to destroy it. So why not powerloom, the lay person may ask. Isn't it cheaper, quicker and less laborious to weave? To say that because we have powerlooms, we don't need handlooms is really so silly. To take the chula analogy, it's like saying because we have microwave ovens we don't need tandoors. Each serves its own unique purpose, and it's the Indian tandoor that creates our unique Indian cuisine and draws tourists and foodies. The handloom can create thousands of distinctive regional weaves and designs that no powerlooms can replicate, plus a tactile wonderful drape that is also irreplaceable by mechanised means. How tragic that instead of investing in this potential we are seeking to destroy it. If we remove the protection and incentives for handloom weavers to continue weaving their traditional products and saris, we would suddenly be bereft of our past. Each weave has a cultural tradition and a story, each one links us to our social and cultural roots. We would literally be naked without them. Handloom lovers, it's time to raise your voice.

Issue #10, 2023 ISSN: 2581- 9410 Although we are a team of transportation designers we ventured into the world of footwear due to the realization of design’s transformative power. Prior to establishing Earthen Tunes, our trio collaborated on a highly successful wheelchair project during our graduation thesis and this experience enlightened us to the immense potential of design thinking to positively impact the lives of Indians. Our exploration revealed a dearth of authentically Indian designs, as much of what we encounter is influenced by the West. This prompted us to question whether we could create something entirely new, unencumbered by external influences, to address the specific challenges faced by Indians. Following the success with the wheelchair project, the founders Santosh Kocherlakota, Nakul Lathkar and Vidyadhar Bhandare met in 2018 with a newfound purpose: to make a difference in rural India. While footwear for farmers was not an immediate decision, we embraced the essence of design thinking, which urged us to immerse ourselves in rural India, rather than merely analysing articles from the comfort of our homes. SEEDHE CARS SE CHAPPAL?- Why Earthen Tunes?

At Earthen Tunes, we understood that true innovation stems from first-hand experiences and empathy. and we ventured into the heart of rural India to grasp the nuances of everyday life, the challenges faced by our fellow countrymen and the essence of their unique identity. The next sections talk about our journey of how we were able to create these farmer shoes from a traditional craft BHAI BOHOT PROBLEM HAIN - RURAL INDIA JOURNEY (SUMMER 2018)

In the first part of our journey we delved into the intricate world of the farmer-to-food supply chain i.e. we tried to understand the complete farming supply chain from sowing to until the food ends up on our plate. We started off our journey, from Nandad, Nakul’s ’ hometown and proceeded further into rural Maharashtra to places such as Wardha, Baramati Immersed in the field, we sought to grasp the challenges faced by farmers, particularly during the scorching summer months. Conversations flowed freely as we engaged with them, without any set agenda other than understanding their experiences. To gain deeper insights, we even tried our hand at activities such as operating tractors, experiencing first-hand the nuances and difficulties faced by these dedicated individuals.

Throughout our six to seven-month journey, we encountered remarkable individuals engaged in even more transformative initiatives. One such person was Mr. Subash Palakar, a leading advocate of natural farming who also advises the Indian government. Attending his sessions broadened our perspective, igniting a spark of inspiration within us. Another impactful experience was our participation in a run organized by the Paani Foundation, spearheaded by Mr. Aamir Khan. This initiative aimed to combat drought in rural Maharashtra by encouraging villagers to partake in activities that promote rainwater harvesting. Witnessing these endeavours only fueled our determination to create something impactful.

As the harvest season arrived, we explored the subsequent steps of the supply chain, witnessing the intricate economy that unfolds, from grain storage to the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC). The visit to APMC revealed the disparities and exploitation faced by farmers at the hands of middlemen Our exploration continued into the vast godowns, where we unravelled the logistics involved. Eye-opening discoveries awaited us, such as the distressing reality of food wastage during storage and the delayed payment farmers endure after delivering their produce.

The warmth and openness of the local communities we encountered along the way were invaluable. Their willingness to share their experiences left a lasting impression, opening our eyes to the realities they face. Upon returning from this transformative research, we meticulously compiled the problem statements we had gathered. Initially faced with a multitude of challenges, we narrowed our focus to five core issues that embody the essence of Earthen Tunes. These will shape our journey over the next decade, driving us to make a lasting difference in the lives of those who cultivate our sustenance. BINA CHAPPAL KE?- FOOTWEAR RESEARCH( MONSOON 2018)

Of the shortlisted problems the first one we set out to solve was the issue of farmers walking barefoot. While there may be a romantic notion associated with barefoot walking, claiming a connection to Mother Earth and promoting good health, the reality for farmers today is quite different. The soil and ecological conditions they encounter actually do more harm than good. Imagine the common sight in rural areas: cracked and calloused feet, plagued by fungal infections, and even snake bites. Farming, being a man-made endeavour, creates unique challenges that necessitate protective footwear

The common suggestion to use gum boots or Western-style footwear like Woodland fails to address the specific needs of Indian farmers. Pushing such products into the Indian market proves flawed, as farmers often end up not wearing anything at all.

To truly understand the predicament, we immersed ourselves in the process, we donned various footwear options available in rural markets, experiencing first-hand the conditions farmers face. From going barefoot to trying traditional slippers and different types of open sandals, we walked the fields ourselves. This exploration led us to monsoon testing in Kolhapur, known for its challenging black soil, where we encountered the accumulation of mud, a common obstacle for farmers. The flaws and limitations of existing footwear became apparent. Armed with this knowledge, we compiled a list of crucial considerations, comprising seven to eight essential points that our footwear should address. Rather than hastily concluding that rubber-based footwear was the solution, we delved into India’s rich repertoire of natural fibres, seeking a sustainable answer. Our quest became twofold: to develop a footwear solution that protected farmers’ feet while harnessing the potential of indigenous natural fibres. LOCAL PROBLEM, LOCAL SOLUTION - SEARCH FOR THE RIGHT MATERIAL (WINTER 2018)

In quest for the perfect material our journey began again in Wardha, where we partnered with the NGO Dhara Mithr. Their generous support allowed us to delve into the world of natural fibres and craft our initial footwear prototypes using jute, banana, and cotton fibres. These prototypes showcased intriguing properties but fell short of meeting our stringent criteria for farmer footwear

Undeterred, we pressed on to our next destination—Kerala. Here, we had the privilege of collaborating with the remarkable NGO KIDS, located in the picturesque town of Kottapuram. Operated by a local church, KIDS empowers single and widowed women by providing them with opportunities for skill development. Working side by side with these talented artisans, we explored unconventional materials such as screw pine, water hyacinth, and coir. During our time in Kottapuram, we also discovered an enthralling museum that showcased a treasure trove of natural fibres and intricate weaves. Unfortunately, despite the rich heritage and craftsmanship on display, the demand for these woven marvels had waned over time, highlighting the need for greater recognition and support.

Continuing our quest, we collaborated with the Central Coir Research Institute (CCRI) in Allepay. Here, we honed our expertise in coir, while also experimenting with water hyacinth and sisal fibre to make footwear Although these creations were aesthetically pleasing and offered a delightful wearing experience, they still fell short of meeting our ultimate objective: designing footwear specifically tailored for the needs of farmers Despite our exhaustive experimentation with approximately 14 to 15 different fibres, it was an encounter in Maharashtra that introduced us to the elusive wool possessing the very properties we had been seeking all along. Intrigued by its potential, we eagerly delved into exploring the wonders this fibre held, paving the way for our next phase of innovation. DESI MAGIC -THE WOOL JOURNEY (WINTER 2018 - SUMMER 2019)

Among the myriad challenges we faced in our pursuit of natural fibres for footwear, one obstacle stood out prominently: -“water resistance”. That’s when we stumbled upon a truly fascinating material that repelled water effortlessly. To demonstrate its remarkable properties, we even placed it atop our heads, and poured water over it and to our surprise the water didn’t pass through. Curiosity piqued, we delved further into the world of wool, particularly the traditional blankets crafted by certain communities known to endure for 20 to 25 years. Intrigued by this longevity, we embarked on a journey to witness the process first-hand.

During our exploration, we immersed ourselves in wool economy. We discovered the source of the fleece, delved into the quality standards, and uncovered the age-old practices employed in blanket making The wool economy serves as a vital source of income for pastoral communities across India. These indigenous wool varieties are primarily reared by the Kuruma, Kuruba, Golla and other specific communities residing in the Deccan region, encompassing Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Interestingly, both men and women participate in the wool economy.

For instance, the shearing of wool is entrusted to the skilled katregar community, while women take charge of carding and spinning the fibres within their homes. Subsequently, the men weave the wool into intricate blankets. The entire process typically spans 10 days, with weaving alone requiring four to five days. Notably, every element employed in this craft is eco-friendly, and the looms utilized are among the oldest pit looms in the world You’ll find the tools used here such as—a hand held spindle for yarn making, a scissor for wool shearing and a brush for applying tamarind kernel paste to reduce coarseness and enhance water resistance.

Sadly, this once-thriving craft faces decline as plastic alternatives replace the coarse wool blankets. What was once a bustling market in Karnataka is dwindling rapidly. Currently, the average age of weavers in this trade is 60 years, and there are no apprentices to carry the craft forward.

In fact, the state of the carding machine pictured here, installed by the government two decades ago, reflects the current state of the craft. With minimal use restricted to three months of the year, neglect has taken its toll. However, we see a glimmer of hope—a potential synergy between our footwear needs and the demand for this remarkable material. By incorporating this wool into our shoes, we believed we could breathe new life into the craft, benefiting both farmers and the pastoral communities YEH NAHI BANEGI - SHOE MANUFACTURING

We embarked on the task to transform this wool material into a fully functional shoe. However, we soon encountered a hurdle—finding skilled artisans willing to work with this unconventional fabric. Initial attempts to engage with craftsmen across various markets, including Hyderabad, Mumbai, Ambur, and Chennai, proved fruitless. Their reluctance stemmed from concerns such as fabric shedding and potential sewing machine malfunctions. To complicate matters further, we discovered a deep-rooted taboo associated with manufacturing footwear, dissuading many traditional apparel tailors from stitching shoe patterns. Determined to surmount these obstacles, we took matters into our own hands, purchasing a sewing machine, the team learnt how to stitch, paste and completely build shoe prototypes in house. A few of which are shown here. Nakul Lathkar, one of the co-founders delved into the realm of crochet, honing his skills to create our very first knitted shoe using Deccani wool. Eventually we developed multiple prototypes to optimize the design. However, we didn’t carry these designs for final production due to the limitation in hand knitting

Eager to explore the potential for large-scale production, we contemplated engaging Women Self-Help Groups (SHGs) as well to bring in an aspect of circularity Working in partnership with Self-Help Groups (SHGs) in both Chennai and Hyderabad, we encountered a promising revelation. In Chennai, the women of an SHG demonstrated remarkable skill by crafting a pair of our shoes in just one day. Despite facing language barriers due to our limited fluency in Tamil, we effectively conveyed our design ideas, resulting in a clear understanding of the pattern and by incorporating principles of symmetry, user-friendly marking techniques and necessary tools, we observed the women’s impressive expertise in shoe production. While this development was encouraging, we recognized the need for further refinement to ensure large-scale production feasibility. This concept remains an integral part of our grand vision, and we aspire to revisit it in the future. BECH KE DIKHAO-SHOE PILOT TESTING (MONSOON 2019)

As our vision gained momentum, we approached IIT Madras, seeking both financial support and incubation. Though intrigued by our idea, they were cautiously optimistic, desiring proof of its viability. Their challenge to us was clear: demonstrate market viability by selling a few pairs of our shoes. If successful, IIT Madras would provide us with the incubation opportunity. For manufacturing the pilot shoes, we ventured to Ambur, collaborating with a local manufacturer to produce 30 pairs of our shoes (design shown in picture)

For pilot testing we ventured into Maharashtra and various locations in Telangana, where we directly engaged with farmers, seeking their feedback. We opted for a nominal fee structure, ensuring the farmers valued the product, and explored different types of wool, including 100% wool and blended variations. The range of conditions we encountered during this pilot phase provided us with invaluable insights. A few important points were observed -women played a crucial role in the labor force and displayed a fondness for our shoes. Many recognized the material as Gongadi, the beloved wool blanket, enthusiastically encouraging others to embrace our footwear. TAG CHAHIYE-IIT MADRAS INCUBATION (WINTER -2019 TO PRESENT)

Subsequently, our goal became associating ourselves with IIT and the immense opportunities that would arise from such a partnership. Fortunately, IIT Madras reviewed our pilot results and agreed to incubate our venture, providing us with a robust platform to showcase our products at various forums. The exposure garnered valuable feedback, enriching our journey further LIFT OFF - PRODUCT LAUNCH (AUGUST 2021-PRESENT)

After multiple Iterations we have launched YAAR shoes into the market. The YAAR range consists of 2 variants -Himachal wool and Deccani wool. The YAAR shoe is also cross subsidised for the farmers to make it more affordable for them

Earthen Tunes is truly humbled to have received press from multiple platforms prior to its official launch. This Press has helped Earthen Tunes in sales and network. It was able to bring back attention to our indigenous wool and initiate conversations about pastoralism and Livelihood

Our shoes have also been supported by Hon Minister KTR garu of Telangana Government and Prof. Ashok Jhunjunwala from IIT Madras

Earthen Tunes has impacted to lives of over 2000 farmers and have provided over 6000 hours of employment to about 11 weaving and allied activity clusters We plan to reach over 10000 farmers by the end of 2023-24 and provide livelihood to about 20 weaving clusters across the Deccan region, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand

The Contemporary Significance of Bamboo Bamboo is being rediscovered by mankind in the age of the information revolution, environmental consciousness and space exploration. As a potential renewable resource and an inexhaustible raw material, if properly managed, bamboo could transform the way we think about and use man-made objects to improve the quality of life. In many economically deprived countries bamboo could provide the answer to the distressing problems of employment generation and of providing basic shelter and amenities in an affordable and dignified manner. It also holds promise of the spawning of a host of new industries that are ecologically responsible while providing for the manufactured artefacts for a new age. An agro-industrial infrastructure could well bridge the urban-rural divide in many regions of the world. Can this promise be realised?Notwithstanding the complexity and magnitude of these assumptions it seems appropriate that these propositions need to be addressed with all seriousness and a multi-disciplinary approach be developed to realise this latent potential. The design disciplines that have emerged in this century have been increasingly drawing on the systems metaphor to cope with the complexity in the real world of resource identification and problem solving. It is here that the lessons from the Bamboo Culture could provide a direction to mankind. Above all the subtle messages embedded in the Bamboo Culture can be re-articulated by mankind today with the aid of some of our very powerful analytical and conceptual tools available to us in this age. Never before has mankind been so fortunate to be in the possession of such a vast and widely networked information base along with the capacity to process this knowledge base for the benefit of all mankind.Last year, I was fortunate to be a member of an editorial group that met at Singapore to assemble an annotated bibliography on the engineering and structural properties and applications of bamboo. The group led by Dr Jules Janssen of the Eindhoven University of Technology worked for four days at the IDRC office (International Development Research Centre, Canada) accessing satellite databases and team contributions to complete the editorial task which is now in production. IDRC's massive investments in bamboo research around the globe are indicative of the resurgent interest in bamboo. These researches however, need to be given a larger framework to make the individual research efforts more meaningful and to enable us to pattern these contributions in a holistic perspective. Hence I shall use this opportunity to elaborate the ideas that I had barely sketched out in my contribution to that editorial effort. Further, I shall try and link these to the deeper concerns that have grown over the years as a design teacher at India's premier design institution while grappling with the immense problems faced in India's developmental efforts along with the conviction that design as a discipline has a pivotal role to play in alleviating some of these seemingly insoluble problems of immense complexity.Bamboo: A Personal Journey My own interest has been in the structural use of bamboo which extends from large structures including houses and bridges, that is structures of an architectural scale, as well as the application of bamboo in furniture and small craft products. Being an industrial designer interested in the use of bamboo, particularly with reference to its conversion into useable products of everyday value, I have been focussing on the way bamboo has been used by local communities in India, particularly with reference to the northeastern states of India. I have surveyed the bamboo growing regions of India intensively with my colleagues at the National Institute of Design and the results of this research have been published in our book titled Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India.Bamboo is found in most parts of India and has been traditionally used to solve a variety of structural and constructional problems in the Indian subcontinent. A very interesting observation that we have made in the course of our studies is the nexus between the form of bamboo structures and a set of influencing parameters. These include the variety in types of local bamboo species, its distribution and variability over climatic zones, the availability of particular species and its translation into products and structures for local application. These factors have all had an overriding cultural connotation particularly in the detailing and formal expressions that are chosen by local communities in solving their structural and constructional problems. Product variability in form and structure seems to be quite independent of product function and dominated by considerations of cultural differentiation expressing a need for an unique identity at the community level. Properties of material and structure, and their appropriate interpretation in product detailing are a high-point of almost every traditional product that has emerged from a very long process of cultural evolution. These findings have convinced me that we need to understand this material at many levels simultaneously to be able to use it effectively.We have followed up our field research work with several attempts dealing with the design of contemporary products and structures using bamboo. Through these experiences we have further confirmed the need for a very precise understanding of the physical and mechanical properties of bamboo. However, I would also like to stress that in order to ensure its successful utilisation over diverse climatic and cultural zones these physical and mechanical properties need to be carefully juxtaposed with cultural and formal practices that are evident in the expressions of local communities. In order to bring about a simultaneous correlation between the various types of information that would be required by any engineer, designer or local craftsman to utilise this raw material in situations such as ours it would perhaps be important at some stage to reorient and enlarge the scope of the ongoing research and development work to include several aspects relating to the cultural dimensions in the use and conversion of bamboo into useable products and structures.The purpose of the International Bamboo Culture Forum at Oita Japan as stated by Dr. Shin'ichi Takemura is to develop an agenda for the setting up and providing a focus for the development of design activities that are ecologically responsive and humanely sensitive. This conference in Oita which is one of a series of efforts planned to set up the agenda for the proposed Asian Design Centre gives me the unique opportunity to connect and reflect on two of my favourite topics, that is, Bamboo and Design. Firstly I shall spell out the issues and messages that map out the boundaries of the Bamboo Culture after which we can explore the various dimensions of the new awareness relating to the use of the systems metaphor in design and their mutual interdependence. Knowledge Base of the Bamboo Culture The manner in which bamboo has been traditionally used by the people in India, China, Japan and several other Asian countries demonstrates a very deep understanding of the workings of ecological principles and the subtle connections between human endeavour and the environment. In our search for sophistication we seem to have lost our tenuous links with the life sustaining processes on earth and seem to be madly accelerating both socially and technologically in an impossible to sustain direction. Total replacement of products of a throw-away culture is unfortunately preferred to the repair and continuous maintenance that is practised in the Bamboo Culture. This has resulted in massive garbage heaps accumulating in our backyards and the creation of museums of garbage. Can we afford to head in this direction? The advanced industrial nations of the West and unfortunately Japan as well seem to be leading the way to self destruction by the materialist and irresponsible consumerist practices and aspirations that are being driven by systematic propaganda in an information rich world. In India too, we have the educated elite aping these practices and aspiring for similar lifestyles quite unperturbed by the ecological consequences and, seeing their behaviour, our disadvantaged rural brethren too aspire to similar unattainable life goals. It is here that I feel we need to rethink our directions and draw on the lessons of the Bamboo Culture. I am not advocating a return to the past. On the contrary I am very much at ease with the computers and other products of human genius including the conceptual tools of our age. I see hope in trying to bridge these seemingly opposing positions in finding a sustainable direction for the future of man on this planet. Man's use of bamboo in the development of human civilization perhaps predates the Stone Age and the Iron Age as a study by G Gregory Pope seems to suggest. Pope's thesis based on the study of fossil records of the distribution of animal species when juxtaposed with the occurrence of traces of human settlements over the globe along with other indirect evidence suggests that the Asian regions housed the origin and flowering of human civilizations rooted in the availability of bamboo. If this is so, history will be rewritten to give bamboo a catalytic role in the cradle of human civilization which was overlooked due to lack of any subterranean traces caused by the biodegradable nature of bamboo. The theory is quite plausible and it provides some clues on the prehistoric origins and development of man and shifts the focal point to our region of the world. These regions of Asia have had an undisturbed association with bamboo and in many inaccessible parts of India and most of other East Asian countries this link survives in the lives and practices of its people even today. These need to be systematically and sympathetically studied by contemporary man to distil the essence of the millennia old wisdom that even today resides in these local associations with bamboo. These proposed studies are not merely aimed at the conservation of archaic practices for the sake of some romantic or sentimental mood. They should be aimed at discovering the larger patterns that lie embedded in the details of each product, practice or ceremony associated with the use of bamboo. Bamboo: The Tasks Ahead Keeping this pattern discovering task as the focus of the study and as the overarching objective the other areas of knowledge need to be correlated and systematically interwoven to map the boundaries of the knowledge base that I prefer to call the New Bamboo Culture. Some of these are listed below, and would naturally be elaborated with the intervention of others from a variety of special disciplines.

Botanical information sources related to the distribution and availability of particular bamboo species in various regions around the world. A map of the available gene pool of bamboo resources needs to be generated and preserved for the future of man. Bamboo constitutes a diverse group of plants that are greatly differentiated in physical stature and structural properties that are influenced by local climatic and environmental conditions. Knowledge relating to this variety and the suitability of each species to particular environmental conditions will be a major factor influencing the future use of bamboo.
Agricultural information relating to propagation, cultivation, care and harvesting and post harvest processing techniques for bamboos suitable for mechanical and structural applications. These would include areas of biotechnology explorations. The anomalous and often mystical flowering of bamboo species over very long cycles of gestation has been a major bottleneck in past researches. However recent researches in genetic engineering and tissue culture seem to suggest potential solutions to the problems relating to the sustained regeneration of species suitable to the task and the location.
Mechanical engineering data relating to particular species of bamboo with reference to physical characteristics of culms and other parts that could be used for structural applications. The variables would include properties influenced by the age at harvest, part of culm and sub-parts of internodes used, species vs environmental conditions in which it grows as well as any changes induced by post-harvest practices. Mechanical properties of each species in respect to a minimum set of variables need to be experimentally verified to generate a database that can be interpreted by the heuristic processes used by designers and craftsmen and not as mere statistical data.Information sources related to structural, mechanical and physical properties of bamboo of various species primarily focussed on test data generated in laboratories and field situations. Building and constructional codes would need to be generated and disseminated to re-establish the status of bamboo as an important resource for mankind.
Information sources relating to the diverse structural utilisation of bamboos in different cultures and geographic regions particularly with reference to the variety of interpretation of structural form as a result of cultural differentiation. This is perhaps the most urgently needed research as the sources sustaining this knowledge base are being rapidly eroded by contemporary education and as a result of the social and economic upheavals of the information age.
Experimental data relating to contemporary explorations into utilisation of bamboo in structural and product design applications. These would include the creative re-interpretation of potential applications in the light of new technological insights developed in diverse fields. The developments in the area of composite materials could transform the manner in which bamboo is perceived as a potential engineering material. Bamboo is nature's marvellous composite material that needs to be reappraised in the light of developments in carbon fibre composites.
Information sources related to techniques, processes and tools/ equipment used for the processing and conversion of bamboos for structural applications. New and improved tools would result from a systematic study in this area.
Principles of structure and morphological characteristics of structural form that show potential for application in bamboo. These would include principles of lightweight architecture and micro-mechanical structures that cover product scale applications.
Materials akin to bamboo such as canes, rattan and a vast range of grasses and leaves as well as other plant materials could be put to effective and sensible use once again in the search for man's harmonious existence with nature. This checklist could provide the agenda for a coordinated research effort that needs to be supported and sustained to generate the awareness and knowledge needed to realise the promise that bamboo holds for the future of man. .
Human experiences in the setting up and the sustained conduct of decentralised cooperative societies that have been practised in several cultures need to be reevaluated in the context of a global information society to explore new and sustainable forms of ecologically responsible behaviour. This combined with the messages embedded in the Bamboo Culture promise to hold a vital significance for the environmentally friendly use of available resources.

Having outlined what I perceive as potentials in the study and contemplation of the Bamboo Cultures we can now look at developments in design thinking in order to try and articulate the kind of shifts in thinking that are beginning to emerge with increasing ecological awareness and environmental consciousness amongst concerned planners and designers. Industrial design principles and processes are being re-assessed in the light of the massive ecological disaster that have been caused by the follies of the so called advanced technological process of scientific industrialization. Systems Thinking and Design The nexus between of the quality of natural and built spaces and its various components with its influence on the quality of life has been a recognised premise for quite some time now. The quality of the built environment is also recognised as a very complex interplay of a vast number of influencing factors that are physical, psychological, socio-cultural, economic and philosophical. If we were to accept this premise, it is apparent that anyone responsible for the conceptual planning and the realisation of these environments must have a holistic view along with a corresponding set of tools and skills that enable one to create the scenario for action. However as professional designers, the various areas of specialization that are represented by Architecture, Urban Design and Planning, Industrial Design and Communication Design, to name only a few, are rarely found to cross their artificial boundaries to explore the potential of a higher level of synthesis that could accrue from such a crossing. Further at the academic level a host of other disciplines (which are also specializations) such as Sociology, Anthropology and Ecology, and Mathematics, Logic and Ethics, to single out a few for the purpose of this illustration, are piously touted as essential branches of human knowledge that enable the resolution of complex design tasks. The attitudes that foster these specializations come into direct conflict with the premise that design synthesis requires quite the opposite, that is an integrative capacity. It is here that emerging concepts of systems thinking, in a vast number of fields, are increasingly influencing the search for inter-disciplinary options that transcend boundaries of traditional specializations. The keyword here is complexity. The resolution of this complexity resides in the necessary diversity and range of factors that affect each designed situation. The handling of this complexity requires the development and assimilation of a body of theory that could enable designers, architects and planners to effectively grapple with real life challenges. This should be possible without having to break down every task into simplistic and specialized sub-functions, to be resolved in isolation, thereby losing the vital advantages of the symbiotic relationships that are enabled when such tasks are perceived and resolved as interrelated components of a dynamic system. The ecological model of design will perhaps be the outcome of this realisation. Design methodologies have constantly been invigorated, over the years, by assimilating into their repertoire developments in a vast number of disciplines. This is particularly so in recent years when there is a resurgence of interest in the theory of systems and structure. Developments in mathematics, physics and information technologies have been responsible for opening up new vistas of exploration in the study of biology and ecosystems which in turn have influenced explorations of the systems metaphor in design and in other fields of human endeavour. These explorations have been greatly influenced by the work of the structuralists in the field of anthropology and linguistics with a resurgence of interest in product semantics and semiotics amongst designers. Engineers and architects have been exploring the limits of the concepts of module, proportion and symmetry while drawing analogies with corresponding work in other quite 'unrelated' fields. Bionics is one such field, where studies of nature and natural forms, structures and their working principles set the platform for the creative development of engineering details and new product analogies that use similar principles. The emergence of the fields of biotechnologies and genetic engineering throw up new design challenges and potentials along with the dangers of a runaway disaster if handled irresponsibly. Design: An Alternate Definition When I use the term 'design', I do not wish to refer to design as an elitist preoccupation but to design as a developmental activity, a powerful tool for economic and social development. The development of this definition of design represents the current state of the art in the area of design as a discipline as we now see it in India and in our perception this interpretation can be used to improve the quality of our lives. Design as a multi-dimensional process and design as a strategy are quite different from the more commonly understood definition that covers the limited roles that professional designers play in the service of organized industry. Design as a discipline necessarily draws on a vast body of human knowledge that are appropriate to the task at hand to generate the scenarios that could be subjected to rigorous evaluation. Design activity focusses on the user's needs. In this case we recognize the need to use design processes to identify and configure products and processes that would enable both producers and users to benefit in a market economy. To achieve this, the designer must develop an intimate understanding of both the production and user environments. The Indian experience in design for the handicrafts and handloom sectors of our economy as well as in the areas of small-scale decentralised production exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi's Khadi and village industries experiment that is being sustained to this day, throws up an intricate set of propositions that impinge on the success of the country's developmental efforts. Many years of efforts have shown that capital is not the sole determinant of economic success nor is the multinational industry model the only way. These views on design are further substantiated by the thoughts and expressions of design thinker Gui Bonsiepe from his experiences in Ulm, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and India. He has been a source of inspiration for many of us in India. Small-scale production on a very low capital base is very susceptible to economic and social exploitation, while markets respond to quality and value in an extremely competitive manner. The designer working in these sectors must recognise the proposition that in the product environment there are those products that are exploitative in nature and products that are liberating in nature, e.g. a component supplied by a vendor to a large industry is exploitative in nature, whereas a small product, low in investment, low in tooling, short time cycle for manufacturing and sale and with direct access to market is least exploitative. Design strategies that recognise these and other similar principles provide us with a tool and methodology for social and economic change. Can we design products of this nature to enable start up entrepreneurship? Can this form of industry be based on use of raw materials that are truly renewable? Can the demonstration of a successful model based on the use of carefully cultivated bamboo set off renewed searches for meaningful patterns in other forms of industry? Can design enable disadvantaged communities to solve social and developmental problems locally? Can a productive and market oriented community be ecologically responsible? Can women play a vital role in the social and economic development of a community? I think the answer to all the above questions is a resounding yes! The New Bamboo Culture: A Search of Sustainable Models Through design as defined above, we can see that it is not the product or the technology that matters, but it is the people who really matter. Design is hence the vehicle for the creation of permanent innovations in a culture and the means available for each culture to express and discover its identity. The Bamboo Culture that I have direct contact with in India is a model of diversity with a richness of messages for mankind of which through the years of study we have barely scratched the surface. I would like to share with you some of these observations with the aid of photographs that aided our research in India. I shall focus on the manner in which various tribes and communities in the bamboo growing regions have built up a very refined sense of material utilisation. The centuries of physical isolation and a deep seated need for an exclusive identity have generated a rich matrix of overlapping cultures exquisitely demonstrated by the manner in which they use and revere bamboo. One tribe in northeast India stands out as a shining example that deserves to be studied in depth before the homogenizing effect of mass media wipes out all traces of cultural differentiation along with the rich messages embedded within that culture. They are the Apa Tani tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, who systematically cultivate bamboo in well tended groves near their villages in stark contrast to their neighbours who generally exploit forest resources. The Apa Tanis have fortunately been studied extensively over the past 50 years by the legendary anthropologist, Christoph Von Furer Haimendorf. The Apa Tanis and others like them are distributed over the Asian and Latin American bamboo regions and they are the custodians of the traditional bamboo wisdom that needs to be made explicit for the future of mankind. At the other end of the Indian subcontinent, in Kerala, community efforts have made the entire population literate, and experiments in cooperative local people's industry are based on the use of natural raw materials including bamboo. Although these efforts have had varying degrees of success they hold the hope for a sustainable model that is both dignified and ecologically sound. Note on photographs illustrating this lecture

All slides of tribes shown are from the resource of the National Institute of Design Ahmedabad, and were generated on the research projects on Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India during field visits in 1979 and 1980, 1981 and 1986.
Slides of the Kerala experiment have been kindly provided by Ms Claire Hicks, Australia, and were generated during a field trip associated with the International Bamboo Conference, Cochin 1988, organised by IDRC

Keynote address at the International Bamboo Culture Forum at Oita Japan from 5 November 1991 to 7 November 1991.

When enumerators from the national Economic Census 2012 knock on your door later this year, give them a special welcome. Census 2012 is going to be hugely significant for CCI and all crafts activist in the country --- and you may well be part of the preparation the enumerators will have gone through in order to do their job. That job is linked to CCI’s “Craft Economics & Impact Study” (CIES) which was completed last year (see Learning Together, Newsletter February 2012). The February Newsletter attempted to keep members informed of developments that have followed the submission of the CEIS to Government, soon after the Study was shared at the Business Meet last August. The Study and its recommendations were then reviewed by a partnership group which came together at the Crafts Museum in New Delhi in September. That was when members of the CEIS team (Raghav Rajagopalan, Gita Ram, Manju Nirula, Shikha Mukherji and I) met with key officials in the Planning Commission and at the Office of the Development Commissioner. CEIS had an impact. Early in March, the Commission called a series of meetings bringing together activists from civil society and a range of Ministries and Departments at the Centre who are (or should be!) concerned with the wellbeing of artisans and their crafts. Those discussions on the CEIS and related experience have proved hugely significant. The CEIS premise (which echoed concerns expressed earlier in discussions with stakeholders leading up to the 12^th Five-Year Plan) was accepted that national data currently available on the sector is dangerously inadequate. It does not reflect in any way the size and scale of the contribution which artisans make to the national economy. It was also accepted that unless this foundation of facts is rectified, policies and schemes as well as investment in the craft sector will continue to miss the bus. At the Planning Commission, two decisions were taken that will have far-reaching effect. One was to include crafts and artisans in the 6^th Economic Census 2012. Another was to follow the Census with a ‘Satellite Account’ specific to the sector, which will provide details which cannot be captured in the Census 2012 focus on ‘commercial establishments’. Following these decisions, the Central Statistical Organization (CSO) and the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts) have looked at CCI for support on next steps. These have included the framing of guidelines and key questions to be used by field enumerators to correctly identify craft activities and artisans, development of tools and materials to be used in the Census process (including in the training of enumerators and their supervisors), a listing of activities and processes involved in 40 selected crafts identified by the DC(H), and linking these to established statistical codes used to classify commercial activities for Census purposes. The materials developed for the Census include generic and state-specific illustrated maps (developed by CCI with a team of researchers coordinated by Vidya and Gita), bringing together available information with the 560 crafts analysed in “Handmade in India” (Aditi and MP Ranjan, NID), using that publication as a key resource. PPTs are also being prepared to use field examples that can sensitise Census staff on the processes and activities involved in craft production, and the numbers/levels of artisans that need to be included in the understanding of ‘artisans’ and craft production. This has been a huge task, carried out by a small team at the CCI office in Chennai, with support from Manju and the Delhi Crafts Council office. The Census 2012 surveys commercial establishments, i.e. of products and services exchanged in the marketplace. The Census will provide broad indicators of the size and contribution of the craft/artisanal sector to the economy. It will include as ‘commercial establishments’ those who produce for market sale and where the activity of respondents represents more than 180 workdays in the year ---- thus excluding many activities in the sector that are beyond these limitations, such as seasonal work that does not extend over 180 days. These exclusions can be of critical importance to craft activists, as well as other details such as the contribution of women artisans, the invisible half of the sector. These important aspects will be covered by the more detailed analysis of the sector to be made through the ‘Satellite Account’ that is to follow the broad outlines revealed by the Census 2012. Hopefully, data from the Census will be enough to provide a wake-up call to the nation on the importance of crafts and artisans, and begin the process of reforming national policies and programmes. The crunching of data emerging from the Census 2012 will take time (60-100 days after the Census’ field process is completed). Therefore there will be ample opportunity to understand and use the data as it emerges so as to influence the Satellite Account process. Studies may be needed in preparation for the Satellite Account, and CCI intends to be an active partner in these preparations. Raghav, Manju and Gulshanji represented CCI at a May 4 meeting at the Planning Commission, where progress on Census/Satellite Account was reviewed. Of particular importance were two issues. One was the understanding that handloom production would be integrated with the Census’ understanding of ‘craft’. Another was the ‘guideline’ that has finally emerged to help describe the sector:

“Handicrafts are items made by hand, mostly using simple tools. While they are predominantly made by hand, some machinery may also be used in the process. Skills are normally involved in such items/activities, but the extent thereof may vary from activity to activity. These items can be functional, artistic and/or traditional in nature”.

The challenge of ‘defining’ crafts and artisans has been a major one. A workable definition had emerged years ago at the time of the 8^th Five Year Plan. The CEIS suggested a definition based on it. Things got complicated when the Supreme Court issued its own definition --- one that was directed at resolving export legalities, not at national data requirements! A ‘guideline’ was needed to address a concern within the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Statistics on distinguishing between crafts and other handmade products (papads, pickles, bricks, bidis etc) that Government does not want to include in its understanding of crafts/artisans. The matter came up again at a June 1 meeting at the CSO, attended by Gita, where the Census 2012 time-table was worked out. Field work will begins after the rains in October, continuing till August 2013. The important issue for CCI is to assist the training that will soon begin throughout the country to sensitise enumerators and supervisors to their field tasks. Details of the training process will emerge from a meeting in New Delhi in late June. Meanwhile, CCI has been asked to assist by identifying resource persons in every region who can be associated with the training process, sharing their knowledge of local crafts in the local language. The support of State Councils and other partners will thus be critical as so much now depends on successfully and quickly sensitizing and ‘educating’ enumerators and their supervisors to the sector. By the time this Newsletter appears, several readers will have been contacted and involved. The range of materials being developed in the course of these efforts will also be of great use and benefit to all craft activists. These can help ensure that future planning and field action are more focused. In addition, the Planning Commission is considering research studies that can support the proposed Satellite Account. It has also expressed its concern to better understand the problems and aspirations that are driving artisans today, most particularly those of the younger generation. Here again are opportunities for advocacy, and for the changes we have all felt so necessary in the way official agencies reach out (or fail to reach out) to artisans through existing schemes --- as well as on changes needed within the NGO sector. That, in a nutshell, is where we are today. So keep in mind all that is at stake when Census 2012 comes knocking at your door!

Issue #006, Autumn, 2020 ISSN: 2581- 9410 There are many ways in which education can support the personal and creative development of traditional artisans. In this article, we will focus on how these experiences can expand an artist’s view of himself in the world and the possibilities for innovation and self-expression. Education can remove perceptual limits created by limited knowledge of what exists beyond the village and imposed by outsiders’ ideas about indigenous artisans and how to define and evaluate their work. Oaxaca is known around the world as a center of folk art and craft. The state’s sixteen indigenous ethnic groups make up a significant portion of the population and the majority of traditional artisans. The three artisans whose stories we will examine here are all Zapotec and come from traditional villages. In Oaxaca, it is common for villages to be known for a specific craft, and in these villages one can find hundreds or even thousands of individuals who work in the medium and style for which the village is known. While there are subtle differences in the use of color and motif among the artisans of a village, the primary differences between artisans are found in the quality and subtlety of their work, rather than the use of dramatically different materials, techniques or motifs. A relatively small number of artisans have made the decision to innovate in ways that significantly and often dramatically distinguish their work from that of their neighbors. Based on the stories of our three artisans, I propose that access to education and direct interaction with artisans and buyers from outside the local environment can open the eyes of traditional artists to innovation that defines their personal styles. All three were trained in the basics of their craft by their parents and other elders of their communities. The work they produce today, while clearly based in the traditions and aesthetics of their communities, stands out from that of their neighbors in both quality and creativity. They have found ways to successfully develop a personal style and expression in their work, while remaining firmly rooted in the life and traditions of their communities. And they attribute this growth and development, at least in part, to participation in workshops and education programs outside their communities. Before we look at our three artisans and their work, it is important to set the context. In addition to the work created by traditional village artisans, Oaxaca is also known for graphics, painting and other “fine arts” and has produced such world-renowned artists as Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo and Rodolfo Morales. We can understand the way different creative pursuits are viewed by looking at the language used to discuss them. Painting and graphic arts are referred to with the word “arte,” meaning art, while work in pottery, textiles, and other traditional media are called “artesania,” meaning crafts or “the work of artisans.” Historically, “arte” described objects that were purely decorative, while “artesania” described useful objects that were made by hand, originally for local use. However, under colonization, usage developed to reflect not a pure, logical distinction, but a division based also on the history of the artform and the people most associated with it. So “arte” expresses the European tradition of fine arts while “artesania” is seen as the continuation of local, indigenous traditions. Thus, even though the vast majority of work currently created by village artisans is purely decorative and produced only for an outside market, it is considered “artesania” rather than arte, and is viewed and evaluated accordingly. Most people see fine art and traditional craft differently. In fine arts, the focus is on the individual style of the creator and artistic innovation. No matter how competent one’s technique, one cannot become a great painter or sculptor without developing a personal style and aesthetic. In artesania/folk art/traditional craft, on the other hand, the focus is on the connection to tradition. What is important is that the creator is part of a community where others make similar items from similar materials, using similar techniques and motifs. The focus is on conserving cultural and artistic traditions, rather than on self-expression and innovation But how do we interpret this in the Oaxacan context, where the most appreciated and sought after folk art, while tied to earlier local traditions, is made purely for sale outside the community, was developed for export and in many cases involves objects developed in the second half of the 20^th Century? While there have been weavers in Teotitlán for thousands of years, for centuries they wove simple blankets and serapes for the local market. Only in the mid-20^th century did the Teotitecos start to weave brightly colored rugs and tapestries for sale in Mexico City, the US and beyond. The designs based on the stonework of the ruins of Mitla now considered “traditional” for weaving from Teotitlán were an innovation by the weaver Arnulfo Mendoza in the 1970’s. Today, local rugs and tapestries are rarely used in the village homes, even by those who make their livelihood producing them. Similarly, the highly ornamented black ceramic pieces for which the village of San Bartolo is known represent a tradition developed in the 1950’s in order to create a product attractive to tourists. Before that, local potters used the same clay to create pieces with a matte gray finish used to store consumable liquids. The focus was on making pieces that were durable and would not leak. Today, most pieces created in the workshops of the village will not hold water and are created for purely decorative use by outsiders. There is only a single potter in San Bartolo who routinely makes “apaztles” (large open bowls) for serving Tejate; ollas for storing water; bottles for storing mezcal and colanders for separating corn from its husk when preparing tortillas. So, why do people talk about these items as if they represent ancient traditions and why do those who have set themselves up as arbiters see innovation as a problem, rather than a strength? Based on conversations with curators, funders and other self-appointed “specialists” in Oaxacan craft or folk art, it seems that a major factor is that these people, most of whom come from outside Oaxaca and virtually all of whom are of predominantly European descent, look at art and craft created by indigenous people though a strongly colonial lens that intentionally supports what is perceived as perpetuating tradition and hinders or devalues what is seen as breaking tradition. When I told the director of a group based in America that supports exhibitions of “traditional” Oaxacan folk art, that I was curating an exhibit focusing on innovation in Oaxacan folk art, she said, “Innovation can be a slippery slope.” When I asked why, she answered, “Because the artists don’t always know where to stop.” I wondered why she thought she had the right to decide how much innovation was too much and to believe that traditional artisans are not able to make that decision for themselves. It seems that that well-educated, middle- and upper-class people of European descent from Mexico, the United States and elsewhere have a vested interest in supporting the manufacture of items that they believe are representative of ancient traditions. They want to believe that the indigenous communities in which folk art and craft are made somehow represent an earlier period in human development and that by visiting these communities they can experience something about their own past. This creates a value system that promotes connections to community and past and censors “too much” individual style or self-expression – the very things that are most valued among artists of European descent and those who work in the media and styles derived from European fine arts. The individuals who support this perspective say that their goal is to keep ancient traditions alive. Unfortunately, they either do not realize that many of the traditions they are supporting are relatively recent innovations developed purely in response to outside markets, or perhaps they simply adjust reality to fit what they want to believe. And they never seem to ask why or for whom traditions should be preserved? They say they want to “help the (poor) artisans,” but rarely actually ask artisans what they want or what would be helpful to them and their communities. They seem to think that artisans can make beautiful things but cannot determine what they want and need, what fits within the boundaries of their traditions, or when it is appropriate for them to work outside those boundaries. The creativity of indigenous people is lauded and coveted, but it is assumed that they are somehow less thoughtful or rational and thus unable to determine what serves them. This perspective also wants to believe that while European culture developed, indigenous people are somehow frozen in time. The reality is that in living traditions, innovation and tradition are two sides of a single coin. The traditions create the framework that defines what is possible while innovation allows each maker to respond to changes in the availability of materials, changes in the market and fashion, personal taste and choice, and other factors that are ever changing. And the only valid arbiters of the appropriate boundaries for a living tradition are those who work in that tradition and members of their communities. I believe that the colonial perspective on indigenous art and craft has been a major damper on the development of truly innovative work as those who are drawn to innovation and personal expression have had to fight to get their work seen and promoted. This is finally changing as Oaxacan artists are finding markets for their work among buyers who value the creative, but with most exhibits and publications on Oaxacan art still focusing on what they understand as traditional, this is an ongoing challenge. Now let’s consider our three artisans and the role education played in their professional development. Moises Martinez Velasquez grew up in San Pedro Cajonos, one of the few Oaxacan villages where the tradition of raising silkworms and processing the silk they produce has been kept alive. Moises learned the basics of the process from his elders and is now the leader of a 13-member family cooperative. When Moises was learning to produce silk textiles, the only natural dyes used in the village were Mexican Marigold and Cochineal. All the garments were woven with undyed yarn and some garments were dyed red when they were removed from the loom. At first, the work done by Moises and his family closely resembled that made by other producers in the region.

Moises Martinez Velasquez Huipil. Handspun silk dyed with indigo Then Moises was invited to a natural dye workshop, hosted by the Textile Museum of Oaxaca and everything changed. The workshop was taught by a traditional dyer from another Oaxacan village, who not only demonstrated how to achieve a wide range of tones with Cochineal by varying the ph of the dye bath, but also demonstrated the use of Indigo, which added blue, purple and green to Moises’ range. Because the workshop focused on wool, Moises had to adapt the recipes he learned to work on silk. After extensive experimentation, he developed a palette that includes many shades of blue, a wide range of pinks, fuchsias, and reds made with cochineal, golden yellows made with Mexican Marigold, and a range of greens and purples created by dyeing with indigo over shades created with cochineal and marigold. The new colors and increased variety led to an immediate increase in sales of the family’s work. From this, Moises learned that providing options beyond those that were considered traditional expanded the market and provided opportunities for increased income. Because Moises took the time and effort to experiment and find the best ways to create a wide range of rich colors on silk, the family’s work stands out from other silk textiles made in the region, whose color range is more limited and less saturated. During this period, Moises also came to see himself as a dyer and to develop pride in his ability to produce colors that were not seen elsewhere.

Moises Martinez Velasquez, Scarf. Handspun silk. Warp ikat dyed with cochineal

Moises Martinez Velasquez, Huipil. Silk dyed with Mexican marigold, indigo and cochineal

Moises Martinez Velasquez, Huipil. Silk dyed with Mexican marigold, indigo and cochineal Over several years, Moises also learned to experiment with different ways of applying the dyes in order to create pattern. He saw how dyeing yarn prior to weaving allowed for the creation of multi-colored garments and started experimenting with stripes and plaids in various color combinations. He also participated in ikat workshops at the Textile Museum and learned to adapt the techniques he learned to his family’s work and market. From the first experiments with ikat, he found that while the pieces take longer to produce, they sell very quickly, even at a higher price. Now, most pieces produced by the family are still dyed a single color, but they routinely produce pieces with yarn-dyed stripes and more complex patterns, created with ikat. This expanded range has caught the eye of buyers and collectors not only in Oaxaca, but also at national craft fairs in Mexico and international events in the US. The work created by Moises and his family is now considered by most experts to be the most interesting and highest quality silk created in Oaxaca. Juan Carlos Contreras Sosa grew up in a textile producing family in Teotitlán del Valle. Like most weavers in the village, he first learned to weave rugs when he was quite young. Juan Carlos grew up during a period when natural dyeing was quite limited in Teotitlán, so he was not initially impressed by the options the traditional natural dyes offered and was not particularly interested in working with dyes.

Juan Carlos Contreras Sosa, Scarves. Merino and silk dyed with indigo

Juan Carlos Contreras Sosa, Scarf. 100% merino wool dyed with indigo and cochineal. When Juan Carlos joined a textile collective in the village, he was invited to participate in a workshop on natural dyes, led by a teacher from outside Mexico. This workshop opened his eyes to the range of colors and shades that can be created with a limited number of dyes and got him more excited about the possibilities. He participated in a workshop on growing dye plants that included discussions of how to pick seeds, prepare the earth, plant the seeds, tend to the plants and harvest the dye material. The workshop also included excursions outside Oaxaca to the Museo del Agua in the state of Puebla and an Eco Reserve in the state of Veracruz. Participation in this workshop gave Juan Carlos a vision of possibilities he had never considered. As he relates, most people in the village complete no more than an elementary school education and do not travel far from the village, so their vision is somewhat limited. After participation in these workshops, Juan Carlos began to grow dye plants on his property in the village and also did extensive experimentation with both the dyes that can be collected locally and with Indigo and Cochineal, which he buys in Oaxaca. As he grew more adept in working with the dyes, the range and subtlety of Juan Carlos’ palette grew, along with his interest in working with the dyes. Within a couple of years, he was doing all the dyeing not only for his own weaving, but also for the weaving done by other members of his family.

Juan Carlos Contreras Sosa, Scarves. Merino dyed with indigo and cochineal and undyed alpaca

Juan Carlos Contreras Sosa, Scarves. Merino, alpaca and silk dyed with Mexican marigold, cochineal and indigo In addition to workshops on dyes and dye techniques, Juan Carlos participated in a number of workshops on design, which he says expanded his vision of both how to combine colors and patterns and how to think about design as part of a project. He started working with 4-harness looms that allow for more complex patterns to be woven without the need for the counting of warp threads or the manipulation of the weft. Through experimentation, he became adept at working with finer yarns and creating cloth that is an appropriate weight for scarves, shawls and other garments. He also developed designs for a laptop bag and other items no one else was making locally. Juan Carlos’ experimentation with natural dyes allows him to use a wide range of rich tones and his experimentation with design has led to a plethora of color combinations, stripes and patterns, thus making his work unique in the village. When he realized that buyers from outside Oaxaca were put off by the texture of the wool available on the local market, he started to seek out yarns made from softer, higher quality wool and has also worked with combinations of wool with alpaca and or silk. At first, he was concerned that the high cost of the raw materials would make these items hard to sell, but he found that he could successfully price the higher quality items to cover his material costs and still pay himself more for his work. The combination of his use of color and design along with the high quality of the materials he is using has placed his work in a category of its own.

Carlomagno, The Drunks

Carlomagno, Death’s Cart Carlomagno Pedro Martinez grew up in a family of potters in San Bartolo Coyotepéc. His parents taught him and his siblings to work with clay when they were quite young. At 18, Carlomagno went to study at the Taller Rufino Tamayo in the city of Oaxaca. The curriculum of the Taller intentionally blurs the boundaries between “art” and “craft” and teaches the students that whatever their medium, they can use their creativity to expand boundaries and express themselves. Once Carlomagno began to conceive of himself as an artist and his work as art, everything changed. He moved away from making the vessels traditionally created by potters in the village and started creating figurative and narrative pieces based on prehispanic myths and legends and local Zapotec culture, often with social and political messages. When he first moved in this direction, some thought Carlomagno was abandoning the tradition, but others recognized that his work, which still used the local clay and traditional methods of working and firing, was simply the latest in many innovations that had already taken place in the village. Carlomagno quickly got the attention of galleries and museums around Mexico and beyond. This led to opportunities for travel to Mexico City, the US and Europe where he saw his work exhibited alongside that of other artists and came to truly accept his role. He says that this travel not only cemented his identity as an artist, but also allowed him exposure to important works of art from many traditions and cultures and from many time periods, thus expanding his vision of what is possible

Carlomagno, The Dandy

Carlomagno, Tribute to my Dog Courage In addition to pursuing his own career as an artist, Carlomagno has served for many years as director of the Museo Estatal de Arte Popular de Oaxaca (The State Folk Art Museum of Oaxaca.) In his role as museum director, he has organized many exhibits that show the range of work currently coming from the workshops of Oaxaca, the most innovative as well as the most traditional, and has also offered a range of workshops to help local artists and artisans expand their vision, learn new techniques and explore artistic possibilities. In this way, he shares his own expanded vision of what indigenous artists from Oaxaca can attain and supports the development of new generations of artists and craftsmen. These three examples demonstrate how education can help indigenous artisans to explore options they may not see in their villages and to determine the direction they want to take with their work, based on their own inspiration, desires and values. Education took these artists beyond the limited normative colonial rhetoric that seeks to define and limit what is appropriate for indigenous people to create. Photo Credits All photos are by the artists

NID's PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION PROGRAMME

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Significance of printing in Rajasthan

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Dyeing Process