5.2.1 Traditional, Institutional and Policy Framework
Bayly notes that pre-colonial clothes in India acted as a powerful symbol, served a purpose, offered meaningful associations and assigned an identity to people based on status, class and gender through which craft came to be known (Bayly 1986). Even in colonial times, “crafts stood in for India as a whole [including its] economy, society, culture and politics” (McGowan 2009, p4). Certain scholars (Sandhu 2015, Berg 2013) demystified colonial rule as not the only force to alter Indian clothing, albeit agreeing on its deep influence on the Indian culture. Roy (2007) asserts that industrialisation and trade in late colonial times only affected a segment of the artisans, while the majority of artisans prospered as they strategically reaped the benefits of industrialisation by using imported raw materials with links to export markets. When agency and design were prominent features in the British colony (Mathur 2007), Venkatesan (2009) reports how the assigned values created differences in artisans, British officials and in the Indian elites while changing the landscape of craft in India. Although considered to be a period of destruction for traditional craft, when the British art school models marginalised the rural craftsman (Balaram 2005), creating an asymmetry between the “native” and the “progressive and superior” west (Athavankar 2002, p44), there are also prominent discussions on the revival of local craft enacted through self-reliance and endogenous methods such as Gandhi’s Swadeshi (self-sufficient) movement (Chatterjee 2005, Balaram 1989).
When craft became a cultural symbol in Indian nationalism and in the construction of heritage, McGowan (2009) however, argues the authority over craft was politicised and always related to ‘power’ whether by the British or by the Indians, and this convergence treated artisans as backward, and defined progress as an outside intervention. She further denotes that it created conflict between cultural versus economic needs, resulting in “market and tradition, heritage and progress” to be discussed always in conjunction (McGowan 2009, p6). Not only that, but according to Mathur (2011) the nationalistic movements like Swadeshi only reiterated the distinction between village craft and industrial design where she further claims that “Indian Nationalism”, even though it attempted to challenge colonial rules and industrial goods, was however limited to the very “conceptual frameworks that it repudiated”(Mathur 2007, p49).
The resistance to industrial production was not merely about boycotting the British rule, but also aligned with the British Arts and Crafts movement generating a “cult of craftsmanship” between primitive and modern (Mathur 2007, p29), and a utopia to celebrate the “living traditions of craftsmanship” (Mitter 1994). It is in this spirit that the cultural preservationist model appeared following the work of William Morris where scholars such as A.K Coomaraswamy, George Birdwood and E.B. Havell took the lead. According to Commaraswamy the Indian craftsman was “an organic element in the national life” and the communal making was the basis of the society, where the peril of the industrial system and the British influence ruined hereditary processes and skills (Coomaraswamy 1909, p1). For those like Havell (1986/1912) the colonial influence was a destruction of the Indian identity. As Greenough (1995) notes, these ideologies were later adopted by post-independent revivalist figures like Jyotindra Jain, Pupul Jayakar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay who then said “to understand Indian life is to understand the Indian handicrafts or vice versa” (as quoted in McGowan 2009, p5). Conversely, imperial politics, nationalism and post-colonialism were not independent features as Mathur (2007, p80) argues, but all attempts equally constructed the “global field” through the consumption and production of cultural goods thus shaping the cultural conflicts of design in India as seen today.
Referring to post-colonial times, it was the rhetoric of design that strategically developed the country’s craft (Scotford 2005) and the two categories: “craft” and “design” were eagerly utilised in building the nation state and were thus aptly endorsed by nationalist politics (Athavankar 2002). Jawaharlal Nehru, as the first prime minister of newly independent India, altered the vision of craft and design with his modernisation programme which resulted in inviting the two American designers Charles and Ray Eames to create the India Report (1958). The report is a landmark in Indian design history, for it gave a vision of how design activity should be appropriated to “help” craft in order to respond to industrialisation (Balaram 2009). The report borrowed from Bauhaus philosophy (Mathur 2011) and portrayed an endogenous approach, starting at the village level as recommended by Eames: to look into “those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life” (Eames and Eames 1997/1958, p2). As a result the National Institute of Design in 1961 was established by the Government of India, serving the purposes of research, services and training. Its model has been adopted succinctly by many other design schools in India today, making it their pedagogic standard (Balaram 2005). However, according to Ghose (1995) and
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Clarke (2016b) such developments only marginalised the craft sector—instead of promoting endogenous methods, it came in association with cold war politicking, USA’s public diplomacy and propaganda strategy says Clarke (2016b). Another crucial document, which came to shape Indian design, was the Ahmedabad Declaration in 1979, a memorandum of understanding between UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organisation) and ICSID (The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) with the aim of providing industrial design strategies for developing countries. According to Chatterjee (2005, p6) the declaration “…articulated a global mission [that designers] must work to evolve a new value system which dissolved the disastrous division between the worlds of waste and want, preserve the identity of peoples, and attends to the priority areas of need for the vast majority of humankind”. Design, which was proposed to be solving real world problems, however became part of a corporate strategy within the capitalist development programmes as a way of “rejecting the socialist paradigm [of] Gandhian baggage” in India (Balaram 2009, p61). The discussion at the review section 2.3 is in line with the above mentioned developments and reflects upon the same implications created by a politicised design agenda inculcated through educational programmes (Ghose 1995, Mathur 2011, Clarke 2016b). Amid this design for development agendas, grassroots design movements emerged as a new role for design. They were attuned to the international design activism that sprouted in response to post-war industrial development.17 Clarke (2016b) asserts that such anthropologically driven “alternative design” methods were key in securing India’s design profession within industrial design strategies, amidst Cold War politics and soft power structures, though they have been criticised for creating a neo- colonial agenda for developing countries (Clarke 2016b, 2016c). According to Athavankar (2002), similar shifts happened during the three decades from 1970s to 2000, when design in the local Indian context was equally shaped by global trends, in return creating a bipolar landscape. Such dualism treated the traditional cultures as vernacular, associated with lower status much akin to the colonial view of “native”. He further claims, contemporary Indian designers have failed in addressing the two extremes (the global and vernacular), as their engagements have become a “synthetic
17
Examples can be found on those grassroots movements like Dastakar and Barefoot designer models in India ( Ghose 1995, Balaram 2005) which attempted to address ‘real world issues’ driven by Papanek’s ideologies (Athavankar 2002). It encouraged the emergence of NGOs in supporting local artisans, promote design interventions and take up a humanist approach away from the corporate designer role (ibid).
search for inventing cultural markers that reflect modernity as much as native identity… [without really] rediscover[ing] the roots in the traditions and try[ing] to evolve new expressions of modernity rooted in the local cultural context” (Athavankar 2002, p55- 56). Consequentially, the designer as “benefactor and protector of the ‘unmodern’ maker” were created, who now takes responsibility for reviving the Indian craft sector (DeNicola and Wilkinson-Weber 2016, p82-83).
In summary, traditional Indian craft at present can be seen as an assemblage of communally driven traditions and professionalised practices. Operating between institutionalised frameworks and social hierarchies, the situation shows the contested nature of craft and design in the Indian context where policies and interventions come into direct contact with those who practice craft. The cultural trajectory from pre- colonial, to colonial to post-independent shows changes in the patronage systems, to the priorities of craft, and the emergence of design specific goals. Actors like the state, NGOs, design institutions, and political movements in turn shaped the discourse of craft and design in India. When post-independent developments favoured professionalisation of design, this came in the guise of aiding the craft sector with design as a development discourse. In return, nationalist ideology encouraged the promotion and preservation of craft in building identity in India. This official approach to design is further confirmed by looking at the country’s newly inaugurated National Design policy in 2007 (Ministry of Commerce and Industry 2015). The recommendations include institutionalised frameworks of design councils, chartered societies and educational programmes where design intervention is encouraged to cater to global markets.
Even though the design policy is disparaged for not adequately mentioning the craft sector, it reflects the above mentioned declarations and links between craft and design (Balaram 2009). Today it also includes allied businesses such as the fashion industry where the Indian designers associate with the “older nationalist idioms” of revival and preservation of crafts while working for global fashion businesses, according to Sandhu (2015, p128). The following section of this chapter will demonstrate how the field work was constructed in order to capture these variations in relation to local and global, tradition and modernity, and from macro (international and national) to micro (community and individual) perspectives.
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5.3 Methods of Data Gathering
Appadurai and Breckenridge (1995, p15) considering globalisation as a dialectic formation between the local and other structures, describe India as a “site” or “a spatial vortex, in which complex historical processes come into conjunction with global processes that link such sites together”. Accordingly, it was deemed an appropriate context for fieldwork in accordance with the study’s methodology of multi-sited ethnography. Adhering to the conceptual framework suggested in section 2.5 and referring to a cultural and historical trajectory of craft and design development in India, places, institutions, communities, individuals and organisations were selected for further observation and analysis.
Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out from August–October 2015 in Sanganer, Jaipur, Bagru and Ahmedabad. The research looked into the development of the Sanganer hand block printing tradition in Rajasthan, India, by examining their craft objects, the practice as well as the social and cultural context in which the craft resides. Research methods included interviews and observations of artisans at work, both at the domestic level and at manufacturing plants outside their houses, documenting life histories, artefacts and skill traditions. Observation and interviews with design and manufacturing professionals included examining the craft work on display (in museums, retail outlets, and workshops and in households). It included active participation with artisans at a local NGO in Jaipur at their design, printing and manufacturing centres, observing the entire process of making and selling craftwork for a period of 3 weeks. Another 4 weeks were spent at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad observing student projects, interviewing design graduates and academics there. Other design institutes visited were Pearl Academy in Jaipur, and the Indian Institute of Craft and Design (IICD) Jaipur. The number of academics interviewed were N=9, design students N=11(undergraduate level), designers (professionals and interns) N = 5, artisans (artisan-designers, artisan- entrepreneurs hailing from traditional families, artisans/ workers at production units) N=21, independent businesses (not run by traditional families) N= 4, allied sector artisans/makers (block makers and dyers) N= 4. Each interview was in-depth, lasting between 30 minutes to 2 hours. Certain individuals were approached several times in order to observe their work including meeting family members within the household. Discussions with several other makers (including women) and non-makers were also undertaken during the field work. Their insights have been taken into consideration to
formulate a deeper understanding of the field work data. Some of these interviews were undertaken individually, others in groups. Certain interviews were undertaken in English, but the majority of interviews with artisans were carried out in Hindi or in their local dialects. A translator was used in these cases. In the community context, artisans were keen to use their names; therefore in most cases I have acknowledged their statements, using their own names to fully credit them for the insights, and wisdom they showed during interviews. However, the researcher has used her discretion in certain instances to avoid using personal names or organisational names causing any distress18. The following section reviews different craft and design engagements in a community context, and the involvements of higher education institutions in shaping the craft sector. While it shows how the idea of local and global works, other actors are linked to the topics so that an expanded view is provided by following the trajectory of locality of production compared to the global needs of consumption and craft development.