Article

Can Our Future be Handmade? Journal of Heritage Management

1(1) 1–11
© 2016 The Centre for Heritage
Management, Ahmedabad University
and SAGE Publications
SAGE Publications
Ashoke Chatterjee1 sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2455929616636447
http://hmj.sagepub.com

Abstract
This article explores dichotomies of India’s craft experience, reflecting the centrality of hand production,
the Freedom Struggle under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, experiments in craft development in national
planning once India was free and contrasting notions today about what represents modernity and
progress. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay pioneered numerous institutions and approaches to empower
artisans and ensure a lasting position for craft in India’s culture and economy. In recent times, there has
been a retreat in understanding and support artisans and their culture, and skills are being interpreted
as representing a primitive past, out of step with global power and influence. New attitudes are revealed
in terms like ‘sunset industry’ being applied to the craft sector. A sense of crisis threatens the legacy of
India’s craft pioneers and the achievements of another generation of activists. Meanwhile, industrially
advanced societies are striving to recover their own craft heritage as a source of creativity indispens-
able to contemporary need. New approaches in the understanding of development also suggest the
incredible value of India’s craft advantage. Several questions are raised, such as what is now at stake, and
where can we go from here? Some are left unanswered for the reader to ponder over.

Keywords
Crafts, creativity, cottage industry, national development, craft-based livelihoods, heritage

Background: A Crisis in the Making

A year ago or so, the Government of India mooted a plan to assist handloom weavers by attaching a
small electric motor to their looms. Official worthies further proposed an amendment to the definition of
handloom fabric, a move that would lead to the great advantage of the dominating power-loom sector.
The logic of the motor was to increase productivity and thus the earnings of deprived weavers—
estimated by some at 13 million—competing against power looms, mills and imports. No questions
seemed to have been asked as to why these millions of weavers were still deprived, despite global
demand for their production, decades after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay had helped establish institutions
and systems meant to empower artisans and sustain their crafts.
Also, no questions seemed to have been asked about the logic of converting handlooms into
power looms, removing at one stroke the quality of the hand that distinguishes handloom fabric from

1
Crafts Council of India, Venkatanarayana Road, T. Nagar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

Corresponding author:
Ashoke Chatterjee, Crafts Council of India, Venkatanarayana Road, T. Nagar, Chennai 600 017, Tamil Nadu, India.
E-mail: [email protected]
2 Journal of Heritage Management 1(1)

power-loom and mill alternatives, and providing the handloom product with its global USP. Neither
questions seemed to have been asked about what weavers might think of this extraordinary strategy to
serve them by destroying their craft advantage, nor of where the power would come from to get those
motors moving. For decades, weavers have been awaiting for functioning light bulbs that could illuminate
their cramped workplaces. No questions seemed to have been asked about what clients of handloom
production all over the world might think of the motorized fabric that would now be offered to them,
devoid of that handmade quality that created demand.
This incredibly foolish, or diabolically wicked, plan—the choice depends on one’s faith in human-
kind—may well have gone through. Fortunately, it did not. The credit for this goes to one vigilant
soul in the now defunct Planning Commission which happened to notice that this project defied both
Twelfth Plan allocations as well as the definition of handlooms on which plan allocations had been made.
Her vigilance was supported by weavers and craft activists around the country. A nationwide movement
followed to protect India’s great handloom advantage from an official threat that compounded the harsh
competition from mass production. That movement is still on-going, with the need now to deal with a
new political environment committed to what we must welcome as ‘market forces’.
The handloom crisis erupted while the government and civil society were working in partnership
to bridge another crisis: the absence of reliable data (outside of exports) about the scale and the contri-
bution of the hand sector to the national economy. This is despite the repeated acknowledgement of hand-
craft as a source of Indian livelihood, second only to agriculture. This partnership between official and
non-government stakeholders succeeded in 2012 to include artisans for the very first time in the national
economic census. The census outcome is now awaited to help correct current estimates of artisan num-
bers that can range as widely as 13 million to 200 million, and to provide for the first time some under-
standing of India’s stake in its craft economy. By indicating scales of risk and opportunity, robust data
might offer a brake on foolishness of the kind that led to the handloom crisis.
In 2008, Gopalkrishna Gandhi had reminded us that the government’s heart is to be reached through
the government’s mind, and that facts would need to speak louder than sentiments (Crafts Council of
India, 2008). For this, economics must be summoned to the cause. He was referring to proclamations
from high places in New Delhi that India’s crafts were a ‘sunset activity’, an exotic and quaint facet quite
out of step with national ambitions of global power and modernity. An attitude of benign neglect would
speed a sunset’s journey into night, allowing sunrise to greet a modern India, cleansed of embarrassing
reminders of a primitive handcrafted past and ready to compete with Singapore and Silicon Valley.
These current experiences and the attitudes they reflect should suffice to warn us that almost seven
decades after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and other stalwarts pioneered handcraft development in
national planning the sector is in crisis. Institutions established by Kamaladevi and like-minded vision-
aries appear to have abandoned their mandate, or they have been sidelined by some vested interests.
While India’s global reputation for craft excellence remains unmatched, there are today dire predictions
about the future, despite all the opportunities of a massive market at home and overseas, as well as grow-
ing recognition of the importance of artisanal cultures and industries. These are acknowledged not only
to protect and reinforce identity and opportunity within the global village, but also to help sustain
the capacities of creativity and innovation that international trade now demands.

Kamaladevi’s Vision and After

It is in this context of opportunity and threat that we pay tribute to the memory of Kamaladevi
Chattopadhyay. Kamaladevi is often called the ‘Mother’ of Indian handicraft. Does she then bear some
Chatterjee 3

responsibility for the current fate of her children? Did the parent fail the child? Or have we failed
Kamaladevi? In these years of transition, how have the skills and values to which Kamaladevi’s genera-
tion were so powerfully committed grown, matured, transformed, flourished or failed?
One is not sure whether Kamaladevi would appreciate the parental label that is so regularly attached
to her. It smacks of a maa–baap (mother–father) patronage that somehow does not blend with her other
no-nonsense reputation. I prefer to think of Kamaladevi as a trustee—conscious of India’s huge advan-
tage of living crafts and determined to transmit that heritage to the future. Experienced in the application
of that advantage during the Freedom Movement, Kamaladevi’s early efforts at craft-based livelihoods
were through helping rehabilitate women who were flooding into refugee camps from what is now
Pakistan. The Indian Cooperative Union’s modest handicraft store was established as the outlet, precur-
sor to the Central Cottage Industries Emporium that started in 1948. ‘Cottage’ was to become a symbol
of free India’s faith in Gandhiji’s example and in his advocacy of decentralized economic opportunity,
heightened by the awareness of so many in our society who live by their hands, including those now
dispossessed and uprooted by the Partition.
Much has been written of Kamaladeviji’s role in launching free India’s programmes for handicraft
and handloom development in 1952 at the behest of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Cottage Industries Board, the
Indian Cooperative Union, the All India Handicrafts & Handloom Board, the Cottage Industries
Emporium, Regional Design Centres, new experiments through marketing clinics in different regions,
the Crafts Council of India, the Crafts Museum, the national and state awards that have done so much to
recognize excellence all these are milestones on Kamaladevi’s journey towards a craft renaissance.
That renaissance has included a national and global awareness of Indian craft and made it an integral
part of our way of life, an inescapable element in the very idea of India. National and world demand for
handmade quality from India has never flagged, even during years of economic recession. The visibility
of its crafts and artisans gives India global leadership in the sector. With such a backdrop of history from
Mohenjodaro to the Mahatma and to ministries of national planning, with India being the first post-
colonial economy to incorporate handcraft into national development and to bring the craft culture to
global attention, why should Indian artisans and their crafts be in crisis today? Perhaps because this
familiarity has led to a sense of taking a priceless heritage entirely for granted, turning familiarity slowly
into contempt. The seeds of crises that I have recalled were sown in the very institutions Kamaladevi
helped establish.

The Sunset Syndrome

This crisis demands understanding because millions of Indian lives are at stake. More critical is the
crisis of values and of mindsets that is the root cause. How and when did pride and confidence in India’s
artisans transform into apathy and contempt, their skills dismissed as obsolescent and their culture
as defeated? A nation that lacks basic data for its second largest industry is clearly not committed to it.
If even the economic potential is ignored or regarded as a threat to modernity and power, what chance
is there for those other craft values that are cultural, social, environmental and spiritual? Has an
India emerged that no longer values the need for different knowledge systems to coexist and enrich
one another?
The only constant over these years has been showcasing of crafts and artisans on festive occasions,
to the accompaniment of mantras extolling our ancient heritage and cultural superiority. Walking the
craft talk has been another matter altogether. While Kamaladevi’s generation epitomized India’s capacity
for synthesis, diversity and tolerance, today’s schizophrenia mixes mantras of an ancient past with
4 Journal of Heritage Management 1(1)

cultural intolerance masquerading as pride, and garnished with Singapore/Silicon dreams. Crafts and
artisans are caught in a bind—simultaneously needed for cultural window dressing—and dismissed
as irrelevant relics. The handloom crisis I have described is a symptom of this malaise.
Perhaps my generation must own some responsibility for this failure. We matured in an India that
took its craft heritage for granted. We accepted the mantras of culture and aesthetic superiority. We did
not ask questions about economics or sustainability or about artisan rights. We did not pay adequate
heed to their repeated demands for basic social security that could offer a safety net against market
uncertainties and offer an incentive to remain within the tradition. Nor did we anticipate the mimicries
of taste that globalization would come to mean. Not a few of us made careers that impinged on the paths
that Kamaladevi and others had prepared for us. Then came those jolting references to a sunset sector.
Recovery is taking its time.
Our effort to recover is a story in itself. It began in the Planning Commission with an effort to
communicate what was at stake to policy-makers—and to communicate this in economic terms
(Crafts Council of India, 2012). It had become clear, just as Gopal Gandhi had predicted, that unless the
economic argument was made, all other arguments would be left unheard. With this vast sector of
the economy adrift without a factual anchor that could to justify investment, a research methodology
had to be evolved and tested to gather data. We also discovered that New Delhi accommodates some
30 ministries, departments and authorities that impinge on artisans. They do not consult. There is no
sector overview, little synergy. Two key offices—the Offices of the Development Commissioner of
Handicrafts and the Development Commissioner of Handlooms—together representing the nation’s
second largest industry—are nowhere near the high tables of decision-making.
If that was not enough, both are currently attached to a Ministry of Textiles whose first concern is the
mass production of fabrics by mills and power looms. It does not seem odd to anyone other than us that
a textile ministry should be responsible for brass, metal, stone, wood, cane and bamboo. What to say
then that this Ministry is not even accountable for India’s wondrous khadi? That great fabric is left to the
mercies of small-scale industries and even smaller scale Gandhians. Against such a backdrop of contex-
tual confusion and missing data, handlooms can be transformed into power looms. No one is watching.
What has speeded this great descent from the heights of Gandhian thought, Tagore’s demonstration
at Sriniketan, Kamaladevi’s torch-bearing efforts, Smt. Pupul Jayakar’s spectacles of craft diplomacy,
and so much other evidence of craft quality? Perhaps early warnings had been ignored. In September
1964, a committee headed by Asoka Mehta laid emphasis on ‘regulated transition of handlooms to
power looms’ with steps to install 10,000 power looms in the handloom sector (Hindu, 1964). One of
Kamaladeviji’s colleagues, Jasleen Dhamija, has recalled that even in the early 1950s, economists from
Western schools in the Planning Commission regarded ‘cottage industries’ as non-productive welfare
(Dhamija, 2007). Their Marxist colleagues opposed the hand sector as exploitive. Pupul Jayakar, another
great craft leader, was to recall that the only argument that seemed to make a lasting dent was that of
export promotion. India then was in desperate need of foreign exchange to help build its basic industries.
The global reputation of Indian hand skills was therefore an opportunity not to be missed.
The Ministry of Commerce, which handled foreign trade, was made responsible for craft develop-
ment. A list of exportable crafts was developed. To this day, that list represents the mandate of the Office
of the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts). This explains why such classic handcrafted products
as clay pots, jhadoos and chiks or items created from re-cycled materials are not the concern of this
office, even though thousands are involved in their manufacture and sale at every corner. The Khadi
and Village Industries Commission may or may not be responsible for khadi. It depends on how
you interpret the term ‘responsible’. This confusion extends to the state and local levels. There are no
federations or fora that bring artisans together. No chambers of commerce or B-schools are bothered
Chatterjee 5

with their business. Artisans do not block highways and train tracks. Like farmers, they are voiceless.
They commit suicide.

The Concept of Cultural Industries

Almost at the same moment that influential Indian planners were declaring craft a sunset activity, the
European Union could be heard proclaiming that the ‘future is handmade’ (Dadi, 2003). So what would
Kamaladeviji, Pupulben Jaykar, L. C. Jain and so many other past stalwarts make of these contradic-
tions? How would they respond to the contrasting message given out from the EU of all places? Would
they ask bemused whether Europe is planning to abandon the machine and revert to its pre-industrial
artisanal past? And if that is unlikely, then how indeed is the global future to be handmade?
The European response would have resonated with its own deep understanding of craft cultures
within the larger human consciousness. The call from Europe is a reminder that creativity and inno-
vation are the only human capacities available to any economy if it is to survive and to flourish in today’s
globalized economy. This creative ability to respond to change is embedded in cultures that harmonize
the hand, eye and mind. Destroy these deeply rooted capacities, and not just crafts but all national crea-
tivity is endangered.
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have long attributed their success in electronic, computer and
automotive industries to craft attitudes embedded in their national psyche. One example is Kanazawa
in Japan, now registered as a City of Crafts in recognition of ‘The spirit of artistic production that
made possible Kanazawa’s own industrial revolution and made it the home of top engineering compa-
nies’.1 Switzerland, Scandinavia, Germany and Italy recognize their craft heritage in the success of
precision and engineering industries as well as in design leadership. Thailand and China are making
major investments in craft strategies, while the United States and the UK2 are rediscovering the potential
of their craft sectors.
Today, there is a growing literature of cultural economics as a discipline which appreciates that
cultural goods and services actually add much more value than what is realized in the market. We Indians
have neglected this link despite brilliant demonstrations that range from Dilli Haat and the Festivals
of India to Titan watches and the machine tool industry of Surat, Gujarat.
In 2005, India was host to a world symposium that culminated in the Jodhpur Consensus on Cultural
Industries, which recognized these industries

as a source of capital assets for economic, social and cultural development’ and as ‘a vital source for the cultural
identities of communities and individuals which lead to further creativity and human development.... What
cultural industries have in common is that they create content, use, creativity, skill and in some cases intellectual
property, to produce goods and services with social and cultural meaning.3

The reminder that artisans ‘produce goods and services with social and cultural meaning’ addresses
those for whom the term ‘cultural industries’ can be disquieting, with possible overtones of selling
out. What protection is there in the marketplace for the culture of the spirit through which craft tradi-
tions travelled through the centuries, not as mere products but as rich expressions of the mind engaged
in service? In Kamaladevi’s words, it is the artisan’s tender care of the substance of everyday life and
of nature’s own rich store house that adds a finer dimension to our being (Ramakrishna Mission, 1962).
Is there place in the market for such caring?
Perhaps a first need is to respectfully accept a marketplace as a space familiar to Indian artisans
throughout history, and the only space that can deliver meaningful livelihoods. Today’s challenge is to
6 Journal of Heritage Management 1(1)

empower the artisan to negotiate effectively with market forces, rather than to fear them. Gandhi’s
respect for the customer, the ultimate user of the handmade, was legendary. His understanding and abil-
ity to use the market enabled the Swadeshi Movement and made possible the handloom revolution.
To my generation, Cottage Industries, Contemporary Arts & Crafts, Sohan, Handloom House, Sasha,
landmark Khadi Bhavans and the Fabindia of John Bissell were among the craft experiences that moulded
us while also delivering to artisans the possibility of dignity and hope. It was the changing market in
India and overseas that forged partnerships between craftspersons and designers to develop an idiom of
Indian craft that could responds to contemporary need. The challenge, therefore, is not the market threat
but rather fostering the capacity of artisans to negotiate effectively with the market, and effectively pro-
tect their own interests within a situation of constant change and unrelenting competition.

Building Demand for Hand Quality

To develop the handcraft sector, building consumer awareness of craft quality is required, to generate a
demand for the quality that only the hand can deliver to markets, at home and around the world. Demand
requires awareness that begins with education that can sensitize the Indian child and tomorrow’s con-
sumer to her craft heritage and its relevance to her own well-being. An important opportunity is now
available through the craft curriculum offered to Indian schools through the NCERT. The curriculum
reflects the thought and effort of Professor Krishna Kumar. He shared his perspective from this podium
through the second Kamaladevi Memorial Lecture Hastkalayein aur Shiksha in February 2011 (Kumar,
2011). I would urge Centre for Cultural Resources and Training to translate Professor Kumar’s
lecture not only into English but also into every language so that his insights can reach and engage
the entire sector.
India’s artisans themselves represent a great educational advantage. They are unmatched in their
ability to communicate through their hands an understanding of materials, technology, function and
aesthetics. Yet, our master artisans are excluded as educators because they lack the formal degrees and
certificates of the so-called qualified persons. This must change because without another generation
of Indians who understand the value of the handmade through direct encounters with the craft culture
and wisdom, respect for artisans and demand for handmade quality may be impossible to ensure. Educa-
tion and awareness cannot be restricted to formal and informal channels of education. The father-to-son
and mother-to-daughter channels to which crafts have passed through generations represent not just
vocational education and training, but also lessons in aesthetics and in the human spirit that no school
can match. Today, these traditional channels can be challenged by the need to distinguish between craft
paramparas or traditions on the one hand, and the issues of caste barriers and of child labour, on the
other. What education must offer to the children of artisans is the option of a hereditary profession
by choice and not by compulsion. For other children, it should be the option to join and to participate
in a shared legacy of heritage. This is not an impractical dream. It is happening in Maheshwar, Kutch
and elsewhere.

Transformed Landscapes, Tectonic Shifts

Many of us who have been trying to manage the challenges of traditions in transition tend to ascribe
failures to our own incapacities, or to the poor framing and execution of national policies, to bureaucratic
insensitivity or to the absence of any clear strategy to raise demand for handmade quality. Perhaps
Chatterjee 7

we also need to go beyond these symptoms of crisis to an even deeper understanding of tectonic shifts
taking place on our ground. These shifts include those which I have described of attitude and perception.
The aspirations of artisans and their clients have also changed from the acceptance of past identities to
those associated with new concepts of progress and modernity. There are also huge market transforma-
tions, transitions demanded by urbanization, the impact of political forces and the colossal influence
of environmental change.
Perhaps the most obvious shift has been that of a transformed market. The struggle for livelihoods is
bereft of pre-Independence barter systems and the patronage of temple, mosque and palace. Systems
of support from central and state authorities made major contributions to the sector, keeping it alive
within a protected economy. In the so-called free market of liberalized globalization, past schemes have
become increasingly irrelevant. The self-sufficient village of centuries, the gram rajya of Gandhiji’s
dream, is now a space invaded by urban dreams and demands for urban services. The user of what the
village artisan makes is now a distant, most often unknown entity located in the cities of India and the
world. To understand her and to influence her choices requires a range of ‘middleman’ functions: access
to market knowledge, to design and technology, to finance and to channels of distribution. Each function
can be exploitive or supportive.
It will now depend primarily on the artisan’s capacity to negotiate and to influence the market chain
with its demands of timely delivery, quality control, merchandising, trade regimes and, above all, of
competition from alternatives. The need now is for building greater management capacities and services
at the grass-roots level, for entrepreneurship capacities that can negotiate unlimited market opportunities
at home and overseas, as well as the range of market threats. Self-reliant entrepreneurship rooted
in inherited wisdom, combined with the current knowledge, is perhaps the most essential prerequisite for
sustainable livelihoods from handcraft—the most essential, but certainly not the only prerequisite.

Rural Crafts or a Rural Myth? The Challenge of Sacred Spaces

Access is another: artisans need access to markets and to services that have failed so far to reach the
village doorstep, forcing the movement of artisans away from villages into town and cities. Many
of us are still obsessed with the myth of preserving a rural culture—‘cottage’ industries, handmade in
kutirs (cottages). The truth is that many of our craft traditions have moved into urban slums and pave-
ments. Every Indian city reveals this fact, with artisans working and selling at whatever corner of space
they can find. Hovels, not kutirs, are crowded with artisans in search of markets, materials and finance.
This trend will accelerate as India evolves as an urban society, a transformation to which the present
administration is wholly committed. The implications are huge for redefining or rediscovering the
cultural integrity of Indian craft.
There is not just the physical shift but also the mental shift.
Contrast this reality with another as recalled by Pupul Jayakar in her classic work, The Earth Mother,
over twenty years ago:

The rural arts of India are the arts of the settled villages and countryside, of people with lives tuned to the rhythm
of nature and its laws of cyclical change, an art with a central concern with the earth and with harvesting...The
rural arts of India are the visual expression and technological processes that had remained static for over two
thousand years...Rural arts are also the arts of people living in forests and mountains, the ancient inheritors of
this land, who claim to be the first-born of the earth..... (Jayakar, 1980/1989)

Pupulben went on to observe, even two decades ago, that

8 Journal of Heritage Management 1(1)

The danger to rural India lies in its accepting the values and norms of technological culture and of a consumer-
oriented society, and in doing so, losing communion with nature and its inexhaustible resources of energy. The
danger is of losing the sense of mysterious sacredness of the earth that ‘life-giving, tranquil, fragrant, auspicious
Mother’ invoked in the Atharva Veda.

Kapila Vatsayan has also reminded us, time and again, of the danger of contextual loss when the earth
is no longer a sustainer but is used as a resource to be exploited: ‘The moment of disassociating life
functions from art/craft was the moment of also accepting the disassociation of Senses, Body, Mind,
Intellectual and Spirit from one another’ (Vatsayan, 1989). Perhaps our first task then is to explore
whether that ‘mysterious sacredness’, for generations the heartbeat of Indian creativity, can survive
and flourish away from contact with the earth, forest and sky, within the dense squalor that is life for
India’s urban poor.
What is needed to foster an idiom of creativity and sacredness in this new setting? Is it past memories
that need to be secured and carried into new places? Is it the need for a wholesome quality of life in
which sacred links with nature can be redefined and redrawn? Do we, who work for artisans, need now
to assist them in finding new centres of the spirit within our urban chaos, so as to nourish civilizational
roots in settings so far removed from their past? Have we the capacity to do what the city of Kanazawa
has achieved in Japan? Where can such a struggle for context begin? What new partnerships may
be needed? Is it with rural and urban educators? Is it with scholars of anthropology, sociology, culture,
language and the arts? Or is it with city planners? Or is it with master artisans, encouraged to reflect on
these changing contexts and on what they consider as tomorrow’s benchmarks of craft integrity?

Earth Mother and Her Artisan Children

The shift is not just cultural. The natural environment is degrading at a pace that threatens not just
the craft inspiration which Pupulji and Kapilaji have described but also its materials. Crafts have
depended on nature for so many resources, elements and benchmarks of excellence: woods, grasses,
fibres, stone, natural colours, earth and water, not to speak of design inspiration. Yet today each of these
essential elements is threatened and often far removed from direct experience. Resources that once
were free or accessible within habitats have disappeared due to environmental degradation, natural
disasters and greed.
How can motifs drawn from nature retain their freshness if new generations are denied the inspira-
tion of having lived with nature and having absorbed the inspiration of changing seasons? And what
of climate change that today threatens us with intensifying disasters of the kind Jammu & Kashmir
has witnessed, that Assam and Uttarakhand have endured, and that have brought such havoc to coastal
Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—everywhere destroying the materials, tools, and stocks of artisans?
If nature’s integrity is a sine qua non of craft inspiration, does this require that craft activists now partner
efforts at protecting the earth? Must we help redress the imbalance between development and greed with
a culture of replenishment and concern for tomorrow? This is the message of Dastkar’s Green Bazaars.

Craft Harbingers of Justice

Another shift is political and social, recalling the million mutinies of our land. A map of Indian tensions
would include the Naxal corridor, Kashmir and north eastern states. These locations are also our richest
craft resources. Does this fact tell us something about those attitudes of sunset and neglect the potential
of Indian crafts as a huge social and political safety net? Can craft cultures flourish amidst violence and
Chatterjee 9

injustice? Consider the reality that the vast majority of India’s artisans comprise those marginalized
by society: scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, minorities, women and citizens of some of the most
disturbed areas of the land. Can we expect rich craft contributions from those deprived of rights others
take for granted and living with neglect and violence? Is our craft culture then a valid argument to be
advanced in the cause of peace and justice? If so, what demands does that make on us as craft activists?
Does this mean that the struggle for human dignity and for human rights is an inescapable aspect of our
movement towards sustainable crafts? Does this demand that we forge new partnerships with those who
struggle for justice and for peace? Do we have the stamina now to be rights activists as well? Do we,
should we, have a choice?

The Development Agenda: A Craft Opportunity

Such a range of challenges may seem an impossible agenda for most of us who are still led by passions
of the heart, not by strategies of the head. Applications of social sciences, politics and management are
still unfamiliar to most of our work territories. Indeed, they often appear as threats to the cultural and
spiritual qualities we hold dear. Yet, the sector’s greatest strength may well be that its impact and influ-
ence are cross-cutting, intersecting with so many national and global priorities. Perhaps, as no other
industry, craft is deeply involved with the most fundamental development agendas of our time: manag-
ing threats to the environment, promoting justice and equity and peace by bringing the deprived into the
centre of concern, empowering women through recognition of their craft roles and contributions, offer-
ing identity and confidence in an era threatened by globalized uniformity, providing sustainable liveli-
hoods to households and communities in their own locations through the use of local resources, protecting
them from the miseries of migration and leaving a light carbon footprint to address the threat of climate
change. In other words, it is an industry that probably reflects, as no other, both the issues and the oppor-
tunities for sustainable development.
The opportunity of craft is to bring back what Kapilaji has described as ‘The experience of the whole,
the total, in its multi-layered inter-webbing and inter-relatedness’ (Vatsayan, 1989), thus, a cutting-edge
industry that represents in itself a development agenda, a movement that is social, cultural, political and
environmental, and one that carries within it the seeds of spiritual awakening.

Craft as Sustainable Development

For these reasons, I do not use the term ‘cutting edge’ lightly. We are on the threshold of one of the most
important debates in economic and political history: the new development agenda that will be framed in
2015 as the sustainable development goals (SDGs) to replace the more limited millennium development
goals or MDGs. The new SDGs are meant to take us as nations into a future that is more socially just,
more equitable and inclusive, and therefore more sustainable. Preliminary documents are emerging out
of the UN system that include the elusive concept of well-being as the primary goal, with well-being
understood as a situation in which social, economic and environmental sustainability are not trade-offs
but together address the needs of billions at the bottom of the global pyramid, empowering them with
a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, trajectory of development.
The backdrop to MDGs and now to SDGs is the shift to human development indicators (HDIs)
evolved by Amartya Sen, Maqbool ul Haque and others to reform global systems of assessing progress.
These indicators can be interpreted as a powerful case for artisans and their crafts around the world.
In India, the indicators can highlight that few countries are so privileged to have a sector that addresses
10 Journal of Heritage Management 1(1)

at such a scale every major issue of national well-being: economic, social, political, ecological, cultural
as well as spiritual. This is the Indian advantage that needs to be brought back into the centre of national
consciousness, that is, where a future that is handmade must begin, and the forthcoming SDGs offer
an opportunity to do so.
In his report on the UN’s development agenda beyond 2015 (United Nations, 2013; World Bank,
2015), released in 2013, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, laid emphasis on inclusive growth, decent
employment and social protection and on the need to ensure that ‘sustainable development must be
enabled by the integration of economic growth, social justice and environmental stewardship’ as global
guiding principles. Craft industries do exactly that. The report is fore-grounded in the language of
human rights and justice, pointing to our own need to position the craft movement as representing
the rights of deprived millions. The report provides a credo of ‘international action for our collective
wellbeing’ that is to be achieved through addressing ‘global challenges with local solutions’—again,
exactly what decentralized crafts are capable of achieving.
Preliminary work on the SDGs in India and overseas has focused on 15 key concerns translated into
goals. Many of these are immediately relevant to the future of Indian artisans and their crafts. The first
SDG is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. This is followed by the goal to end hunger and to
achieve food security, nutrition and the promotion of sustainable agriculture. The invisible 50 per cent
India’s artisanal population are women, and another goal is to attain gender equality and to empower all
women and girls. Then there is Goal 8 to ‘promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth,
full and productive employment and decent work for all’—the very argument we have been advocating
at the Planning Commission. Note the word ‘decent’.
And then, critically important for us, there is Goal 12, which is to ‘ensure sustainable consump-
tion and production patterns’ that can reflect a middle path of well-being in which the progress of the
human and natural ecologies is established as a single trajectory, and not as a competing one. Perhaps
no other industry addresses this goal as responsibly as craft. This is backed by Goal 9 that aims at inclu-
sive and sustainable industries that foster innovation. Another goal concerns the need for urgent action
to combat climate change, and yet another aims to ‘protect, restore and promote sustainable use of
terrestrial eco systems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land
degradation and halt bio diversity loss’—each element critical to the natural resources on which so many
crafts depend. A UN high-level panel has recommended the need for turning to the private sector as
well as to civil society ‘within market principles’. For us, this is an opportunity to re-emphasize that
marketing and entrepreneurial capacities are essential keys to sustainable livelihoods from handcraft.

Handmade in India for the World

The coming year will see heightened levels of debate and discussion on the meaning of sustainable
development and on how the SGDs will be interpreted for action at the national and global levels. This
is our new opportunity. We can now take the legacy of India’s craft advantage to another level of under-
standing by linking our heritage as well as our current concerns to the most contemporary developmental
challenge of our time. We can try to bring back the understanding of the whole, the context that has given
Indian craft its age-old power. As the largest craft concentration in the world, Indian artisans can make
a massive contribution to the search for a more socially just, equitable, sustainable and inclusive planet.
At last, we have an opportunity to demonstrate why the legacy of Gandhi, Kamaladevi, Pupul Jayakar,
L. C. Jain and so many other stalwarts of the Indian craft movement is not just about a proud past but
also about the future we all want for our predecessors. At the end of the day, there are only two tasks
Chatterjee 11

that truly matter: caring for each other and caring for the earth. That is indeed a future that Indian hands
can help make—handmade in India for the world.

Acknowledgement
An earlier version of article was delivered as the 5th Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Memorial Lecture on 29 October
2014, for the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training, New Delhi, and Centre for Heritage Management,
Ahmedabad University, Gujarat.

Notes
1. Creative Cities Network, UNESCO, www.unesco.org
2. See http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/articles/createuk-week
3. Jodhpur Consensus, UNESCO 2005; See www.unesco.org

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Author’s bio-sketch
Ashoke Chatterjee was executive director of National Institute of Design
(NID) from 1975–85, Senior Faculty Advisor for Design Management and
Communication from 1985 to 1995, and Distinguished Fellow at NID from
1995 until retirement in 2001. He has served for many years as honorary presi-
dent of the Crafts Council of India and continues to work as a consultant in
India and internationally, especially on projects concerned with water manage-
ment and environmental issues. He has been consultant on social communica-
tion, institutional development, design education and crafts development and
has been associated with a large number of institutions in India and abroad.
An author and writer, his books include ‘Dances of the Golden Hall’ on the art of Shanta Rao and
‘Rising’ on empowerment efforts among deprived communities in rural Gujarat.
He is presently Chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Heritage Management,
Ahmedabad University.