Indian textiles find their patron

UNESCO Courier, July, 2001 by Jenny Housego

High quality crafts can't survive without skillful marketing, argues the author, who has woven close ties with Indian craftspeople to build up a business. When will aid agencies follow suit?

As an art historian, I had long been fascinated by the fragments of medieval hand-painted and block-printed fabrics excavated in the rubbish heaps of Fostat, old Cairo. These were almost certainly made in Gujarat in western India, and attest to a flourishing trade with Egypt in Indian textiles in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Some years ago, I decided to see if I could revive the patterns of these ancient textiles with techniques still available today.

I met Mohammad Bhai Siddiqui--a famous master block-cutter and printer from Kutch in Gujarat--and showed him illustrations of some of these fragments, now in museums in different parts of the world. He was very excited, said he had no blocks like this, but recognized them as part of his tradition. He promised to see what he could do.

Mohammad Bhai was as good as his word. From an illustration of a small fragment, he had worked out the repeat in the design. He had created a superb Fostat tablecloth, in rich, glowing colours, made from the same natural ingredients that had been used in the past.

We launched the tablecloths onto the market, certain that buyers would be as excited as we were. Alas, we were disappointed. Long used to Indian block prints being cheap, buyers found our tablecloths too expensive. They were unable to appreciate the centuries of expertise that had gone into recreating them.

Why should craft be cheap? Why should beautiful, hand-made things be expected to compete with mass production? Why have the crafts of India, once so highly renowned, become associated with bad quality, running colours, boring designs?

Because the old traditions of patronage have not been replaced by new ones. Because craftsmen, no longer working for their own communities, have great difficulty in finding new markets and fall prey to filling orders where only the price counts. Because the idea of high-quality craft items aimed at discerning markets is not yet fully understood in this region. Because the importance of aid in helping to improve quality and identify market outlets has not been addressed by governments and crafts organizations.

Craft and commerce are inextricably linked. Very early on, an embroiderer in the first village centre established by my company said to me, "How fortunate that you are a commercial company, because you have to make money and therefore so will we!" She then told me about a government agency and an NGO that had set up training programmes in the village, but as there was no instrument for marketing or selling any of the products, the projects had collapsed.

This is not a unique story. I hear the same all over India. A friend in Delhi who tirelessly promotes craft bewails that aid is always available if she wants to build a shed in a village, buy some looms or dig a well, but not to help in marketing crafts.

Without promotion or marketing, crafts are perceived as charity. People buy them to "help the poor craftsmen" rather than because they are well-made and a delight to have.

From the village up

For the tradition of hand-made textiles to survive, new patrons have to be found. My long interest in textiles and in craft convinced me that something could be done to revive India's fabled reputation of producing the world's finest fabrics.

For many years, my interest in the field was academic, but I have always enjoyed working in the field and learning about the past from the present. When I came to live in India almost 15 years ago, the two began to merge; I found I wanted to develop textile crafts myself.

This is why, together with my husband David, we established Shades of India, a company that makes high quality textiles for the home. We do not believe that craft should remain static, so we combine the best of traditional techniques with innovative designs, some ancient, others contemporary. We have established our markets ourselves, presenting our collections to buyers, instead of them telling us what they want. A buyer from a famous London shop once told us: "Make me dream!" This is what we attempt to do. And increasingly, international buyers are coming to us because they recognize that India is the only place left in the world where such a variety of hand-made textile techniques can still be found.

It is not an easy road. There is nothing I enjoy more than sitting with a group of craftspeople and working out ideas for a new collection. We work with craftspeople all over India, and at the centres we have established not far from Delhi, in villages where there had been no employment for women before.

The same philosophy lies behind the Kashmir Loom Company, which I established a couple of years ago in Srinagar with Kashmir brothers Asaf and Hamid Ali. Kashmir understands the spinning and weaving of high quality wools like nowhere else in the world. The softest of these is Shahtoosh, now banned because the wild Chiru antelope from which it comes, faces extinction.