Aarti Kawlra

In this chapter, I interrogate elements within the trajectory of India’s discourse on craft, that permeated policy and action in the pre- and post-independence period, from a feminist perspective. Asking the question ‘Where are the women?’ in the sphere of crafts, as does Cynthia Enloe (2014) in the sphere of international politics, is to shed light on the ways in which women’s activities are framed through the private and the domestic in the service of national and international goals. Seeking answers to this question also highlights the different spaces and roles women occupied in the renewed debates about crafts, as well as the intended and unintended consequences of foregrounding women’s capacities in craft in relation to their home-based skills.

Aarti Kawlra is Assistant Professor in the Fashion Design Department at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Chennai, India. She is co-author of National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi. Her research has led her to work among handloom weavers in Tamil Nadu for more than a decade and taken her to the National Museum of Ethnology Osaka, Japan as a Visiting Scholar. The Kimono Body

In this exploratory paper, I inquire into the re-articulation of craft in India and Japan during the first half of the 20th century. Examining notions of craftsmanship as expounded by Muneyoshi (Soetsu) Yanagi (1889–1961) in Japan and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903– 1988) in India, I explore how craft came to be initially deployed as a peg to situate an imagined 'Asian' civilizational affinity following the friendship forged between
Okakura Tenshin and Rabindranath Tagore. In the post-War period craft came to be accepted world-wide as a modernist project for Asian countries seeking to re-build their national self-hood. What were the routes taken by India and Japan? We know that Kamaladevi was deeply impressed by Japan's valorisation of its artisans as 'national treasures' and understood well the significance of state-led institutionalisation of craft for India's national development. How did Kamaladevi and Yanagi re-constitute folk craft as aestheticized labour on the international stage of nations emerging from the ravages of war? What were the metaphors,
affinities and aesthetics invoked by the two cultural interlocuters in shaping the emergent transnational craft-scape, whose legacy continues in contemporary craft (and design) conversations between India and Japan? The paper will take up articulations around the linkages between the sari and the kimono as unstitched or textile garments, to constitute a shared crafts ethic.

In this article, we foreground the potential for a space for collective deliberation and political subjectivities building among women leaders in local governance. We interrogate the Gramamukhya portal, which was initiated in 2011 and continued until 2015, as a democratic space to politicise the invited spaces of governance. Revisiting the question of women’s engagement in panchayati raj institutions in Kerala, we suggest that the practice of citizenship can become politically effective for women in governance if they use a platform that facilitates critical engagement from within and without the invited spaces of participation. This reflection becomes all the more significant given the contemporary political context of Kerala, where the women’s question is caught between developmentalist intentions of the state and right-wing political mobilisations at the grass-roots level.

In the review of Lives of Indian Images, by Rich H. Davis, Kawlra looks at how the book presents individual biographies of seven prominent artistic and religious objects and sites. The author shows how Davis seeks to go beyond the ‘cult’ value and ‘exhibition’ value of art to discover the multiple ways in which visual art can be integrated meaningfully by the particular set of people viewing it. Particular art objects have reinvented themselves with each viewing at a different place, and Davis employs anthropology to both art and history to explain his premise.

In this exploratory paper, I inquire into the re-articulation of craft in India and Japan during
the first half of the 20th century. Examining notions of craftsmanship as expounded by Muneyoshi
(Soetsu) Yanagi (1889–1961) in Japan and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903– 1988) in India, I
explore how craft came to be initially deployed as a peg to situate an imagined 'Asian' civilizational
affinity following the friendship forged between Okakura Tenshin and Rabindranath Tagore. In the
post-War period craft came to be accepted world-wide as a modernist project for Asian countries
seeking to re-build their national self-hood. What were the routes taken by India and Japan? We
know that Kamaladevi was deeply impressed by Japan's valorisation of its artisans as 'national
treasures' and understood well the significance of state-led institutionalisation of craft for India's
national development.
How did Kamaladevi and Yanagi re-constitute folk craft as aestheticized labour on the
international stage of nations emerging from the ravages of war? What were the metaphors,
affinities and aesthetics invoked by the two cultural interlocuters in shaping the emergent
transnational craftscape, whose legacy continues in contemporary craft (and design) conversations
between India and Japan? The paper will take up articulations around the linkages between the sari
and the kimono as unstitched or textile garments, to constitute a shared crafts ethic.

As teachers we have recognized that space that lends itself to use in multiple ways is far more valuable than space which can be used only in one way…. A room with a few mats and possibly chaukies will not only remain clean but also provide infinite opportunities for small group work, music and dance, sitting in a circle, reading

The diffusion of information technologies in recent decades has introduced new modes of production and consumption of traditional textiles in India. New media technologies have opened spaces of participatory parity for artisans, hitherto labelled as “bearers of tradition” and insulated from global capital and markets via protective state policies. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which computer-aided graphics have transformed silk handloom saris into canvasses for the visual representation of a shared past. My aim is to inquire into how agents of a handloom tradition in south India deploy digital imagery, drawn from an authorized discourse of heritage, in claiming techno-economic coevality in the present.

This paper explores the reconstitution of craft-work in the idiom of inclusive education through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and M.K. Gandhi’s (1869–1948) experiments in alternative pedagogies. Both Tagore and Gandhi conceived of craft-based
education as a humanist alternative to the estrangement and elitism of colonial education on the one hand and the tedium of rote learning in the vernacular, on the other. Their projects were a response to the
long-drawn ideological debate on what constitutes a truly ‘national’ education and directed toward learners from the lowest strata of society

This article explores the diverse strands sustaining the self-conscious recovery of natural dyes and dyeing as an ethical (and ecological) craft practice in India. It charts the contested terrain of ideas and beliefs around the production and application of colour in the opening decades of the 20th century. The narrative follows the story of colour along the path of disenchantment via science and industry in the late colonial period and, post-Independence , underscores its location in the national landscape of craft and beyond (figure 1). I begin by examining the colonial discourse on the ascension of synthetic dyes and its ambiguous reception. Through the voices of some interlocutors, I enquire as to how the call for a " true " swadeshi sought to re-enchant the practice of natural dyeing for independent India. The images that are included sketch the afterlife of these enquiries. What is the inspiration behind some of the many spaces for natural dyes and dyeing that dot the craftscape of India ?

The kimono and the sari conjure appealing stories of mutuality and difference. There is a need however, to interrogate them as inhabiting a shared ‘transnational craft-scape’ so as to recover both past and present techno-cultural circulations between India and Japan. See page 11

Inspired by the potential of Information and Communication Technologies, henceforth ICTs, for socio-economic development, and supported by a university based technology and business incubator, Rural Production Company, henceforth RPC, was set up in 2007 employing an ICT-mediated distributed production model.
This paper reveals how RPC, initially an exploratory project whose key innovation was its Internet kiosk facilitated model of crafts production and local empowerment, morphed into a social enterprise catering to global demands. The context of innovation provided by the Incubator led to a transformation of an ICT4D
(ICT for Development) project into a business venture through the practice of formal and informal questioning at every stage of its implementation. This paper focuses on the iterative method adopted while highlighting the role of the incubator in the overall design and development process of the enterprise. This paper is a
reflexive mapping of the organization’s evolution from the original research agenda of outsourcing production cum rural employment, to one that privileges local networks both as a conscious business strategy and as an arena for collaborative change for human development.

This paper explores the sari as the site for creation of a pan Indian identity in nationalist imaginaries in pre-independence India and later, post-independence, in the shaping of the ‘modern’ Indian woman within a gendered code of aesthetics. The sari is viewed here as a cultural artifact within a wider politics of feminizing tradition and nation in modernity.

The Geographical Indications of Goods or (GI) is a globally instituted label of origin that links a product‟s identity to a specified place and grants proprietary rights to its „original‟ producers. Based on ethnographic field research conducted in Kanchipuram since 2011, this paper presents the ambiguities and tensions around the use of the GI tag among local producers. I suggest that the Tamil Nadu state‟s dispensation of the GI is predicated upon production compliance with the features of an „original‟ Kanchipuram sari entextualized (Raheja, 1996) in official colonial and postcolonial records through a place-based typology of traditional craft. I go on to show how the GI‟s conceptualization of quality and authenticating formula has become the basis for renewed branding for some producers while a majority of small private producers and cooperative societies subvert the GI‟s standard through the production of „duplicate‟ Kanchipuram saris.

The transformation of an information and communication technology for development
(ICT4D) project into a ‘rural-inclusive’ company at an academia-led business incubator
in south India is explored in this reflexive ethnography. As a consultant to the team
implementing the project since its inception in 2005, I was an active participant in the
processes of enterprise-building from within the space of the incubator over a five year
period. Employing a self-critical ethnographic lens in this paper, I chart the evolution of
the ICT4D project into a for-profit start-up to foreground the model’s i) expert mediation
and articulation of “needs” of the disadvantaged on behalf of the state and ii) its middleclass
bias in promoting the Internet as a national tool for poverty alleviation and iii) its
rhetoric of social inclusion and “agency” at the margins, towards a critical understanding
of social exclusion under contemporary neo-liberalizing structures in India.

The 'Humanities Across Borders' (HAB) book series aims to trigger discussions on the relevance of normative, top down, and institutionalised standards of knowledge production and transmission in the academy. As conventional models and modes of understanding lose their capacity to explain the human condition in the new global era, the multitude of voices, lives, locales, and journeys emerge as windows into the past and present to give a fresh, more expanded meaning to the Humanities.

Comprising monographs as well as edited volumes, the HAB book series focuses on methodological experiments and reflections across disciplinary, institutional, ideological, national, and sectoral borders. The series will:

Interrogate prevailing, often dominant, conceptual frames and categories.
Posit uncommon entry points to inquiry that bear meaning in the everyday lives of people and are relevant for interrogating wider global issues.
View quotidian knowledge-practices as valuable sources of experiential knowledge (and pedagogies) unfolding over time and space.
Encourage dialogue ‘across borders’, in the spirit of inter-cultural scholarship and educational justice.
Seek collaborative institutional and/or programmatic arrangements that re-invigorate the civic embeddedness and global connectedness of university-based curricula.

About the Book

"Our thread is different from the thread of the brahmin.
They have the Vedas, we have weaving."

We Who Wove is the first in-depth ethnographic study of the Telugu-speaking Padma Saliyars of Tamil Nadu, who claim a high status among hereditary weaving castes. The Padma Saliyars consider themselves ‘on par’ with brahmins, claiming difference through their ‘thread’ and the divinely ordained work of weaving. Their origin myth as recorded in the Bhavanarishi Puranam pronounces weaving as a divine boon, referring to their longstanding recognition and status as those who wove with lotus thread. Approaching community not as a closed and unchanging world but as a dynamic one, the study contributes to the growing scholarship on re-articulations of caste in South Asia. Using methods of both history and ethnography, it reveals the ‘hidden histories’ of artisan caste affirmation and community belonging in mobilising for production.

The author beautifully reconstructs the organisation of the weaver household and the meticulous work that goes into producing a Kanchipuram silk sari, highlighting the unity of the work, the loom and the weaver. She explores handloom weaving in light of the different regimes of value—craft (as opposed to machine) aesthetic, traditional technology, cottage industry and embodied work—that define its lived reality in South India. She also addresses the need for a new approach to the subject of artisans in India, given the lack of critical anthropological and historical works on the subject.

Providing descriptions and analyses of hitherto unpublished material supplemented with photographs, this volume will be a valuable addition to the fields of ethnography, anthropology and sociology.   

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Foreword by Prasannan Parthasarathi 
Author’s Preface and Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration



1.  Claims of Community

2.  Reform and Revival: Making of a Handloom Tradition

3.  Sustaining Production: Leadership and Cooperative Conflicts

4.  Weaving as Sacrament

5.  Reproductive Household: Work, Loom and the Body

6.  Mobilising Value: Authentic and Auspicious Design

7.  Concluding Reflections



Bibliography
Appendix
Index

In A Possible Anthropology, Anand Pandian draws us into an exploration of anthropology's methods, not only to seek redemption for the discipline's past colonial misdeeds but also to put its humanist peregrinations to the litmus test of our present. Pandian tells us that the three essays present 'an ambulatory form of writing', taking readers along on a walk with anthropology's methods of being some place with oneself, but always in the company of others.

Reviewed by Chandan Bose for the
Contributions to Indian Sociology 53, 3 (2019): 441–468
Excerpts:
What differentiates Kawlra’s book from previous scholarship on the transformation of caste patrimony into cultural associations in India, such as Balmurli Natrajan’s The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity
and inequality in a multicultural age (Routledge 2013)—an ethnography among the kumhar (potter) community of North India—is her unpacking of the very notion of politics that underlies the articulation of collective/
individual agency.

The organisation of chapters within the book indicates that Kawlra wishes to engage with the subject matter, namely the institutionalisation of weaving among the Padma Saliyars, by juxtaposing two perspectives. One
is from a macro viewpoint highlighting structural and historical contexts within which weaving as an industry took shape over the course of the 20th century. The other looks at weaving as an embodied performance
which emerges within moral claims— practices of the body and spaces one articulates in everyday life.

Caste as Capital
S. Anandhi

The book under review, We Who Wove With Lotus Thread, neither offers such images of weaver vulnerability nor does it offer any resolution of class collectivism. Instead, it invites us to look at how caste serves as social and cultural capital in protecting the material interest of the Telugu-speaking silk weaving community of Padma Saliyars of Tamil Nadu under harsh conditions of economic distress.