Remarks
by Laila Tyabji,
Chairperson
of DASTKAR
June 10, 1998
I am truly honored to be here, Frankly, I'm not much of
a speaker! My organization, DASTKAR rather avoids seminars
and conferences. India's problems, like the country itself,
are so vast. It seems more important to do something - rather
than about it.
Some years ago in the mid 80s, I was doing a design workshop
with a group of patchwork applique woman in a re-settlement
colony outside Ahmedabad in Gujerat. 3 days into the workshop
a communal riot broke out in Ahmedabad city. Arson and looting
turned into mob warfare and killing and the trouble spread
into the slum suburbs. The patchwork women were Muslim,
and most of their husbands and fathers worked in the city.
They drove bicycle rickshaws, sold vegetables and groceries
on small handcarts, or were unskilled labor in factories.
Now they were trapped. Those who ventured into the city
were drawn into the violence, those who stayed at home forfeited
their daily income.
Every day people were brought into the community center,
where we sat matching colors and cutting patterns, burnt,
wounded, maimed. A child's eyes had been gouged out; the
brother of one of the women had been burnt alive in his
cycle rickshaw. It seemed stupid and callous to the point
of crazy hubris to be sitting there making pretty patterns
while people were dying - a little like Nero fidding while
Rome burnt.
Nevertheless, the income the women were making from what
we stitched, was the only money coming into the community.
They were, quite literally, living off the patterns of circles
and squares they cut and sewed. Ironically, the disregarded,
decorative activity done by the women had turned out to
be the life line of their families. As Ramba ben, a mirrorwork
embroiderer from Banaskantha once said to me, "The
lives of my family hang by the thread I embroider."
If this is a rather sombre note on which to begin a talk
on hand craft and embroidery it is because I want to set
the context in which ADTHI, Dastkar and I work. A context
where the beauty, authenticity, original creativity and
spontaneity of the product is second to the sheer economic
necessity of its production and sale.
I am talking today about the people, politics and practice
of traditional Indian embroidery - in the context of craft,
women and development in contemporary India. The story behind
the stitches is both a parable and a paradox: craft traditions
are a unique mechanism for rural women entering the economic
mainstream for the first time, but they also carry the stigma
of inferiority and backwardness as India enters a period
of hi-tech industrialization and globalization.
A Dutch diplomat visiting a DASTKAR exhibition last autumn
and looking at the women's intricate embroideries, remarked
sadly: "They are so skilled; why doesn't anyone train
them to make electronic spare parts?" An illustration
of the relative values the urban educated elite places on
20th century technology versus traditional skills.
But in India craft is not just a production process - merely
a mechanical, mindless, somewhat outdated form of earning
and employment. It is a rural woman's creative means to
conquer her desert landscape and the confines of her limited
income - her way of transcending the dependence and drudgery
of her arduous agrarian and domestic life cycle. It is a
creative skill and strength that is uniquely hers - an individual
statement of her femininity, culture and being.
As I speak to you, I'm haunted by the words of Geetha Devi,
one of the ADITHI women: "To work is forbidden, to
steal is forbidden, to cheat is forbidden, to kill is forbidden,
what else is left except to starve, sister?". As per
the present going rate for female agricultural labor in
Bihar, a woman would have to work 70 days a month in order
to feed her family. Geeta Devi's slow stitches, telling
stories, have become the alternative to starvation.
In the West these days, craft is something that people,
weary of the relentless pressures and uniformity of the
industrial and professional sector, turn to in search of
freshness and individual self-expression. In India craft
is an industry an profession, often practiced in sub-primitive
conditions, without the supports of pensions, insurance,
a fixed salary, medicare.
A wonderful painting by Paul Gauguin is entitled: "Where
Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"
Similarly, the quilts downstairs both answer and raise these
questions.
Three years ago, I sat with a group of mirrorwork craftswomen
in Lakhu ben's mud and thatch house in Gadda Village. They
were part of the Rabari women's embroidery group that is
the nucleus of the DASTAR Kutch Project, and we were working
on a mirrorwork panel that would go to the Women's Conference
in Beijing.
None of the women quite knew where Beijing was, or what
it was all about. But they liked the idea of thousands of
women getting together to shape a new world, and they wanted
to be part of the action. Working collectively on the piece,
deciding its design, and sending it out to the international
forum of women as their message of strength creativity and
independence, seemed to mark their coming of age.
They bank their payments and earnings and have started a
cooperative Loans & Saving Scheme. Reacting to the exploitation
of illiterate women by both village men and urban tradespeople,
they have taught themselves to read and write and do simple
accounting. This time, Lakhu ben had gone one better - her
Work Issue Register had each woman's name written in English!
She had got her son to teach her. Coming to Delhi had made
her aware, she said, of the importance of being able to
speak and make bills in English. They have realized that
a pen is no more complex to handle than a needle.
Formerly the women (in true Gujerati entrepreneurial style)
had greeted each DASTKAR visit with vociferous demands for
higher wages. But seeing mirrorwork embroidered kurtas by
Ahir crafts women selling at cheaper price, they had got
together and decided to lower the rates of their own products,
while simultaneously raising the quality. With characteristic
Rabari arrogance they told me that of course their embroidery
was much superior, but they couldn't afford to be outsold
by "those Ahirs"!! They have come to an arrangement
with the local contractor that they will work in the fields
only if he sends a tractor to collect them - so they can
save time to also work on their embroideries.
The crafts sector, where I work, is the largest source of
employment and income generation for Indian women (more
women work as agricultural labor, but their contribution
is generally unpaid). It is also the one area of acknowledged
skill, creativity and expertise (apart from child-bearing)
where women are not just on par, but ahead of men. The one
area, too, of economic and productive strength that Western
countries have lost.
While international agencies, economists and activists agonise
over the conflicting interests of unemployment, the depletion
of natural energy resources and the degradation of the environment
through industrialization, craft continues to be a viable
alternative. With a simple, inexpensive, environmentally
friendly needle, palm leaf, spindle or loom, and the inherent
skill of her hands, a woman can both support her family
and enrich the national economy and export trade.
Many Asian countries have the same un-tapped strength -
of literally lakhs of women whose discounted but extraordinary
skills give us a cultural and aesthetic identity uniquely
our own. But, because these women are village bound, unorganized
and illiterate, their voices and needs are never heard in
international forums. The raw material they depend on -
yarn, bamboo and cane, lac, leather - are being exported
abroad or diverted to the industrial sector. Financial credit,
social security schemes and investment ignore them.
Their priorities - both on spending international resources,
and on the issues themselves, might well be different from
politicians, bureaucrats, and other movers and shakers who
prefer to move into the 21st century to more technologic
tune. But we must listen to those voices and give them space
- even when we disagree.
We are all super-sensitive to vestiges of colonialism and
exploitation, but we practice a cultural imperialism of
our own: dominance by virtue of education language and profession.
Expertise has its own class system. In my own area, the
designer dominates over the craftsperson; the urban management
consultant dictates the rural development process.
I'm not trying to present answers and solutions. I'm equally
floundering and uncertain. It is confusing trying to find
a sensible, idealistic yet viable "alternative"
when you work in the villages with the poor and uneducated,
using hand craft and thousand year old traditions as your
via media, in a world that is obsessed with INTERNET, electronic
technology, macro enterprise, and the 21st Century. Where
everything from a soft drink to a baby's diaper is made
by an assembly line, of synthetic materials, and sold globally.
One 10 second ad on satellite TV for a can of Pepsi would
support a rural family for a year. I live and work in a
country with 360 million people below the poverty line.
People so poor one can even have two views about the rights
and wrongs of child labor.
For me, one of 1996's most chilling images was a small boy
on Northern Rajasthan. He stood, nose running, shivering
in the January cold. His village is in one of rural India's
most conservative belts, a region with it's own rich, distinctive
culture and clothing. But all he wore, was an oversized
T-shirt. Emblazoned on his chest was the slogan: I AM THE
BEST FUCH IN THE WEST.
It seemed a paradigm of our Third World cultural enslavement
to products, idioms and lifestyles passed on wholesale by
the so-called developing nations, while barely understanding
their implications. The T-shirt was probably a gift from
some well meaning tourist, - it might even have been an
item of clothing sent as charitable relief. But that boy's
mother would have died before dressing him in it if she
had known what it said.
New products and images beamed on satellite TV as part of
a globalized economy, are eroding the appeal of traditional
products and traditional lifestyles; simply packaged jams,
soaps, juices made by KVIC or women's orgs do not have the
appeal of the glitzily advertised Pepsi, Maggie and Revlon.
Both the trendy urban young and rural poor in India are
now wearing exports surplus T-shirts and jeans.
All of us, North, South, East & West alike, should take
care, that unlike that boy in the T-shirt I mentioned, we
don't get fucked up by what's worst in the global market
place - we must fight and grab our own place for our cultures
and heritage - and guard it proudly.
"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," said Shiva Kashyap,
a DASTKAR craftswoman from Bihar, at one of the preparatory
workshops for the Beijing conference.
Having got the ADITHI craftswoman out of their veils and
villages into the international market place. We should
help them take that next difficult but vital step - out
into the street, into the election process and Government
forums - being their own spokespeople, celebrating their
own identity, setting their own agendas.
Almost 9 years ago, a young woman in Rajasthan killed herself,
I knew Dhapu well. I was living and working in her village
at the time. We were neighbors. She soaked herself in kerosene
and set herself afire. We were only a few houses away but
the drums of a wedding procession drowned her screams. By
the time we reached her and broke open the door she was
dead. Later we heard she still owed the village shopkeeper
for the kerosene.
Dhapu was bright, young, lively, beautiful, the mother of
5 children. She killed herself because she had so many skills
but no opportunities.
She lived in a part of India that is semi-desert - dry,
desolate, deprived. The villages in that area had been re-settled
as part of a Government scheme to create a tiger park. Dhapu
and her family were small herders who depended on access
to the forest for firewood, fodder and water for their herds.
Now that was gone. 5 years of drought had created further
hardship.
Life was incredibly hard. Dhapu's daughter Indira was about
to be engaged. She had saved desperately to put together
a dowry. Then disaster struck. Her husband's elder brother
suddenly died. Dhapu's husband's sense of family honor was
greater than his income as an agricultural laborer. He told
her that his brother's widow and her 4 children would come
to live with them. There were 5 more mouths to feed. Indira's
dowry would have to be given to his brother's eldest child.
It was too much for Dhapu. She killed herself for lack of
an economic alternative.
Dhapu's death had a profound effect on me. The tragic irony
haunts me still. The group of us who rushed to save her
from the flames were working to create economic opportunities
for women just like her. Dhapu's daughter Indira, her widowed
sister-in-law and her niece became among the most prosperous
women in Sherpur village - among a group of 100 women whom
DASTKAR has trained to earn their own livelihood through
their own hand skills - patchwork, tie-dye, embroidery and
printing. Dhapu's daughter didn't need a dowry, she was
sought after as a bride by everyone - because she was bringing
in her own income.
Today, Rameshwari, Raeesan, Shameem, Badam, Farida, and
the other women recall those first early days in the tiny
Dastkar room in Sherpur village nine years ago, and the
fear and suspicion with which they had greeted the idea
that something they made with their hands could sell in
the Delhi market, the disbelief of receiving their first
earnings. They thought I had come to kidnap their children!
Today they are the leaders of approximately 55 families
in the area who make and sell products through Dastkar -
crafting quilts, soft furnishings, garments, mobiles, toys
and accessories for both local and urban market. Their daughters,
Bina, Mumtaz, Laado, are also learning the old skills as
well as new ones - reading, writing and cyphering form the
first part of the morning for both mothers and daughters.
In the wasted, deprived landscape around Ranthambhore, where
the only water and forest has been reserved for the tiger,
craft is the practical use of waste and found materials:
a means of recycling and value-adding reeds, old paper,
cloth scraps, the debris of the forest. Vegetable dyes,
block printing, and tie-dye enhance simple handspun cotton;
patchwork or sewing sequins is something a comparatively
unskilled woman can do while she rests from her work in
the field, in between tending her children.
Income generation is not, by itself, a synonym for development,
but it can be the key and catalyst to development's many
processes: education, health, community building, the repudiation
of social prejudices, the empowerment of women.
As we sit and sew together, I ask the women what they will
do with their money? Some silver jewellery but also bet
ter seeds and a buffalo. The ability to send their children
by bus to a fee- paying school. Medical treatment and their
tubes tied at a 'proper' hospital. A new well in the village.
They have their own bank accounts to prevent misappropriation
by drunken or gambling husbands. They all want 'pukka' houses.
Rameshwari is a widow and is saving for her children's weddings.
Methods of birth control are canvassed along with color
combinations; old women learn that writing their names is
no more difficult than threading a needle. Children who
wander in are conned into blowing runny noses - and running
errands! Wholesale dealers coming to deliver our orders
become an informal weekly market where women can make purchases
without an expensive trek to the town. Cotton rather than
synthetic, traditional block prints rather than mill-printed
roses have become the in-thing again, both to make and to
wear. In the evenings, songs and stories and folklore are
swapped for political gossip and revolutionary ideas of
social change. The women have set up their own savings and
loans micro-credit group. They are now money lenders to
the whole village.
Everywhere, the energy of a source of new employment and
earning binds together and revitalizes communities that
were as deprived and denuded as the desert around them.
This is particularly true when one works with the latent
skills and strengths of woman. They suddenly discover their
self worth, seeing themselves as active participants in
the community rather than passive recipients of welfare.
Wells are dug, children are dug, children educated, social
prejudices and taboos are thrown away when women discover
their own power.
Muzaffarpur district in Bihar is deceptively green and lushly
serene. The media reports of violence, corruption, exploitative
political and intercaste tensions seem at such variance
with the passivty and karmic calm that are also a feature
of rural Bihar. The women embroiderers in Bhusara and their
sujni quilted embroidery are a paradigm of similar paradoxes
and contradictions: The meticulousness of the thousands
of fine stitches contrast with the apathy and casualness
with which the women work; their indifference to earning
higher wages by more systematic production a denial of their
poverty and need.
Centred in Bhusara, a village of about a 1000 families is
MVSS (Mahila Vikas Sahyog Samiti), a small, autonomous Society
supported by the Patna-based NGO ADITHI. MVSS spreads out
to 350 sujni craftswomen in 10-15 villages in the environs,
under the leadership of Kailashji, a social worker who had
worked with Jai Prakash Narayan in the Land Reform Movement,
before returning to Bhusara, his native village. Other MVSS
and ADITHI projects in the area, include agriculture, health,
education and fishery. (Bhusara is perched on the banks
of a lade.) Anju and Archana, two young, partially educated
local girls, are in charge of coordinating production, and
are paid a salary. Others, including Nirmala Devi and Vibha,
who trace the designs, are paid on a piecework basis.
MVSS's objective is to reach all sections of the community,
and the beneficiaries are both the upper-caste, homebound
women who traditionally did sujni, and women from the really
needy, desperately poor hutments on the outskirts of the
villages who work in the fields and otherwise never handled
a needle. There are middle-aged women looking to supplement
family incomes, as well as very young girls, 'passing time'
before marriage.
MVSS operates from a small two-storey house in the middle
of Bhusara village - it is more of a home than an office.
The women and young girls sit around on the floor and verandah,
stitching the quilts, bedspreads, and garments. Craft in
India is a community activity; a production system in which
many craftspeople work together. Different women with different
skills work on different aspects of the process, and friends
or members of a family come together to quilt, sew and embroider
large pieces (and give advice!) No piece has been made by
a single hand. None have an individual craftswoman's signature.
Their identity is the tradition, the technique and the motif
directory unique to each craft community.
Though they are functional objects of everyday usage - quilts
and articles designed for daily wear or the home - their
motif and color, as in most Indian craft objects, however
utilitarian, have a significance that is deeply rooted in
socio-cultural and votive traditions, that we have tried
to respect, even while adapting them. Including the craftswomen
in the design process: helping them understand the end usage
and methodology, sharing the fund of experimenting with
new layouts and a different color palette, is an integral
part of Dastkar's development of new products.
Reena the filmmaker who made the video documentation of
Asia Society quilts, told me that though she loved the colors
and layout of Quilt 1, the dramatic "ochre, red, black"
color combination was a very urban "designer"
one - clearly an outside intervention. It had actually arisen
out of a group discussion with the women. The associations
- yellow and red for fertillity and marriage, white for
widowhood, black for death - were very much part of the
traditional color symbolism of Indian society. When colors
were vegetable and mineral dyes, made by craftspeople themselves,
from plants and resources around them, each color and shade
had a meaning and name and the directory of colors went
into hundreds. India is probably the only civilization to
have had words for 5 distinct shades of white! It is the
advent of cheap commercial azo-dyes into the village economy
that has reduced the choices of the women to these half
dozen, crude primary shades now available in rural markets.
When we first started working with mirrorwork embroiderers
in Kutch, the Rabarii women - used to their own singing
color palette of flaming pinks, yellows, parrot greens,
reds and oranges - found the muted earth tones and shaded
creams and whites of contemporary urban fashion extraordinarily
limited and boring. They deplored the fact that though "Laila
ben knows a lot about embroidery," I had so little
colu sense! "How sad that your kurta has faded when
you put so much work into it," was their tongue-in-cheek
reaction to one of my tone-on-tone masterpieces. They marveled
that I would want to revive stitches and motifs they had
abandoned as passe and old fashioned. But being shrewd,
entrepreneurial and enterprising, they saw the need to adapt
to the demands of the market. Today - since they are craftspeople
who are instinctively also creative artists, they have incorporated
my design sensibility into theirs. They play effortlessly
with the buff and grays, off white, beige, stone and brown
shades they once rejected - as skillfully as they once evoked
blazing vermillion and turquoise and magenta as a counterpoint
to the colors of their desert sand.
Back at MVSS, Anju, just married, has a supportive husband
and in-laws who are happy to have her work. Sarita was married
at 11 to a husband who is a deaf mute. There are many similar
tragic, but familiar stories. Drunk, disabled, absentee
or other wise unemployable husbands, wicked mothers-in-law,
property that has been mortgaged away to pay debts. Nirmala
is everyone's surrogate mother; widowed, always complaining
but endlessly energetic, she is the driving force that keeps
the organization going.
We settle down together to discuss the object of the workshop
- the Asia Society quilts as a means to learn how to combine
colors, motifs and designs and make the woman more participant
in the creative process. Along with the quilts we want to
make other products - garments, accessories, soft furnishings
- to add diversity to the MVSS sujni range.
One is concerned that design, aesthetic and function should
accompany the powerful social message. Some of the early
quilts seem rather contrived and polemic - out of the head
of an earnest activist rather than a rural craftswoman's
psyche. How will they sell? There is one on AIDS - with
wasted figures, doctors with syringes and sickle shaped
knives, and a border of huge, ochre yellow condoms! I personally
can't think of anything less conducive to the tranquil enjoyment
of the two functions one normally associates with quilts
and bed - i.e. slumber and sex!
Earlier designers from ADITHI have had an interesting challenge,
in trying to create a whole new design idiom for sujni;
since the original craft tradition has died without being
documented and the women are not yet equipped to become
their own designers. But I have some reservations about
their treating the sujni quilt as a kind of admonitory poster,
rather than a functional and decorative household accessory.
The sujni/kantha technique lends itself to pictorial story
telling but social and political rhetoric should also be
pleasureable viewing ! A condom quilt crafted in rural Bihar
as an interesting, one-off, cultural phenomenon, but when
hundred of women in dozens of villages have both the need
and capability to earn from sujni, there is an imperative
to also develop products with a more universal appeal -
products that are marketable, functional and fun.
Setting the women to draw produced a collection of extraordinary
images - ranging from comic scribbles to hauntingly evocative
scenes of childbirth and alienation. Interestingly, men
hardly figured in their vision of their lives - the marriage
scene was the only one where a man (perforce!) had been
included. Even when I teased them and forced them to put
in an occasional male, they figured only as pall bearers,
a priest, or the doctor with a grisly scalpel in hospital.
With all the drawings in, we discussed each scene and how
the different images could be incorporated into one harmonious
composition. To introduce the concept of colors as conveying
a mood, as well as combining with each other to create a
pattern, I suggested that we give each scene a separate
colored background appropriate to its subject. Though limited
by the choice of colored poplin in the MVSS store, our eventual
choices ranging from a progression of deepening yellows
and reds for birth, girlhood, marriage, to the gray and
black of widowhood and death. The idea that we were showing
one woman in various stages of her life, and that she should
be the central figure in each square, distinguished by size
or some special feature from the others, seemed unfamiliar.
Obviously, unlike urban women, they don't see themselves
in the heroine mode or as markedly different from each other!
We were also working on how different juxtapositions of
the same motifs created different designs and images. How
interlocking and extending some branches into the spaces
where there are figures softened the regularity of the layout.
In both life and art, human beings and nature must interact
together.
Meanwhile, Auchana wants a private chat - including sex
and marriage. She has decided that (like me) she doesn't
want to marry. I encourage her to be her true self, but
say that for me - urban, educated, with my own home and
income, part of a family and social structure where single
women are taken for granted and need not be solitary or
celibate - to be unmarried is much, much easier than for
her. The community in which she will spend the rest of her
life is very different. She should not take categorical
decisions just yet but stick out for the freedom of choice.
The products from ADITHI and the MVSS Women's cooperative
in Bhusara tell the story of Indian crafts in transition:
the traditional hand skills of women, used to craft products
for themselves and their families, gradually changing into
a contemporary, urban, market-led product, but still strongly
reflecting the cultural identity and individual skills of
the makers. It also tells the story of women, subtly changing
themselves in the process. Like a kaleidoscope, familiar
elements, transposed, take on a new, dynamic pattern. The
process is not without conflicts, but it is invariably catalytic.
The ADITHI quilts are here as their own statement; but what
has using their inherent craft skills as a tool of empowerment
done to these and the many other crafts women?
In 1985, I went to SEWA in Lucknow to work with a 100 chikan
embroidery women. They were black burkhaed, illiterate,
earning about 100-150 rupees a month, house-bound and previously
totally dependent on the local Mahajan to fetch their work
- or pay them for it. Sitting together embroidering, teaching
them new skills and designs, we naturally talked about everything
under the sun. They were stunned that I, a well-brought
up, believing Muslim woman, could also be liberated, happily
unmarried, earning my own living -travelling the world,
untrammeled by purdahor convention.
Our first argument was when I was furious with them for
signing, unread, a petition about path breaking Shah Bano
judgment, just on the say-so and a biased and retrograde
interpretation of the Koran by local male chauvinist Maulvis.
They listened to all this chat, wide-eyed, slightly disbelieving,
slightly envious, slightly shocked. They certainly didn't
relate it to the realities of their own lives. When six
of them bravely agreed to come to Delhi for the first chikan
exhibition, the men of the mohalla threatened to burn down
the SEWA Lucknow office, accusing us of corrupting their
women's morals.
Today, those 100 SEWA women have grown to 4,500. They travel
all over India, happily doss down and sing bhajans in a
dharmasala, or cook biryani at the Bombay Salvation Army
Hostel. They interact with equal ease with male tribals
from Madhya Pradesh and sophisticated buyers from HABITAT;
they march in protest against dowry deaths as well as Islamic
fundamentalism; demand financial credit and free spectacles
from the Government; self-confidently refuse to give the
most powerful local politician or bigwig a discount! They
earn in thousands rather than hundreds, have their own savings
bank accounts, and have thrown away centuries of repression
and social prejudice along with their burkhas.
This augmented role - being entrepreneurs, saleswomen, executives;
as well as housewives and mothers - the additional weight
of responsibility, independence and experience - has changed
women, even if it hasn't materially changed male attitudes.
Sometimes the added stresses and pressures have destroyed
them; sometimes it has made them stronger and more self-confident.
Whenever I think of my 17 years with DASTKAR, I remember
Dhapu, whom lack of economic alternatives, fear of the future,
family pride and prejudice had driven to burn herself to
death.
In our Project in Ranthambhore (where Dhapu's daughters
now work) the local doctor says he can recognize a DASTKAR
craftswoman from half a kilometer just by the way she walks
and holds her head.
It has changed their attitudes to society, caste, marriage,
purdah. They are more able to objectively evaluate the gospel
as preached by men. Initially, in Sherpur village, women
of different castes and religions wanted separate timings
to come to the room where I lived and worked. The first
time a harijan woman came for work she crouched outside
the door. It was she herself, not the upper caste women,
who explained - with shocked disbelief at my naivete - that
she could not enter. I had to literally pull her in. When
a Muslim child peed on the floor, the Hindu women fled in
horror and wanted the whole place lippai-ed! Today, the
100 men and women in the Project work, travel, cook, eat
and drink together, marveling at the folly that kept them
separate for so lang. At the annual picnic the men made
the women sit, and served them - Hindus and Muslims, harijans
and upper-castes alike.
The changing woman has changed some (a few!) male mind-sets.
The same men who threatened to burn down the SEWA office
now help pack the exhibition stock, and escort their wives
to night school. Money power is a most amazing thing. But
the men at the picnic did make it plain that this was only
once-a-year! Normally the women cook for and feed their
menfolk before they come to work and on their return, even
now when they are the principal earners in the family. They
are still expected to gather the firewood, work in the fields,
care for the children, in addition to being entrepreneurs
and wage earners.
It would be simplistic to pretend that the shifting balance
of power and the new self-worth of the women has not created
enormous family strains: between husbands and wives, mother-in-law
and daughters-in-law, between self-realization and traditional
mores. It would be foolish to ignore that it is the woman
who always has to bear the burden of this. Also, that her
inherent tendency to silently take on more and more, rather
than scream with rage and rejection, often makes the burden
well-nigh unbearable. Naïve too, to think that without
the carrot of cash payments, women would voluntarily rise
up and change the status quo. There is a security in being
inferior yet protected; the burkha veil can be a comfortable
and addictive escape route from the adult responsibilities
of an independent life. But the changed confidence of the
women - their ability to take and make decisions, to disagree
with their husbands, to plan their own and their children's
future - is not a once in a blue moon phenomenon that is
going to go away.
Sawai Madhopore was once the center of dabu indigo printing.
When we tried to revive it (initially only as a means of
getting interesting, locally-made raw material for the women's
patchwork) the one surviving craftsman, although he had
no male karigars left to fulfill his mushrooming orders
- refused to teach women to block print. He felt extraordinarily
threatened by the thought of women entering his all-male
bastion; and of sharing his expertise with those he'd previously
regarded as inferior. He feared, rightly, that once women
left their traditional place, they would never quietly return
to it. Their new economic strength and earning power has
changed their ability to implement their dreams and aspirations.
Even more importantly, I think, it has given them the strength
to dream. Women who had nothing, whose highest aspiration
was a husband who didn't beat them or drink away his earnings,
can today educate themselves and their children, save for
a house or a cow, invest in their daughter's future.
There is a new sense of self worth and identity. Indira-ki-maa,
Kalu-mian-kiaurath - so-and-so's mother, so-and-so's wife
- have turned into Rameshwari, Nafeesa, and Ayeeyan. Their
ability to influence the lives of their families and community
has altered and grown, and they have altered and grown with
it.
I started my talk this morning with Dhapu - a young woman
who killed herself for lack of an economic alternative.
One evening some months ago, a young activist (slightly
lit up by alcohol!) told me that it was I who should be
shot. He felt that the international situation - economically,
politically, morally - was so desperate that only total
revolution and anarchy could cure it. People like me, who
suggested that there were other non-violent alternatives,
were (in his opinion, the real villains and deceivers).
A month ago, coincidentally, I celebrated my 51st birthday
a stone throw away from the site, where India exploded its
nuclear bombs. I was there only a week or so earlier - in
villages on the Indo Pak border in the desert, doing a 5
day design workshop with suf and sindhi bharat embroidery
women, sitting in the blazing 48 degrees heat, sand storms
blowing. The women who live there trek 30 minutes through
the burring desert sands for water. They do their fine embroideries
without the help of electricity. They are desperately poor,
unaided by any Government supports.
In the context the nuclear explosions seemed such a monstrous,
jingoistic, unnecessary ego trip for us to indulge in. Not
just in the light of the feebleness of the argument that
the nuclear option is a security safeguard - duly confounded
by the Pakistanis retaliatory blasts. Both mad and sad when
we can't even provide water and light to our people, nuclear
bombs that will wipe whole nations being propounded as a
method for world peace, the young activists defeatist anarchy,
all seem as lopsided solutions to me, as putting slow stitches
in cloth as a means of empowerment may seem to others…
Who is right? Only time and the history books will tell.
Meanwhile as long as there are Dhapus, Geetas and ADITHIs,
Dastkar continues to go on working.
Thank you for listening.
Laila
Tyabji, Chairperson of DASTKAR, a Society of Crafts and
Craftspeople strongly believes in crafts as a social, cultural
and economic force of enormous strength and potential. Working
with over 100 grass-roots producer groups all over India,
DASTKAR provides a variety of support services such as marketing
to traditional artisans, especially women.
For the Last 20 years, Laila has worked with the chikan
workers of SEWA Lucknow, kasuti embroiderers in Karnataka,
the Mithila folk painters of Bihar, leather craftsmen in
Kutch, amongst others. Two of her most exciting projects
have been creating new employment opportunities through
craft for communities displaced by the creation of the Ranthambore
Tiger Reserve, and the Bajara tribals made homeless by the
1994 earthquake in Latur.
Laila also writes regularly on craft, design and social
issues. In the intervals of travel and work, she reads,
cooks, and embroiders.
