Jasleen Dhamija, Jyotindra Jain, Ritu Kumar and Rahul Jain: in conversation with Monisha Ahmed and Mayank Mansingh Kaul.

THE TRAJECTORY OF SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIELD OF TEXTILES in India has been shaped by many individuals since the early 1950s. Their pioneering work has contributed to different aspects of the larger ecology of handcraftsmanship. In the following series of conversations, we focus on the journeys and thoughts of four remarkable individuals--Jasleen Dhamija, Jyotindra Jain, Ritu Kumar and Rahul Jain. Each comes from a different set of approaches to the study, policy formulation and design of Indian textiles. While their work has diverged, it has also integrated at many levels and brought them on common platforms, bound by a relentless commitment to excel and support Indian handcrafted textiles. Here, they reflect on the environment when they started their professional careers and the challenges they faced. They also look forward to a future for the heritage and continuing traditions they have influenced so greatly.

* Jasleen Dhamija worked closely with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in the early years after Independence when government institutions for the support of the handcraft sector were first formed. A vanguard for the research and revival of the arts in the country, she has travelled extensively in a career spanning six decades, and been involved in policy formulation, design and product development, ensuring stable and sustainable markets for crafts. She was the Chairman of the Committee for Handlooms Development for the 12th Five Year Plan, initiated in 2012. Author and editor of several publications on Indian textiles, she continues to curate and write about the subject from contemporary perspectives.

* Jyotindra Jain is probably best known for setting up the Crafts Museum and initiating the Arts and Aesthetics course at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), both in New Delhi. He is a historian of Indian art and culture, and a museologist with particular interests in India's folk and ritual arts, and popular culture. During his distinguished career, he has been the Director of the Crafts Museum, Dean of the School of Aesthetics at JNU and Member-Secretary at the IGNCA. He is currently involved with the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi. He has authored and edited numerous publications on his varied subjects of interest.

* Ritu Kumar is a leading Indian fashion designer and textile revivalist. From the 1980s onwards, she has been closely involved in innovating with Indian handcrafted textiles for contemporary apparel design and fashion accessories. Her Indian and ethnic bridal-wear brand Ritu Kumar has branched into a ready-to-wear brand in the last decade called Label, and together they comprise a chain of around 45 stores in the country. She is the author of Costumes and Textiles of Royal India (1999), and is currently the Chairperson of the All India Handloom Board, Government of India.

* Rahul Jain is a textile designer and historian who lives and works in New Delhi. He runs a workshop of traditional Indian drawlooms in Varanasi, which weave samite, lampas and velvet textiles modelled on historical Indian, Iranian and Ottoman silks. He has written and published extensively on historical and contemporary Indian textiles. A nominee for The Jameel Prize 3, he is currently associated with the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, the Mehrangarh Museum Trust in Jodhpur, and Jnana-Pravaha in Varanasi.

Jasleen Dhamija

MA/MMK: You have worked almost since the time of Independence in the field of textiles, reviving practices and innovating, bringing about policy changes and implementing planning strategies in the country. What were the crucial factors at this time facing the textile sector? And what were some of the important steps that the government took in that early phase?

JD: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was involved with the preservation and development of textiles, as well as other crafts, even before Independence. She would organize handloom exhibitions at the All India Congress meetings and meet with craftspeople to find out their difficulties. So it was only natural that after Independence, Nehru brought her in and made her the Chairperson of the All India Handicrafts and Handlooms Board.

When the Board began functioning, there was no experience of this sector, nor was there any information on employment and production. In fact, the craft community was marginalized and their situation was dire. Many of us felt a sense of despair and thought that unless we started working immediately on the development of crafts, their fate was uncertain. At the same time, craftspeople were disadvantaged and discriminated against; they lived on the edges of their villages.

We went from village to village meeting with craftspeople, researching and documenting, seeing what we could salvage, setting up training programmes with, in some cases, the last surviving exponents of the craft. We also studied textiles in museum collections.

The government was supportive, especially state governments, but still funding was difficult and meagre. Government and the economists of the Planning Commission felt that there was no future and we were being sentimental. But the Gandhians saved us; they encouraged our work and saw it as having a lot of potential. Nehru also supported us--he realized this had an impact on the development of the non-formal sector and was important to sustain the non-farm sector in the rural area and the large urban craft sector.

Kamaladevi worked on multiple levels--she not only worked at reviving crafts but also set up policies and strategies for marketing, finance, credit and technology. She developed administrative structures in the government. This was the foundation she created and I had the good fortune to join her in 1954.

MA/MMK: What are some of the fundamental shifts you see from the policy perspective from then to now?

JD: When we first started, the Handicrafts and Handlooms Board was a single entity. In 1953, it was divided between Handlooms and Handicrafts--the former referred to handwoven fabric only; the latter included high quality brocades and weaves as well as decorative work such as block-printing, embroidery, zardosi. Those of us who worked with the Board didn't agree to this division. The largest number of people were involved with the handloom sector, but the handicraft sector seemed to get more emphasis. Even today this happens. In fact, Gira Sarabhai [her family were mill owners and she was instrumental in setting up the Calico Museum], who also took an interest in textile development, was of the opinion that the government should only concentrate on the more elaborate weaves and decorative textiles and leave the development of the plain weaves to the mills. We did not agree with her.

Have people changed? Not really. Government support was certainly there but the funds were hard to get. At the same time, Kamaladevi had been an important leader of the freedom movement and had been greatly respected by leaders throughout the country. On the Independence of the country, most of her colleagues were chief ministers and they gave her full support. Within a year, she set up Advisory Boards, Marketing Boards, Emporia and State Design Centres throughout India. The Industries Departments had a separate section to look after this sector. The Planning Commission set up a separate Advisory Committee for development of small-scale cottage industries.

Pupul Jayakar had the support of Morarji Desai, who had appointed her as the Chairperson of the Handlooms Board. She set up Weavers Service Centres in the different regions and they made tremendous contributions. In addition, she organized international exhibitions, which created a market for quality textiles, involving young designers such as Martand Singh who made tremendous contributions to the revival of textiles.

MA/MMK: What were the realities of working on the ground in the early years? The realities are very different now--what do you think has been the key factor(s) that led to this change?

JD: We found that many of the textiles which had a market in India, as well as all over the world, had disappeared or were on the verge of disappearance. For instance, block-printing which employed a large number of people was adversely affected by both the import of Manchester printed cloth and the printed cloth from mills in India. Further, the Second World War had broken the trade links and the printers faced unemployment. We collected whatever blocks we could find. A special effort was made to go to all the old printing centres in Gujarat, in Madhya Pradesh, in Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and also in southern India. We initiated schemes with designers like Riten Mazumdar, Kokila Mawani, Nelly Sethna, Rajeev Sethi, Ritu Kumar, S. Sengupta, Gosto Kumar and many others--all of whom had made a tremendous contribution towards this revival.

We worked with other textile traditions--from jamdani to patola and kalamkari. If we had not worked on the revival of these and other textiles at that stage, we would have lost them all. In Banaras, we had a special scheme for the revival of the traditional designs because master-weavers had been influenced by new designs they had acquired when they had gone to London for the Great Exhibition. They came back with the free samples of bathroom tiles and wallpaper! And then they introduced these motifs into the brocades. The old traditional patterns of shikargah, butidar, jalidar, minakari ... were not to be seen. We worked with the nakshabands and revived the old patterns.

For instance, we tried to revive Baluchar in Murshidabad but failed. Then we brought the Baluchar samples to Banaras and produced them there with the help of the nakshabands. Today the Baluchars that Banaras is producing are of the quality that Bengal used to produce in the 19th century.

We also assisted in organizing technical changes. For instance, each region had its own sari style with its own size. Some were five yards long, others nine. Widths varied from 36 to 38 inches. The looms were not wide enough to weave 45 inches, which was the demand of the urban market, so we worked at changing the structure of the loom. Sometimes, in order to initiate just that change, we even had to assist in enlarging the houses where the looms were situated.

If we had not done this initial work of revival, many of these textile traditions would not exist today.

MA/MMK: From those early decades onwards, beginning with extensive travels with people like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, you have observed developments at the ground level in villages and handcraft communities across India. You have also researched and written extensively on the cultural aspects of textile traditions. What is the relationship between such scholarly work and policy according to you, and how has one such aspect of your work informed the other?

JD: Research is closely linked with development work. Unless we make an in-depth study of the different traditions, we cannot develop a programme which could be effectively implemented.

From the very beginning, when we started the work in the different regions, we used to study the gazetteer and get information which had been collected by the British civil servants. These were useful in studying the origins. Kamaladevi had also met the heads of important temples to request them to initiate some of the craft traditions. She saw the Nathdwara pichwais kept by the temple trust and met the old painters, and with the help of the master-painter Kirpal Singh Shekhawat re-introduced the traditional mineral colours and revived the tradition. She took the advice of the important heads of temple trusts and saw old temple saris. She worked with Vaidyanatha Sthapati and his son V. Ganapati, who were responsible for starting the traditional School of Architecture, Sculpture and Art, Mahabalipuram. Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur, was persuaded to lend samples of old prints of the royal ateliers from the City Palace Museum and with the help of Surjit Sahay, who headed the Design Crafts Centre, these patterns were revived. This was the beginning of the fine quality printing of Sanganer. Research has been the base on which the development programme was built.

MA/MMK: You were Chairman of the Committee for Handlooms Development for the 12th Five Year Plan. What are some of the significant aspects of the government's approach to this sector, and what are your views on these?

JD: The government has encouraged this sector, but has also put hurdles in its path. Take for instance the introduction of the powerloom. The decline of the textile industry in Gujarat and Bombay led to the development of the powerloom and it has been given a great deal of support by the government. This has adversely affected the handloom. What has happened in some places is that the powerloom has taken the place of the handloom and its products are sold in some places as handloom--it would take a real expert to discern the difference. This has been a tremendous blow to the handloom weavers. We have been fighting against this. The government has been asked to introduce a marking for powerloom cloth, which has not been done before. They have introduced a mark for handloom products but the mark has been used by the powerlooms in some areas. We are up against large private industries so this task is difficult.

Unfortunately, the government believes that the handloom sector is not economical and does not need to be protected. In a sense what has happened is that the highly developed ornate textiles have survived remarkably well, but the simple yardage material, the kind used in single-coloured saris, dhotis, turbans--the bulk of which used to be made of handloom--has diminished in scale of production. With that, we have lost the very fine textures which distinguished the handloom and created a large market for the discerning buyer.

MA/MMK: Looking forward, where do you see the success story of these textiles?

JD: I think in the handloom sector, in the handicraft sector, we have lost somewhere but we have also gained a lot elsewhere. It remains an industry that employs over 30 million people, and impacts their livelihood at many different levels. In many cases, the quality of textiles has not deteriorated. At the recent Tree of Life exhibition at Bikaner House in Delhi, we saw the work of Niranjan Guruppa Chetty's son, an old kalamkari artist. His work is as fine as that done by artists in the 17th and 18th centuries. It makes me think back, that if Kamaladevi had not revived the Kalahasti kalamkari, if we had not persuaded Guruppa's grandfather and father to run the apprentice training centre before the industry died out completely, we would have lost that art. Today, thousands of kalamkari artists earn a good income and they have enriched the repertoire of kalamkari designs.

Kamaladevi had gone and found the last of the dyers in Machilipatnam and persuaded Mr Naidu, who ran a kalamkari cooperative society there, to revive the colours of the region. She followed this up by encouraging Nelly Sethna, the wonderful designer from Bombay, to travel to the place and dig out the old samples, the old blocks and revive them. Had it not been for this, the kalamkari tradition which now employs over a lakh of people would not have been in existence today.

I can give you many examples like these in the textile field. Look at the work that is being done in Kashmir. The kani shawl, which we thought was finished, was then revived by the dedicated work of concerns such as Kashmir Loom. There are so many activities carried out by NGOS, who have also encouraged the master-weavers to evolve into successful entrepreneurs, and many are running successful businesses. If initiatives had not been taken by Kamaladevi, Pupul and their proteges in the early stages to carry out this development work, this would not have been possible. Today India has the largest variety of textiles in the world, and the finest quality of handspun and handworked textiles.

Jyotindra Jain

MA/MMK: You are a curator, historian, educator and institution builder--what have been some of the common concerns that have interested you through all these roles?

JJ: Since there were no predetermined common concerns for the different kinds of institutions I worked with, let me talk about my experimental approaches and methods of work that I used at these places. My first assignment in India was to set up a Museum of Folk Art and Culture of Gujarat at Ahmedabad in 1977. I had seen the cliched orientalistic representation of Indian objects in Western museums and was apprehensive of the stillborn, colonial model of museum-making in India, especially the classification of cultural objects into random and overlapping categories of art, craft, design, ethnography, classical, folk, religious, secular, masterpiece and primitive, amongst others. So I was thinking about an alternative methodology of putting together a collection for the new museum in the post-Independence era, with a fresh understanding of the cultural and social rooting of the objects as these passed from an imaginary tradition to contemporaneity in a continuum. I approached the sponsors, requesting them to avoid excessive buying of stray objects from art dealers, but instead, to let me travel across Gujarat, looking at markers of regional and communal identities while observing nuanced differences from one cultural milieu to another, visiting local fairs and festivals, observing the habitat in its entirety, photographing all these situations and collecting for the museum from the users themselves. This allowed me to fracture the conventional method of establishing vague and fictional identifications of museum objects. I documented the living culture of almost all the major communities of Gujarat through first-hand contact and then sat down to curate the museum galleries. The narrative of display of objects followed a community-wise grouping while taking into account the broader regional traits as well as how they encountered and adapted to change. I felt that the framing of each object in its social, spatial and temporal context gave more meaning to it.

As for my role as an educator, I had different concerns in mind. Setting up the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2001 was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. As Professor and the first Dean, along with a wonderful team of brilliant colleagues, I had the challenging task of defining the objectives, drafting an innovative syllabus, setting the criteria for recruitment of students, and planning a methodology for teaching. After nearly six months of deliberations, we decided to replace the conventional discipline of "art history" with a broader stream of "visual studies", which took cognizance of the fact that the making of art in any era comprised a convergence of multiple streams of inter-visuality. To strengthen the spirit of the idea, I taught a course on "Indian Popular Visual Culture" based on the mass-produced printed imagery of the 19th and 20th century to examine their role in the "visual construction of the social" in the fast-transforming India of that time. Similarly, the course dealing with theatre, music and dance was construed as "Performance Studies". A separate wing of "Cinema Studies" was envisaged at the planning stage but was introduced a little later. The three streams were seen as interconnected disciplinary practices and the students could choose in the first year any of the courses across streams, while specializing in one of them later in their course. This fresh approach has made the school most unique and forward-looking, thanks now to an expanded faculty of astute academics.

MA/MMK: Engaging with living traditions was most strongly reflected in your work at the Crafts Museum. How did you conceptualize and curate the spaces here, and think of its mandate?

JJ: The perception that I developed during those two years of travel in one cultural region in Gujarat provided me with a different perspective on Indian folk culture and continued to guide me during my work of setting up the Crafts Museum, from 1984 onwards. I soon realized that here the category of "handicraft" was construed as one undifferentiated holdall. It simultaneously included the mass manufacture of utilitarian objects by professional craftspersons, such as jewellery, furniture, utensils; women's domestic ritual arts such as Madhubani or Warli painting; storytellers' scrolls and dowry embroideries. Many of these were highly innovative and individualistic works of folk art, reflecting a conscious departure from the repetitive traditional manufactures and a definite desire to echo personal and social predicaments. Emphasis was on preservation and revival of tradition as a marker of the nation's identity. As in the case of the Gujarat Folk Art Museum, at the Crafts Museum too, I first thought of creating community and region-based clusters of objects within a broad thematic area of a gallery rather than isolating single objects as imaginary embodiments of an entire cultural category. At the Crafts Museum, I had the opportunity to observe how the craftspersons and folk artists were negotiating the inherited tradition and the new space of the changing contemporary world around them. To bring this newly emergent space into the orbit of the museum, I curated the exhibition Other Masters in 1998.

MA/MMK: Other Masters was a seminal point in your professional life; can you share some more about this?

JJ: I joined the Crafts Museum at a time when the government's emphasis was on salvaging and reviving dying Indian traditions, and the entire machinery was geared towards mass production for marketing. On the other hand, there were artists like Ganga Devi, Jangarh Singh Shyam, Neelamani Devi, Jivya Soma Mashe among others, who walked a different individualistic path. Their individuality and reflection on their personal as well as contemporary social and political predicament led me to curate the path-breaking exhibition Other Masters at the Crafts Museum in 1998, with an enlarged version shown in Paris at the Musee du Quai Branly in 2010.

The examples of what inspired me to curate Other Masters include visual depictions of police leading away handcuffed tribais, or the Hindu god of death, Yamaraj, being shown as a policeman wearing a bullet-belt over his shoulders, in the painted scrolls of the Santal creation myth. There were several instances of tribal representations of insurrectionary encounters with modes of governance: Jivya Soma Mashe recalling images from the Warli tribal community's collective memory of a railway line cutting ruthlessly across his village, fragmenting families, fields and rivulets; or Jangarh Singh Shyam, the renowned Pardhan Gond artist, transforming the community's fables, myths and legends into a plethora of images mediated by references from the image world of the Other--the urban world he had entered--"a place from where to speak". Like these examples, there were the works of many other contemporary folk and tribal artists who were dealing with issues of land rights, ownership and belonging.

In the last several years since the Other Masters exhibition, I have become more conscious of the historical perspective of visual representations of tribal and rural communities in photography, calendars, posters, postcards and Bollywood films. These representations speak to the specific historical and continuing othering of communities. It is this sense of otherness that has been at the core of some of the visual expressions of the tribal and rural society. The sense of otherness felt by the social groups themselves, and the visual narrative of their objectification in photography, museum dioramas, calendars and cinema, charts out a complexly mediated field that served as the opening section of the exhibition in Paris. Here, from the essentializing colonial visual representations of anthropometry and ethnography to re-sexed images of bare-chested tribal women in postcards and calendars to song-and-dance sequences from Bollywood films, the exoticization of the imaginary tribal world was mapped out with specific examples.

MA/MMK: In the absence of a museum dedicated to Indian textiles in the country, how do you see the documentation and research on the subject moving forward?

JJ: It is not that there is a complete absence of textile museums in the country--we have the legendary Calico Museum in Ahmedabad; in Delhi, the Crafts Museum has a large wing dedicated to textiles; the National Museum has a good collection of historical textiles and the Sanskriti Foundation has a small but representative collection. And amongst private collections, there is the Tapi Collection in Surat and Mumbai. These collections formidably represent the textile traditions of India.

From my 35-year experience with textiles in museums, I feel that we need to reverse the ratio of displayed and reserve collections. For reasons of conservation, all textiles should be in storage/visual storage and every year a couple of special thematic exhibitions should be held for public viewing for a limited period. Nevertheless, the storage/visual storage should become the main centres of activity--backed by easy public access, research and conservation.

Our museums have become "display-lighting-caption" places. In the era of new media technology, it is crucial that they develop exhaustive digital archives of research and visual material around the collections. Efforts need to be made to obtain digital copies of images of textiles in other collections, to continuously update bibliographies of the published material, and to gather information from weavers, dyers and embroiderers through fieldwork to add to the archives.

It is an old museum habit to foreground historical material (the salvage paradigm) while scornfully neglecting contemporary developments. In the seven decades since Independence, we have seen a massive revival of extinct traditions of textiles along with development of new designs combining the traditional ethos with contemporary Indian aesthetic sensibility. Our museums have shown no interest in the vibrant scenario of contemporary Indian textile design and fashion. As early as the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Crafts Museum had pioneeringly organized two fashion shows by Ritu Kumar and Muzaffar Ali respectively, representing new developments in Indian textiles and fashion--raising many an eyebrow and questions of whether this was really a museum's role.

What is most neglected in our textile museums is the representation of the social, political and trade histories of our textiles--for example, histories of forced indigo plantation and exploitation of the farmers in the 19th century; the aesthetic and commercial impact of the German synthesization of indigo in the 1870s; the boost in the Afro-British ivory and slave trade through the export of "Rubbishi Indian Cotton" to Britain and onwards to Africa; European aesthetic and moral sartorial concerns influencing the modern urban sari as fashionable attire combined with a blouse to become a version of the Western gown; the massive Indo-British mill textile trade eventually leading to large-scale cultivation of cotton all over India; the rise of khadi and handloom on the one hand, and on the other the mushrooming of textile mills and powerlooms in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. I understand that a new project of developing a museum of Indian textiles in one of the defunct mills in Mumbai is in the offing. I hope some of these concerns will be addressed in there.

Ritu Kumar

MA/MMK: "Ritu Kumar" is a major Indian fashion brand, synonymous with the country's diverse handcrafted textile traditions. You have, in previous interviews and articles, spoken about the opportunities that the craft sector offers and the development of your work over the years. Could you share with us, however, what was the environment for working in Indian textiles when you first got interested in the field?

RK: When I started in the late '60s, there were hardly any books on the subject, no interesting stores and retail spaces, and very little by way of the idea of "fashion" as we know it in India today--there was practically no reference to start from. People like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar had done the groundwork to lay the foundations of craft revival in the country; and people like Mapu [Martand Singh], Rajeev [Sethi] and I, among others, comprised the second generation of individuals going out into the field to research and learn about textile traditions--in a sense we were like barefoot doctors going out into uncharted territory.

At the same time, we were the first generation after Independence that had not really experienced colonial rule directly, and by the time we grew up, all the imports from Manchester in England that had flooded the Indian market before Independence had stopped. We came from backgrounds where our parents were involved with the freedom struggle and so we could relate to that previous culture of swadeshi, of boycott of foreign goods, of Gandhi. We wore khadi, but there was no talk of it being the "fashion" or fashionable. We were interested in the crafts of our country, the little that had survived. I remember when I first went to Farrukhabad to study block-printing, I was lucky to find a family of block-makers who still had their great-grandfathers' blocks that were more than 175 years old! We printed with these old blocks and made new ones as well, inspired by them. Most of the other printers and their families had burnt their blocks as firewood.

MA/MMK: You must have faced many challenges?

RK: well, not only were we discovering our crafts for the first time in such an intense manner after Independence, we were also changing a mindset in this country: by then there had taken place a complete elimination of Indian design, and references of good taste were predominated by English aesthetics. We had no confidence in our inherent Indian sense of aesthetics and design, or anything indigenous for that matter. Anything Indian was considered old-fashioned. That was an initial challenge. Then the government did us the biggest favour indirectly--for almost 40 years, we were not allowed to import anything. We had to make everything we required, we had to improvise, and an organic handwriting of textiles and clothes began to slowly evolve. For instance, the trend of handmade cloth buttons in garments emerged during that time because we did not even have access to good quality machine-made buttons and zippers within the country. Today you may take it for granted, but you are probably living in the only country in the world that makes and wears its own indigenous textiles to such a large extent. And that this has not been prescribed by any religious or social order means that such choices are made consciously and intentionally, despite access to everything from mill-made fabrics to ready-to-wear imported garments.

There was a time in the late '80s when international high-street labels were beginning to come into India and we thought we'd lose Indian textiles and traditions again. At that point multinationals were getting very strong and aggressive in their marketing, and anybody who was not wearing what they were prescribing was considered "not happening". But fortunately that did not happen entirely--consumers still frequented shops like Fabindia and continued to wear Indian textiles. I feel we are sitting in one of the most unusual countries in the world and we should celebrate that.

MA/MMK: Why do you think this phenomenon is so strong in India?

RK: I think it is because of the women of this country. Changes in men's clothing were so significant under colonial rule that their impact has left a majority of urban Indian men wearing Western clothes largely--safari suits, white-collared shirts and so on. Women however, continued to have an affinity for, interest in and understanding of Indian textiles. Look at today's designers in India; most of them use Indian textiles and traditional techniques, and they are all largely selling to women.

MA/MMK: You are at present Chairperson of the All India Handloom Board. What have been the main concerns in the handloom sector that you have tried to address through this? And what is the relevance of such institutions in a rapidly changing craft fashion-design scenario in India today?

RK: The Weavers Service Centres, when they were first started by the government, worked effectively as they gave weavers, master-craftspeople and designers a common platform to interact and co-create. They played an instrumental role in significant textile-revival exercises such as Vishvakarma. With their decline in the last two decades, however, no alternative support system has come up to offer such services.

My main view, however, is that the role of the government must be to facilitate the development of broad infrastructure that can enable the craft sector, but not to get involved in aspects like design and marketing, as this is not their core expertise. I also feel that subsidies, which have become the main way of offering support to the handloom sector by the government, harm the ability of products to command the rightful price that such handmade products deserve in the market. One cannot encourage high-quality handwoven fabrics if they are sold at subsidized rates!

MA/MMK: You have been at the vanguard of the recent re-interest in Banaras handlooms. There have been many visible results of this, with Fashion Weeks in India supporting initiatives from Banaras, and many younger contemporary fashion designers getting involved with hand manufacture. Since Banaras is such an important weaving centre in the country, how do you see this momentum moving forward? And what are the main areas of concern emerging from here?

RK: A better Banarasi sari has probably not been woven in this country since 1890! Banaras is certainly an important weaving centre but somehow we have not seen innovations in design from here as we have seen from handloom centres in Bengal and Odisha. There has been a dilution in the original designs that Banaras was renowned for, in the quality of the yarn, in the quality of the gold zari that is used for brocading; the Banarasi brocade isn't considered anymore the classic textile it once was. We have to work at bringing that aesthetic back to Banaras.

And that is what we have been doing in our recent Banaras Project. The biggest resource of textiles we have in this country are collections in our museums. We need to use those to understand how these saris were made in the past, to understand not only the colours and designs but also the very yarn that the fabric was woven with. I have been showing the weavers I collaborate with these resources--through visuals or actual pieces, because touch is equally important. Currently, we are working on a line of saris taking all this into consideration and the first pieces are ready and look like they are worth a million dollars ! At the same time we are also ensuring better pay scales for the artisans, improving working conditions and infrastructure. This is the only way to attract artisans' children to these crafts. India is emerging as the craft centre of the world and it will succeed only if the craftspeople are part of the growth story.

You have to be very humble about working with craftspeople--you can change the colour or the design but you cannot intrinsically change the process of the craft. Also, your yardstick for innovation has to be different.

MA/MMK: The Indian wedding is said to be one of the prime economic earners for fashion designers in India--what has been the effect of this on handcrafted textiles?

RK: Well, for the saris we are currently making in Banaras--if the wedding market in India finds them aspirational, then I don't think Banaras will have a problem. I don't think we are short of consumers in this country but at the same time we have to think about how to sustain the crafts. We cannot only address a bridal market. There are certain crafts that do not fall in its purview that also have to be sustained. Take some of today's young designers in India who are working with local crafts: they are addressing a niche market of non-bridal apparel, where the quantities are small enough to allow local artisans to work with them.

MA/MMK: In recent years, the Ritu Kumar brand bas seen significant shifts--expansion into a pret sub-brand called Label, Western-wear collections and important advertising campaigns with a contemporary edge. At the same time, the fashion industry is changing fast with e-commerce and online presence becoming necessary for brands. How do you see your work evolving in the years to come in this light?

RK: We are sitting in a country that is the biggest resource of textiles in the world. This has a deep historical legacy, with the potential to inform innovation for the future. The world, for instance, has been copying the paisley motif--which was originally inspired from India--for centuries. To some extent it may be quite unrealistic to try and translate an intensely handcrafted textile into a pret line, but what we can translate is a part of the technique and a part of the aesthetics. This is most important, and has guided us in our design directions for Label.

Rahul Jain

MA/MMK: You studied economics and were working at the World Bank in Washington when you first got interested in textiles. Can you share with us your motivations and questions through these early years of your journey in textiles?

RJ: Unlike most other people involved with contemporary textiles, my interest in this field came, fundamentally, from handweaving. The most important impetus was the act of making itself, and how handmaking invests the object with a priceless, and sometimes ennobling and transcendental quality, involving as it does a highly elemental, a primordial engagement of the human body. I was fascinated by this. This process is closest, as I see it, to dhyan, to sadhana, in Indian traditions--ways of transcending real time and space through meditation and dedicated practice.

In the early 1980s, when I started studying historical Indian textiles in Western museums, my engagement with them was not for their "Indianness" at all. The textiles that I first encountered were brocaded patkas (sashes worn at medieval Indian courts), and my first response was that these were not textiles but jewellery. The very particular use of metallic thread had transformed them into something more than, and palpably beyond, fabric--something new, something "other". This ability of the hand to enable one medium to become another was what drew me to them. There was the possibility within a material to escape itself and its confines and become something else altogether--quite akin, again, to the freedom and release of a meditative state that I spoke of earlier, where this allows for a certain transcendence of a physical limit and boundary. To call these concerns conceptual does them a disservice ... after all it is the physical body that is the primal site for the act of making. At a certain level, in a certain moment, the creation of material art may not be very different in the human experience from the production of an abstract art such as music.

As I studied more historical textiles, I began to observe that Indian dyers, weavers, embroiderers and printers have excelled in transforming the ordinary--it is easier to compare the finest Indian muslins with air, or dew, or water, than to the altogether more routine material nature of the cotton fibre from which they are made. Indian chintzes were glazed and calendered to such an extent that they sometimes resembled the highly finished pages of painted manuscripts or the fine Chinese porcelain from which they partly derived their floral imagery in the first place. Early Kashmir shawls were woven with pashmina wool, but to such a degree of refinement even in a complex tapestry weave, that they appeared to be made from gossamer silk.

Perhaps equally importantly, I was struck by how textiles as built structures were once more pervasive than formal architecture itself ... cloth forming entire landscapes ... a far cry from its very restricted use today, almost entirely in the form of garments to clothe the body.

Despite the enormous innovations in modern textiles, somehow mechanized processes cannot quite capture these less obvious concerns and sensibilities connected to historical textiles. Exploring such possibilities in handmade textiles then, I would say, has remained a central concern in my work for the last 30 years.

MA/MMK: Your first major project was Minakar at the National Museum in Delhi in 1997. How did this reflect such enquiries?

RJ: The intention with this project was the redevelopment of Mughal-style patkas that had not been made in the country for the last 150 years. The looms that had traditionally made them, no longer existed, and it took us four years to simply re-create and re-master them. The materials and yarns that were used had also to be redeveloped. To reflect their quality of being highly metallic products, the term minakari--enamel-work--largely done on metallic objects, offered a fitting description. To place the makers of these works at the centre, we named the exhibition Minakar or The Enameller. Incredibly, when the first National Master-Craftsman Award was given to our weaver who first wove these, it was given for inlaid metalware and not for textiles! It was the best validation of the idea that had preoccupied me during those early years. The first art collector to acquire one of our pieces responded in the same manner--"but this is jewellery, not cloth"--when she was shown one of our pieces on the loom.

The contemporary parallels to such minakari textiles, from Paithan and Varanasi, belonged firmly in the realm of cloth ... they looked like routine fabric versions of inlaid metalware, just as one would expect. They simply did not have the transcending sensibility, the surpassing material quality, of the historical pieces that I had first seen. And to me, this is the difference between what constitutes artisanship and industry, and which I largely see as the difference between art and an industrial product. In India, we have a small circle of artisanship, and a large industry of textiles. The Minakar brocades, thus, seemed to me to offer themselves as an art, where art offers the possibility of transcending a medium and also of transforming the maker himself.

MA/MMK: Two interesting projects you later worked on were an exhibition on khadi in 2002, and archiving and curating the collection of textiles and garments of the Hyderabad Nizams in 2006-07 towards a permanent display. How did these carry forward your ideas?

RJ: The project Khadi was an important moment because it led to the realization that much of what constituted khadi in contemporary India was not true khadi at all because the human hand did not touch the material in the first place--it was hand-woven to a large extent, but not made of handspun yam. Handspinning in India has become so limited that most cotton yarns that are used for what is called khadi today are made through a semi-mechanized process. If you saw the exhibition at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Delhi, however, you realized you were in visceral contact with handspun, handwoven fabric ... the installations were like a series of skins you could temporarily inhabit. When fabric becomes skin, it is inseparable from the human body, and its tactility achieves primary importance. I did not see it as any different from what my own work had otherwise reflected. One visually-impaired child who had come for the Khadi exhibition described one fabric as a dry pipal leaf; another child described a fabric as the wings of a dragonfly. They had taken a leap in understanding, otherwise difficult for most people today, with an ability that was innate, and also supremely honed.

In the process leading up to the exhibition, we had recreated 108 varieties of khadi across the country, and my essay in the accompanying catalogue merely brought out the facts of the weaving and technical processes involved. We had also, within the catalogue, included the names and contact details of the weavers with whom we had worked, so that this could become a resource for those interested in working with khadi. We saw soon, however, that many of those fabrics were available in degraded versions within a year or two, which led to an altogether different kind of idea and commerce than we had intended. In the one and half years of that project, however, I began to learn handspinning with a takli, or drop-spindle. After almost 20 years of being moved by the idea of handweaving as a transformational process, I realized how equally elemental, and meditative, the act of spinning is too.

With the Nizams' collections in Hyderabad, the surviving textile materials and garments focused on metallic embroidery from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The way the embroidery was done, however, evoked strongly a sculptural approach to form and image. The metallic elements were so densely massed together that they created unbroken metallic plaques, further shaped and moulded to suggest a three-dimensionality that we do not see in contemporary embroideries where the surface embellishment is far flatter and closer to drawing on fabric with a needle. The skills involved in creating the older embroideries reflected a timeless preoccupation in Indian art with deeply dimensional sculpture, its plasticity, its concern with volume and palpable weight--the zardozi embroiderers were trying to approximate, in fabric, what traditionally in India a metal-carver or sculptor would have done.

MA/MMK: Having written ten books, and curated several projects with similar concerns, do you find that your interests are today changing?

RJ: It is important for me to state that the textile medium itself is not of central concern to me. I am interested in all media, most particularly in what I see as their essential congruence and the creative possibilities that might exist at their interface. And so, as I said earlier, I'm interested in what a medium is not. When does architecture not remain architecture, when does cloth not remain cloth.... Having said that, much of what I have had the chance and privilege to pursue has been truly life-changing. The books I have chosen to write have been written with a very clear purpose of sharing a familiar medium with a larger number of people, hoping to provoke at least some into deeper study of the medium and, most particularly, its fascinating edges.

Caption: 1: Tree of Life by kalamkari artist Jonnalagadda Niranjan Chetty, from the Tree of Life exhibition, 2016. Natural dyes on cotton cloth; 190.5 x 94 cm. Courtesy Bikaner House, New Delhi.

Caption: 2: Detail of kani shawl with motif of gulabdar (rose) flowering plants, exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum's The Fabric of India exhibition, London, 2015. Hand-woven pashmina; 115 x 230 cm. Photograph: Qamoos M. Bukhari. Courtesy Kashmir Loom.

Caption: 3: Detail of sainchi showing both a train and a caravan of camels, early 20th century. Sainchi are pictorial embroideries created by women in East Punjab and Haryana which mirror their life and beliefs. Silk thread on hand-woven cotton; 139 x 212 cm. Collection Jasleen Dhamija. Photograph Himman Dhamija.

Caption: 4: Detail of a painted scroll depicting the Creation Myth of the Santhal tribe, displayed at the exhibition Other Masters of India at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, 2010. The painting is remarkable for its depiction of the contemporary social and political predicaments of tribais, for whom policemen are divine authority incarnate. Photograph: Jyotindra Jain.

Caption: 5: A remnant of the flourishing Indo-British textile trade in the 19th century, showing an orientalistic mill label pasted on a fabric imported into India from a Lancashire mill. Photograph: Jyotindra Jain.

Caption: 6: A swatch folder of machine-made Parsi gara borders produced in Germany in the early 20th century for export to India. Photograph: Jyotindra Jain.

Caption: 7: Detail of a khadi sari with the inscription "amaar desh" woven in the border, reflecting the fervour of the Independence movement. Photograph: Jyotindra Jain.

Caption: 8: Ritu Kumar extended the revival story to leather with a collection called Karabagh. the designs were created in the studio, stamped on scale on leather bags with authentic motifs from the region and then hand-painted by women craftsmen in vegetable colours in the workshops of Santiniketan. Matching scarves were also hand-printed. Courtesy Ritu Kumar.

Caption: 9: Ritu Kumar's zardozi revival established itself through erly exhibitions in Jehangir Art Gallery, Lalit Kala Akademi and the Festivals of India held all over the world. From this emerged a srong bridal traditional line which has gone on to become the brand's signature. Seen here is Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra in a zardozi creation from the early 2000s. Courtesy Ritu Kumar.

Caption: 10: Ready-to-wear garments from the Spring/Summer 2016 collection for Label, aimed at a younger market. Courtesy Ritu Kumar.

Caption: 11: Detail of a minakar shawl, shown at the Minakar exhibition, Delhi, 1996. Woven silk and gilt thread; 90 x 242 cm. Courtesy Rahul Jain.

Caption: 12: Detail of minakar fabric based on the shikargah theme. Banaras, 2003. Woven silk and silver gilt thread. Courtesy Rahul Jain.

Caption: 13: Detail of embroidery designed by Charu Wadhwa, inspired by the sculptural tradition of metallic surface embellishment seen in historical court textiles in India. Courtesy Devi Art Foundation.

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Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

Article Details

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Title Annotation:	CONVERSATIONS
Author:	Ahmed, Monisha; Kaul, Mayank Mansingh
Publication:	Marg, A Magazine of the Arts
Geographic Code:	9INDI
Date:	Jun 1, 2016
Words:	8113
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Topics:	Textile industry International economic relations