Crafting Social Uplift And Cultural Preservation: Social Entrepreneurship And Indian Textiles

• In Event: Craft As Entrée To Larger Historical Patterns: India In Motion

Abstract

Civil-society and State collaborations focused on a substantive reworking of the role of crafts, along with Market contributions (especially after Economic Liberalization in the 1990s) have helped shape India’s unique global position as the world’s largest democracy as well as the most developed of the Global South’s developing nations. NGOs have played a crucial change-agent role since Independence in these partnerships, enabling the handicraft sector to not only survive but become a central signifier of India internationally. Perhaps especially in the realm of textile-crafts, however, there is a much broader taxonomy needed to locate change-agents operating within civil-society, requiring us to reach beyond NGOs to capture the dynamic animating efforts to preserve crafts and ensure sustainable livelihoods. From Central Cottage Industries (which works with traditional craftspersons to target global and internal markets, required by the State to make a profit), to NGOs like SEWA-Lucknow (which teaches numeracy and literacy along with embroidery skills to impoverished women, often Muslim, who do not come from a crafts background), to designer-run enterprises like Anokhi (that animate age-old craft techniques with contemporary designs, and have had to provide effective schooling to retain their workforce in craft villages): the interactions of all these actors may make India unique among Asian countries (even those who continue craft production for tourists and their nostalgic middle-class purchasers of “ethnic chic”). Focusing on craft to understand change over time thus suggests that the increasingly complex elaboration of civil society provides a continuity of ‘motion’ underlying the shift from colonial to independent India.

Author

• Sandria B. Freitag, North Carolina State University