Craft As Entrée To Larger Historical Patterns: India In Motion

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Our historical understanding of patterns of the past have been significantly nuanced and deepened with systematic examination of visual-culture evidence; even newer methodologies and analytical approaches have begun emerging around materiality. Indian history has become especially rich in these approaches, yet one meeting ground of the visual and the material ignored, thus far – at least in terms of the relationship between colonial and independent India – is that of crafts. As this panel’s papers suggest, developments emerging from the dramatically changing craft-world reveal immensely significant socio-economic and political patterns writ large.
Jim Masselos’ examination of matchbox labels, thus far peripheral to analyses of ephemeral calendar/poster art, begins with their visual themes and fundamentally translocal nature. Both the labels and the matches themselves began as cottage industries; as production industrialized we see revealing implications in the changing practices of craft. Gyanesh Kudaisya focuses on two case-studies of innovative social experiments using crafts for survival/rehabilitation of refugees of the traumatic 1947 Partition. One served as catalyst for the state-sponsored revival of handicrafts (now indisputably recognized as a global “brand” for India); the other created a model for community development, based on craft and artisanal skills, replicated across Nehruvian India. Elaboration from these early examples of civil society-state partnerships is demonstrated in contemporary case studies around textile-craft examples discussed by Sandria Freitag. Tracing contributions from a complex of change agents located at the nexus of craft-preservation efforts and social-uplift strategies, she demonstrates that this nexus offers hope to traditional craftspeople as well as newcomers.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Sandria B. Freitag, North Carolina State University

Chair

• Anand Yang, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• Indian Matchbox Labels and the Translocal over the 20th Century - Jim Masselos, The University of Sydney

• Crafts and Skills for the Nation: Partition Refugees and Ideas of Self-Help in the Nehru Era - Gyanesh Kudaisya, National University of Singapore

• Crafting Social Uplift And Cultural Preservation: Social Entrepreneurship And Indian Textiles - Sandria B. Freitag, North Carolina State University

Discussant

• Anand Yang, University of Washington