Has the time come to admit that Indian socialism is an elitist construct? This week in Mumbai at the release of the book on Fabindia (The Fabric of Our Lives, Penguin) written by Radhika Singh, some of India’s leading hand-made people were asking themselves this question.
Not with any aggression, mind you — that would go against the multigrain and textured world-view of people steeped for decades in the finest art, aesthetics, culture and handlooms.
But the question hung in the air and in the spaces between the barrels of ikat and the baskets of organic food, as the awful truth was revealed: Fabindia, that seminal Delhi store that had been cherished for years as the capital’s best-kept secret by international economists and wives of diplomats and ferociously cultured women — had actually done the unmentionable: it had gone and joined the new economy (shock!) and multiplied itself into over 130 stores, with another coming up next to you RIGHT NOW (gasp!). Fabindia was being run like a regular business (arrgh!).
The fact that this was a matter of concern for the people gathered in that room is what fascinates me about upper-class India’s tryst with socialism: they don’t see the irony.
Remember that brilliant story of the no-nonsense Sarojini Naidu who affectionately pointed out to Mahatma Gandhi that his penchant for eating simply (fruit and nuts and dates and goat’s milk) was in fact unsustainable and that keeping the Mahatma in poverty was awfully expensive.
Much the same irony always struck me when I used to watch those alternative (and state-financed) sixties art house films about revolution and subversion by directors who thought of themselves as champions of the proletariat.
Rarely did those idealistic men realise that the people whose champions they had set themselves out to be were in fact clapping and cheering and whistling to those big overblown song and dance, lost and found schlock Bollywood melodramas produced by men who wouldn’t know ideology if it grew teeth and bit their nipples.
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The Fabindia story is in many ways the story of modern India. A young man who isn’t a socialist hasn’t got a heart, and an old man who is, hasn’t got a head.
India was young when the legendary John Bissell, who was as enamored of Indian craft as he was passionate about championing the cause of the craftsman, started Fabindia. Until he died it remained a single iconic store in Delhi’s GK 1, to which its legion of patrons would come like pilgrims to satiate their hunger for handlooms.
Today his son William presides over McFabindia. He has a head. He has transformed the business into a “lifestyle enterprise” that has followed the path of India’s disposable incomes. Up. Along the way, he’s democratised good taste, inflated the appreciation for an indigenous aesthetique and spread the cheer. More handmade available to more people; more demand, more supply; more money to the weaver and the craftsman and the karighar.
Today the boy from the BPO in Bhayander has the choice to buy a Fabindia kurta if he doesn’t want to wear Marks & Spencer. Today not only the luuvies of Lutyen’s Delhi but vast multitudes of India can share John’s passion for handloom, and participate in his dream of empowering as many craftsmen as possible.
“It seems contradictory that we pursue both profit and a social goal, but I believe that is the only way to do it,” says William. I agree.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer