Geetanjali Krishna: Elephant dung paper!

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

On the first day of Dastkaar's annual Nature Bazaar, Dilli Haat was looking bright and festive. I walked past stalls of the usual suspects, the shawls from Uttaranchal, the Dhokara work from Orissa, potters and ceramics sellers. It was great eye candy, but there seemed to be little that I hadn't seen year after year. "Why don't you make a George Bush or Shah Rukh Khan toy like this?" I petulantly asked the chap selling those antiquated toys with their familiar nodding heads. He looked up, perplexed: "But this is what we've always made!"  

This lack of innovation, I felt, was something Indian craftsmen really needed to do something about. They need crafts skills as well as entrepreneurial qualities to take their work to the next level. Just as I was thinking of all this, I saw the Haathi Chaap stall. Bright yellow and red flags fluttered in the breeze, all proudly emblazoned with the rear end of the elephant. On display were innovative stationery products, all made with elephant dung paper.

"When I asked handmade paper manufacturers to make paper with elephant dung, I encountered a lot of resistance," said Mahima Mehra (the Haathi Chaap label is her brainchild). Everyone, she said, wanted to do only what they'd always done. "Some said it was dirty work, others said it won't sell "" but fact is, most were just too chicken to innovate," she laughed. Then she met Vijendra Shekhawat, an enthusiastic but small-scale paper maker in Jaipur, who was willing to take this project on. 

Mehra and Shekhawat experimented with lots of yucky stuff "" they tried mixing dung with different fibres ("to get paper with different textures," she explained), dung from other animals ("cow dung's looking promising," she said) and natural colours ("it's a lot more complicated than using the dung of an elephant that's eaten beetroot!" she quipped). Their enthusiasm was equalled, I found, by the response they've been receiving to their interesting product during their maiden foray into the retail market. 

"Few people who come this way, pass us by without picking up at least a small souvenir of elephant dung paper," said Mehra, "we've already got one order and lots of enquiries!" This is a better response than what she expected, and certainly a lot better than the response ordinary handmade paper producers hope to get. Mehra, an exporter of handmade paper, said, "To sell a lot of handmade paper products, you need to ensure they have really unique designs (which is not easy, since it is an old market). But with ED paper (which is how they somewhat prosaically refer to elephant dung paper), people pick up little bookmarks and coasters, just for the sheer novelty value."   

As for Shekhawat, ED paper has paid off big time. "When I became the first and only manufacturer to make ED paper, my family thought it was a big risk. Handmade paper was an established market "" what if this didn't sell? Also, I'd have to wash the dung alone, nobody else wanted to do the job," he said.

Today, things are very different. The paper is being exported and there's regular work. Shekhawat has bought a house with a shed where he makes ED paper. His younger brother and two sisters are also helping him now.  

"I could have been making handmade paper for the rest of my life and made a living out of it," he said, "but I'd have remained a small paper producer forever. Instead, I'm doing something different, and discovering that there is a market for unusual products...I can't tell you how exciting this journey has been for me!"