It’s that time of the year again. After the tumult of the Commonwealth Games, India’s craft tradition is being feted at what’s arguably the country’s finest handicraft expo, Dastkar’s Nature Bazaar. Walk past the bright stalls, and you’ll see apricot oil made by Kumaon women, xylophones fashioned out of cow bells from Gujarat and jute bags made by mentally challenged children in Delhi.
“There’s such a wealth of creativity and craft in these products,” I mused to Pooja Ratnakar who, along with her sister Payal Nath, runs Kadam, an organisation that develops small and medium handicraft units in West Bengal, “but does handicraft actually provide them with viable economic opportunities?” Given that most of the craftspeople we had seen at the Bazaar primarily sold directly only here, did they manage to generate enough orders to keep them in business the entire year?
My comment set Ratnakar off, for this is exactly what has driven her to work in the handicraft sector for over a decade. As we sat under colourful tents, she told me how she and her sister (both design graduates) came to the conclusion that developing a market for Indian handicrafts was the most effective way to to enable the sector to evolve. “Initially we used to do short-term projects commissioned by INTACH, the ministry of textiles and cottage industries, and work with craftspeople across the country to develop new designs,” she said. But the results, to the duo’s dismay, were equally short term. “We would develop new products and designs but the artisans had few avenues to sell them,” she said, “this lack of adequate marketing made new design development quite unsustainable — for you can create the most wonderful new designs, but what good are they if you have nowhere to sell them?”
Kadam, which provides skill development and marketing support to craft clusters in West Bengal, grew out of this idea. “We identified clusters of villages around Kharagpur where local artisans made products with locally available raw materials such as palm wood and sabai grass. We first worked on some key areas with them — design, quality control, consistency and most important, timely deliveries,” recounted Ratnakar. The sisters found support from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, which provided them space to work out of. Today, Kadam engages 300 people (mostly women) there. “Every two months, we go to Kharagpur, work on new designs and refine existing products,” she said. Kadam also operates in two other crafts clusters in Midnapore and Raghurajpur. The artisans in Kharagpur are able to earn Rs 3,000-7,000 depending on their skills, much more than what they earn from agriculture.
“We realise that extensive marketing is the key to Kadam’s success,” said Ratnakar, “so, every year we participate in 24 exhibitions such as Dastkar all over the country.” Other than this, Kadam products, ranging from sophisticated starter plates and cheese platters to the more prosaic chapatti tongs and serving spoons, are also being sold through select retailers. “The response to these items has been very encouraging,” said Ratnakar, “perhaps because our products aren’t just artifacts to hang on the wall and forget about, they can also be functional additions to a home.”
As I watched a lady wax eloquent about a pair of wooden tongs and a ladle with a palm nut handle that she bought for her daily bowl of dal, I realised what Ratnakar had been talking about. Organisations such as Kadam enable people like us to see crafts made in a faraway village as products that we can use everyday. That’s how through exhibitions like the Nature Bazaar, these handicrafts become the bridge that connects people like them to the bewildering world of people like us …