Skilling is as old as time. We are either learning to skill ourselves for survival or for pleasure. But, the ways of the world have changed and that too, so radically that societies in India that hadn’t witnessed change, are confronted by a world they cannot comprehend — the phone being one such instrument of change. But when it comes to livelihoods, human needs, necessities and national economies, the situation is baffling. Each one of us needs to concern ourselves with these issues and address them within his/her sphere of influence and understanding.
It is precisely this that made me embark on the genre of films and focus on rural craft skills, their design and marketing and the lives of artisans. It’s been 25-odd years and I feel I have barely scratched the surface. However, I am convinced that one is on the right path, even though not all the dimensions are commercially valid and sustainable, essentially because the field is becoming top heavy with processes deployed for marketing and designing.
This need to focus on rural craft has been felt very acutely by the government for several decades. But unfortunately, this realisation has not penetrated the consciousness of the corporate sector to awaken their corporate social responsibility. Nevertheless, the effort has to be relentless. There are several levels at which we have to develop a sensitivity for the hand-made. This is a two-way process, involving evolution of the consumer mindset through exposure to crafts of their own region.
Secondly, there is a need to create a global positioning of the craft forms through museums and gift shops. The other end of the process is working on holistic craft welfare concepts in a sustainable fashion.
I was attracted to craft in many ways. And for such attractions to become lifelong and larger than life, one’s tangible and intangible heritage has to be so intertwined that it becomes almost inseparable. As a child, I was growing up in a craft-oriented city like Lucknow, or walking into old world homes in Calcutta (now Kolkata), or seeing a Ray film — and then stepping into Air India as someone responsible for creating the identity of the national carrier, through arts, crafts and culture.
I was then working on films like Umrao Jaan, crafted out of craft. In the late 1980s, I was working in Kashmir on Zooni, the 16th century poetess queen of the valley, with designer Mary McFadden as the costume designer. This was one of the greatest upgradation of Kashmiri skills in my memory.
We set up a Shah Hamadan Centre for Design Development under Mary and me and a whole team of NID designers and students. We created properties and costumes with the help of local artisans, much of which was lost to fire and vandalism. Anyway, it was an enriching experience, which my wife Meera and I applied to Lucknow and Kotwara, and it now calls for both an archive and an institution to celebrate these decades of work and preserve old references of paintings and embroideries.
Our recent efforts are directed towards a series of films on craft, Dastaan e Dastkaari. We are also organising a poetry festival on craft. While Skill India is a commendable mission, we cannot afford to lose our human resource already skilled in the age-old traditional craft, be it embroidery or weaving, to new skills because of inflation and the rising cost of living.
