Craft Pride

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I wonder if you or your children have ever spent any time watching Indian crafts people at work.  Maybe if you are from a rural area where handicraft workers are in production then perhaps you will have glimpsed weavers preparing their warps, or you may have seen women sitting in front of their houses doing intricate embroidery.  But as many people have left villages to find work in cities it is likely that fewer and fewer people actually see Indian crafts people at work.

A couple of weeks ago we invited some of the craftsmen and women who supply MESH to Delhi to promote their skills and meet buyers come and demonstrate their crafts outside our shop.  We arranged the event to coincide with a visit from a wholesale buyer and her designer, who was fascinated to see the women weaving the bags they buy from MESH.  The designer watched the weaver carefully and was shocked to find that when she sat to weave it was actually not at all easy.  Of course, over time she would have learned the pattern of lifting and beating and lowering but it was striking how easy the weaver made it look but how, even to an experienced textile designer, it was not at all easy to do.

That is the wonder of crafts, something as ugly as a raw papier-mâché shape pulled from a mould can become a beautiful hand-painted trinket box or coaster in the hands of a craftsman from Kashmir.  Sajad, from Care Kashmir was here with a coaster set which he painted for us to see.  There were no markings on the piece, all was done free-hand and our visitors wondered at the steady hand and artistic eye creating each piece.

We launched our own Paint-Your-Own-Bag and children and adults joined us to colour the designs printed on cotton tote bags in Kiran village near Varanasi.  There men and women with disabilities cut the bags, screen print them and then stitch them. In Kiran they paint our lovely family sets and Ms Nirmala Devi came to our demonstration to show people the skill she had learned and to encourage our young Paint-Your-Own-Bag children.

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Tariq was here from Kashmir too, doing the most intricate embroidery on a shawl which was completely covered with his hand work. One of the visitors on that open day is faculty at Indira Gandhi National Open University and she told us that they have courses on handicrafts and hoped Tariq could become a resource person.

It isn’t easy to get people to come to MESH events but I can say that those who came were happy to have done so and hopefully they left with a better sense of the wonder of the work of Indian craftsmen and women especially those with disabilities.