The Story Behind the Stitches: Indian Women, Indian Embroideries

The Story Behind the Stitches: Indian Women, Indian Embroideries

Laila Tyabji _*

New York, June 10, 1998

Speeches and Transcripts: 1998

I am truly honored to be here, Frankly, I’m not much of a speaker! My organization, DASTKAR rather avoids seminars and conferences. India’s problems, like the country itself, are so vast. It seems more important to do something—rather than about it.

Some years ago in the mid 80s, I was doing a design workshop with a group of patchwork applique woman in a re-settlement colony outside Ahmedabad in Gujerat. 3 days into the workshop a communal riot broke out in Ahmedabad city. Arson and looting turned into mob warfare and killing and the trouble spread into the slum suburbs. The patchwork women were Muslim, and most of their husbands and fathers worked in the city. They drove bicycle rickshaws, sold vegetables and groceries on small handcarts, or were unskilled labor in factories. Now they were trapped. Those who ventured into the city were drawn into the violence, those who stayed at home forfeited their daily income.

Every day people were brought into the community center, where we sat matching colors and cutting patterns, burnt, wounded, maimed. A child’s eyes had been gouged out; the brother of one of the women had been burnt alive in his cycle rickshaw. It seemed stupid and callous to the point of crazy hubris to be sitting there making pretty patterns while people were dying—a little like Nero fidding while Rome burnt.

Nevertheless, the income the women were making from what we stitched, was the only money coming into the community. They were, quite literally, living off the patterns of circles and squares they cut and sewed. Ironically, the disregarded, decorative activity done by the women had turned out to be the life line of their families. As Ramba ben, a mirrorwork embroiderer from Banaskantha once said to me, “The lives of my family hang by the thread I embroider.”

If this is a rather sombre note on which to begin a talk on hand craft and embroidery it is because I want to set the context in which ADTHI, DASTKAR and I work. A context where the beauty, authenticity, original creativity and spontaneity of the product is second to the sheer economic necessity of its production and sale.

I am talking today about the people, politics and practice of traditional Indian embroidery—in the context of craft, women and development in contemporary India. The story behind the stitches is both a parable and a paradox: craft traditions are a unique mechanism for rural women entering the economic mainstream for the first time, but they also carry the stigma of inferiority and backwardness as India enters a period of hi-tech industrialization and globalization.

A Dutch diplomat visiting a DASTKAR exhibition last autumn and looking at the women’s intricate embroideries, remarked sadly: “They are so skilled; why doesn’t anyone train them to make electronic spare parts?” An illustration of the relative values the urban educated elite places on 20th century technology versus traditional skills.

But in India craft is not just a production process—merely a mechanical, mindless, somewhat outdated form of earning and employment. It is a rural woman’s creative means to conquer her desert landscape and the confines of her limited income—her way of transcending the dependence and drudgery of her arduous agrarian and domestic life cycle. It is a creative skill and strength that is uniquely hers—an individual statement of her femininity, culture and being.

As I speak to you, I’m haunted by the words of Geetha Devi, one of the ADITHI women: “To work is forbidden, to steal is forbidden, to cheat is forbidden, to kill is forbidden, what else is left except to starve, sister?”. As per the present going rate for female agricultural labor in Bihar, a woman would have to work 70 days a month in order to feed her family. Geeta Devi’s slow stitches, telling stories, have become the alternative to starvation.

In the West these days, craft is something that people, weary of the relentless pressures and uniformity of the industrial and professional sector, turn to in search of freshness and individual self-expression. In India craft is an industry an profession, often practiced in sub-primitive conditions, without the supports of pensions, insurance, a fixed salary, medicare.

A wonderful painting by Paul Gauguin is entitled: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Similarly, the quilts downstairs both answer and raise these questions.

Three years ago, I sat with a group of mirrorwork craftswomen in Lakhu ben’s mud and thatch house in Gadda Village. They were part of the Rabari women’s embroidery group that is the nucleus of the DASTAR Kutch Project, and we were working on a mirrorwork panel that would go to the Women’s Conference in Beijing.

None of the women quite knew where Beijing was, or what it was all about. But they liked the idea of thousands of women getting together to shape a new world, and they wanted to be part of the action. Working collectively on the piece, deciding its design, and sending it out to the international forum of women as their message of strength creativity and independence, seemed to mark their coming of age.

They bank their payments and earnings and have started a cooperative Loans & Saving Scheme. Reacting to the exploitation of illiterate women by both village men and urban tradespeople, they have taught themselves to read and write and do simple accounting. This time, Lakhu ben had gone one better—her Work Issue Register had each woman’s name written in English! She had got her son to teach her. Coming to Delhi had made her aware, she said, of the importance of being able to speak and make bills in English. They have realized that a pen is no more complex to handle than a needle.

Formerly the women (in true Gujerati entrepreneurial style) had greeted each DASTKAR visit with vociferous demands for higher wages. But seeing mirrorwork embroidered kurtas by Ahir crafts women selling at cheaper price, they had got together and decided to lower the rates of their own products, while simultaneously raising the quality. With characteristic Rabari arrogance they told me that of course their embroidery was much superior, but they couldn’t afford to be outsold by “those Ahirs”!! They have come to an arrangement with the local contractor that they will work in the fields only if he sends a tractor to collect them—so they can save time to also work on their embroideries.

The crafts sector, where I work, is the largest source of employment and income generation for Indian women (more women work as agricultural labor, but their contribution is generally unpaid). It is also the one area of acknowledged skill, creativity and expertise (apart from child-bearing) where women are not just on par, but ahead of men. The one area, too, of economic and productive strength that Western countries have lost.

While international agencies, economists and activists agonise over the conflicting interests of unemployment, the depletion of natural energy resources and the degradation of the environment through industrialization, craft continues to be a viable alternative. With a simple, inexpensive, environmentally friendly needle, palm leaf, spindle or loom, and the inherent skill of her hands, a woman can both support her family and enrich the national economy and export trade.

Many Asian countries have the same un-tapped strength—of literally lakhs of women whose discounted but extraordinary skills give us a cultural and aesthetic identity uniquely our own. But, because these women are village bound, unorganized and illiterate, their voices and needs are never heard in international forums. The raw material they depend on—yarn, bamboo and cane, lac, leather—are being exported abroad or diverted to the industrial sector. Financial credit, social security schemes and investment ignore them.

Their priorities—both on spending international resources, and on the issues themselves, might well be different from politicians, bureaucrats, and other movers and shakers who prefer to move into the 21st century to more technologic tune. But we must listen to those voices and give them space—even when we disagree.

We are all super-sensitive to vestiges of colonialism and exploitation, but we practice a cultural imperialism of our own: dominance by virtue of education language and profession. Expertise has its own class system. In my own area, the designer dominates over the craftsperson; the urban management consultant dictates the rural development process.

I’m not trying to present answers and solutions. I’m equally floundering and uncertain. It is confusing trying to find a sensible, idealistic yet viable “alternative” when you work in the villages with the poor and uneducated, using hand craft and thousand year old traditions as your via media, in a world that is obsessed with INTERNET, electronic technology, macro enterprise, and the 21st Century. Where everything from a soft drink to a baby’s diaper is made by an assembly line, of synthetic materials, and sold globally. One 10 second ad on satellite TV for a can of Pepsi would support a rural family for a year. I live and work in a country with 360 million people below the poverty line. People so poor one can even have two views about the rights and wrongs of child labor.

For me, one of 1996’s most chilling images was a small boy on Northern Rajasthan. He stood, nose running, shivering in the January cold. His village is in one of rural India’s most conservative belts, a region with it’s own rich, distinctive culture and clothing. But all he wore, was an oversized T-shirt. Emblazoned on his chest was the slogan: I AM THE BEST FUCH IN THE WEST.

It seemed a paradigm of our Third World cultural enslavement to products, idioms and lifestyles passed on wholesale by the so-called developing nations, while barely understanding their implications. The T-shirt was probably a gift from some well meaning tourist,—it might even have been an item of clothing sent as charitable relief. But that boy’s mother would have died before dressing him in it if she had known what it said.

New products and images beamed on satellite TV as part of a globalized economy, are eroding the appeal of traditional products and traditional lifestyles; simply packaged jams, soaps, juices made by KVIC or women’s orgs do not have the appeal of the glitzily advertised Pepsi, Maggie and Revlon. Both the trendy urban young and rural poor in India are now wearing exports surplus T-shirts and jeans.

All of us, North, South, East & West alike, should take care, that unlike that boy in the T-shirt I mentioned, we don’t get fucked up by what’s worst in the global market place—we must fight and grab our own place for our cultures and heritage—and guard it proudly.

“We may be wage earners but we are still walking on someone else’s feet. Because we lack the tools of education and language we are still dependent,” said Shiva Kashyap, a DASTKAR craftswoman from Bihar, at one of the preparatory workshops for the Beijing conference.

Having got the ADITHI craftswoman out of their veils and villages into the international market place. We should help them take that next difficult but vital step —out into the street, into the election process and Government forums—being their own spokespeople, celebrating their own identity, setting their own agendas.

Almost 9 years ago, a young woman in Rajasthan killed herself, I knew Dhapu well. I was living and working in her village at the time. We were neighbors. She soaked herself in kerosene and set herself afire. We were only a few houses away but the drums of a wedding procession drowned her screams. By the time we reached her and broke open the door she was dead. Later we heard she still owed the village shopkeeper for the kerosene.

Dhapu was bright, young, lively, beautiful, the mother of 5 children. She killed herself because she had so many skills but no opportunities.

She lived in a part of India that is semi-desert—dry, desolate, deprived. The villages in that area had been re-settled as part of a Government scheme to create a tiger park. Dhapu and her family were small herders who depended on access to the forest for firewood, fodder and water for their herds. Now that was gone. 5 years of drought had created further hardship.

Life was incredibly hard. Dhapu’s daughter Indira was about to be engaged. She had saved desperately to put together a dowry. Then disaster struck. Her husband’s elder brother suddenly died. Dhapu’s husband’s sense of family honor was greater than his income as an agricultural laborer. He told her that his brother’s widow and her 4 children would come to live with them. There were 5 more mouths to feed. Indira’s dowry would have to be given to his brother’s eldest child. It was too much for Dhapu. She killed herself for lack of an economic alternative.

Dhapu’s death had a profound effect on me. The tragic irony haunts me still. The group of us who rushed to save her from the flames were working to create economic opportunities for women just like her. Dhapu’s daughter Indira, her widowed sister-in-law and her niece became among the most prosperous women in Sherpur village—among a group of 100 women whom DASTKAR has trained to earn their own livelihood through their own hand skills—patchwork, tie-dye, embroidery and printing. Dhapu’s daughter didn’t need a dowry, she was sought after as a bride by everyone—because she was bringing in her own income.

Today, Rameshwari, Raeesan, Shameem, Badam, Farida, and the other women recall those first early days in the tiny DASTKAR room in Sherpur village nine years ago, and the fear and suspicion with which they had greeted the idea that something they made with their hands could sell in the Delhi market, the disbelief of receiving their first earnings. They thought I had come to kidnap their children! Today they are the leaders of approximately 55 families in the area who make and sell products through Dastkar—crafting quilts, soft furnishings, garments, mobiles, toys and accessories for both local and urban market. Their daughters, Bina, Mumtaz, Laado, are also learning the old skills as well as new ones—reading, writing and cyphering form the first part of the morning for both mothers and daughters.

In the wasted, deprived landscape around Ranthambhore, where the only water and forest has been reserved for the tiger, craft is the practical use of waste and found materials: a means of recycling and value-adding reeds, old paper, cloth scraps, the debris of the forest. Vegetable dyes, block printing, and tie-dye enhance simple handspun cotton; patchwork or sewing sequins is something a comparatively unskilled woman can do while she rests from her work in the field, in between tending her children.

Income generation is not, by itself, a synonym for development, but it can be the key and catalyst to development’s many processes: education, health, community building, the repudiation of social prejudices, the empowerment of women.

As we sit and sew together, I ask the women what they will do with their money? Some silver jewellery but also bet ter seeds and a buffalo. The ability to send their children by bus to a fee- paying school. Medical treatment and their tubes tied at a ’proper’ hospital. A new well in the village. They have their own bank accounts to prevent misappropriation by drunken or gambling husbands. They all want ’pukka’ houses. Rameshwari is a widow and is saving for her children’s weddings.

Methods of birth control are canvassed along with color combinations; old women learn that writing their names is no more difficult than threading a needle. Children who wander in are conned into blowing runny noses—and running errands! Wholesale dealers coming to deliver our orders become an informal weekly market where women can make purchases without an expensive trek to the town. Cotton rather than synthetic, traditional block prints rather than mill-printed roses have become the in-thing again, both to make and to wear. In the evenings, songs and stories and folklore are swapped for political gossip and revolutionary ideas of social change. The women have set up their own savings and loans micro-credit group. They are now money lenders to the whole village.

Everywhere, the energy of a source of new employment and earning binds together and revitalizes communities that were as deprived and denuded as the desert around them. This is particularly true when one works with the latent skills and strengths of woman. They suddenly discover their self worth, seeing themselves as active participants in the community rather than passive recipients of welfare. Wells are dug, children are dug, children educated, social prejudices and taboos are thrown away when women discover their own power.

Muzaffarpur district in Bihar is deceptively green and lushly serene. The media reports of violence, corruption, exploitative political and intercaste tensions seem at such variance with the passivty and karmic calm that are also a feature of rural Bihar. The women embroiderers in Bhusara and their sujni quilted embroidery are a paradigm of similar paradoxes and contradictions: The meticulousness of the thousands of fine stitches contrast with the apathy and casualness with which the women work; their indifference to earning higher wages by more systematic production a denial of their poverty and need.

Centred in Bhusara, a village of about a 1000 families is MVSS (Mahila Vikas Sahyog Samiti), a small, autonomous Society supported by the Patna-based NGO ADITHI. MVSS spreads out to 350 sujni craftswomen in 10–15 villages in the environs, under the leadership of Kailashji, a social worker who had worked with Jai Prakash Narayan in the Land Reform Movement, before returning to Bhusara, his native village. Other MVSS and ADITHI projects in the area, include agriculture, health, education and fishery. (Bhusara is perched on the banks of a lade.) Anju and Archana, two young, partially educated local girls, are in charge of coordinating production, and are paid a salary. Others, including Nirmala Devi and Vibha, who trace the designs, are paid on a piecework basis.

MVSS’s objective is to reach all sections of the community, and the beneficiaries are both the upper-caste, homebound women who traditionally did sujni, and women from the really needy, desperately poor hutments on the outskirts of the villages who work in the fields and otherwise never handled a needle. There are middle-aged women looking to supplement family incomes, as well as very young girls, ’passing time’ before marriage.

MVSS operates from a small two-storey house in the middle of Bhusara village—it is more of a home than an office. The women and young girls sit around on the floor and verandah, stitching the quilts, bedspreads, and garments. Craft in India is a community activity; a production system in which many craftspeople work together. Different women with different skills work on different aspects of the process, and friends or members of a family come together to quilt, sew and embroider large pieces (and give advice!) No piece has been made by a single hand. None have an individual craftswoman’s signature. Their identity is the tradition, the technique and the motif directory unique to each craft community.

Though they are functional objects of everyday usage—quilts and articles designed for daily wear or the home—their motif and color, as in most Indian craft objects, however utilitarian, have a significance that is deeply rooted in socio-cultural and votive traditions, that we have tried to respect, even while adapting them. Including the craftswomen in the design process: helping them understand the end usage and methodology, sharing the fund of experimenting with new layouts and a different color palette, is an integral part of Dastkar’s development of new products.

Reena the filmmaker who made the video documentation of Asia Society quilts, told me that though she loved the colors and layout of Quilt 1, the dramatic “ochre, red, black” color combination was a very urban “designer” one—clearly an outside intervention. It had actually arisen out of a group discussion with the women. The associations—yellow and red for fertillity and marriage, white for widowhood, black for death—were very much part of the traditional color symbolism of Indian society. When colors were vegetable and mineral dyes, made by craftspeople themselves, from plants and resources around them, each color and shade had a meaning and name and the directory of colors went into hundreds. India is probably the only civilization to have had words for 5 distinct shades of white! It is the advent of cheap commercial azo-dyes into the village economy that has reduced the choices of the women to these half dozen, crude primary shades now available in rural markets.

When we first started working with mirrorwork embroiderers in Kutch, the Rabarii women—used to their own singing color palette of flaming pinks, yellows, parrot greens, reds and oranges—found the muted earth tones and shaded creams and whites of contemporary urban fashion extraordinarily limited and boring. They deplored the fact that though “Laila ben knows a lot about embroidery,” I had so little colu sense! “How sad that your kurta has faded when you put so much work into it,” was their tongue-in-cheek reaction to one of my tone-on-tone masterpieces. They marveled that I would want to revive stitches and motifs they had abandoned as passe and old fashioned. But being shrewd, entrepreneurial and enterprising, they saw the need to adapt to the demands of the market. Today—since they are craftspeople who are instinctively also creative artists, they have incorporated my design sensibility into theirs. They play effortlessly with the buff and grays, off white, beige, stone and brown shades they once rejected—as skillfully as they once evoked blazing vermillion and turquoise and magenta as a counterpoint to the colors of their desert sand.

Back at MVSS, Anju, just married, has a supportive husband and in-laws who are happy to have her work. Sarita was married at 11 to a husband who is a deaf mute. There are many similar tragic, but familiar stories. Drunk, disabled, absentee or other wise unemployable husbands, wicked mothers-in-law, property that has been mortgaged away to pay debts. Nirmala is everyone’s surrogate mother; widowed, always complaining but endlessly energetic, she is the driving force that keeps the organization going.

We settle down together to discuss the object of the workshop—the Asia Society quilts as a means to learn how to combine colors, motifs and designs and make the woman more participant in the creative process. Along with the quilts we want to make other products—garments, accessories, soft furnishings—to add diversity to the MVSS sujni range.

One is concerned that design, aesthetic and function should accompany the powerful social message. Some of the early quilts seem rather contrived and polemic—out of the head of an earnest activist rather than a rural craftswoman’s psyche. How will they sell? There is one on AIDS—with wasted figures, doctors with syringes and sickle shaped knives, and a border of huge, ochre yellow condoms! I personally can’t think of anything less conducive to the tranquil enjoyment of the two functions one normally associates with quilts and bed—i.e. slumber and sex!

Earlier designers from ADITHI have had an interesting challenge, in trying to create a whole new design idiom for sujni; since the original craft tradition has died without being documented and the women are not yet equipped to become their own designers. But I have some reservations about their treating the sujni quilt as a kind of admonitory poster, rather than a functional and decorative household accessory. The sujni/kantha technique lends itself to pictorial story telling but social and political rhetoric should also be pleasureable viewing ! A condom quilt crafted in rural Bihar as an interesting, one-off, cultural phenomenon, but when hundred of women in dozens of villages have both the need and capability to earn from sujni, there is an imperative to also develop products with a more universal appeal—products that are marketable, functional and fun.

Setting the women to draw produced a collection of extraordinary images—ranging from comic scribbles to hauntingly evocative scenes of childbirth and alienation. Interestingly, men hardly figured in their vision of their lives—the marriage scene was the only one where a man (perforce!) had been included. Even when I teased them and forced them to put in an occasional male, they figured only as pall bearers, a priest, or the doctor with a grisly scalpel in hospital.

With all the drawings in, we discussed each scene and how the different images could be incorporated into one harmonious composition. To introduce the concept of colors as conveying a mood, as well as combining with each other to create a pattern, I suggested that we give each scene a separate colored background appropriate to its subject. Though limited by the choice of colored poplin in the MVSS store, our eventual choices ranging from a progression of deepening yellows and reds for birth, girlhood, marriage, to the gray and black of widowhood and death. The idea that we were showing one woman in various stages of her life, and that she should be the central figure in each square, distinguished by size or some special feature from the others, seemed unfamiliar. Obviously, unlike urban women, they don’t see themselves in the heroine mode or as markedly different from each other!

We were also working on how different juxtapositions of the same motifs created different designs and images. How interlocking and extending some branches into the spaces where there are figures softened the regularity of the layout. In both life and art, human beings and nature must interact together.

Meanwhile, Auchana wants a private chat—including sex and marriage. She has decided that (like me) she doesn’t want to marry. I encourage her to be her true self, but say that for me—urban, educated, with my own home and income, part of a family and social structure where single women are taken for granted and need not be solitary or celibate—to be unmarried is much, much easier than for her. The community in which she will spend the rest of her life is very different. She should not take categorical decisions just yet but stick out for the freedom of choice.

The products from ADITHI and the MVSS Women’s cooperative in Bhusara tell the story of Indian crafts in transition: the traditional hand skills of women, used to craft products for themselves and their families, gradually changing into a contemporary, urban, market-led product, but still strongly reflecting the cultural identity and individual skills of the makers. It also tells the story of women, subtly changing themselves in the process. Like a kaleidoscope, familiar elements, transposed, take on a new, dynamic pattern. The process is not without conflicts, but it is invariably catalytic.

The ADITHI quilts are here as their own statement; but what has using their inherent craft skills as a tool of empowerment done to these and the many other crafts women?

In 1985, I went to SEWA in Lucknow to work with a 100 chikan embroidery women. They were black burkhaed, illiterate, earning about 100-150 rupees a month, house-bound and previously totally dependent on the local Mahajan to fetch their work—or pay them for it. Sitting together embroidering, teaching them new skills and designs, we naturally talked about everything under the sun. They were stunned that I, a well-brought up, believing Muslim woman, could also be liberated, happily unmarried, earning my own living—travelling the world, untrammeled by purdahor convention.

Our first argument was when I was furious with them for signing, unread, a petition about path breaking Shah Bano judgment, just on the say-so and a biased and retrograde interpretation of the Koran by local male chauvinist Maulvis. They listened to all this chat, wide-eyed, slightly disbelieving, slightly envious, slightly shocked. They certainly didn’t relate it to the realities of their own lives. When six of them bravely agreed to come to Delhi for the first chikan exhibition, the men of the mohalla threatened to burn down the SEWA Lucknow office, accusing us of corrupting their women’s morals.

Today, those 100 SEWA women have grown to 4,500. They travel all over India, happily doss down and sing bhajans in a dharmasala, or cook biryani at the Bombay Salvation Army Hostel. They interact with equal ease with male tribals from Madhya Pradesh and sophisticated buyers from HABITAT; they march in protest against dowry deaths as well as Islamic fundamentalism; demand financial credit and free spectacles from the Government; self-confidently refuse to give the most powerful local politician or bigwig a discount! They earn in thousands rather than hundreds, have their own savings bank accounts, and have thrown away centuries of repression and social prejudice along with their burkhas.

This augmented role—being entrepreneurs, saleswomen, executives; as well as housewives and mothers—the additional weight of responsibility, independence and experience—has changed women, even if it hasn’t materially changed male attitudes. Sometimes the added stresses and pressures have destroyed them; sometimes it has made them stronger and more self-confident.

Whenever I think of my 17 years with DASTKAR, I remember Dhapu, whom lack of economic alternatives, fear of the future, family pride and prejudice had driven to burn herself to death.

In our Project in Ranthambhore (where Dhapu’s daughters now work) the local doctor says he can recognize a DASTKAR craftswoman from half a kilometer just by the way she walks and holds her head.

It has changed their attitudes to society, caste, marriage, purdah. They are more able to objectively evaluate the gospel as preached by men. Initially, in Sherpur village, women of different castes and religions wanted separate timings to come to the room where I lived and worked. The first time a harijan woman came for work she crouched outside the door. It was she herself, not the upper caste women, who explained—with shocked disbelief at my naivete—that she could not enter. I had to literally pull her in. When a Muslim child peed on the floor, the Hindu women fled in horror and wanted the whole place lippai-ed! Today, the 100 men and women in the Project work, travel, cook, eat and drink together, marveling at the folly that kept them separate for so lang. At the annual picnic the men made the women sit, and served them—Hindus and Muslims, harijans and upper-castes alike.

The changing woman has changed some (a few!) male mind-sets. The same men who threatened to burn down the SEWA office now help pack the exhibition stock, and escort their wives to night school. Money power is a most amazing thing. But the men at the picnic did make it plain that this was only once-a-year! Normally the women cook for and feed their menfolk before they come to work and on their return, even now when they are the principal earners in the family. They are still expected to gather the firewood, work in the fields, care for the children, in addition to being entrepreneurs and wage earners.

It would be simplistic to pretend that the shifting balance of power and the new self-worth of the women has not created enormous family strains: between husbands and wives, mother-in-law and daughters-in-law, between self-realization and traditional mores. It would be foolish to ignore that it is the woman who always has to bear the burden of this. Also, that her inherent tendency to silently take on more and more, rather than scream with rage and rejection, often makes the burden well-nigh unbearable. Naïve too, to think that without the carrot of cash payments, women would voluntarily rise up and change the status quo. There is a security in being inferior yet protected; the burkha veil can be a comfortable and addictive escape route from the adult responsibilities of an independent life. But the changed confidence of the women—their ability to take and make decisions, to disagree with their husbands, to plan their own and their children’s future—is not a once in a blue moon phenomenon that is going to go away.

Sawai Madhopore was once the center of dabu indigo printing. When we tried to revive it (initially only as a means of getting interesting, locally-made raw material for the women’s patchwork) the one surviving craftsman, although he had no male karigars left to fulfill his mushrooming orders—refused to teach women to block print. He felt extraordinarily threatened by the thought of women entering his all-male bastion; and of sharing his expertise with those he’d previously regarded as inferior. He feared, rightly, that once women left their traditional place, they would never quietly return to it. Their new economic strength and earning power has changed their ability to implement their dreams and aspirations. Even more importantly, I think, it has given them the strength to dream. Women who had nothing, whose highest aspiration was a husband who didn’t beat them or drink away his earnings, can today educate themselves and their children, save for a house or a cow, invest in their daughter’s future.

There is a new sense of self worth and identity. Indira-ki-maa, Kalu-mian-kiaurath—so-and-so’s mother, so-and-so’s wife—have turned into Rameshwari, Nafeesa, and Ayeeyan. Their ability to influence the lives of their families and community has altered and grown, and they have altered and grown with it.

I started my talk this morning with Dhapu—a young woman who killed herself for lack of an economic alternative. One evening some months ago, a young activist (slightly lit up by alcohol!) told me that it was I who should be shot. He felt that the international situation—economically, politically, morally—was so desperate that only total revolution and anarchy could cure it. People like me, who suggested that there were other non-violent alternatives, were (in his opinion, the real villains and deceivers).

A month ago, coincidentally, I celebrated my 51st birthday a stone throw away from the site, where India exploded its nuclear bombs. I was there only a week or so earlier—in villages on the Indo Pak border in the desert, doing a 5 day design workshop with suf and sindhi bharat embroidery women, sitting in the blazing 48 degrees heat, sand storms blowing. The women who live there trek 30 minutes through the burring desert sands for water. They do their fine embroideries without the help of electricity. They are desperately poor, unaided by any Government supports.

In the context the nuclear explosions seemed such a monstrous, jingoistic, unnecessary ego trip for us to indulge in. Not just in the light of the feebleness of the argument that the nuclear option is a security safeguard —duly confounded by the Pakistanis retaliatory blasts. Both mad and sad when we can’t even provide water and light to our people, nuclear bombs that will wipe whole nations being propounded as a method for world peace, the young activists defeatist anarchy, all seem as lopsided solutions to me, as putting slow stitches in cloth as a means of empowerment may seem to others...

Who is right? Only time and the history books will tell. Meanwhile as long as there are Dhapus, Geetas and ADITHIs, DASTKAR continues to go on working.

Thank you for listening.

*: Laila Tyabji, Chairperson of DASTKAR, a Society of Crafts and Craftspeople strongly believes in crafts as a social, cultural and economic force of enormous strength and potential. Working with over 100 grass-roots producer groups all over India, DASTKAR provides a variety of support services such as marketing to traditional artisans, especially women.

For the Last 20 years, Laila has worked with the chikan workers of SEWA Lucknow, kasuti embroiderers in Karnataka, the Mithila folk painters of Bihar, leather craftsmen in Kutch, amongst others. Two of her most exciting projects have been creating new employment opportunities through craft for communities displaced by the creation of the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, and the Bajara tribals made homeless by the 1994 earthquake in Latur.

Laila also writes regularly on craft, design and social issues. In the intervals of travel and work, she reads, cooks, and embroiders. Back.