India is a huge, intense country. I have made many journeys there in search of textiles and their makers, travelling to the north western cities and states famous for their block printed, dyed and embroidered textiles, particularly to the state of Gujarat. My interest in print and dye processes, global textiles and trade histories has developed since I completed a degree in Craft/Textiles at Curtin University in 1983, and has grown over the past two decades, during which I have specialised in printed textiles, establishing studio/workshops in London and Australia to produce textiles, homewares and accessories for the retail market.

Gujarat and its inventive textiles hold a significant place in the history of textiles. Four thousand years ago the Indus Valley region, which forms modern day Gujarat, was home to the Harappan civilisation, where cotton weaving, block printing and mordant dyeing are believed to have originated. There is no evidence that mordant dyeing – the process of permanently colouring textiles with dyes and metallic salts – was known in the West before the first century AD.

My visits to India have led to meetings with extraordinary people who have challenged many of my assumptions and helped me to see beyond the exoticism of India’s textile history and craft industry. I have been encouraged to become involved in grassroots projects, contributing skills and knowledge. My journeys to India have also made me aware of the complex issue of fair, equitable and ethical trade and have raised many questions about the appropriate methods for marketing authentic cultural products in a global marketplace saturated with mass-produced ethnic handicrafts.

Like an archaeologist who had been digging for too long, I was surrounded by a curious collection of fascinating finds. The Between You and Me forum provided an opportunity to take a critical look at that extensive fieldwork, by recalling two distinctly different journeys. These explorations start in the densely overcrowded back blocks of Bombay (now known as Mumbai) and extend to a distant corner of Gujarat, the remote desert region of Kutch.

A WORKSHOP IN BOMBAY

In 1989, at the invitation of a Perth-based community development group, I conducted a two-week textile workshop at the Jeevan Nirwaha Niketan (JNN) women’s co-operative in Bombay, to assist with the development of new products for local and overseas markets. JNN was located in the shanty town district of Andheri East, near a large industrial area in Bombay’s northern suburbs.

Today there are more than 25 million craft practitioners in India, forming the second-largest employment sector after agriculture, and Non-Government Organisation (NGO) activists have emerged as a major influence on India’s craft development. My pre-trip planning and workshop preparation had included learning about some of these. One internationally recognised non-government organisation is the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), one of the largest and most successful of India’s many well-established co-operative organisations. SEWA was founded in 1972 in the Gujarati capital, Ahmedabad, a city closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi, who was born there and returned in 1915 to establish the ashram from which he successfully lead the socialist movement’s resistance to British Rule [A note from a reader: 'Indeed Ahmedabad was his work place, but he was born in Porbandar in Gujarat']. Central to SEWA’s mission and organisational structure is the Gandhian philosophy of swaraj (self-governance) and Gandhi’s vision of linking village industries and crafts to economic empowerment, freedom and national identity.

Before starting the workshop in Bombay, I travelled to Ahmedabad to visit SEWA’s head office and find out more about their work. Most of SEWA’s members work from home, and many are artisans, some of whom migrate to cities from villages in search of employment, giving up their traditional lives and skills. SEWA provides organisational assistance to enable women to form their own craft co-operatives, which are entitled to facilities, equipment, finance and marketing assistance from the state government. In Ahmedabad, I met briefly with Elaben Bhatt, general secretary of SEWA, who told me about the Women’s Bank they had started, which had allowed some of their many thousands of members to buy their own land.

This visit gave me an insight into the co-operative system and was my first experience of the real power of Gujarati women and Gandhism at work. These were impressive people running dynamic organisations, working against extraordinary odds. I started to have serious doubts about the relevance of my own skills and experiences and wondered whether my ideas for the forthcoming workshop were achievable or even appropriate.

On the first day of the JNN workshop, I managed to find my way to the co-operative through a maze of narrow alleyways. I had been directed to meet the local community development worker, Sister Isabel, who would be my translator. Quite by chance, she had visitors that day: Manjula, a social worker, and Kirit Dave, a textile designer with extensive experience working with craft NGOs and Alternative Trade Organisations (ATOs) throughout India.

The JNN co-operative had just started work on some samples of fabric toys, intended for an overseas market, that Kirit had designed for Marketplace: Handworks of India, a recently established ATO. Kirit and I started talking textiles, and within moments a collaborative process had begun. We  agreed that I should build on this work already underway, introducing some new stitching techniques and design ideas to the toys, and concentrating on colourway selection, finishing detail and product presentation. There were about twenty women in the co-op. Over the next two weeks, we sat together and stitched and patched and swapped stories, miming when language didn’t work.

SHRUJAN

During my time in Bombay I visited ‘Sanket’, Kirit’s extended family home and the Bombay base for Shrujan a textile foundation started by his mother, artist/designer Chandaben Shroff. One room held a superb collection of embroidered textiles. On the walls throughout the house I saw grainy, unframed enlargements of warm black and white photographs showing spectacularly dressed people from another world, a place of vast desert landscapes, leafless trees, decorated mud and clay huts, and old fortresses. This was Kutch.

The Shroff family are Gujarati, with strong family connections to the district of Kutch. The people of Kutch are descended from nomads and refugee migrants and, with just a few more than a million people, are a tiny population by Indian standards. Kutch is bordered by Rajasthan and the Sindh region of Pakistan to the north, and by the Arabian Sea to the south and west. Surrounded by a flat salt desert that lies just metres above sea level, once a year Kutch is transformed into an island and the entire region becomes virtually inaccessible. For hundreds of years, therefore, the Kutchi communities were able to get on with their lives and preserve their craft traditions with very little outside interference.

This changed in the 1960s when escalating tensions on the India–Pakistan border resulted in improved transport and communications systems being introduced to the district. A severe drought followed in 1969. The Shroff family became involved with famine relief, and then made a long-term commitment to support the local communities in their determination to maintain their way of life. Chandaben Shroff began Shrujan by directly assisting fifteen embroiderers in one village through commissioning textiles, supplying good quality fabric and threads, and finding buyers in Bombay for the end products. Today Shrujan supports the work of four thousand artisans in 120 villages practicing fourteen schools of traditional embroidery.

It would be ten years before I managed to get to Kutch, but in the meantime Kirit visited me in Perth and met curator/textile artist Maggie Baxter, who worked in an adjacent studio. Maggie was planning a trip to India to assess the viability of producing a range of bedlinen for the Australian market. Kirit’s visit could not have been more timely. (Maggie has written about some of this in her article ‘Serendipity: The art of designing for Kutch’, in Craft Culture, Volume 4, no. 246, Autumn 2003).

During this time, I was involved in ongoing long-distance attempts to design and develop products in Bombay and Kutch for the Australian market, including block-printed homewares and sarongs, and embroidered bags and shawls, but we were ultimately defeated by a combination of factors – layers of bureaucracy, trade restrictions, the demands of Australian retailers, and general lack of resources, funds and experience.

Finally, in 1997, a visit to Kutch became possible. I had applied to the Australia–India Business Council for a scholarship, proposing to visit India to research traditional and industrial textile processes to add value to Australian wool. My research would contrast visits to commercial textile manufacturers located in mostly grim industrial districts in Bombay, Delhi and the Punjab with time spent in Varanasi studying handloom and jacquard weaving. In Kutch I would visit the Shrujan centre and explore the potential for wool as a basecloth for block printing and bandhani (resist dye) techniques.

My application was successful, and the resulting scholarship allowed me to spend three months in India, between November 1997 and February 1998, exploring textile production possibilites and establishing commercial and cultural networks. For the first few days, I stayed at the recently completed Shrujan Design Centre, located just outside Bhuj, the Kutchi capital. Built around an internal courtyard, the centre contained workrooms, design studios, offices, material stores and a large gallery space. In the grounds were a kitchen garden and a scattering of traditional round mud and clay houses, the internal walls decorated with raised plaster and mirrorwork patterns. These provided accommodation for the constant stream of visitors. I brought with me a selection of Australian wool fabrics sourced from suppliers and mills around India.

Kirit had arranged for me to visit the Shrujan dye workshop at Amibag and a block-printing community in Tera, a three-day round-trip in an old Ambassador taxi. The house and dye workshop at Amibag were surrounded by rice paddies and cotton fields, outside was a wood-fired furnace with metal dye pots, and block-printed cotton fabrics were drying on washing lines strung between trees. These fabrics would be sent back to a co-operative workshop in Bombay to be made into garments for a Japanese ATO.

The next day we headed off to Tera. The landscape changed to rocky desert and we passed Rabari nomads on the move with their camels. We were heading closer to the Pakistan border, closer to the old Indus Valley region. In Tera we met Ashish the master printer and selected existing blocks for the trials, drank tea and watched as the first wool shawl was printed.

This proved to be a moment of epiphany, a rare moment of clarity about my original motivation to head off to India. I had wanted to find the source of a passion, to meet those with an unbroken tradition that continued from before the violence of industrialisation and the misery of factories, and I had found it. And what is more, I had been privileged to meet like-minded souls who shared this passion.

My journey had started in Bombay, with meeting Kirit and working with those who had left their traditional lives behind. Now, in Kutch, I saw cotton-growing and textile-making occurring in the same place, where farming and object-making coexisted as seasonal activities.

I returned to the Shrujan Centre knowing I had much more to learn. Of debates within India about pre-industrial and post-industrial values and processes. Of the role of modern, low-tech and alternative technologies and environmentally sustainable methods. Of the role of the designer.

Back in Australia, the connectedness was broken and I suffered from feelings of isolation. The Between You and Me forum presented the first opportunity to discuss these issues with colleagues. I believe there are real opportunities for craft practitioners to be part of this paradigm shift, this evolutionary process. We have much to learn from the well-established and highly skilled organisations within India.

AFTERMATH

On January 26, 2001 while Republic Day celebrations were taking place across India, Kutch was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed more than 13,000 people, injured 160,000 and left 600,000 homeless. Eighty per cent of Bhuj was destroyed, and the Shrujan Centre was damaged beyond repair. The Shroff family and Shrujan staff immediately mobilised to provide emergency relief assistance and started planning for rebuilding and regeneration.

On 12 September 2003 an exhibition curated by Maggie Baxter, ‘Shrujan: Threads of Life’, will open at Global Artlink, in Ipswich, Queensland. This exhibition of fine textiles from Kutch is designed to lead Australian audiences from very traditional items of clothing and textiles of domestic use, to contemporary applications and the most innovative work being done by both Indian and overseas designers.

The newly rebuilt Shrujan Centre, enlarged and encompassing an impressive gallery space, is due to open in 2004.