Scholarship Topic: Tell us about your greatest influences. Explain how they have inspired you to get where you are today and how they are likely to shape your future.
Amidst this vast cosmos
Through deep space and time
Alone I walk ever, in awe.[1]
There is a saying, influences in one’s childhood stay(remain) forever with him/ her.(during) In all my travelling years, either with parents on vacation, or for design-development workshops with talented artisans across the interiors of the country, India mesmerizes, and still continues to do so, with its experiential knowledge and a design thinking born from the maker’s acts of processing and shaping raw materials in his hands.
The practices of the Creative Industries of India are followed by the visual, the olfactory clues of the land and the creative sounds, as the clack of the heddles and the spooling of the shuttle at the loom, the clink of hammers and chisel on metal. The sight of balconies and rooftops overflowing with the bright colour and lively patterns of thousands of cotton head shawls drying in the bright sun never fails to excite the eye. Often halting on the fringe of a village, the nose twitches with pleasure at the scent of that particular fragrance of wood and straw smoke that comes from the firing of an open kiln, packed with a cache of terracotta pots. By the side of a busy city road, weavers can be seen at work preparing the cotton or silk thread which will later be mounted on their wooden looms. In the city jewellery bazaar, the silversmith can be found, bent in intense concentration over his intricate filigree work. On the open road, potters are a common sight, with cluster of voluminous clay water pots, borne on their heads as they walk from their village to the market.
The vast diversity of India is ever inspiring with its subliminal notions of history, memory, ecology and geography-- with spirituality and a deep and intuitive communion with the natural world. To me, it is a place of activity, of innovation, of calm, of introspection, of chance encounters.
Her vast biodiversity and climatic zones from the sea-level coastal settlements or the extreme habitats built on top of lofty snow covered mountains, stand in contrast to those in regions of torrential rainfall and abundant vegetation and dry deserts.
Entrenched in the historical, India’s culture is an amalgam of various inspirations through time and space. From this rich repository, has evolved an interesting material culture, outlined by its artistic traditions, natural materials and a dynamic art and craft culture, which through its vibrancy, inventiveness, and often superlative workmanship, has for over a thousand of years enthralled all who have encountered it.
The world of India’s Creative Industries is a patchwork quilt of many hues and shades of meaning-- reflective of interactions with social, economic, cultural and religious forces. The universe of India’s creative industries, its crafts landscape, is made up of numerous types of applications; representing many levels of refinement- from the simplest and earthy to the most technically complex and advanced: from the vernacular object of daily use that are rough-hewn from local materials to the celebrated objects of symbolic value; signifying technical excellence and conceptual sophistication and orientation towards the ideal of an intact ecology.
In some cases, the same object may be used in different settings, but in each case, the value assigned to the object is subsequently different. The lota, or the brass container for liquids, is one such multipurpose and multivalent object in use at home-- in the kitchen, the bathroom and the prayer room. And in each case, it is held in a different spiritual or physical plane, each reflecting the state of the object in the particular context. Objects are thus imbued with value and spirit, which are respected by all users in the society; with our sense of value, each object triggers a sequence of responses, enhancing a reflective process, converting a simple act of exchange into a symbolic transformation. This submerged psychic thresholds into a deeper, extra-visual awareness of self, location, context and environment.
“I have an incredible number of images in my head. I can review these, as if they are in a kind of carousel, and one particular image keeps on coming back.”[2]
India’s time honored hand skills live in the daily life of common people. To understand India’s Cultural and Creative Industries, one needs to understand the vital significance of her hand skills, which take shape as a way of life. Here, creativity has emerged as the response to very basic needs which utilizes minimum and provides maximum. Her ability to grasp, accommodate, transform, innovate and simplify has influenced me to work for this sector as a change agent.
Jiyo! [3](Believe! Buy! Belong!) at Asian Heritage Foundation, is one such unique programme for the holistic development of Creative and Cultural Industries amongst the economically vulnerable communities of India. By providing ownership to the skilled poor as its principle stakeholders, Jiyo! has facilitated linkages between new grassroot enterprises and empowered them as self-managed cluster level institutions. Devised on a sustainable model, this Design-led initiative has started to create new livelihood possibilities while providing access to a better quality of life.
My three year long association with Jiyo! as a Design Manager in three clusters across East and South India (Madhubani in Bihar, Nimmalakuntha and Srikalahasti in Andhra Pradesh[4]), has allowed me to interface time honoured skills and practices with modern day themes and designs, generating renewed rural livelihoods and set international standards for cross cultural artistic collaboration. Not only that, it is increasingly visible that these communities of skilled poor getting empowered with their inherent creative potential towards becoming principle stakeholders of their cultural businesses that helps to create alternative choices of lifestyles for young consumers.
Indeed, what we must admit, if not learn, is that true art requires true men and women who work with the materials at hand, to serve and to feed neighbors that they know. To the extent that a craftsman is connected to his art through personal experience, that relationship is impossible to replicate and difficult to quantify. When business decides to disregard “mere detail” in the name of efficiency, it also chokes off the possibility for innovation that derives from the irreducible experientiality of artisanship. Speaking from my context, I can only plead for the strengthening of the rich and socially-embedded "cultural services ecosystem" that enable people to be creative and enjoy greater control and autonomy over their material life. Thus I would want to enable and strengthen myself, not just as a designer but as a entrepreneur facilitator, to contribute to India’s Cultural and Creative Industries with better sustainable solutions, and contribute to effective policy making to give its long overdue.
Arghya Ghosh
[1] Prayer Song for Brahmo Society, written by Noble Laurate Rabindranath Tagore.
[2] Els Reijnders, Friso Witteveen’s Hocus Pocus: The Magic of a Form, 48°C Public.Art.Ecology.
[3] Jiyo is a street smart word used to express our faith in life.
[4] Madhubani painting has been practiced traditionally by the women of villages around the present town of Madhubani (literally meaning ‘forests of honey’) in the Mithila region of Bihar state, India. The painting was traditionally done on freshly plastered mud wall of huts, but now it is also done on cloth, hand-made paper and canvas.
The shadow form of puppetry locally called Tholu Bommalata, meaning dance of leather puppets (tholu – leather, bommalata – puppet dance) is widely practiced in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
Kalamkari refers to a method of painting natural dyes onto cotton or silk fabric with a bamboo pen or kalam at the South Indian Temple town of Srikalahasti, Andhra Pradesh. The name kalamkari translates as pen (kalam) & work (kari) in Hindi/Urdu, and was most likely derived from trade relationships between Persian and Indian merchants as early as the 10th century CE.
Bibliography
Visvakarma, Examples of Indian architecture, sculpture, painting, handicraft, New Delhi, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt Ltd, 1978
The Earthen Drum, New Delhi, Pupul Jayakar, National Museum, 1980
Arts and Crafts of India, place, Ilay Cooper and John Gillow, Thames & Hudson, 1996
The Craft Traditions of India, place, Jaya Jaitly, Lustre Press Pvt Ltd., 1990
Arts & Crafts of India, place, Nicholas Barnard and Robyn Beeche, Conran Octopus, 1993
Crafts of India: Handmade in India, place, Aditi Ranjan & M.P Ranjan, Council of Handicrafts Development Corporation (COHANDS), 2007
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