'ART & SOUL
Different crafts, new energies

Almost always, the term ‘art’ is thought of as an activity involving the intellect, while ‘craft’ is considered a manual skill, writes B. N. Goswamy

On arts and crafts: "If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

THERE are different voices that one hears in these two statements. The first is that of a man who was a painter, poet, designer and socialist thinker all rolled into one. He was the founder of the great Arts and Crafts movement that swept through England in the late Victorian age and continues to inspire a number of people even today.

He toiled life-long to bring the beauty of handcrafted objects back into peoples’ lives, and to restore dignity to craftsmanship. The second is that of a contemporary writer concerned more with perceptions than with objects, visibly engaged in establishing categories and differences. One man is rooted in the earth, the other in theory.

But, on one’s own, one often wonders about the term ‘craft’. Different definitions of it have been around for a long time, most of them choosing to relate the activity to, or to distance it from ‘art’. Of course, both terms emphasise skill in making or doing things, proficiency in other words: to make or construct in a manner suggesting great care or ingenuity.

However, almost always, ‘art’ is thought of as being naturally superior: an activity of the mind, something involving intellect, and ‘craft’ only manual dexterity. It is difficult for most people to shake off the feeling that the difference between the two, simply put, is that between what can be called "High Art" and "Low Art".

One can question this. In any event, the subject is complex and I do not have the competence I am sure to make a meaningful contribution to the debate. At least here.

Except perhaps to draw attention to the fact that the term shilpa, so extensively used in early India, covers both categories with gracious ease.

No conflicts are hinted at by it, no hard categories created. Wonderful passages are to be found in our literature - check on what Coomaraswamy cites and has to say in his early study, The Indian Craftsman, or his Medieval Sinhalese Art, extolling the virtues of craftsmen and the great respect in which they were held by the society once.

Things have changed since then, however, and we have all fallen into the trap. But, as I said, the matter is not above, or beyond, debate. One extraordinary aspect of even this debate, however, is that very few will deny the remarkable skills of Indian craftsmen - craftspersons would be a more appropriate term, considering that a large number of them are women - and their capacity to change and to adapt to situations. I might be altering - jumping? - tracks here a bit, but I was quite struck by a small study that I came upon recently on some unknown craftsmen of Bengal.

Titled In the Shadows, it does not speak of the usual if anonymous craftspersons whose gifts one commonly associates with Bengal - kantha workers, image-makers, potters, textile weavers, and the like - but of people who are exploring different fields with their hands.

These simple folks, generally from close-knit families living in small villages, have turned to new and innovative crafts like making wigs and polo balls, shuttlecocks and festive light fixtures, and so on.

The study explores not so much their methods and materials in detail as their lives: the travails, the enterprise, the vision if it can be so called of barely literate men, women and children. The fine photographs in the study apart, there are vignettes of life and history in it that bring it to life.

When Kazim Mallick of Baniban Jagdishpur village, now 85 years of age and head of a family that only makes wigs - for theatre-persons and for the fashion industry alike - sits on a wooden cot fanning himself and talks, while reminiscing about the past, memories come flooding.

The memory of the time, for instance, when he made with his own hands a sadhu’s wig for Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, then a young freedom fighter, for him to wear and leave the country in disguise to escape British pursuers.

But soon it is time for him to get the grandchildren together, sit under the glare of a bulb, and drape a fine net on a wooden head-block for the young ones to start weaving their magic with fine strands of hair.

Not far from this village is another, Jadurberia, where a more organised crafts-industry is to be seen: the making of shuttlecocks. Here different people are employed, but the work is done mostly with hands: the gathering of ducks’ feathers, the washing and the cleaning, the clipping and the trimming, the fixing on corks and the weighing.

And then of course the labelling, depending upon the fancy of the city folk ordering the shuttlecocks: "Albatraoss", "Skylark", "Parrot Fly", and so on.

The spirit of the work, however, and the concerns, remain the same in nearly all cases: will the next generation continue doing this? How long is this going to last? Can other things be learnt?

This is the way this study of the spirit of enterprise of a group of craftspersons continues. Not without drawing attention to another kind of craft - related to guile and deception - however: that of sly middlemen who know whom to exploit, and how.

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