The world of craftswomen

I haven’t read it myself, but someone narrated to me a story by U.R. Anantamurthy once in which the writer speaks feelingly about the two very different worlds inhabited by men and women of the same family in a traditional, well-to-do Kannada village home. The men’s world is a public place where there are constant comings and goings, plans are made, everything under the sun is discussed from local politics to the future of our planet; the inner, women’s world, however, is where intimate cares are shared, little pains and aches are spoken of, sensibilities cultivated. The one looks outwards, and the other is inwardly turned. He was not speaking of the usual difference between the zenana and the mardana as one knows them, for privacy is not the issue. He was speaking of different concerns. These two worlds of his description are not unaware of each other; they even intersect; but, in the final analysis, they stay apart.

I was reminded of all this as we sat concentrating upon the theme of Punjab Crafts and Craftsmanship in the recent symposium held on that subject at the Punjabi University in Patiala. Quite naturally the generally unsung role of women in keeping so many of our crafts alive figured in the discussion: the ceaseless toil, the joys and the sorrows of work, the staggering range. Phulkaris and baghs came up for attention as did simple durries; we saw a great deal of paintings on the walls of village homes and little decorative features that are so much a part of vernacular architecture in mud; even the making of lowly nallas – drawstrings – with which lower garments are tied figured among the presentations.

In her finely crafted paper on the ‘Floating Stitch’, Salima Hashmi, who had come over from Lahore, drew attention to the work of several contemporary, very contemporary, women painters of Pakistan in which memories of isolation and confinement – and memories of course of what women’s work used to consist of – keep surfacing even when their approach to art is nearly completely abstract. In that seminar room, slowly, it seemed, one was being led towards looking closely at the world of craftswomen: the human aspect of it and not merely of skills.

On my part, I was specially moved by the presentation made by a student who had documented in detail some uncommon work being done by the women of a simple Punjabi joint family living in a small village not far from Chandigarh. Picking up old, discarded electric bulbs, and using their natural shape, they would turn them into little decorative pieces by sheathing them as it were with a dense crocheted netting of gaily-coloured wool: pairs of eager ducks, for instance, or flower vases and the like. All this not for sale, but for their own pleasure, it would seem: svantah sukhaye, as we say. What they showed off, however, with some hesitation but also some pride, was their very special craft-work using simple glass bottles with tall narrow necks, like those in which syrup or liquor is sold. Inside the old bottle would hang an elaborate, almost floating, arrangement made up of a series of little textile-covered cushion-pieces strung together with cotton thread and festooned with a series of streamers of plastic beads. It all looked very cheerful, very festive. The skills required to do this kind of work sitting on a mud floor were obvious: making tiny little cushions from scraps of fabric, sewing them together with hand in an artful manner so that they would hold, pushing them gently one by one through the narrow neck of the bottle, and so on. But the old lady who was the head of the family being interviewed would turn quiet after a while, we were told, and keep staring at her bottle with a look which the researching student caught deftly in her photograph. There is wistfulness in those ageing eyes, a marked touch of sadness.

To the simple questions, "What is it that you have made?" or "why do you do this?", she had no other answer except "ehi saadi duniya hai", meaning: "for such is our world". One can only interpret this in one’s own manner, and begin to wonder: do those little cushions stand for dreams of some distant comfort? Is the festive arrangement a counterpoise to a dreary reality? Is the liquor bottle a reminder of some male’s addiction from which an escape is needed? One could be wrong on any, or all, counts, but thoughts like these do cross the mind even when they are belied by the cheerfulness of a younger woman in the family who sets about demonstrating the process.

This is not the first time that one has seen ‘bottled art’ or ‘whimsey puzzles’, and one is aware of highly sophisticated workmanship in this genre that has been around in the western world for a long time: delicately crafted sailing ships, elaborately carved chairs, fans fashioned out of cork, all inside bottles. One can even read learned articles on "The Story of Folk Art in Bottles" or go into the life and career of Daniel Rose, crowned "Champion Whittler of the United States" in 1926 for having crafted one hundred ‘whimsey bottles’. But, for me, none of that work, however technically refined, is possessed of the feeling that is there in this artless rendering of a craftswoman’s world confined within a grimy old bottle.

This article was published on March 18, 2007