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Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s role in the history of India’s craft renaissance

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s role in the history of India’s craft renaissance

Freedom fighter & social reformer’s belief in crafts was multifaceted in nature: A way to support women’s advancement & India’s economy, crafts were also charged with the power & potential of all art

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

In 1944, Kamaladevi travelled to West Bengal to visit an orphanage in Bankura, a small town about 170 kilometres northwest of Calcutta. Japanese forces controlled Burma at the time, but the largest threat to Bengal was not military invasion but famine. While the colonial government focused on the war effort, millions were dying of hunger and famine-related disease. As president of the AIWC, Kamaladevi rallied local women’s groups to provide relief, but her trip to Bankura would not be remembered for its humanitarian purpose. Rather, it was a small, seemingly inconsequential discovery that would echo through Kamaladevi’s future. Outside a modest home, Kamaladevi happened to spot two terracotta horses. She was struck by their beauty. After enquiring with the owner of the horses, Kamaladevi managed to acquire a pair that she brought back with her to Delhi. In the years ahead, the Bankura horse would become a symbol of India’s craft renaissance, the emblem of India’s most renowned department store and the namesake of that store’s popular café. In 1957, the horse would earn its own postage stamp. By that time, the Bankura horse had become indelibly associated with Kamaladevi herself, a tribute to her commitment to recovering, preserving and celebrating the crafts of India. Largely forgotten was the fact that it was Kamaladevi’s ability to see beauty in the midst of tragedy that defined the story of the Bankura horse—and much of Kamaladevi’s life.

The history of India’s craft renaissance is rich with beauty and with tragedy. It is a history of heroic dedication to cultural preservation and regeneration, in which Kamaladevi and her colleagues strove to enhance the livelihoods of millions of Indian artisans and enrich the homes and lives of the millions of people—in India and abroad—who came to treasure Indian crafts. This is a history about the empowerment of women not only as producers and consumers of crafts but also as development visionaries routinely forgotten in narratives that ignore the crafts sector when discussing the economic development of postcolonial India. But this is also a history in which the majority of artisans remained in poverty, a history in which the markers of success were too often defined by elite consumers in Delhi and Manhattan. In the words of the scholar Anita Cherian, ‘The middle classes presented themselves as saviours of the arts, liberating one form after the other from imminent depravation and sure extinction.’ What does it mean to save an art form if most of the artists remain impoverished? To her credit, Kamaladevi stayed focused on the dignity and livelihood of crafts-makers. She recognized her own failures and linked them to the larger failures of postcolonial India. Just as she had when she was fighting for India’s independence, she maintained hope in the face of epic challenges, and kept struggling to do as much good as possible. Even if she could not fully redeem the promise of India’s freedom, she could support thousands of artists whose work carried forward that promise.

‘Beauty is the soul of freedom,’ Kamaladevi told the All Bengal Students’ Conference in 1931. That is why the ‘cultural conquest of India’ was bound up with India’s economic and political enslavement. India would not be truly free until ‘the artistic starvation of millions of people’ had been ended. In Ceylon that same year, Kamaladevi decried the fact that ‘the children of the people that created the wonderful works of art at Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura are today feeding their hungry souls on Dunlop tyre advertisements and match labels that adorn the walls of the huts in the villages’. This was a great loss for those children and for humanity. ‘Art is not a luxury or the privilege of the rich few,’ Kamaladevi asserted. ‘It is the life-giving force that touches all ordinary things of everyday common use with its vitality transforming them into sublime things of joy.’ Kamaladevi linked such a democratic vision of art to a sharp critique of colonialism. In a speech in Meerut in 1936, she lamented the fact that when the East India Company came to power, ‘the handicrafts were ruthlessly destroyed, throwing hundreds of thousands out of employment and abruptly converting the country into a purely agricultural one’. Some economic historians have challenged the idea that the onset of colonial rule devastated handicrafts industries. In the 1930s, however, that idea was an article of faith among most anticolonial activists. In the years ahead, Kamaladevi would repeatedly denounce the cultural devastation caused by colonialism and would link the struggle for beauty to the struggle for freedom.

Indian anticolonial activists had long cherished crafts as emblems of Indian culture and resistance to foreign rule. The annual gatherings of the Indian National Congress often included handicraft demonstrations. By 1944, a ‘Handicraft and Swadeshi Exhibition’ had become a regular feature of the AIWC gatherings as well. In her presidential address that year, Kamaladevi called for ‘training women in handicrafts and fostering hand industries’. Such training would benefit women and the economy. Moreover, such work would yield ‘delicate creations in word, song and colour in which the dreams of mankind find expression’. Here we see the multifaceted nature of Kamaladevi’s belief in crafts. A way to support women’s advancement and India’s economy, crafts were also charged with the power and potential of all art.

According to Kamaladevi, her love for crafts had many roots: from her childhood in Mangalore to the influence of her longtime friend, the art critic G. Venkatachalam. ‘But it was only after I met Gandhiji,’ she wrote, ‘that I came to understand the deep relationship of handicrafts with our daily life.’

During one of her first visits with Gandhi, she found the Mahatma sitting next to James Cousins, the husband of Margaret Cousins, with ‘a few handicraft objects lying before them’. Gandhi spoke passionately about the importance of using one’s hands to create, a belief he would famously illustrate with the spinning wheel. Despite her love for homespun saris, Kamaladevi never embraced spinning with true Gandhian zeal. Yet her commitment to creating with her hands brought her close to the Mahatma in a way that distinguished her from many veteran freedom fighters. When it came to handicrafts, one could argue that Kamaladevi was Gandhi’s most devoted and impactful disciple.

Excerpted with permission from Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom by Nico Slate. HarperCollins India 




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