Craft forms are generally considered traditional and unchanging. They form a kind of atavistic link with a society and economy that is fast changing. Yet, crafts, like their makers, are products of our times and the same forces and shifts impact them. For instance, cane, which we hardly consider a craft. In some parts of Arunachal Pradesh, there is a quiet, if instructive, revolution underway. In village after village, household objects once made from cane have been partly replaced by plastic ones. Imagine the shock when you reach a remote village in Arunachal Pradesh after a half-hour walk through land and water to find yourself confronted by plastic. The explanation is insightful. Cane is easy to weave, but it takes a long time and great effort to clean out and get into weaveable form. And these days, time is at a premium, no matter where you live. In contrast, plastic twine is available in pre-prepared form and requires the user to put into action only a percentage of his available skills. This slow shift in the material base of an old skill comes with its own hierarchies. Plastic chattais are used to lay the table, while the ones made from palm leaves (also relatively hard to prepare) are used to sit on because they are more comfortable. Moorhas with cane are rewoven with plastic, but that’s for sheer time saving. No one actually believes it is more attractive, despite the range of colours. So, what do you do in this situation? Can you preach, ‘say no to plastic’? I believe this question is important because it asks us something bigger. It asks us about the idea of purity we attribute to a spectrum of art forms. Earlier, they were brought into the market as indigenous knowledge urban India needed to see and appreciate. But crafts are dynamic and one can hardly hope to keep them in a time freeze. What should concern us as buyers is not the loss of that ‘look’, because many skills are still intact in this medium. The issue is that this skill and knowledge is shifting to an unsustainable material. Plastics use up four per cent of the world’s petroleum and are loaded with additives. Plus, there is no real innovation from the artisan’s side in these shifts. So, initiatives addressing the materials shift in crafts should spring from this perspective. Introducing prepared cane in the marketplace, which is possible through inexpensive machinery, is one option. In the larger picture, it’s important to seriously reconsider preserving craft forms for their aesthetics. Their real value lies in their being sustainable repositories of skills developed over centuries. Addressing material shifts through this prism is likely to be way more successful because they will strike at the real reasons for these changes. Then the impact will go beyond products.
