CRAFTS-INDIA: Jewellery Brightens Prospects for Craftswomen

By Neena Bhandari Reprint | | Print |

Neena Bhandari

UDAIPUR, India, Feb 20 1996 (IPS) - The remnants of a dying art are on display along the narrow lanes of an old quarter in this historic city in India’s western State of Rajasthan.

A decade ago, Udaipur’s bustling Kheradiwada locality was lined with shops selling colourful wooden toys. The bright lacquer- polished dolls, tops and toy furniture made of a local wood, drew buyers from far and wide and were even sold overseas.

Today, only a handful of the toy shops remain in the locality named after the ‘Kheradi’ artisans. A mere 20 of the 600-odd artisan families inhabiting Kheradiwada now practise the craft.

The nimble hands which once turned Kheerni wood into the delightful products of their trade, now often pull carts on the city roads or haul bricks at construction sites. Instead of learning the family craft, their children hawk newspapers at roadsides or work in tea shops.

Those lucky enough to have been educated have taken up jobs in government offices or with private companies.

“I have become a wage hand though once I hired my own workers,” says a wistful 82-year-old Kheradi artisan Champadevi. Many Kheradi craftswomen now make a living by selling home-made pickles or working as domestics in city homes.

Bad times have fallen on Kheradiwada because the wood of the Kheerni tree is no longer easy to obtain, thanks to tightened forest conservation laws.

Each artisan can use only 100 kg of the wood every year. Bitter craftspersons point out that authorities allow five times as much wood to cremate the dead.

Seventy-one-year-old Hukmi Chand remembers the days when the Kheradi artisans would haul back bullock loads of wood from the Kheerni forests.

The price of the wood has soared more than five times over the past decade. In the early 1980’s, the Rajasthan Forest Department stopped commercial sales of the wood, slashing the annual 196 tonnes of wood sold to Kheradi artisans down to a mere 15 tonnes.

By 1990, each family was getting only one tonne a year. Forest officials argued that there were no ripe Kheerni trees to be felled.

“Its not just the wood, but even the prices of colours have gone up from Rs 100 a kg to Rs 300 a kg,” says young artisan Geeta, who as a child helped her parents paint the toys.

This hit both production and quality and Kheradi toys started losing out to better made competing products made in modern town factories.

The few efforts to revive the craft have met with mixed success. A wood toy makers cooperative set up by 40 local artisans is facing problems of raw materials, marketing and training.

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