/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE-INDIA: Traditional Basket Weaving Endangered

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lalitha Sridhar

CHENNAI, India, Mar 2 2004 (IPS) - Kannama, a 70-year-old resident of Konapet hamlet in the arid Chettinad region of southern Tamil Nadu state, is among the last living master practitioners of the craft of making kottans, or palm-leaf baskets.

Kottans are a centuries-old tradition, passed from mother to daughter by the women of the Chettiar community. Kannama, however, says, ”So many women used to sit together and make kottans for marriages and other functions. Nowadays, nobody does it. Plastic baskets are quicker and I find that I am able to sell them even. I would rather make plastic baskets than kottans.”

The dry expanse of Chettinad, like many rural regions in India, is home to a range of distinctive crafts. Part of the country’s rich and diverse oral traditions, that come with no textual references or documentation to record their history and techniques for posterity, Chettinad too is witnessing the decline of its crafts and craftspeople. What took centuries to create, improvise and perfect is being obliterated by mere decades of industrialization.

”Kottans are among the hundreds of crafts and traditions that are almost gone now,” says Visalakshi Ramaswamy, founder-director of the M.Rm.Rm.Cultural Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to traditional livelihoods.

”These colourful baskets were once a part of our day-to-day lives. We saw them being made and used them all the time but never stopped to wonder what was going to happen to them. There are just a handful of women living today who still know how to make kottans.”

The foundation has set about trying to find women who made the baskets and to involve them in reviving the craft, including by training others. This has not been easy, Ramaswamy says.

In the village of Keelaypatti, one of the women from a group of kottan makers has sent her daughter to university. Another has purchased a grinder and a third is readying for trips abroad to participate in a series of crafts exhibitions. Clearly, new recruits are needed to keep alive the craft.

Says one of the new recruits, Manimekalai a 37-year-old mother of three who finishes her housework to report for basket weaving during office hours every day, ”It was difficult to find women in the beginning. This is laborious work and difficult to learn. But as time passed, and opportunities became available, it became more interesting.”

Basket weaving also has provided her family with additional income, she says.

Even if women get their families’ consent to engage in paid labour, however, traditional production often is labour-intensive and time-consuming to the point of being unsustainable.

Says Ramaswamy, ”Master craftspeople make difficult work look simple. Anyone who imagines weaving a palm leaf basket is easy must give it a try at least once.”

”But the revival of a craft is not only about providing gainful employment to the craftspeople. It generates ripples in many ways. Women are aware of their rights and assert themselves better. The Keelaypatti village now has a school with a full-time teacher,” she adds. ”The revival of a craft is also about overall well-being.”

Weavers, however, say the revival hinges on marketing, and here they rely entirely on Ramaswamy and the foundation.

Non-governmental organizations like hers play a critical role in reviving traditional crafts. But the range of craft traditions is so immense and the funds available are so limited, that ultimately the market will decide the fate of craftspeople.

Very little is available by way of financial incentives, benefits and relief directly to artisans – support that the government routinely extends to mechanized industries and agriculture. Likewise, artisans lack the access to cheap credit enjoyed by other groups.

”Where is the question of borrowing loans for purchasing raw materials when the availability of food itself is a problem for craftspeople who are seeing their traditional livelihoods disappear?” asks Ramaswamy.

While artisans rely on markets for their survival, consumers also are bringing change to traditional crafts.

Traditional handicrafts are primarily individualistic and subject to varying degrees of imperfection. Standardisation is difficult to teach, much less accomplish in practice, but it is a prerequisite for urban markets.

In addition, traditional and modern forms often must blend in order to appeal to urban shoppers.

”For traditional crafts to survive, marketing strategies have to be inventive and proactive,” says Geetha Ilamurugan, manager of a leading crafts shop in Chennai city. ”We mix and match craft traditions under threat, like giving a Mangalagiri border to handloom cotton from Kerala in the making of a sari. If chemical dyes are going to help weavers sell hand-woven indigo-coloured bedspreads, let us stock them too. Ultimately, to survive, we must sell.”

Purists, however, feel that this outlook is self-defeating since the mixing and matching of varying traditions leads to a loss of the uniqueness that makes a craft sought after.