Picture this. You pick up a shiny metal lamp from a government handicraft emporium. You want an authentic handmade artifact for your home. You also want to support the few families who still use the lost-wax casting process. What you don’t know is that you might have actually acquired a fake.

Our education is indifferent to the skills that have made India famous but left its practitioners impoverished. There are few to applaud traditional knowledge systems in this age of hyper modernity. The national economic indices don’t recognise the contributions of the millions who make up the so-called unorganised sector. During the pandemic, therefore, there are few relief packages for artists and artisans who, unlike frontline COVID-19 warriors protecting our bodies, remain the guardians of our soul.

Lives unnoticed

Your brass lamp, with its lustrous patina of a bronze original, is manufactured in Moradabad or Aligarh. Churned out as assembly line duplicates from rubber moulds, there is little evidence of these lamps ever having been touched by dexterous fingers conditioned by tradition.

Old Moradabad was once famous for its ‘Kaseras’ and ‘Chiteras’, who made chitai or repoussé and meenakari or enamelling into an art form. Today, it is a warren of tiny one-room tenements that double up as industrial units, circumventing factory laws, stealing electricity from domestic meters, and turning homes into factories. Children with soot-covered faces and tired eyes hold up gleaming candelabras and beer tumblers for foreign buyers.

New Moradabad starts on the highway leading to the inner town. Large factories and export houses line the road, supplying to the home décor trade. Their orders are cancelled, but they may well be the first to qualify for relief. Even though machine-made masquerades as handmade and siphons off official subsidies for handicrafts, relief measures must address everyone in need.

So, who does India consider as its hard-hit craftspeople and how do we identify vulnerable skills? Tragically, only a fraction of those who make the products that line the stalls of urban haats or fill the shelves of emporia and boutiques qualify. The rest exist as numbers in officially recognised clusters, their aesthetic merit bolstered with misdirected interventions and subsidies. Hundreds more are referred to rather derogatorily as ‘languishing’, and more ‘assistance’ is pumped in with little effect.

But millions live unnoticed at the bottom of the pyramid in thousands of villages, providing ubiquitous services as a part of their families’ inherited skills or caste occupation. These include potters, cobblers, metalsmiths, carpenters, basket-weavers, rope-makers, broom-makers, and more. Outside of any mapping and rarely the beneficiaries of any government schemes, they include vast numbers of women, children and itinerants.

Swanky new definition

Between what leaders say and what they leave out, millions of lives stay suspended in poverty. The Centre has announced a ‘Fund of Funds’ to incentivise growth for MSMEs (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises), but the upper end of this omnibus sector might soon tweak official classification to suit its agenda.

The new MSME definition has a swanky message: revise the limit of investment in machinery or equipment and introduce a ‘turnover’ criterion. The government is, in fact, saying ‘no need to stay small to avail benefits’. Who in this rejig will understand that handmade as a carbon-friendly enterprise must remain small to thrive?

In our excitement with this newfound support for MSMEs, let us not blur small cottage-based livelihoods with government terminology. Mud homes cannot install machines to qualify for equity or loans. In the crores of rupees promised last week to the informal sector, immediate attention must be given to clear these ambiguities in classifications.

‘Handmade’ is a much-abused tag, with different meanings for different people. It no longer implies the use of skilled hands, informed by an agile mind and subtle function, motivated by a tradition that moves the spirit. Machines are rapidly being configured to make anything that was earlier made by hands alone. Then came powerlooms, each not just displacing the hands of six weavers but also their sense of making and being.

Bleeding heart boutiques

Many handcrafted ‘khadi’ or cottage industry enterprises with their fancy boutiques make a bleeding-heart pretence of helping the poor, of promoting traditional livelihoods and heritage, and with debatable claims of fair trade. In fact, several hide exploitative work conditions and polluting processes.

We need to be cautious in the post-COVID-19 scenario when a lot of money is earmarked for small enterprises. ‘Handmade’ must be appropriately distinguished and positioned. The shrinking cultural contexts that are marginalising millions of skilled workers require that, simultaneously with relief efforts, MSMEs are also provided with sensitive design help and new markets, both local and global.

Technology is inevitable, as is new material. Anodised aluminium wires, colourful plastic tubes, telephone cables, all sorts of waste get reprocessed into unprecedented incarnations, creating new ‘handmade’ items. Materials and processes will continue to augment creative vocabularies, blurring the borders between handmade and machine-made, merging traditional with modern. Now, more than ever, the purely handmade will have to be made distinct from part-handmade and full machine-made, with new muscular classifications. Legal safeguards, reservations, subsidies and trade unions will all need new teeth if ‘handmade’ is to survive.

Rare but real

Pure handmade textiles, for instance, can only thrive when they offer something that machines cannot. The evolved aesthetic and functional sensibilities that match the individual’s warp of hand skill with the weft of personal insight can only survive when appreciated and recognised. A conscious consumer must first learn to distinguish the real from the fake.

Artistic weaves with natural dyes, handmade block prints, asymmetrical loom embroidery and interlays, unique double ‘ikats’, hand-spun organic cottons of fine counts, wild exotic silks, all these can thus far only be hand-created by the most dexterous. These constitute an exclusive range of products that are for the few, by the few, and, so far, also sold only through the few.

Rarefied? Perhaps, but nevertheless important milestones for the future of what will remain worthy of being called handmade.

Machines will wipe out everything the hand cannot make better. I say better and not cheaper because the future of handmade — as anywhere in the world — is not going to be cheap. Each form of manufacture must be re-classified according to its own carbon footprint. Until the ecological impact of every product begins to reflect on its price, machine-made manufacture will continue to rule. Handmade is best understood when it is measured with the impact that manufacture has on soil, soul and society. Promoting this unique Indian concept of pehchan, or recognition, will be a huge challenge; but it can be done.

Historically, the modernisation process aspires to substitute hard labour with technology. So, government policies must be reappraised ensuring that handmade goods stay one step ahead of automated produce, and that copyright issues or G.I. protection for vulnerable community knowledge are addressed immediately. We need many more design activists willing to work in villages and small units, taking it up as a challenge and leading artisans towards quality products.

Finally, I believe a few thousand crores must be pumped into creating a system for identifying, certifying and promoting 100% handmade goods. It has the potential to generate millions of decentralised livelihoods and earn billions in untapped revenue. More pertinently, in a post-pandemic world, it can create a sustainable movement for slow manufacture, slow clothing and a slow lifestyle.

The scenographer/ designer is founder-chairman of Asian Heritage Foundation and a Padma Bhushan.