In January 1965, Aileen Webb [then president of the World Crafts Council] travelled to India, where Kamaladevi arranged for her to take a national tour under the aegis of the AIHB and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. In the pages of Craft Horizons, Webb celebrated “the extreme kindness shown me by Mme Chattopadhyay” and praised the AIHB for “its emphasis on quality and its research into techniques of the past”. Such a focus on quality resonated with Kamaladevi, who wanted Indian crafts to be respected throughout the world. Whenever she travelled to London, she would visit the Victoria and Albert Museum.
While other activists demanded that the UK return Indian artefacts that had been taken during the colonial period, Kamaladevi was “quite happy that those things are there”, where they could be cared for and remained “open to world view”. They remained Indian wherever they were displayed. “Even if they are in London,” she explained, “they belong to the Indian people.” While embracing the opportunity to raise India’s profile on the world stage, Kamaladevi remained committed to her vision of a crafts renaissance that would bring beauty into the homes of villagers throughout India. When it came to the development of crafts, she wanted to increase quality and quantity.
It was to support both kinds of craft development that she founded the Crafts Council of India in 1964 – the same year that the WCC was created. Unlike the AIHB, which was a government agency, the Crafts Council was an NGO driven by volunteer labour. Most of the key leaders were women, many of whom came to play a major role in Kamaladevi’s life. When she visited Kanpur, Kamaladevi would stay in the home of Mrs Santosh Mahendrajit Singh, a dedicated supporter of the Crafts Council. The two women would take the family’s Dodge to visit craftsmakers across Uttar Pradesh. In Chennai, Kamaladevi often stayed with Vijaya Rajan; in Calcutta with Ruby Palchoudhuri; in Nagpur with Leela Ramanathan. Kamaladevi was grateful for the hospitality and friendship of these younger women, all of whom were leaders in the Craft Council.
In June 1963, she told delegates to the Far East Regional Workshop in Manila that “women’s response” to handicrafts had “been the greatest” and that the consumption choices of women were key to the present and future of the sector. Her work with the Crafts Council demonstrates that it was also women volunteers who were at the forefront of the movement to protect and expand the making of Indian crafts.
Her work with the Crafts Council took her on trips across India. In 1967, she travelled to Bastar, a remote district in the present-day state of Chhattisgarh, with another craft advocate, Mohana Ayyangar. Their goal was to help establish a craft exhibition. All of the hotel rooms had been booked by political figures, and so the two women were housed in a school. Heavy rains began to fall and the school flooded. According to Ayyangar, Kamaladevi remained stoic throughout the ordeal and insisted that they continue their work. On another occasion, Ayyangar recalled, Kamaladevi was delighted to attend a shadow puppet performance in a village in Andhra Pradesh. “The performance took place under a tree; the accessories were only a couple of oil lamps and a big piece of cloth that was both the theatre and curtain,” Ayyangar remembered. “We sat among the village people and enjoyed the show.”
While developing the Crafts Council, Kamaladevi continued to use the AIHB as a tool to advance grassroots development – sometimes one artisan at a time. In Hyderabad, Kamaladevi was introduced to an artist who specialised in miniature Mughal-style paintings. The artist was finding it difficult to sell his work and was struggling to provide food for his family. Kamaladevi travelled with him to his village along with several AIHB field officers, whom she then instructed to provide the painter with raw materials and to send the finished work to the Shilpi Kendra exhibition hall in Bombay where the work would find eager buyers.
Kamaladevi knew that such lone acts could never come close to ending the poverty of many of India’s artisans. She continued to use her pen to advance knowledge of Indian crafts – and to argue for increased state support for the arts. In 1964 and 1965, she collaborated with Jasleen Dhamija to edit two issues of MARG, a journal run by Mulk Raj Anand. In the second issue, which was focused on the carpets of India, she wrote, “It is a ridiculous irony that wherever objects of art wither and die people should sigh and grow nostalgic for feudal lords, the backbone of the landed aristocracy, a system we strenuously fought and did our best to liquidate. Has all our struggle for democracy and socialism been in vain?” The key, in her opinion, was for “the nation and its worthy leaders to offer a liberal and generous patronage to our great heritage of arts and crafts”. While many of her writings argued for such support, her main focus remained on celebrating the crafts themselves.
In 1966, she published Indian Carpets and Floor Coverings, a sweeping overview that combined history, art analysis and technical details about carpet-making across different regions of India. Largely devoid of social critique, the book overflowed with the passion and attention to detail of a craft aficionado.
Kamaladevi was not becoming apolitical, but her engagement with politics was changing and, in some ways, becoming less radical. Consider, for example, how she used her passion for crafts and other forms of art to advance solidarities between recently decolonised countries. In April 1966, she travelled to Dakar, Senegal, for the first World Festival of Negro Arts. She was selected as one of the few official invitees to the festival based on her ability to discuss, in the words of the deputy director general of UNESCO, “les liens qui existent entre l’art indien et l’art africain” (“the ties that exist between Indian art and African art”). Her flights were covered by UNESCO and her local expenses were paid by the Senegalese government, with the approval of the Senegalese president and pan-African visionary Léopold Sédar Senghor.
In Dakar, she met a range of artists and intellectuals, including Langston Hughes who later remembered her as “charming”. She gifted Hughes a copy of her book Indian Handicrafts, which he praised as “lovely”. Hughes and Kamaladevi were both veteran socialists who had spent decades fighting racism and fascism throughout the world. It is possible that they discussed the ongoing struggle against White supremacy and other forms of inequity, but there is no evidence that Kamaladevi used her time in Senegal to link her cultural cosmopolitanism to the social and political challenges facing much of the postcolonial world.
Kamaladevi continued to believe in the importance of Afro-Asian solidarity, but her focus on crafts increasingly narrowed her understanding of such solidarities. In June 1966, Kamaladevi travelled to Montreux, Switzerland, for another session of the WCC. Some 1,255 people from 32 countries attended. According to Craft Horizons, “The most significant contribution was the clear demarcation of differences in the problems of craftsmanship among the developing nations of Asia, Africa, the Near East, and South America and those of Europe and North America.” Kamaladevi rejected the idea of India or other recently decolonised nations as less advanced than the so-called “developed” world, but she was very aware of the unique challenges facing less wealthy regions.
Excerpted with permission from Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom, Nico Slate, HarperCollins India.