Embroidery (Bharat) traditions and women casual labour in Barmer, Rajasthan

# This article first appeared in Livelihood Systems, EXCHANGES, September 1997, Issue No. 18, Action Aid (India)

Indo –Pak War of 1971 and Exodus:

This article is a short account of the changes in the livelihoods of the war displaced women who came to India after the Indo-Pak War from the villages of Thar parkar, the district of lower Sind contiguous to Rajasthan and Gujarat. The aftermath of the war was followed by an exodus of around three lakh people (around 90,000 families) to the districts of Barmer and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan alone.

Thars fled from their villages for the fear of persecution, hardship and discrimination at the hands of the military dictatorship of the Islamic state of Pakistan as well as the uncertainties and scarcity of the war affected and occupied territory. The hopes for a better future in India eroded soon in the face of the growing hostility of the raiyas (natives) on the Indian side of the border as well as by the align and partisan treatment meted out by the Indian state. Viewed with suspicion they were doomed to exist as sharanarthis (refugees) dependent upon the rations provided by the Indian state in relief camps under confinement and strict surveillance. These rations could barely sustain them and a struggle for survival relied more on the deployment of coping strategies. These coping strategies were subaltern practices evolved by the sharanarthis themselves in response not only to an indignant native population but an equally hostile harsh climate of the arid region of western Rajasthan.

One such coping strategy employed by the women of the Pak Oustees was the reworking of the female handicraft traditions for market production. The years of survival in the camps and the decade after has seen the commodification of these once domestic handicraft traditions. The life of limited opportunities, the marginalization of male traditions of weaving, and increased incidence of alcoholism at a time when women became producers for the big market of handicrafts contributed to the reordering of the gender space within the households. In the pages to follow an attempt is made to delineate the stages of the ‘fetishisation” of the exquisite art/ craft of embroidery (bharat) traditions in the context of the emergence of a large women causal labour force in the Barmer district of Rajasthan.

Craft traditions from the west

The Thar parkar, especially its arid tracts, contiguous with those in India had a rich diversity of craft traditions practiced by both men and women. The slow and idyllic life of the arid tracts with leisure time at hand and proliferation of settlements as well as occasions of exchange was particularly well suited to the proliferation of these craft traditions. Mirror work incorporated with thread work originated with the use of mica found in the desert. In this account the discussion is restricted to craft traditions known as bharat (which literally means to fill) in the local dialect and includes both embroidery as well as appliqué / patchwork traditions. Oral testimonies of Dhatis, the natives of Thar Parkar, do not say anything definite about the exact place of origin of these traditions. However most accounts point out that the traditions came from the West, from the vast chain of Persio-Arabian deserts stretching uninterruptedly across the entire width of the Near East. The route to Thar Parkar lay via the tract known as Sawloti (comprising of Mithi and Diplo taluka) which can be easily designated as the nucleus of these craft traditions. It was from this core that the traditions diffused eastward towards Chachro and Nagar Parkar talukas. Given the demographic composition of these tracts it would not be too far fetched to surmise that the initial bearers of these traditions must have been several nomadic pastoral groups like the Baloch.

When and how these pastoral traditions were adopted by the Hindu in the Thar Parkar is something on which the accounts do not say anything definitive. But what is peculiar about the assimilations of the bharat traditions is their popularity and provenance amongst the subaltern groups. The practice of wearing embroidery was more prevalent among the lower castes like the Meghwals, Ravana Rajputs, Bhils and Kolis. In fact many elders remembering life in the Thar Parkar remark “…wearing bharat was a stigma, a mark of being low caste, of placing and identifying a dhend as the Meghwals were derogatively addressed.”

Traditions of exchange and Communication

The bharat traditions were household traditions and were personalized expressions of a gift economy. Each embroidered piece was an individualized expression of the female artisan’s passion and love for her family members and relatives. The desire to embroider may be explained as an urge to add embellishment to cloth, the desire to bring colour, design, vivacity and an identity to something which is plain and austere. The elderly women in the community initiated the young girls into this craft at the early age of six or seven. The initiation into the production of craft was part of the larger process of socialization of the neophytes. By the time the girls were married they had a collection of different bharat to decorate their own new homes and thus display their embroidering skills to the relatives.

If we stroll through the gallery of objects which were produced under the rubric bharat we would see how the fantastic range of the domestic tradition was meant to engulf (rather fill) almost every aspect of the life of the person to whom it was gifted. This is what constituted bharat as one of the most memorable gifts, almost as important as the jewels exchanged on ceremonial occasions. A glance through the typical dress code of the bride and groom of the lower caste in Thar Parkar would suffice as an illustration. Conventionally the male attire decorated with bharat would include a rumal (handkerchief), a kadbandhna, a safa (turban), a topi (cap), a malir while the bharat adorned female dresses like the odana (veil), kanchli (bodice), kanjri and ghaghra (skirt). Apart from these dresses bharat included objects like raali, seranthio, pagothia, gadadi, thelo (bag) even mojadi (shoes). The intricate geometrical designs, symmetrical placing of squares, triangles, circles all embroidered through a variety of stitching practices like kutcha, soof, kharak, mucca, jari, etc using attractive colour schemes are suggestive of the fact that bharat ranked as one of the fairly well developed handicraft traditions of Thar parkar. The designs told a story or served a need, patterns brought harmony and the colours imparted character which stood out in the sandy and monotonous landscape of the desert.

These presentations of what a cultural anthropologist has aptly called ‘threads of life” were communicative skills par excellence. It is through the production of these, during times of leisure or timed to climax with a significant ritual or rites of passage, that the women communicated with nature as well as the world around them. Many names of the designs like sugga (parrot), nimbodi (of the neem tree), bachda (calf), kambhiri, bawalia, kurja, lehrio (wavy), etc are suggestive of this. It may be interesting to note that there are folk songs which are referred to by similar names as these designs thus conveying their important place in the oral folk tradition. The repertoire of patterns was fairly vast and consisted of hundreds of designs. Even in the case of patchwork, more popular among the Rajput and Charan women, the different figurines and animals cut in varying sizes to be placed in a particular order on the sheet of cloth signified their image of the world / nature.

It was this kind of domestic craft tradition serving a gift economy of prestige and love which the Dhati (driven away) women brought along with them when they left their houses for fear of persecution, injury or death. The visual expressions of women and the artisans themselves, embedded in a pre-literate rural culture, were to undergo a radical transformation in the ensuring years of survival as sharanarthis, in a struggle to escape from penury, destitution and famine.

Handicraft Boom and Struggle for Survival

In the early months of 1972, in their struggle to eke out an existence in India, the Pak Oustees discovered that the bharat which many of them had managed to get along with them was in demand in the handicraft bazaar of Barmer city. Distress sale of bharat along with other valuables at throw away prices was one of the widely practiced coping strategies. The villages of Chohtan and Sheo tehsils (blocks) wee suddenly flooded with a large number of artisan women who could be made to work in meager sums. The handicraft traders of Barmer had stuck a fortune. The camps were targeted as sites of mass production of bharat. The trader would supply the necessary raw material to the women sitting in the camps and collect from them exquisite finished products often paying miserably low rates like one rupee for sticking ten mirrors in a cap or five rupees for embroidering a cushion cover. The early seventies saw the emergence of some big traders who were to dominate the trade in handicraft in the coming years. The handicraft trade with the twenty five relief camps was controlled by two main traders- Pitambar Das Shishopal located in Gadra monopolized villages in Sheo tehsil and Asulal Dosi located in Chohtan tehsil monopolized production in all its villages. By the end of seventies both these firms had grown into large export houses with showrooms in Jodhpur and Jaipur with annual turnovers of more than 10 crores. The ghettos like Leladi Dhora in the city of Barmer were left for local traders from Barmer city. These local traders had their own clientele of outsiders, mainly working in the armed forces and other Government jobs who numbers increased substantially.

Years of hardships in relief camps transformed the relations of Dhati women with these craft traditions. From expressions of desire, affection and exchange bharat became products highly valued added and produced exclusively for the growing market abroad. The connectedness between artisan and bharat was replaced by a wage in cash relationship. The growing alienation between the worker and her product also manifested itself in a new rationale for production-instead of being made for special occasions or periods of liminal transition, the production of baharat was regulated by the whims and orders of a merchant. This mass production for the handicraft market rested on the immobility of the women labour force. It was sustained by the logic of confinement implicit in the life in the refugee camps, and the social and cultural taboos which debarred women from venturing into the public sphere. The production and marketing process was hierarchical in which a handful of big merchants were at the top followed by a large number of consisting mostly of Pak Oustee males with the artisan women at the lowest rung. The big merchant would advance raw material which was to be carried by the middlemen to the artisans sitting in the villages. Usually one such middlemen would be entrusted with 8-10 villages. Often there were a number of commission agents between the middlemen and the artisans who in turn would monior the production in one village or a cluster of houses. Sometimes this chain that worked like pre-capitalist putting out system could have as many as eight middlemen between the merchant who invested the capital and the bharat artisan who made the product. Wages, which were as such depressed, accruing to the artisan women were further lowered by the commissions of each such middlemen.

By the time the relief camps ended in 1979-80, the production processes were well entrenched and operating in the villages of Chohtan and Sheo. The handicraft boom thst came riding on the romantic constructions of Thar had managed to carve out a space for itself in the informal sector of a rural economy of barmer district. Thus, bharat, a tradtion from the other side of the border, and practiced by women artisans from war displaced families were gradually integrated into the lowest rungs of the rural society of barmer district.

Immiserisation and Wage Hunting

The consecutive famines in the eighties put further squeeze on the household economies of the barmer district. The sudden closure of refugee camps and an absence of any opportunities for employment complelled more and more women to seek recourse to the production of bharat, even at depressed wages, as the only alternative. The scarcity of food fodder nd water affected the raiya populations as well. Consequebntly many women from other castes even amongst the riaya got drawn into this un-regulated non-agrarian sector of the economy of the frontier district. This expansion of the female labour force had its own impact on the on-going commodification of bharat traditions. The market oriented production adjusted itself to tap this easily available and cheap labour force by introducing certain changes in the strategies of production. The emphasis was on simplifying the products often at the expense of quality as well as the exquisiteness and complexity that had been the hallmark of bharat traditions.

The employment of raiya women who were not the original bharat artisans favored the patchwork traditions more. Unlike embroidery, which was labor intensive and required skilled labor, the advantage with patchwork was that it involved the relatively simpler tasks of cutting figurines and placing them. It was also easier to replicate the patchwork traditions as the figurines could be cut in large numbers using a cutting machine which made it a more suitable product for mass production. In embroidery the more complex patterns using complicated stitching practices like kharak were abandoned in the favor of a new set of designs which were easier to execute. That the ‘age of creation’ was on the wane could be discerned in the popularity of new designs like the village scene, half moon, Taj Mahal, Ganga, Sea, desert life etc. These new designs, as the names suggest, had little to do with the creative urges of the bharat artisan and emphasized mass production for an alien market. Through the mass production of such new designs the bharat traditions were making a transition to the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’.

The enlargement of the informal sector manifested itself through changes in the constitution of the production chains. The small number of middlemen who were pioneers in venturing out into trade in the seventies gave way to more of their kind as they scaled up further to become petty organizers of production for increased profits. The eighties were characterized by the emergence of these petty traders from amongst the Pak Oustee community who often worked with capital advance by the giants of the trade. This emerging hierarchy among the traders was accompanied by as growing differentiation in the strategies of tapping and regulating labour. For instance, the petty traders from the pak Oasutee community because of their grater rapport with the bharat artisans could convince women to come to their units thus saving on the expenses and worries of sending raw material and collecting finished products.

A case study on the expansion of such production units from a handful to more than thirty in a decade in the village of Dhanau points to the handicraft production emerging as one of major occupations of women in the rural economy. Most of the units which started in eighties were the initiatives of the Meghwals from the Pak Oustee community. These units in Dhanau tap women labor from around twenty five villages and dhanis in a radius of around 30 km. n spite of differences and stiff competition amongst these units they follow a common strategy of regulating bharat labour. All of them operate on a weekly basis with each Monday of the week marked out for cash transaction with women. This has tied women to a weekly cycle of oscillation between their households and these units. On Monday women from all around make their appearance, coming in groups of five or six. Dhanau on Monday is crowded by these ‘wage hunters’. The bharat artisans who were not tied to one particular unit deposit their finished products claim their wages then go to the different units, and pick up more raw material to work on.

The involvement of a female artisan in bharat production begins with her establishing a link to a production unit, mostly producing out of her household time along with dispensing her duties as a mother as well keeper of livestock. Most of her leisure tie is spent in bharat usually providing her an occasion to interact with other women from the same settlement. The job done consistently and diligently over along period of time very often results in excessive strain on the eyes. Partaking of boric acid or snuff as antidotes to this are fairly common among the older women workers. In the absence of nay other source of employment these women work round the year producing bharat in weekly or fortnightly cycles. Time off from this impinging rhythm of production is literally dependent on the good fortune and nature’s benevolence. If it rains well for seven to eight days (which is rare and happens only once in many years) in July-August then they work as farmhands for around a fortnight sowing their fields and about the same number of days in October-November when they harvest the subsistence grains.

The commodification of bharat traditions over the last quarter of the century has situated the bharat artisans as possibly the largest group among the women wage workers in the laboring landscape of Barmer. This swelling of the number of women wage hunters and gatherers’ has had an adverse effect on their wages which on the average vary between Rs. 200-5000 per month to as low as Rs. 15-20 per month. The payment in cash is many times supplemented or replaced with wage advances in kind consisting of daily provisions from the village shops invariably owned by the middleman or the petty trader. These subsistence wages in kind unleash their own cycles of indebtedness which is another feature of the growing immiserisation of the primary producers of the exotic handicrafts. Thus the ‘fetishization’ of the bharat traditions continues unabated in a sector whose characteristic features are unrestrained capital and footloose and disenfranchised labour.


Photo Credits: Swasti Singh