Pallavi Chamarty

This paper explores the interconnected histories of the Indian textile craft kalamkari and the anglicised chintz. Globally popular from the seventeenth century onwards, the chintz is associated with the English garden floral, the craft and makers of kalamkari remained detached from its relationship with the chintz. Even within the internationally acclaimed host of Indian handicrafts, kalamkari remains a lesser studied, languishing craft which has given in to the forces of commercialisation and commoditisation. This paper explores how this alienation came about, by using textual and discourse analyses to critically analyse the history and historiography of apolitical, traditional craft literature, and juxtapose them with post-colonial theory and craft discourse. The paper also attempts to retrieve artisanal subjectivity from the past, where it was buried with historicising, politically uncritical language which sought to naturalise the impacts of colonialism and coloniality on craft practice, discourse, and identity formation of maker communities. This is done through interviews with contemporary kalamkari artisans to understand material and cultural mediations, and attitudes towards community, labour and creative ownership from the artisan’s perspective, which has been has systemically excluded from all forms of discursive place-making in cultural studies like literature, galleries, museums and academia. As a work of postcolonial research on craft history, this paper uses theories proposed by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Ariella Azoulay to reject the academic tradition of historicizing colonial encroachments on traditional knowledge and generalising distinct cultural signatures to offer an alternative understanding of craft history from the position of artisanal subjectivity.

Keywords: Chintz, Kalamkari, Coromandel, Craft, Colonialism, Coloniality, Decolonisation, Artisan