“Today, craftspeople are struggling to survive, and the only thing they have is their uniqueness.” —Laila Tyabji
After finishing her studies in the fine arts from Japan, where, “like all good art students,” she picked up a certain disdain for design, Laila Tyabji returned to India in the ’60s. And after doing odd jobs like designing stationery for Indira Gandhi (a fluke, she says) and starting the Taj Khazana store for the Taj Hotel on New Delhi’s Mansingh Road, she took a trip to Gujarat in 1978. She was 30 then, and the visit transformed her life. She then founded Dastkar, a non-governmental crafts-centric organisation, in 1981. Today, as chairperson of Dastkar,Tyabji organises craft bazaars and melas across the country, and was awarded a Padma Shri in 2012. Old friends and collaborators David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore speak with her about the way forward.
David Abraham & Rakesh Thakore: What were you doing before Dastkar? Laila Tyabji: I started, I suppose, as all good art students do: Despising design, thinking that it was very much the lower end of the spectrum. I was in my early 20s in the late 1960s, and lived on my own, but my parents were supporting me. I had a little place in Defence Colony for which I had to pay the rent, and my paintings were not enough. So I started to take on design assignments. Then, in 1978, at the age of 30, I visited Kutch, and it was a life-transforming experience. Kutch was totally unexposed, and both Gurjari and the Cottage Industries Emporiums were just beginning to come there to source for their shops.
DA & RT: What happened then? LT: We discovered a lot of good material, and I ended up staying there for six months. When I came back to Delhi, something completely opposite happened. The Taj Palace Hotel on Mansingh Road was opening, and they had this huge space where they had decided, rather reluctantly, to run a shopping arcade themselves. They were looking for people to do the merchandising for the shops, and somebody said to me “why don’t you go?” I did, got the job, and that’s how the Taj Khazana began. I stuck around for almost a year till I felt myself getting disenchanted. I had been sourcing from craftspeople and stocking at Khazana, but after a while, I was told that the merchandise wasn’t bringing in enough profits as per the space it occupied in terms of floor area. That’s when Dastkar came into my mind: An organisation in the middle, which obviously had to be financially sustainable, with the interests of the consumers and the artisans at heart, and act as a bridge between the two.
DA & RT: After you set up Dastakar, what was the first thing you did ? LT: We didn’t realise that we would actually be marketing the products. All of us were working, and ran it in our free time. We gave the artisans products to develop, and we told them about costing and pricing. Then, we understood that we required to sell. That’s how the first Dastkar Bazaar started in 1981.
DA & RT: How do you feel about looking at Indian crafts through a Western aesthetic?
LT: It’s a sensitive issue, and there is no right or wrong. The person, designer or developer, who is taking the decision, should be very sensitive before imposing the solution: It may not always suit the skill or the community. The other thing is that you have to take the craftsmen into partnership. Everybody wants you to be on one side of the debate, but I am tired of people assuming that since I have worked with crafts, I would say that nothing should be changed. Craft is a production process, and it’s always marketdriven. International or not, it has always responded to the consumer. For example, earlier, the artisan was at the centre of the adaptation process. Nowadays, an exporter or a young kid thinks that Lambani embroidery in a black-and-white geometric pattern may look interesting. But you must look at the fact that Lambani embroidery has an extraordinary range of stitches and motifs that you can contemporise without throwing away the baby with the bath water. Today, craftspeople are struggling to survive, and the only thing they have is their uniqueness. That’s what we need to preserve.