Laila Tyabji sits on her ikat-upholstered sofa with equal ease as she does with the idea that it’s time to pass on the reins of Dastkar, the organisation she has built for over five decades that privileged the needs of the craftsperson above all else. Her naturally-lit living room in Shanti Niketan, New Delhi, hosts a menagerie of memories — be it the rugs, the carved wooden panel or the Chambal Rumal wall frame. The handmade, the handwoven is at an arm’s distance, at every point.
As daughter of diplomat Badruddin Tyabji and artist Surayya, who designed the Indian national flag adding the Ashoka chakra instead of the charkha, Laila and her four brothers grew up seeing the world in a grain of sand. Her early schooling at Dehradun’s Welham Girls’ School and art studies at MS University Baroda would hone her art and design skills which she later fine-tuned when she became an intern for Japanese abstract woodcut artist Toshi Yoshida. “My parents were both aesthetes and believed that whatever we used should be beautiful. In my early days as a designer, in the ’70s, I had a barsati in Defence Colony where I lived and worked. I did everything from garments and graphics to theatre sets and wedding design, including stationery for Mrs Indira Gandhi. In those days design was so open, there was no specialisation and there were not that many of us. I was fortunate to work with people like Shona Ray, Ratna Fabri, Zehra Tyabji and Martand Singh,” she says.
Poonam Muttreja, who is now chairperson, Dastkar, remembers how the organisation itself came into being.”Since 1981, Dastkar has been a platform that gave artisans dignity through fair market prices. Laila took the lead and single-handedly made Dastkar a strong institution,” she says. Laila credits the other five founders — Bunny Page, Jaya Jaitly, Gauri Chaudhury, Prabeen Grewal and Poonam.
“It was just something that began quite spontaneously,” says Laila, 78, “We started working informally. We would meet women and teach them how to string beads and do that in interesting colour combinations. Just those small interventions got them to earn more.” Though in the initial years they did not take funding from elsewhere, requests grew from craftspeople for support. The founders reached out to foreign institutions until the late 1990s when they began to generate their own funds. “Craft is the second largest sector of employment after agriculture. But because it’s so diverse and dispersed into different communities, different genders, different castes, different geographic locations, different skills, they don’t come together as a single voice,” she adds.
Laila Tyabji with women from Ranthambore, Rajasthan (Dastkar)
By that time, Laila was also merchandiser for Taj Khazana, the lifestyle store managed by Taj Group of Hotels. Tasked by the Gujarat Handloom and Handicrafts Corporation to document and reskill artisans in Kutch, Laila travelled to the villages for three months. She stayed for six. “I taught them how to use their intrinsic handskills, prompted them to use better quality materials and colours and suggested they do kurtas and cushion covers besides just their traditional dresses. Things that seem obvious now were revolutionary then.”
But without resources to buy quality raw material or access to a market, it was a tough ask. At the time, state emporiums came with vested interests, which meant it was a closed loop with no way in for these rural craftspeople. That’s when the first Dastkar exhibition happened in 1977, at Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi. For many visitors, it was the first time they had met a craftsperson. For the makers, it was the first time they had ever made a bill and could take the money themselves.
Over the years, Dastkar has worked in 29 Indian states, including with chikankari embroidery women in Lucknow; with tribal women in Bihar, honing their skills in tussar; and in Rajasthan, the Dastkar Ranthambore Project has revived craftgroups, skilling them with contemporary design ideas and training them in product development and production systems, including costing and pricing. “It has been a learning for both sides. I always tell my young colleagues at Dastkar, when you go on a field trip, listen with your hearts, your head and your ears. Very often craftspeople are polite and they don’t tell you that X is not the way to behave or suggest that something will not work within their technique or tradition. You will have to sense it. It’s one of the reasons why so many student design projects in craft don’t go as planned,” says Laila.
Having been on numerous design juries for schools, including National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), she knows that design development and system upgrading are a slow-cook. It’s not the question of just having a brilliant idea but having an idea that matches the technology of the craft. Laila recalls a student project from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where the student had worked with chikan embroidery women from Lucknow. “She was so frustrated because she had done these designs which were all rectangular shapes. With embroidery, it’s very difficult to make sharp corners and squares, that’s why chikankari is full of floral motifs and flowing jaals. If she had studied the tradition she would have seen that. In weaving it’s the opposite. Because it’s based on a grid of warp and weft, you can get checks and stripes out but it’s very difficult to get curvilinear lines,” she says.
Though in her teen years, embroidery seemed boring as she watched her mother and grandmother work with their hands, Laila grew into it over time. “For the Kutch women to see this urban person who seemed to have all the advantages that they didn’t have, still sitting and embroidering and enjoying it, paradoxically gave them a sense of value. I made the most extraordinary friends. Four decades on, I have seen three generations of craftspeople and the changes that have come in their lives, the confidence and resilience that women have gained. Today, they use their skills not only to support their families but also in making decisions, walking away from bad marriages, educating their daughters.” But there were tough times too.
Laila talks of Dhapu, a young craftswoman, who killed herself in Ranthambore when her husband told her his brother had died and his widow and two children were going to come and live with them. With a family of five of their own, she didn’t know how she would feed another three. “In just a few years, her daughter and nieces were sought-after brides because they had good incomes of their own working with Dastkar. It was such a tragedy that Dhapu wasn’t able to hang on long enough,” says Laila.
According to the Dastkar website, the Ranthambore project has seen earnings grow from Rs 500 in the initial years to Rs 6,000; the project turnover was Rs 1.29 crore in 2011-2012. Through Dastkar, Laila not only opened doors for craftspeople but also showed them how to walk out of that door with all the skill and courage that they had within them.
Curated by Aisha Patel
