Session 76 summary
In 1995 when Anurag was in Lakhimpur Kheri, she had gone for an internship where she spotted a beautiful basket and there Anurag’s journey began. She was specifically sent by the client to go to the tharu community, who had been displaced, and she was only told to go there and see what the community were doing. When she picked up the roti basket, interesting thing was that it was bamboo that had been woven in. The outside was a coloured patterned craft that had taken shape and it had a bamboo frame and had been tied in with moonj. It is fascinating because the outside and inside are two different plates which are bound together in a circular shape so, they were woven flat and then they were bound together with moonj. There are two grasses that were used, one is bamboo and the other is moonj Anurag didn’t know much about it in so much detail at that time. In around 2019 when she was invited to again go and talk to the tharu community and see what they were doing, she thought that she would be coming across bamboo and moonj. The moonj grass grows around the river, and most of the grasses that they are working with in the Mon Ami foundation grow through the river and the river bodies through the plains. So, all these grasses are found in the wild and then are being utilised by the local community as their local raw material. For somebody who has worked in Rajasthan and Karnataka where there was absolute arid land, with no water and raw material, this was a contrast in comparison to that because it is a rich area. Anurag had the opportunity to work with the tharu community which is up in the north of Uttarakhand and she is working around areas of Lucknow, she is also working around Kolkata working with madhur grass which is growing in the fields across west Bengal.
Moonj is a wild grass that grows along seasonal ponds is harvested by hand for which the women walk long distances to the places where the grass grows naturally. It is growing through the river Ganga and also it is grown to prevent animals from going into the fields. Only after a long and tedious pre-preparation process is the grass ready to be handcrafted into some extremely beautiful and stylish products. It is cut only during monsoon and stocked throughout for the year, the reason they cut it at this time is because it is the easiest time to slice through it otherwise later it become very hard to go into the bushes and cut the grass out.
Tharu tribe a community nestled in the Terai and Bhabar region of Uttarakhand, consider themselves as the “people of the forests” since they are mainly in agricultural work. The tharu women take a lot of pride in their artistic skills as they are extremely proficient weavers. In other parts of the country the people usually use frames to give a certain shape to the baskets but the tharus do not use frames. In fact the reason that Anurag and her team were able to make the project successful was because there was such little investment of infrastructure that was required to create and reach out to people. Everybody had their tool, it was a simple long needle that they used and they had their raw material growing not far. So, it was interesting to see that the shapes that they create was without any frame at all. They just do a simple coiling, and the binding that is done is being done with the grass called moonj, the inside grass (the grass that is bound) is totally different, it is kans which is another quality of wild grass which grows in the same area. But it is not moonj, moonj is a unique grass which is very sturdy, it can be bound into ropes, it has been the binding grass as the tharus know it. Over the time tribals have adapted to using different materials that are available to them because of being displaced. The skills that the women have has been there for generations but to sell them is something recent. So, when the foundation started working with them, the main focus was to be able to make products that were more utility based, there was no concept of size or form that was being followed, in fact the first thing Anurag did there was to introduce inch tapes to them.
Mon Ami Foundation is an independent not-for-profit trust registered in India, with a strong focus on social responsibility. They work closely with recipient communities across rural and urban India with support from corporates domain experts and service providers to ensure equal participation from all stakeholders for a sustainable future. So their goals are aligned with the different SDG goals that have been called out specifically. There is a lot of work that is going on these three specific category which is recent work and economic growth which specifically means that the work environment that the women- the artisans are working in needs to be respectful or they cannot be taken away from their natural environment and ensure that what money that they earn is going to them. Responsible production and consumption- the way to go ahead is that they collaborate, they understand and carefully tread on the direction and where production is concerned, being able to work at the grass root level with local materials. They don’t want a situation where they start cultivating forest with moonj, they also don’t want to go in a direction where they say that there are rates that the women have agreed on or disrespected by any chance. So, there is a lot of work the foundation has been thinking through. How the foundation goes about working with any cluster any tribe: first mapping the craft which is extremely important to be able to understand what is the tool and the technique they are using, their raw material and what is the community doing. After creating products, after the design intervention if one leaves a project then they are not doing justice to the work that has been done to any community if they don’t take it to a market. Taking any product and making it marketable needs to be understood and explained to the community why some amount of products need to look a certain size, form, pack up,etc. everything has to be taken into account. The beauty of this project was that when Mon Ami did the design intervention unfortunately Covid struck and everything was shut down but the government was there with them, who said that the schools were empty-why don’t Mon Ami get all the women from the villages around to the local government school, organize zoom sessions and do the training through zoom. So, they designed zoom training modules for the first range of their products to be developed. The first range was the basic utility baskets, the women would work outside the school premise after having the training session. They would be given printouts, which they would start working in the school and would come back the week after with the homework that they were given. By the end of it they were all working. After a year of having worked with them, the Foundation called group of women who had been the representatives of the three or four villages that they have been working with and 12 women came to Delhi Sharda University, where they did a week long training at the university, where they were taught how to use the smartphones, what is their Facebook page, creating their Facebook page, creating email ids, telling the women what does it mean to create and craft a product by making- journey of the product and how the costing needs to be done. So, the business school at the university sat them through the entire training process, it was a beautiful one week just like an opening from the village as most of them had never been to Delhi. What was really interesting was that for the first time their work was given a very different level of costing and they realized that nothing is for free. If their work, effort and time has a cost it needs to go into the product. This being understood by the 12 women representative, they went back to the villages so when the next round of product development happened, they gave the Foundation a raise of all the work of baskets because they calculated the time and then prepared a written performer stating the new rate on which they will work on. This was well respected because it was for the first time they were at a training programme at the university itself, there was discussion, and there was thought and a real understanding of those beautiful baskets that they had created and the well-deserved money that they were getting directly. So, Mon Ami Foundation made sure that the money that was given to them went into their banks, into their self-help groups, nothing went as a cash. As of today they are working with 700 artisans, all of them are part of self-help groups, all of them get money in their banks and none of them give it to their husbands. The previous range was developed in a village in Small Township called Khatima area in Udham Singh Nagar, where they focused on very simple work just increasing sizes, keeping forms very simple and creating that range.
The next range was very ethnic. It was a Dalia that they found in villages, it had a bit of writing on the top and Anurag found it very fascinating. Nilesh, a member of Mon Ami, collected all kinds of dahlias with the women there and each Dalia was more fascinating than the other. It is made in silky grass which is changing, this village is next to Khatima so even the two groups are nearby but this group has adapted to a completely new grass than the moonj, and even use plastic waste to make dalias. What is fascinating in those dalias is that there is the use of motifs and Anurag really tried searching high and low trying to figure out if those motifs have been documented. She only found one UNPD documentation of those motifs, which stated that they are all narratives of their life in the village, the mountain there farms women animals around. So, each dalia is fantastic and unique. They didn’t do any design intervention, just told them if they could do wall mounts of those dahlias and not use dalias as they use- part of dowry when a girl gets married, not the dowry in modern sense but as a pride that the woman has learned that particular skill and she is going to have it for the rest of her life. They take atleast over a month or even more to make a dalia. Anurag just asked them to convert the images into flat wall mount in different sizes different colours that the women want to use. She once tried giving a graph and failed miserably, the reason to give them a graph was that maybe she could get them to replicate one design and repeat the same but the design is imbedded in their minds so beautifully so she didn’t even want to try and get them to make two baskets of the same kind. At times as a designer one really need to be sensitive to the fact that what a particular community is doing and respect it. Anurag’s main emphasis has been that whoever can make that should just continue with the craft.
India’s handicraft heritage positively draws inspiration from the environment and it compensates back by furnishing products that are non-polluting and sustainable thereby helping reduce carbon footprints.
About the Speaker
Anurag Rana
With over 23 years of experience in business skills training and product development in the rural sector and among the marginalized sections of society, Anurag firmly believes that lasting economic growth can only follow an integrated approach to product development, skills training, market access and eco-effective processes. To this end, she has been working with low-income workers, imparting training and design inputs in order to help them develop products that are ready for contemporary markets. This endeavour has taken her to crafts persons in Himachal and Rajasthan, Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Kerela and Karnataka, where she worked with wool and livestock. With hands on ground, Anurag strongly feels that the possibility of projects that will positively impact society is endless, and the needs of these people are real. However, the funds that these crafts persons receive are severely limited and this prompted her to establish Mon Ami Foundation. Her recent project involves training women in the rural urban pockets around Delhi – NCR region to develop vegetable dyed crochet toys for children. At Mon Ami Foundation, Anurag will be instrumental in identifying projects focussed on sustainable livelihood & vocational skills, environmental sustainability and healthcare. Anurag holds a Master’s degree in Textile Design from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
