Preserving or Prolonging?
- Aanya Kapur
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Sri City: I recently visited the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy in New Delhi with my younger brother for a project he was working on. As part of the project, I had to speak with some of the artisans present there about their work and livelihood. One of the artisans present was a woman from Jammu, who was selling woolen stoles with Kashmiri Sozni embroidery on them. When I asked her about her livelihood, she mentioned how that form of art has been in her family for generations and she has been practicing her craft for over 25 years. When enquiring about the price of one stole she stated that it was ₹2800, after which she added that initially the price was ₹3500 but had to be decreased due to declining sales. I asked her about the frequency of the decline in sales, to which she said that while she’s faced the problem of declining sales, it has never stretched out for more than 2 months.
This looks like an ordinary fluctuation in sales however it points to something a lot more problematic. The fact that her declining sales stretch over multiple months shows how instability in demand has become a persistent problem rather than being a passing phase. The root cause of this lies in a market that prioritises speed, low-cost and scalability above all else. Furthermore, this is also what pushes families who have carried these crafts through the generations to gradually abandon them. To combat this, we are often told to ‘support local artisans by buying their work, but as well meaning as the initiative is, I believe that the responsibility of preserving a historical craft cannot be solely placed on the individual consumer. In terms of institutional efforts, museums and government schemes are positioned as pillars of support. However, their impact is also quite limited. They offer public platforms to the artisans as a way for them to showcase their work and also help raise awareness among the general public about the value of traditional crafts. Similarly, government schemes may offer occasional financial assistance and incentives but there have been questions about whether these schemes are truly effective. Take, for instance, the PM Vishwakarma scheme which was launched by the Indian government in 2023. Its primary aim is to support artisans through skill upgradation, toolkit incentives and providing of collateral-free credit in order to integrate them into the formal market. Yet despite this there have been significant drawbacks to the scheme which includes its limited reach as it covers only a fraction of the artisan population. Additionally the loan approval rate remains extremely low, mainly due to concerns over poor creditworthiness or a high risk perception among banks.
Thus, while we can say that institutional involvement strengthens the artisans ability to take part in the market, it is basically making them compete in the very same system that undervalued their work in the first place. The logic is similar to an argument made by the writer Audre Lorde, who in her essay “The Master’s Tools” argues that a system cannot be broken down using the same tools that built it in the first place. Looking at artisans from this perspective, their relying on market based solutions and institutional schemes that are rooted in the same economic logic will do little to address the core issues that are at the heart of their marginalization.
This is also one of the main reasons as to why I feel some crafts should be allowed to die. Preserving a piece of work simply for the sake of preservation, without any genuine appreciation or demand strips it of its meaning and relevance and ends up becoming a static relic that is now disconnected from the communities that once sustained them.
Ultimately, forcing a craft to survive through measures like government schemes and museum exhibitions will simply reduce the value of the work. Instead, it is better to accept that not every craft can or should be preserved, considering the fact that today's system and economic framework was never made to accommodate them.
