Thank you for keeping me in the loop on the ongoing deliberations on the Varanasi weavers crisis. The note that has emerged from all your efforts promises to be a comprehensive agenda for action if we have the will to deal with all the issues and ideas that have emerged. Do we have the faith that the new order of globalisation, at its best, has a space for the Banaras silk weavers? I do believe that it has, but how many others do, outside your list of those involved in the current deliberations? How do we innovate a way forward from here?

There are many ways we can approach the revival of our crafts traditions and transform these into a model of sustainability and creative reinterpretation as we move further into the age of globalised economies all over the world. It is not an option that we can just leave to chance and we will need to act and act fast to make the necessary adjustments that this massive change brings along for all of our crafts in India today. Today it is the Banaras weavers and tomorrow it will be others who will find that their markets have evaporated or subsumed by some new process or material reality that the deep global-culture change is bringing along in our acceptance of this changed order.

I feel that we must have both a short term and a long term view, and the long term one is one that few policy makers seem to have any patience for in these days of daily crisis. The long term view I believe lies in education and empowerment and in retracing the creative energies that symbolise the activities of craftsmanship just as they are found in the roots of sportsmanship, both dealing with the use of the Human Body AS WELL AS the Mind. Our policies for crafts development and preservation, I believe, has been wrongly looking only at the craftsmen, which it should rightly do, since most are underprivileged and exploited by years of neglect or isolation. However we do need a new thrust towards revisiting the whole area of craftsmanship which is a quality search that creates great value for society and it is I believe sustainable in any age, past and in the future, but the form and structure of this sustainability will rest in the creative energies that the craftsman and his society can unfold as time and context change rapidly with greater global connectivity and exchange.

Keeping this in mind, my specific recommendation for the Varanasi situation is that while immediate humanitarian supports are being explored and implemented, we must look at ways to see the sustainability of the craftsmen and their unique ways through exploring education and empowerment opportunities through facilitating the creation of new institutions and platforms for change that can provide an alternate to the dreary education systems that are being passed out to our youth that is devoid of any form of craftsmanship, from the primary to the tertiary levels, rather unfortunate.

I have written about these concepts and I can share these with you. (these papers and reports are all on my website). I do think that a special effort to build or transform an existing educational setting from a purely skill training orientation to a more wholesome systems focused development centre may help in finding the long term that I think we need to seriously examine. The value of the creative industry that I see ahead for our craftsmen will all be lost if we do not take this route going forward while dealing with the immediate crisis on hand.

While I do not have the subject expertise to give specific recommendations for taking the correct steps in the Varanasi weavers situation, I can share with you our insights on the bamboo front where we were able to build and test such a centre between 2001 and 2004 at Agartala, the Bamboo and Cane Development Institute (BCDI) which is covered in the papers that can be downloaded from my website link below:
http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp/Beyond_Grassroots/FileSharing81.html (Feasibility Report, Curriculum plan, etc.)

Each of our many crafts will need initiatives like that attempted at the BCDI when we had worked with the DC (Handicrafts) to build. But we need to figure out the model to make it sustainable as an educational and research facility, which unfortunately it is not, under the current format of administration and management. I believe that our so called mainstream education institutions and universities can be modified to create a place for the forward education and empowerment of our crafts communities, working at a massive scale that is now needed to face the multiple crisis that all our crafts will face in the days ahead.

I trust that you will be able to use this input as one of the threads in your growing set of recommendations and I look forward to any other comments that you may wish to make. I must congratulate Mr Ashoke Chatterjee and his team for the excellent draft recommendations that have been put together and yourself for your unstinting efforts and involvement in dealing with real problems faced in the field of crafts sustainability.