Women, work and the imagination of craft in South Asia

Abstract The conditions of production in women's handicrafts are related in complex and contradictory ways to discourses about them. The semblance of tradition and authenticity that surrounds women's craftwork masks the alienated production of handicraft commodities for the market. Indeed, commoditisation and commercialisation depend upon such constructions, just as home-based labour and hand-power, while fully consistent with capitalisation processes, tend to strengthen assertions about the survival of traditional practices in handicraft production. This paper focuses initially on the chikan embroidery production of Lucknow, India. Widely portrayed as a leisure-time activity, embroidery production employs poor, Muslim women workers on piece rates. The embroiderers' distinctiveness is used to shore up primarily urban, middle-class ideals about tradition and heritage that are necessary in order to create demand for handicraft products. Similar discrepancies between what is written about crafts and what it means to make them appear in other women's handicrafts in India. While women are heavily involved in handicraft production, their contribution is often masked by discourses that tend either to ignore or marginalise them, or portray their work as use-value production. Overall, there is very little critical analysis of women's handicrafts. While development projects involving handicrafts have been favoured by the state and non-governmental organisations as low-cost, low-risk interventions, their value is compromised by the persistence of exploitative forms of production.