We Craft Our Lives...: 2 AD , 7 AD 8 AD ?????

Today I had the privilege of visiting some villages that are situated a few kilometres away from the India- Pakistan borders. I am referring to this as a privilege because unfortunately the rest of the group, being foreigners couldn’t tag along as they required special permission to visit these areas. A two and a half hour journey through the desert brought us to a small village in the districts of Pugal. 2AD. I am not talking about the period here, but the name of a village . It took me a while to keep up with the names of these villages , 2AD , 4AD, 6AD,7AD and 8 AD. I felt like I was referring to a prisoner code in a sci-fi movie! the women here are skilled in the art of embroidery . from the early age of 5 or 6 they start to learn embroidery and by the time they are 12 , they master the skill and take on work. They mainly work on four different types of embroidery ; soof,karak, pucca and kambhiri.

2 AD village

14 and 16 year old girls working on embroideries

soof embroidery

Each cluster in the village has a group monitor , who is in charge of outsourcing the embroidery received from Rangsutra to the women under her group . each group consists of 40 to 65 women. Once a new style is given to the monitor to get embroidered , the women come and collect a certain number of pieces each , embroider the pieces and then bring it back to the monitor who keeps a record of the number of pieces issued per person. The payment is made per piece , depending on how complicated a particular style is. Some women earn 2500 Rs a month and some even earn 8000 Rs ! Most women take the work home during the day , and once they are done with all their house chores they come back in the evening and all of them sit together and work for a few hours before dinner time. The women in this village( 2AD) seem to wear the pants in the family. They make more money than the men and then use that money to run their homes. They are extremely smart as well , for example , Badhili Bhai , who is one of the group monitors handles transactions between 65 women and has an account of every product that has been embroidered over the last 25 yrs. she has a good control over her group and can remember the thread numbers of all 250 odd colours in the anchor shade card ! the women in this cluster seemed to be very happy with their jobs , one of girls was so proud of herself because she had managed to save an amount of 40,000 INR to pay off her marriage dowry and did not have to rely on her alcoholic dad to do so . Unfortunately , this was not the scenario in the other villages. The craftsmen in 7AD and 8AD were not so happy with their jobs. From 40 women , it had now come down to only 15 who would turn up for work and even these 15 women had lost interest . When I asked them why , they told me that it’s harvest time and they need to be there for their families and help out in the fields. Most of the women had also lost interest because their payments were never made on time .Some of them had not been paid for months together. They said that they would rather work on the fields earning 400 Rs a day instead of spending one and a half days on a piece of fabric that would earn them only 70 to 90 Rs a piece. Each cluster has the capacity to take on 2000 pieces a month but now they are finding it hard to complete an order of a 100 pieces.

If payments are made on time and there is constant supply of work to these women then it will give them a ray of hope to lead a better life and to make a difference. As future designers we hope to help the craftsmen make that difference .