New Tradition

The inaugural edition of the AD x Sangita Jindal Prize for Contemporary Craftsmanship celebrates where tradition meets the cutting edge. Here, we announce the jurors on the lookout for new ideas in craftsmanship in 2019

- Gauri Kelkar

Chances are slim that most would be familiar with the intricacies and history of chokstes, the handcrafted wooden tables common to households in Ladakh. Or that of longpi ham—the black-stone pottery from a little hamlet in Manipur, which, at one point, only the rich from the state could afford. In a country long on history and longer on diversity, craft serves as an alternative study of a deep past—the deeper you dig the more offshoots you find. It’s a fineness of skill honed to perfection, and absorbed so absolutely by the subconscious that it becomes muscle memory, handed down from one generation to the next. Eventually, it becomes a doorway into lost strains of a culture, or a region. However, as real and tangible as craft is to its practitioners, it is obscure and ephemeral to a vast majority.

The karigar may spin an exquisite, eloquent tale about a region, stitching together a compelling narrative from memory, but his own story is in dire need of an update. Making traditional craft relevant in a contemporary world is a task already being undertaken by individuals and institutions alike, who reinvent, reimagine and contemporize it, to enable it to thrive in a modern world. But in a country whose tradition of craft dates back millennia, just as many often stay hidden.

PLATFORMING CRAFT