Stephen Huyler: “Daughters of India” and other stories

Book launch at NID: Stephen Huyler speaks of “Shakti – The dominant female principle in India”

Prof M P Ranjan

Image 01: Stephen Huyler posing in the NID Library with five of his books, all well used by students and faculty, from the NID archives.

An impromptu display of books was created in the NID library to let the students know that the author of the five books on Indian art and culture was also speaking at the NID Auditorium on the evening of 4 March 2009. The occasion was the promotion of his new book “Daughters of India” across India and the stop at NID was one of many pit stops across many cities in India at the invitation of the publisher, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad. I had met Stephen Huyler first in 1986 at a conference on Design of Crafts Museums at New Delhi, which was organized by the Crafts Council of India in October 1986. It was during this very conference that my book “Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India” was formally released at a simple function at the National Crafts Museum at Pragati Maidan and Stephen Huyler and all the other speakers of the conference were present at the release function where Shri P A Sangma, MP from Meghalaya was to chief guest. Stephen Huyler’s then new book had been released a year earlier and “Village India” (1985) still remains the only significant study on rural arts and crafts and lifestyles that cover the whole sub-continent between the covers of one richly illustrated book. This was followed up “Painted Prayers: Women’s Art in Village India” (1994), “Gift of Earth: Terracotas and Clay Sculptures of India” (1996), “Meeting Gods: Elements of Hindu Devotion” (1999) and now with his inspired offering, “Daughters of India: Art and Identity” (2008).

Image 02: Stephen Huyler featured in a series of events at NID. Exchange of books “Handmade in India” for “Daughters of India” between the Editors and the Author at the Gautam-Gira Square under the Big Tree at NID, followed by a visit to the NID Library and then onto the NID Auditorium for the book sale and talk by the Author.

Aditi and I got a signed copy of Stephen Huylers book for the man himself and we in turn gifted him an inscribed copy of Handmade in India in the presence of a small entourage of NID Faculty and Bipin Shah the Publisher from Mapin Publishing. A small audience had assembled to hear the talk, which was as usual a rich presentation of images and an impassioned sharing of experiences with the selected women of India who had been featured in his book. The stories were touching as well as inspiring. I introduced Stephen Huyler to the NID audience and spoke about his passion for travel and his long and winding journeys through India that started in 1971 and continues today, and each year he has been in India for three or four months each year, all the time with his camera and recording his experiences of living with the people wherever he went.

Image 03: Stephen Huyler at NID Auditorium on 4 March 2009 for his talk about his book “Daughters of India: Art and Identity”.

Stephen Huyler spoke at length about the book “Daughters of India: Art and Identities” and he illustrated his talk with images and stories of a few of the women featured in his book. The book profiles the lives and art of 20 women he had carefully chosen from a vast range of experiences so as to cover many facets of India across many regions and class barriers while he looked at women and their roles in the Indian sub-continent. Here at NID he chose to speak about Pushpa, who works as a sweeper at Mumbai Airport and lives in the slums next door, and this reminded all of us of the Oscar winning film “Slumdog Millionare” that has caught the attention of the West like none other before it. He also spoke of Indira from Jaisalmeer, Kusima from Badami in Karnataka, Sambai from Ludia in Kachchh in Gujarat and finally about Sonabai from Sarguja District in Chhattisgarh, all touching tales and full of appreciation of both their art and their character that was shaped by the many difficult experiences that they had related to him on his journeys across India.

Bibliographic Data: and link on Amazon and the publishers in the USA, The Abbervile Press and in India, Mapin Publishers Pvt Ltd.
Daughters of India: Art and Identity
Text and Photographs by
Stephen Huyler
Size 9’ x 11 11/16” – Cloth, 264 pages
250 illustrations in full colour
Published by Mapin Publishers Pvt Ltd
ISBN: 978-81-89995-01-0

Prof M P Ranjan

Indian Saris: Woven fabrics of fantasy and folklore

Indian Saris: Woven fabrics of fantasy and folklore – A new book from NID on the subject of design will soon hit the stands.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Vijay Singh Katiyar reviewing pages of his new book “Indian Saris” in his office at NID, Ahmedabad.

Something to celebrate has come up and I will share this with you. A new book is to be launched shortly by one of the faculty colleagues at NID, Vijai Singh Katiyar, of the Textile Apparel Design Faculty is ready to launch the new offering called “Indian Saris: Traditions – Perspectives – Design” which is published by Wisdom Tree, New Delhi. Katiyar has a blog on the subject, which promises to tell us all the details as they unfold in the days ahead and I do wish it all success as we move forward from here. I have not yet had a chance to read the book and post a review but the fact that such a book has been created is a welcome event since so little has been published on Indian design and I welcome all these contributions with an open mind and hope more people will come forward to share their insights and experiences and this would apply to all my faculty colleagues at NID and at other design schools across India. There is much to be done in this space.

Image 02: Glimpses of the new book “Indian Saris” in the hands of the author, Vijai Singh Katiyar.

Vijay Singh Katiyar did his Diploma in Textile Technology at the Central Textile Institute, Kanpur before joining NID in Textile Design as part of the Advanced Entry Programme (AEP). He graduated from NID with the AEP Diploma in Textile Design and then joined the
NID Faculty in 1993 and he has been working at NID since then in a number of capacities including administrative roles and teaching roles that cover education, research and projects as part of any faculty member’s activity at NID. In recent years Vijay Singh Katiyar carried out several sari design and development projects for the States of Tamilnadu and Kerala and these have helped support his deep research into the subject of woven sari production which is the subject of his book. We will hear more about the book after its formal release that is to take place in London at the Nehru Centre on the 20 April 2009 at an evening function that promises to be an intellectual and stimulating social event since the Indian High Commission in London has agreed to host a panel discussion titled “Design for Indian Textiles & Fashion: Tradition to Modernity – A UK – India Deliberation” as a curtain raiser for the evening event and the book launch. More about this event at the blog “Indian Sari”, here. I was told that Wisdom Tree has arranged for pre-orders at a number of online booksellers including Amazon and I hope that the book is well received by the design community.

Image 03: Goddesses and mortals draped in the sari as visualized by Raja Ravi Varma who has influenced India in how we see ourselves and our deities in more ways than we can possibly imagine. Lakshmi, Saraswathi – Hindu Goddesses and mythological characters from the Mahabharatha – Damayanthi and Nala story, as well as the Shakuntala story, all depicted with the sari clad persona as imagined and visualized by the great artist.

The impending launch of the book gives me an opportunity to reflect on the topic of the book, the Indian Sari. A length of cloth, sometimes plain and at others highly decorated, the sari, has been the source of many fables and a fabric of our imagination as a society and a culture. While working on this post I looked up the Wiki on various aspects of Indian garments and the Sari in particular and was amazed at what we can find on the subject online today. I came across Raja Ravi Varma’s depiction of sari clad goddesses and immortal mortals – our mythology is full of their stories - as well as stories of love and intrigue all part of the Indian cultural traditions, some I remembered from my childhood stories told to me by grandmother and also my father. Nala and Damayanthi, Shakuntala, Uruvashi and Puraravas – were all depicted by our visionary painters – as sari clad women and men in draped garments, in their various settings and here Ravi Varma has taken hold of all our collective imaginations of how we see our past through his realistic paintings that got transmitted to us through the rich tapestry of the calendar art from the hot printing presses of Shivakashi and elsewhere, to reach every nook and corner of India, in the tea stalls as well as in the homes. “Bharat Mata” – Mother India – was shown in a sari on matchbox labels and all of these images contribute to our collective imagination of India and the Indian reality, if there is one such singular thing that can be called the “Indian reality”. I do not know how much of these aspects are covered in Vijay’s book but I will look out for it when it reaches my hands, hopefully soon.

Image 04: Images of Uruvashi as visualized by Raja Ravi Varma on the left and by Ramachandran on the right.

The stories of love and life as well as the depictions of Indian women in theatre, film and in print have been in sari mode for the past 5000 years of our civilization. From the expressive depictions of the sari clad goddesses in cave paintings to the realistic images of Raja Ravi Varma and the depictions of the love story of Uravashi and Puraravas by Verma and later by Ramachandran show just a tiny fraction of our visual landscape and story-scapes which has been the images of our mythology on which all of us have been educated in the real world that is India today. The sari continues to thrive in rural India while urban India has adopted various new forms of expression – from the salwar khameeze to the business suit in the BPO’s and IT enabled offices around the nation and ofcourse the jeans and T-shirt of our schools and colleges. New visions of feminine expression have emerged and the sari still plays a role in a number of fashion interpretations and it will be interesting to see how the Indian imagination and fashion will shape the sari of the future.

Vijay Singh Katiyar, “Indian Saris: Traditions - Perspectives – Design”, Wisdom Tree, New Delhi, May 2009

Hardcover: 228 pages
Publisher: Wisdom Tree (May 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 8183281222
ISBN-13: 978-8183281225

Wisdom Tree, New Delhi
Link to Amazon - Indian Saris

I have requested the NID Library and Knowledge Management Centre for a full list of original documents in their archival collection which deals with the design of saris and they have promised to give me a list of Craft Documentations, Craft Design Diploma Projects, Faculty Research Projects and Faculty and student sari design projects that were carried out at NID over the years. I am told that there are many and none of these have been published so far so I will bring out a full list as soon as I get the copy from the library, hopefully very soon. I remember several memorable sari design projects done by NID faculty in the past and I do hope that these are also published at some point even as pdf documents that may be available from the web, why not? Gitto, Aditi and Krishna had all done saree design projects and more recently Vijai too has completed his own collections and I do hope that these are all made available through the NID Library soon as a result of my request here.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Art Book Centre: Launches “Handmade in India” in Ahmedabad

Art Book Centre: Delivers “Handmade in India” in Ahmedabad

M P Ranjan

Image 1: The Art Book Centre at Madalpur village in Ahmedabad and its founder at the balcony with book jackets and artworks on display.

A quaint and endearing bookstore in Ahmedabad has more titles of books about Indian textiles, art and design than most places that I have seen in India. Located at Madalpur village in the heart of Ahmedabad city in the Ellis Bridge area, it is a specialized bookstore run by a dedicated father and son team who perhaps know more about what has been written about Indian textiles and handicrafts than most scholars of the subject, and this is due to their commitment to locate and collect all available books in their field, old and new, and make them available to those who seek knowledge about Indian textiles, art and handicicrafts. Shri Manohar Patel, founder of the Art Book Centre and his son Shri Ketan Patel are seen at all book exhibitions dealing with art and design books and their first floor bookstore is a feast for the hungry book lovers looking for the subject of Indian art, textiles and handictafts. Accessed through a steep and narrow stairway, their first floor shop is decorated with colourful graphics, Torans (traditional Gujarati buntings) and book jackets from a wide range of publishers, with Mapin taking the lion’s share of shelf space.

Image 2: Aditi Ranjan signing few copies of Handmade at the Art Book Centre with Manohar and Ketan in their shop.

It is therefore no surprise that they were the first to carry stocks of “Handmade in India” and reach them to NID, the local libraries as well as NID faculty and students who have gobbled up the first batch of 100 books that reached them last week. Shri Manohar Patel tells me that he is picking up the next consignment of 100 books later this week, immediately after the long Diwali holidays get over in Ahmedabad. Aditi and I were invited to sign a few books for their regular buyers and collectors who keep in touch with them from all over the world. The Art Book Centre has been around for a long time and it is one of the must visit places in Ahmedabad on the list of most textile design related tourists to the city. They have an interesting and informative website and also respond to emails and can be reached through their contact info provided below. They have a particularly good reputation for mailing books overseas in a good condition but the book is heavy at 3.5 kg apiece and the postage too will be pretty heavy as a result.

Art Book Centre
Specialists in Books on Indian Art and Culture
Madalpur, Nr. Jain Temple, Ellis Bridge,
Ahmedabad – 380 007 INDIA

Email: artbookcenter_2000 (at) yahoo.com
Website: www.artbookcenter.net : Art Book Centre

Image 3: Product information from the previous posts on Design for India as well as the Mapin 2008 Catalogue.

The “Handmade in India” is marketed by Mapin Publishers Pvt Ltd, Ahmedabad on behalf of the COHANDS and the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India who are the publishers of the book. Mapin has included the product details in their recent brochure and the product details are given below.

Handmade in India

Edited by Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan

576 pages, 3500 colour photographs and 140 maps,
9.5 x 13.5” (240 x 340 mm), hc,
Weight: 3.5 kg nett
ISBN: 978-81-88204-57-1 (Mapin)
ISBN: 978-81-88204-49-6 (Mapin Series ISBN)
Rs.3,950.00 / US$95.00 /

Image 4: Aditi Ranjan and M P Ranjan at the Art Book Centre signing event on Sunday 2 November 2008.

Download the complete book as pdf file 337 mb size Handmade in India as pdf 337 mb

M P Ranjan