Sisters Daxa and Vanita Khatri are sitting in a circle with four or five women and one man on a white sheet with boxes of colourful beads. They are here to teach them bead work.
As part of Crafts Council Tamil Nadu’s (CCTN) initiative to promote indigenous craft, Jayashree Ravi, President CCTN and her team have invited them to conduct a workshop. They are trying out different techniques, which they hope will lead to a finished product that will look like what the Khatri sisters have brought along with them for the CCTN Crafts Bazaar later this week. Someone wants to make an intricately meshed necklace of beads, while the less ambitious stick with simpler projects.
“I think a colourful strand to hang our spectacles on would be perfect,” says one and immediately a chorus of “Please, I would like one too if you are making it,” fills the room. There is banter and laughter (I am sure if I had stayed long enough I would have heard singing too) with some serious tutoring in between, just as it must be back home in Bhuj where the bead ladies come from.
Daksha and Vanita Khatri
“As a business it has been just 10 years, but I have been doing bead work as far back as I can remember,” says 39-year-old Daksha. In my head, beadwork, Gujarat and thoranams are somehow interconnected and I ask Daksha if she has any samples of the beaded beauties to hang on my front door. She looks a tad disappointed and says they have travelled a long way from making just those.
“In fact, the thorans are something we make very little of these days, as people are reluctant to knock nails into their walls, which are often of marble. The doorways are also not of standard size. But we make so much more: like jewellery, wall hangings, gift tags...”
Daksha and Vanita are also working with several universities with the faculty and students of design. She shows me a video recording of the making of something that looks like a beaded Rubik’s cube! In another, she has been asked to design installations, all made with beads.
- Daksha and Vanita are happy to teach you a few techniques even at the bazaar if you ask them nicely. Meet them at the Crafts Bazaar 2019 where they will display and sell their colourful creations.
- When: June 29 to July 4, 10.00 am to 8.00 pm
- Where: Suguna Kalyana Mandapam, Avinashi Road
- What: Please carry your own shopping bags
“I am now more involved with ideation and execution of designs,” she says. “Where I come from, all women do embroidery or mirror work but comparatively there are not so many doing bead work. I too embroider. I trained for six months at Shrujan (a not-for-profit organisation that works with craftswomen in Kutch to revitalise local crafts). But, otherwise, I am mostly self-taught. Now I train other girls back home,” explains Daksha.
She informs me that every community and caste in that area has embroidery very typical to it. She knows all those too. She usually exhibits in government events, as it is prohibitively expensive to do so in private shows. Now she has also taken up the onus of conducting workshops. “This is fairly recent. Otherwise I was happy to teach anyone who was interested to learn.”
Daksha and Vanita have made indigenous craft contemporary. “We have to, as there are not too many takers for the craft in its traditional form.” From a full bag, she fishes out intricately designed bead earrings. There are necklaces, bracelets, anklets and even small beaded birds with flapping wings!
She shows me a betel nut that has a sheath of colourful beads. “That is for a wedding,”she says and assures a couple of clamouring women there that they do make beaded receptacles for manjal and kumkum that is also distributed to wedding guests.
