The Future is Handmade

In India, beauty is everywhere.

In fact, the making of handcrafts is so important here that India was the first country to integrate hand-production (or handicrafts) into its centralized planning.

Handicrafts are the second largest source of Indian livelihoods, after agriculture. Anywhere between 7 and 200 million people are estimated to be involved in what is the oldest unbroken “design” tradition in the world that goes back 3000-4000 years.

When the British came they saw artisans selling “crafts” on the street and in that very western way of putting things into little boxes and categories labeled it all as “arts and crafts”.

But this making of handcraft and the culture of “design” of which it is a part is so much more than this.

Last month in Ahmedabad, India we met with Ashoke Chatterjee, the former executive director of the National Institute of Design.  He told us, “Design is everything that creates quality in everyday life and is practiced as an offering to God.”  It includes everything from engineering to music.

Sure, such handcraft is “beautiful”, “inspiring”.  We witnessed it everywhere.

And it is so much more.

As Mahatma Gandhi knew, the making of handcrafts are at the heart of the work of justice.

At the center of Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence was taking back the manufacture of the everyday stuff Indians wore (khadi cloth) and ate (salt) into their own hands.  Gandhi inspired the spinning of local “khadi” cloth instead of buying linen from England.  The “manufacture” of salt from the sea instead of buying it at the market.

The work of handcraft is predominantly done by those in disadvantaged groups – those of lower castes, Muslims, and women – who do half the work and get little credit for it.

 

We know today that the work of doing things with your hands is critical for brain development and function.  What is just now beginning to be appreciated is the ancient truth that hand skill is integral to a fully functioning, healthy society and economy.

What we do with our hands matters.  It’s true for esthetic, social and justice reasons.

It’s the season of it, of course – of Christmas cooking, crafts, singing and making music, writing Christmas cards.   But activities that we have often traded for things others have made, manufactured, packaged, recorded, and written for us.

In India, Chatterjee told us, “We are now at risk of throwing away our rich culture of handcrafts for a ‘shopping mall’ culture of mimicry and a new media-driven ‘colonialism’”.

What about you?

What might you do to take back life, quality, beauty, justice, faith, into your own hands?

What might you do with your hands to “create quality and celebrate God” in your life today?”