Forget Dusty Narratives, Get to Know the Pioneers of Contemporary Indian Textiles
- Sumana Mukherjee
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Imagine it’s your 55th birthday and you finally sit down to write your memoir. Friends and peers keep reminding you that nobody reads books anymore, it’s the age of short-form content, so you follow the path of least resistance and decide to share it in bite-sized carousel pieces.
Your first post gets the novelty attention. Your friends share it across platforms and the algorithm picks it up. New followers discover your journey and promise to be with you through the series. Your enthusiasm receives the validation it needed, and you continue to write and share. Until one day the algorithm suddenly stops paying you attention. You keep posting, since showing up everyday is the only way forward.
Weeks pass, and your memoir is now beautifully sheltered within bordered tiles, waiting for the ideal reader to find time and scroll through your slides. Five decades of your life, reduced to 5 seconds of attention.
How would you feel?
I first had this realisation while reading Indra Nooyi’s memoir ‘My Life in Full’. She is a woman who has broken through enormous glass ceilings and has beautifully documented her journey from the soulful and humid Madras days to the snowscaped wonderlands of USA. You think it’s just a memoir? It’s not just a memoir—it’s a shining beacon of hope for, I don’t know, a woman moving forward while the world around her changes faster than the Coriolis forces could withstand (Thanks Nigel!).
Social media has certainly given us the tools to connect with the unknown, but to believe that it can replace the depth of written archives is simply naive, if not devoid of complete and any synaptic connections.
Several weeks ago, I posted on social media saying ‘I want Kriti Magazine to be the most reliable living documentation on Indian textiles, and I mean every word of it.’ Today I am taking that pledge one step further. I am launching #KeepYourKriti - with the aim of spreading awareness on the tireless (and often thankless) work being done by artists and scholars across the country to preserve the crafts that have kept the Indian textile industry flourishing for centuries. Be it Jonali Saikia’s efforts of empowering the Assamese handloom artisans, Sreejith Jeevan’s artistic pursuits of bringing Kerala’s eternal beauty to our lives, or Anhad Bhullar Malhotra’s vision of taking Himachal’s Gaddi tribe to the global stage through the Hindee Tweed — all of these efforts will be lost in time, gathering a dusty narrative of ‘Textiles = India’s Glorious Past’, unless we realise the inherent power that lies within these community contributions. No matter what the trends report, storytelling can never be authentic without the storyteller’s honest intention of amplifying the voices of the creators.
Hence, I invite you to #KeepYourKriti. It is a digital downloadable file that you can read on any device. Choose a particular issue or go for the yearly subscription, I promise to keep documenting these crafts and the people behind them, with the respect they deserve. My only ask is — Buy Kriti, Read Kriti, Gift Kriti.
Thanks for reading,
Sumana, Editor Kriti Magazine.
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