The woman who made craft an economic argument, not a sentimental one
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay founded the Crafts Council of India in 1964 not to preserve tradition for its own sake, but because she understood something about quality that the post-independence push toward industrialisation was about to erase: the structural superiority of the handmade object. A Pochampally ikat weave, where the thread is resist-dyed before it ever touches the loom, produces a colour that does not sit on the surface of the fabric, it is the fabric. Industrial printing applies pigment on top. One fades in three monsoons. The other does not.
