This afternoon I went with a friend to Daachi, which is a (now) long-running artisan/ craft fair that has become one of the city’s main events. It has a mixture of artisans from all over the country, including from some very poor and remote areas, and others who are less marginalised: older men and women who design clothes or jewellery, some younger people who make soaps or truck art inspired homewares. The last time I visited it was in the Tollington Market and was so jammed one could hardly move, plus the old colonial market is not designed for browsing, but for people to go up to a specific butcher or vegetable stall and buy what they need. It’s now moved to a big event space in Model Town, one which normally is for weddings etc, so was much more open, though I gather it was still very crowded on Saturday.
Of course I couldn’t buy anything for myself, but I got a couple of ceramic things for the house: a bright yellow bird bath from Bhit Shah, and a similar, larger one in blue-grey, for birdseed. The friend also bought three, two to give as gifts. Came home to discover an aunt had also bought two. Felt rather like those parents who name their child Edwina or whatever thinking it’s an unusual name and discover that everyone in their age group has chosen the same name for the same reason.
It’s nice, though, to see crafts being valued a bit more than they used to be when I was growing up. Back then, handmade stuff was available sold by people coming in from villages on the street, or else in dusty, miserable ‘handicraft’ shops attached to the Lahore Museum or in a basement in Liberty Market (they had cheap embroidery and a vast array of camels and eggs made of marble, onyx or sandelwood because actual crafts that people made were not considered saleable). Sometimes a servant or a visitor from a village would bring something along made by the women of the household. But that was it.
Then, a couple of years ago, some enterprising soul at a government office opened up a shop in the Xinhua Mall. This lasted for only a couple of years, and much of what it stocked was the same onyx and cheap embroidery as before, but it also had some new things: Multani painted ceramics, and a few more innovative things like cushion covers embroidered with truck art motifs using traditional embroidery techniques. In Islamabad a couple of shops opened selling stuff to the floods of foreigners who came in to work at NGOs, donor agencies and embassies in the post-2001, 2005 and 2010 era. And now, it’s good to see our own work being valued by people who would not have valued it in the past. Even at Daachi, I’m rather pleased that they try to maintain a balance between traditional craftspeople and urban makers — I think putting them on an equal footing enhances the position of the craftspeople, gives new ideas and gives a way for old techniques to be used by people who might otherwise scorn them.
This is an inaccurate history, as it’s the one I see from the outside; I’m sure there is a more truthful one that others could tell who live here. There are also other things about Daachi and crafts etc generally which are less positive, not least the way some wealthier types exploit the poor and claim their work for themselves (some of the truck art stuff is probably the best example of this). But still….