Pooja Sastry – Workshop: Toward a Multifaceted History of Architecture and Internationalism, Reed Hall, University of Exeter (16-17 November 2023)

This presentation focuses on the international exchanges that influenced the patronage of Indian crafts by affluent women in 1930s British India as seen through the archives of two publications: the Indian Ladies’ Magazine and The Illustrated Weekly of India. Both magazines featured articles written by women which relied on multiple representations of modernity to navigate tensions between imperial citizenship and emerging Indian nationalism. Prominent Indian women such as Sarojini Naidu and Begum Shah Nawaz drew on their engagement with an international network of feminists to contribute articles to both magazines.

The Swadeshi (or “self-sufficiency”) movement in India had its roots in William Morris’ ideas of constructed socialism in the British Arts and Crafts movement and Ananda Coomaraswamy’s romanticisation of the social structures of the supposedly pre-colonial South Asian village. These grafted themselves onto Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas of self-determination, in which the preservation of crafts in the imaginary “ancient Indian village” became a key component of the nationalist movement. Indian suffragists and feminists took up the cause of “traditional” Indian crafts in earnest, both as part of the Swadeshi movement as well as to represent their cultural identity at international women’s fora .

By the 1930s, small industries across the subcontinent had already undergone multiple changes in form and process as a result of their presence on the global economy, and were no longer located exclusively in villages . In fact, idealising them as pre-industrial and yet modern served the purpose of re-trenching caste hierarchies in villages as being somehow essential to the preservation of the craft . The popularising of crafts in the magazines involved calling on wealthy women to see themselves as “saviours” of workers in villages, especially women, instead of campaigning for their autonomy and political self-representation. Modernities were thus selectively co-opted into the nationalist movements on the subcontinent as being suitable only as far as they did not threaten to change the social order.

Link to programme: https://healthscapes.co.uk/toward-a-multifaceted-history-of-architecture-and-internationalism/