Working Through Tradition: Experiential Learning and Formal Training as Markers of Class and Caste in North Indian Block Printing

Abstract

Located about 40 kilometers west of Jaipur, India, Bagru is home to a nationally renowned cluster of about 100 artisan families who use wooden blocks and rely heavily on regionally manufactured natural dyes to hand print upscale boutique textiles for the world market. As printers have successfully entered into export markets, they have sold their products as “traditional,” marking their commodities as distinct from mass-produced, screen-printed textiles made with chemical dyes in urban factories. At the same time, designers have played an important role in introducing these traditional products to a global market, marking their role as “innovative.” In this article I argue that the articulation and practice of tradition and innovation within different works, then, serve to mediate and maintain class distinctions in an arena where a rising middle class is still self-consciously creating itself. This article explores the distinctive formal and experiential learning associated with tradition and innovation alongside the discourses that accompany them. What is implicitly at stake in this narrative is the construction and maintenance of a class distinction: one that borrows from local caste understandings of patronage and responsibility at the same time that it manages to negotiate local and global systems—both exploiting and being exploited by the consistently reconstructed boundaries of the market.