A conversation with Indian craft scholar Aarti Kawlra

Garland magazine

We talk with Aarti Kawlra, author of We Who Wove the Lotus Thread, about her intellectual journey in the crafts and the development of a pan-Asian sensibility. Kawlra reflects on the nature of caste in India as a social construction. She also talks about the "kimono body" and how textiles in Asia are objects in themselves rather than body accessories as in the West. Finally, she reflects on the changes of craft discourse, from the talk of civilisations in the early twentieth century, with writers such as Okakura Tenshin and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, which evolved into talk about authenticity during the time of neoliberal reform in the last twentieth-century, which is now more closely tied to the market with tourism and heritage marketing. You can read her article in Garland here.