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Portrait of Jasleen painted by Andrea Nield in 2008, Sydney
Jasleen with her sister Ramindra and friends, Uzbekistan, 1996
included
Living Tradition of Iran’s Crafts
(1979),
Asian Embroidery
(2004) and
Sacred Textiles of India
(2014). She has contributed to the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
,
Encyclopaedia Iranica
and edited Volume
IV of
World Encyclopaedia on South Asia & South
East Asian Dress & Fashion
(2010). She has been
a visiting faculty at NIFT in New Delhi and at the
University of Canberra, Australia, and received the
Hill Professorship at the University of Minnesota.
She continues to curate and write about the subject,
often from a contemporary perspective, both
encouraging and working with a generation of young
scholars and artists. Her most recent exhibitions
were
Power Cloths of the Commonwealth
for the
Commonwealth Games in Melbourne (2006) and
New Delhi (2010), and another on
The Sacred Grid
– Phulkari, Bagh and Sainchi
in Delhi (2012). She has
organised two festivals on the
Sacred Arts of India
.
She also continues to be an advisor to the Crafts
Council of India, which she helped set up in 1964,
and works closely with the World Crafts Council. For
the 12
th
Five-Year Plan of the Planning Commission,
Government of India, she was the Chairman of the
Committee for Handlooms Development. Today,
she is widely acknowledged internationally as a
philosopher of living cultural traditions.
Jasleen’s personal life reflects her professional career
– her home is a showcase for the world’s prized
textiles and she herself is always dressed in the most
exquisite saris. She commands a presence that speaks
of her aesthetic taste and vision for what living with
handcrafted ideally means. After textiles, her next love is
food, and she is widely known for her warm hospitality
and the incredible flavours of her cooking. She is also
the author of two cookbooks,
Joy of Vegetarian Cooking
(2000) and
Food for All Seasons
(2003).
Jasleen has collected discerningly, each piece carefully
selected for its technique, design, colours and meaning.
Some have been purchased in bazaars; others directly
off a weaver’s loom and some are the first pieces from
independent India’s revival efforts. Many are no longer
made, barely visible in the cultures they come from,
their use and meaning almost forgotten.
fortuitous when she showed her purchases to L C Jain,
Member Secretary of the Handicrafts Board, who was
so impressed by the young woman, that he introduced
her to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a pioneer in India’s
crafts revival movement, and invited her to join the
Board. That was in 1954, and though it meant giving
up her postgraduate studies at Miranda House, she has
never looked back since.
Jasleen has been involved with policy formulation,
revival efforts, design and product development for
the handicraft and handloom sector. Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s first PrimeMinister, was keen to revive all that the
British had tried to destroy, especially the production of
handloomproducts. Working closely with Kamaladevi,
she travelled throughout the country meeting a range
of craftspeople including weavers, dyers and printers.
Often going where there was no road, Jasleen narrates
her encounters in those early days of discovering a
hundred-year-old earthen pot used to ferment indigo,
or meeting the last known weaver of
kani
shawls, or
reusing the redundant wooden blocks of a print maker.
Referring to old British Gazetteers, Kamaladevi and
Jasleen located craftspeople in village after village they
travelled to. As her story unfolds, it becomes apparent
that her work in those early days has helped shape the
trajectory of significant developments in the field of
Jasleen with her colleague Aminata Traore in Bambako, Mali,
West Africa, 1980
textiles in India, provided livelihood opportunities to
thousands, and sustained the craft in multiple forms
for the future.
Jasleen has travelled extensively, and lived in many
places, during her career. She lived in Iran for seven
years, and Africa and Central Asia for four years each.
During this time she worked as a cultural advisor
and consultant on rural non-farm development and
women’s employment for the UNDP (United Nations
Development Programme). Iran especially, touched
her deeply and continues to have a special place in
her heart. After 17 years of intensive work in India
covering the length and breadth of the country, she
was delighted to have the opportunity to study the
traditions of Iran. What fascinated her most were the
links between the two countries and being able to
make connections between present day crafts in India
and those that existed in Iran. Jasleen was invited to
teach at the Institute of Ethnography on the symbolic
significance of the rural traditions; Iranian scholars
were very keen to learn of their ancient past and
the traditions they had lost. Her work in other parts
continued with this focus, and in South East Asia as
well, she created an awareness of the links with past
traditions between there and India.
Jasleen was able to build on the skills she had learnt
from Kamaladevi and apply these to countries
whose economies also needed to be developed
and strengthened. Living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
from 1978-82, she worked in 21 countries in Africa,
reviving important craft traditions that had been
lost and creating a number of schemes for women’s
employment. The break-up of the Soviet Union
created great hardship for the women whose
economic and social needs had been looked after by
the government. In 1994, she travelled throughout
Central Asia as a Head of the Mission of developing
programmes for the women. Uzbekistan faced in
some of its remote areas, such as Kashkadarya and
Sukhandarya, a high rate of suicide by women. Jasleen
headed a UNDP project for assisting women there for
four years.
An author and editor of several publications on
Indian textiles, one of her most popular books,
Indian Folk Arts and Crafts
(1970), continues to be
in demand today. Other books over the years have
MONISHA AHMED
, who has written the text
for this catalogue, is an independent researcher
whose work focuses on art practices and material
culture in Ladakh. Her doctoral degree from
Oxford University developed into the book
Living
Fabric: Weaving Among the Nomads of Ladakh
Himalaya
(2002), which received the Textile
Society of America’s R L Shep Award in 2003 for
best book in the field of ethnic textile studies. She
has published several articles on textile arts of the
Himalayan Buddhist World as well as other areas
in India. More recently, she wrote a chapter on
textiles for
The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati
Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond
(2016). Ahmed co-
edited
Ladakh: Culture at the Crossroads
(2005)
and collaborated on
Pashmina: The Kashmir
Shawl and Beyond
(2009). Formerly Associate
Editor of
Marg
(2010-16), she is co-founder and
Executive Director of the Ladakh Arts and Media
Organisation, Leh.