Heavy dressing: fashioning aesthetics and relationships in a Rajasthani textile craft

Abstract

Textile crafts are an important component of the Indian, and global, fashion industries even as maker communities outside of India’s cities are internally and externally considered as traditional and officially categorised as backward. This thesis examines how ideas and practices of fashion and craft emerge amongst people in the block printing textile community in the small town of Bagru, Rajasthan with special attention to in-marrying women. Based on long-term participant observation and informed by the questions of how relationships in India’s non-urban artisanal communities are experienced, embodied, and materialised, the thesis contributes empirically grounded material to the growing bodies of scholarship on fashion and craft production in the Global South as zones of precarity, livelihood and consumption. I argue that while it is important to document and analyse India’s culturally shaped and transforming sites of fashion cottage industry, it is equally critical to attend to ways in which craft livelihoods contribute to, and envelop, other aspects of life and the inequalities, benefits, dependencies, difficulties, and possibilities that lie therein. I evaluate attire and cloth as material sources of relationality, developing and adapting with and against internal dynamics in India’s rural craft communities as well as larger political, economic, and cultural shifts. I propose a theory of fashioning projects to demonstrate how engagements with cloth and attire contribute to making, sustaining, and transforming kinship and gender relations in India’s fashion cottage industries in the contemporary era.