The Man Who Walks Into Villages Before Their Crafts Disappear

Weaving

The Man Who Walks Into Villages Before Their Crafts Disappear

For decades, he has worked in places most people will never see.

Dr Sukamal Deb comes from Assam, a region where language, food, and weaving patterns change every few kilometres. Over the years, he has worked directly with more than 26,000 villages in Assam, and across the Northeast, the number rises to over 47,000. His work has taken him into forests, islands, border settlements, and villages where most government officials rarely travel.

Before entering academia, he served with the Government of India as the regional head of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) for the Northeast. That role gave him a close view of India’s craft sector, not as a romantic idea, but as a fragile ecosystem dependent on people, markets, and infrastructure.

Today, he leads the Anant Centre for Documentation and Development of Crafts at Anant National University. But his work still begins the same way it always has - by going to villages, meeting artisans, and listening.

Forty crafts on the brink

Recently, he and his team identified forty languishing crafts across the Northeast, spread across Assam, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Sikkim. Some of these crafts have only a handful of practitioners left. Others survive only because elderly artisans continue to practice them out of habit rather than income.

His dream is simple but ambitious. One day, he wants India’s languishing crafts to be documented in a single book - an archive of techniques, stories, and people - before they vanish.

The urgency is real. A British Council report in 2023 estimated that India has around 200 million craftsmen, and more than 56% of them are women. In village after village, he has seen women weaving, spinning, embroidering, or shaping clay, often while managing households and fields. Yet the policy attention and market support given to them remain limited. “These women are holding the craft sector together,” he often says. “But the systems around them are not.”

Meeting the last potter of the Monpa community

In 2020, Dr Deb travelled to a remote village in Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh, near the border with China. The journey itself took hours along winding mountain roads. The village had no visible signboards, no markets, and very little infrastructure.

There he met Lham Tsering, a 65-year-old man who was believed to be the last traditional potter of the Monpa community.

The Monpas are a Buddhist tribal group, known for their rich cultural traditions. Yet their pottery had nearly disappeared. Young people had moved away from the craft, and plastic utensils had replaced clay in daily life.

He asked Tsering what could be done. The answer was immediate: train the youth.

Within weeks, Dr. Deb organised a training program. Ten young villagers, mostly women, gathered to learn pottery under Tsering’s guidance. “We also brought in power-operated pottery wheels from Maharashtra and Gujarat to make the process less physically demanding,” said Dr Deb.

For a while, the craft began to stir again. Pots were made. Young women experimented with designs. There was a sense of revival.

But Dr Deb is honest when he speaks about that effort. “It was not enough,” he says. “Officers get transferred. Projects end. Without local leadership and sustained markets, many such initiatives fade.”

The deeper issue, he believes, is not training but continuity. Villages need community leaders who take ownership long after government teams leave.

Potters on an island that disappears each year

Another journey in 2018 took him to Majuli, the world’s largest river island, located in the Brahmaputra. To reach one particular village, Dr Deb travelled by car, then by two-wheeler, and finally walked the remaining distance.

In the village, he met a group of elderly women - most between 65 and 70 years old - who depended entirely on pottery for their livelihood. They shaped clay with their hands using techniques passed down through generations. Years of mixing clay had worn down their fingernails.

Training sessions were organised. Power-operated wheels were introduced. Production improved. But the real problem soon became clear.

For nearly six months every year, floodwaters from the Brahmaputra submerge the village. Families abandon their homes and move to higher ground along the riverbanks. During that time, pottery stops, and they switch to weaving to survive.

Even in the dry months, their biggest challenge is transport. The market for their pots lies in Jorhat, across the river. The only way to reach it is by small country boats that carry both people and fragile clay goods through unpredictable currents.

“Unless the pots cross the river, they might as well not exist,” he says. “That is what market access means in rural India.”

A bridge over the Brahmaputra is under construction and may eventually transform their lives. Until then, the women continue to make pots that are beautiful, fragile, and uncertain of ever reaching buyers.

Craft, poverty, and the limits of sympathy

He has seen many well-meaning campaigns that ask people to “buy dying art to save it.” He believes such messaging is flawed. “Craft should not be sold through sympathy,” he says. “It should be sold through aspiration.”

In his view, traditional crafts are not relics of the past but potential luxury products. Their value lies in their story, their material, and the time invested in them - qualities that fast fashion cannot replicate.

Learning from the Kalbeliya women

His work has also taken him beyond the Northeast. During a workshop at Anant National University, artisans from the Kalbeliya community of Rajasthan were invited to teach embroidery and beadwork, and the Kalbeliya culture.

The Kalbeliyas are globally known for their dance form, but their embroidery traditions are equally rich. The master artisan who came to the university was a woman who had built her enterprise in a deeply conservative environment where women’s financial independence was once unthinkable.

She travelled with her entire family - husband, children, daughter-in-law - all involved in the craft. Over conversations and demonstrations, she shared stories of resistance, ridicule, and gradual acceptance as her work began to bring income into the household.

For students, it was not just a workshop but a lesson in how craft intersects with gender, dignity, and social change.

Saving music before it falls silent

Craft, for him, is not limited to textiles or pottery. It includes instruments, performance traditions, and intangible cultural knowledge.

One such tradition is Sufiana Mausiqi from Kashmir, a classical music form that relies on a set of rare instruments, including the santoor, sitar, and saaz-e-kashmir. At one point, only a few artisans knew how to make these instruments. If they stopped, the tradition would collapse within a generation.

Through the university, artisans were invited to campus to build instruments. In one instance, eight santoors were crafted on site. The idea was simple: let young designers witness the process and understand that some knowledge can only be transmitted through hands, not screens.

In Kashmir, they tracked down a single surviving saaz-e-kashmir instrument that had remained in one family for over 250 years. Efforts are now underway to recreate it so that the sound and craftsmanship are not lost.

When artisans teach across conflict lines

In January 2025, the university invited a black pottery artisan from Manipur, a region affected by unrest. At the same time, students from Kashmir were attending a winter school on campus.

For a few days, a Manipuri artisan (Ms Kamala) taught Kashmiri students how to shape clay. In a country often divided by geography and politics, the sight of young people from distant conflict zones sitting together over wet clay felt quietly significant.

“Art is sometimes the strongest bridge we have,” he says.

Building markets where none exist

One of the recurring themes in his work is market linkage. Without buyers, even the most skilled artisans eventually abandon their craft.

In 2022, in a Monpa village near the Indo-China border, he noticed that traditional attire made from eri silk was being imported from Bhutan and Tibet. Local artisans had stopped producing it, leading to money flowing out of the community.

A weaving and garment unit was established in the village, training young women to produce the fabric locally. Initially, the products were sold only within the village. Demand was high because people preferred their traditional clothing, but had no local source earlier.

The next challenge is scaling production and connecting these textiles to mainland markets without diluting their identity.

The village that produces everything it needs

In Nagaland, he studied a village called Ntuma, Peren district, known for its self-sufficient cotton ecosystem. The community grows its own cotton, uses natural dyes, spins yarn, weaves fabric, and produces finished textiles — all within the village.

For researchers and sustainability advocates, Ntuma represents an almost complete circular economy. International scholars have lived in the village to study its practices, sometimes contributing knowledge about new dye plants and techniques.

He believes such villages should be positioned as global examples of organic, slow, and ethical production. But this requires patience. International buyers must be willing to spend time in these locations and understand their rhythms, rather than expecting factory-style output.

“These are not fast-fashion products,” he says. “They are luxury items in the truest sense.”

Stories woven into fabric

In Arunachal Pradesh, he encountered textiles whose designs were not abstract patterns but encoded stories. One motif, consisting of expanding circular ripples, was said to have originated from a young woman who threw a pebble into a pond while thinking about her beloved and later translated that image into a weaving pattern.

Another pattern was inspired by a dream in which a woman saw her absent husband returning in the form of a snake, its scales forming intricate shapes.

Such stories rarely appear in official documentation. Without recording them, the motifs risk becoming decorative forms stripped of their meaning.

Witnessing poverty behind celebrated crafts

Not all his memories are inspiring. Some are deeply unsettling.

While researching the appliqué craft traditions of Odisha, Dr Deb visited a village called Ghoradia. Despite being associated with a craft known across India, the village was mired in extreme poverty. Artisans reported earning only ₹300 to ₹400 a month.

There was no proper room large enough to hold a meeting. Eventually, they gathered in a cramped space while women stood outside, listening through two small windows. The village, he was told, had not had a functioning school for decades.

For him, that visit changed how he viewed craft promotion. Celebrating a craft in exhibitions and markets means little if the community producing it continues to live in deprivation.

From government corridors to a design university

Dr Deb’s transition from a senior government role to a university environment was not accidental. While working in the ministry, he came across an advertisement for the Anant Fellowship for Climate Action and applied. The interdisciplinary approach of the program appealed to him, especially its emphasis on indigenous knowledge systems.

After completing the fellowship, he was invited to help establish a dedicated centre for craft documentation and revival. He formally joined the university in December 2023 and has since led multiple projects across the Northeast, Kashmir, Rajasthan and other regions.

Anant University positions itself as India’s first “Design X” university, where design is treated not as a narrow discipline but as a multiplier across sectors - from climate to crafts to public systems. For him, the environment offers something government service could not: continuity.

Why documentation cannot wait

Across his journeys, one concern remains constant - the speed at which knowledge disappears. When a 70-year-old potter dies without an apprentice, an entire lineage of technique and cultural memory disappears with him.

Dr Deb is currently working to document the languishing crafts of the Northeast in detail - processes, tools, stories, songs, and rituals associated with them. The work is painstaking, but he sees no alternative.

“If we do not record these now,” he says, “future generations will only know that something existed. They will never know how it was made, why it was made, how significant it was.”

A life shaped by villages

Despite holding academic and administrative positions, he still introduces himself first as someone who works with villagers. The numbers - 26,000 villages in Assam, 47,000 across the Northeast - are not statistics he uses for impact reports. In these villages, the people whose homes he has entered, whose meals he has shared, whose crafts he has watched take shape.

In many of those villages, development arrives slowly, if at all. Roads wash away in floods. Young people migrate to cities. Plastic replaces clay. Synthetic fabric replaces hand-spun yarn.

He does not claim that all crafts can be saved. Some may already be beyond revival. But he believes that documenting them, supporting those who still practice them, and creating dignified markets for their work is a responsibility shared by government, academia, industry, and society.

“It is not just about preserving objects,” he says. “It is about preserving ways of thinking, ways of living, and ways of relating to nature and community.”

And so, he continues to travel - to islands that flood, to border villages, to communities whose names rarely appear on maps - carrying notebooks, recording devices, and a quiet determination to ensure that when these crafts are spoken about in the future, they are remembered not as footnotes, but as living traditions that once shaped everyday life.

From Conflict To Craft

Another part of his work has taken him into spaces few would willingly enter.

In Assam, Dr Deb was involved in an effort to bring women militants from underground factions back into the mainstream. It was delicate work, carried out quietly, often inside designated camps under the watch of security forces. There were conversations, long pauses, and a need for patience. Trust did not come easily.

He often recalls a group of 26 women who had laid down arms. They came from factions like DNLA, UPLA, and PDCK. For many of them, this was their first step into a life beyond conflict. What could that transition look like? For him, the answer lay in craft.

Through a government-led initiative, these women were introduced to khadi weaving. The idea was simple - give them a skill, a routine, and a source of income. But the process was anything but simple. He remembers visiting the camps with senior officials from the Assam Police, sitting with the women, listening more than speaking, trying to understand what they had been through and what they were willing to hope for.

“It was very, very sensitive work,” he recalls.

Progress was slow, but it was real. The looms became more than tools, they became a way to rebuild identity, to replace uncertainty with something tangible. For him, this remains one of the most meaningful interventions he has been part of.

In December 2022, he had to leave his position at KVIC unexpectedly, and the work could not continue under his watch. It is something he still thinks about.

Yet his belief has not changed. If the concerns of young people are understood early, and addressed with care, he says, very few would choose a path of conflict. The Northeast, in his view, is not a region of scarcity but of possibilities - rich in resources, and richer still in its people.

“Peace,” he says, “can be built through work, income, and dignity.”

26 women militants TAGS Training.jpg - Dr Sukamal Deb motivating the surrendered women cadres on 17.10.2022 at a Training Centre, Tamulpur Anchalik Gramdan Sangh, KVIC, Tamulpur, Bodoland Territorial Region, Assam

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