Embroidering lives: Women's work and skill in a north Indian handicraft industry

Few studies of handicraft industries in India attempt to fuse aesthetic and economic perspectives. The present study explores how the knowledge and skills of female embroiderers in the chikan industry of Lucknow illuminate relations of production between merchants and embroiderers, and among embroiderers themselves. Informal organisation, piece-wages and cheap products have characterised the chikan industry for a century. All stages of production are presently affected by the overwhelming emphasis on a cheap form called bakhya. Embroiderers are almost all Muslim women from town and country, linked to merchants through male and female sub-contractors. With occupational opportunities and organisational capacities constrained by purdah, embroiderers are in fierce competition for meagre and unreliable piece-wages. Highly-skilled embroiderers find limited outlets for their creativity in government award schemes and in commissioned work for private patrons. Most make their living sub-contracting simpler work to other women. Agent roles have often been passed in the family from previous generations of embroidering men. Government organisations give some work directly to rural workers at the bottom of agent pyramids. In circumventing agents, the government frustrates the same women they reward in other setting with awards and incentives for their fine work. Increasingly, the highly skilled have less control over the terms by which fine chikan is defined. Any fine chikan they do make is subsidised by agent-activities in the commercial sector. One must recognise the ways in which skilled embroiderers exploit other workers, as well as show the ways in which embroiderers, as women, share some of the conditions of their oppression. Caught up in the volatile fashion market inside India, the future of chikan and of embroiderers is uncertain. Future research needs to be conducted into the wider relationships of embroiderers, and of the productive lives of other specialists implicated in chikan, in order to form a more comprehensive portrait of working class culture surrounding this unique commodity.