Mala Pradeep Sinha

Mala Pradeep Sinha is a textile designer based in Vadodara, Gujarat. As a practising designer, she has been producing textiles using block print, screen print, dyeing, embroideries, applique, patchwork and tailoring for many decades. Her collaborator on this project, Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, teaches at the School of Design, Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has held a Post-doctoral Leverhulme Fellowship at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. Under IFA’s erstwhile Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative, she jointly researched towards and curated an exhibition on the brocade Saris of Banaras with Abeer Gupta. Both Mala and Suchitra have graduated from the National School of Design, Ahmedabad.

The grant will enable Mala and Suchitra to research into the life and work of Maneklal Gajjar (1933-2012), who was a textile blockmaker and master craftsman from Pethapur, Gujarat. Through his practice, Maneklal Gajjar blurred the boundaries between craft and design and carved a niche for himself in the field.

According to Mala and Suchitra, the discourse on craft and design in India primarily focuses on techniques, technologies, materials, processes, and the craftsperson’s skill. It seldom considers the creative and social worlds of the person or their place in a rapidly changing universe. This project will attempt to fill this gap in the scholarship on craft by focusing on the life and work of Maneklal Gajjar, the shaping of his aesthetics, social moorings and the questions around tradition, craftsmanship, entrepreneurship, design, patronage and their interrelationships.

Maneklal Gajjar was a conscientious recordkeeper. He has left behind a rich archive of prints of his designs, correspondence with clients, letters from fellow craftspersons, financial records, photographs, tools and signboards of his workshop. This archive is indicative of a self-conscious, self-reflexive personality who seamlessly transcended practices and modes of knowledge while being rooted within his traditional hereditary craft. The principal focus of this project will be this archive, complemented by interviews with his family members, his associates from the crafts community in Pethapur, clients, and scholars who interacted with him during his lifetime.

The outcome of this project will be an illustrated biography of Maneklal Gajjar and an immersive exhibition of his works. Mala and Suchitra believe that the biography and the exhibition will provide a window into his life and work within the context of history and discourse on crafts in India. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the manuscript for the book and audiovisual documentation generated during the fieldwork and exhibition. 

We supported Ushmita Sahu in 2019 - 2020 to look at the life and work of artist-designer Riten Mozumdar. One of the aims of her project was to address the lack of scholarship on the history of modern Indian design by situating Riten Mozumdar’s life and work at the centre of its inquiry. Like Maneklal Gajjar, Riten Mozumdar too opened up Indian design to creativity and innovation. Though situated in two different contexts, these projects speak to each other in more than one way. Both attempt to address serious gaps in the discourses in the history of Indian design by focusing on key figures who subverted the gospels of their respective professions and made distinct contributions to the field. The focus on the archives of the two practitioners and gleaning information from their personal belongings also make these projects similar in terms of methodological frameworks. It will be interesting to see how many more ways these projects would complement each other once they complete.

This grant is supported by Parijat Foundation.