Bengal has historically held its
title as the cultural capital of India. The Art & Craft traditions of
Bengal are rich in content, varied in their styles, exhibiting all the hues of
the rainbow in their finer nuances. Government of West Bengal’s Department of
Micro Small Medium Enterprises & Textiles (MSME&T), with a vision of
capitalising the cultural richness of the state for developing grassroot
creative enterprises, undertook the Rural Craft Hub (RCH) project with 3000
crafts artists across Bengal from 2013 to 2016 in partnership with UNESCO. The
project demonstrated how traditional art can be the epicentre of vibrant
eco-systems that are self-sustaining. Buoyed by the success of RCH, MSME&T
Dept. and UNESCO initiated Rural Craft
& Cultural (RCCH) project in late 2016 to reach out to 15000 people
involved with folk and handicrafts in the state.
banglanatak dot com is the
implementation partner for both RCH and RCCH project using our Art for Life
(AFL) methodology. The methodology used for AFL has 3 main pillars, Capacity
Building for improving the skill base, Direct Market Linkage and Exchange &
Collaborations.
We just concluded a series of capacity
building workshops in different rural locations of Bengal using Guru Shishiya
Parampara with the objective of improving the basic skills. Each community and
their traditional art form have specific needs. The capacity building workshops
were designed to address the specific skill needs and gaps with the objective of enhancing the market
potential of the artists.
For training of Bhawaiya
artists, the lifestyle music from north Bengal, 5 days workshops were organised
at different centres of Alipurduar and Cooch Behar districts. A total 767
artists participated in the workshops and were trained to strengthen their renditions.
Chau, the masked martial art based acrobatic dance form of Purulia is
inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of
Humanity since 2010. It represents a large skill base in the context of RCCH
project objective. The Chau
trainings targeted broadening the
skill base further. A total 9 residential training workshops were held
at Nimdih (a Gandhi Ashram at Purulia-Jharkhand border) to train a total 1345
artists. The trainings focused on improving the quality of performance.
The puppetry tradition of Bengal
is in need of urgent safeguarding and revitalization. Increase in options of
entertainment and lack of innovation and improvisation forced puppeteers of the
state to explore other livelihood options of survival in the absence of
adequate market. The Puppetry workshops thus introduced new stories for
the puppet theatre which have been hinged on the traditional Ramayana,
Mahabharata and Puranas. A total 37 participants from Bankura, Bardhaman and
Nadia participated in the residential workshop at Tepantar (a theatre village
in Bardhaman).
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