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The circle of creativity

The circle of creativity

Author: Amitabh Srivastava
Publication: India Today
Date: January 21, 2008
URL: http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3346&issueid=37

Did you know tikuli or bindi, as it is popularly called, takes an expert to make it? An ancient craft of the Mughal times, it involved melting glass, adding colours, tracing patterns out of it and thereafter embellishing it with gold-leaves to create the dot that defines the Indian woman even today.

This way of making tikulis though gave way to the modern cloth-cut mechanically produced bindis long back and the art form got lost somewhere in the process. Now, Patna-based Ashok Kumar Biswas has almost single-handedly revived it.

He has fused the tikuli craft with another art form of Bihar, Madhubani, to make decorative wall plates, coasters, table mats, wall hangings, trays, pen stands and other utility items.

Motifs are traced upon scraped and chiselled hardboards. Precision is the key word as thin lines need to be drawn with single strokes requiring good concentration and a lot of patience. The craft involves as many as 15 stages.

The painstaking procedure notwithstanding, as many as 152 women in Patna have taken up this art form as a way of supplementing their family income. In some cases, as in Geeta Devi's, tikuli art is the only source of income. With a husband and two daughters back in village, Geeta has come to the city to provide education to her six-year-old son.

And it is tikuli art which brings her Rs 1,000 every month-precious money she earns by putting in four hours for two days a week and it fetches her son's school fee at the end of the month.

The credit for these women gaining some sort of financial independence goes to Biswas, who is a master craftsman himself. He visits the women to teach them the nuances of the craft, supplies base materials and also arranges work orders. In return, the process fetches him "reasonable money".

In Patna there are 29 such groups of women, who work from home. Half of them are college going girls. Since 1993, Biswas has trained more than 2,500 women, mostly from economically weaker sections of society. He got a state award last year for reviving the art form.

Biswas gets orders from West Bengal Handicraft Development Corporation, ministry of textiles and a number of NGOs.

The biggest recognition, however, came when during 1982 Asian Games articles made with tikuli art were handpicked by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi as official gifts for participating athletes.

Tikuli products are sold in the market for Rs 50 to Rs 1,000. This may be peanuts given the amount of labour involved. But, Biswas says, "It's fine with me as long as the art form is alive and keeps fetching these women some money."

From bindis to a bindas art form.


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