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."