When Craft Speaks: Women Artisans Share Their Stories at Swadesh Hyderabad

The afternoon brought together three remarkable master artisans in conversation with curator and art historian Alka Pande. On the panel were contemporary Gond artist Japani Shyam, blue pottery revivalist Leela Bordia and renowned Mithila painter Shanti Devi. Their journeys could not have been more different, yet each one revealed how tradition survives because someone chooses to carry it forward.

Around them at Swadesh were the crafts themselves. Shawls, bags, intricate embroidery and wall hangings lay displayed like quiet witnesses to generations of skill. When you closely examine a finely embroidered bag, the tactile beauty of handmade work became instantly clear. Embroidery has that tactile feel. Every time you touch the bag, you know that somebody’s needle has travelled through it. It was a reminder that craft is not just about objects. It is about labour, patience and memory.

Alka Pande opened the conversation by describing artists as the conscience keepers of society. “The artists are the conscience seekers and the soul of society,” she said, asking the artists, “I would like to ask you, how did you come to art? And what is art to you?”

For Leela Bordia, the answer began with a moment of curiosity. “I came to Jaipur after marriage. My husband worked in construction and would leave very early in the morning. I had time and I thought, why should I cry about it? Why not use it?”

What followed was a chance encounter that changed her life. Bordia noticed a few craftsmen living in cramped conditions while making objects she had never seen before. “I asked them what they were doing. They said they were making blue pottery. I asked what blue pottery was. They told me they were making it for someone else.”

The idea that the craftsmen themselves did not have work in their own villages stayed with her. “I immediately said, I will give you work. I didn’t know anything. But sometimes things happen like that.”

What began as curiosity slowly turned into a lifelong commitment to reviving and sustaining Jaipur’s iconic blue pottery tradition. “I shifted them to their own village and started learning from them. Today whatever you see is because I learned from those people.”

If Bordia’s story was one of rediscovery, Japani Shyam’s was rooted in inheritance. Her very name carries a story. “When my father went to Japan for the first time, I was born. So they named me Japani,” she says, drawing laughter from all the distinguished women gathered there.

As a child, she found the name unusual and sometimes embarrassing. “People would keep calling me Japani, Japani. At that time I felt bad. But now I like it because it gives me a different identity.”

Her father, the legendary Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam, transformed tribal storytelling into a visual language that later came to be known as Jangarh Kalam. Before that, stories were only sung.

“In our area people used to sing stories,” she said. “They were never painted. My father started painting after listening to those songs.” Growing up in that environment, art became inevitable.

“I started painting by watching him. But he always told us one thing. Every artist must create their own identity.”

She took that advice seriously. While Gond art is usually vibrant with multiple colours, Japani chose to restrict her work to just two. “That is why you will see my work mostly in black and white because I wanted to create my own image,” she says.

The third voice of the evening came from Mithila painter Shanti Devi, who had travelled all the way from Bihar for the event. Her art belongs to the deeply women-centred tradition of Madhubani painting, once created primarily on the walls of homes rather than for galleries or collectors.

“This painting is our tradition. It is handed down from generation to generation.” Her own journey began in modest circumstances. After her marriage in the 1970s, life was difficult and resources were scarce. Yet when the opportunity to paint on paper first arrived, she seized it.

“They gave us a small piece of paper. I drew on it immediately and they gave me two rupees. That was the first money I earned from painting,” she recalls. That small beginning eventually took her art far beyond her village. Over the years she travelled internationally, sharing Mithila painting with audiences who did not even speak her language.

“I don’t know English. But I talk to everyone,” she says. Throughout the conversation, laughter and reflection moved easily across the room. What united the three women was not just their work, but the quiet resilience behind it.

Their journeys also highlighted something fundamental about Indian craft traditions. These forms were not created for markets or exhibitions. They were born in homes, villages and communities. Women preserved them through everyday practice long before they were recognised as art.

The crafts around the room seemed to carry deeper meaning. Each object represented hours of labour, but also the determination of women who refused to let traditions disappear. At Swadesh, the gathering was meant to honour those hands and those journeys. Because long before craft became fashionable again, women like these were already keeping it alive.