A Chorus of Craft
02 January 2017
Crafts, like all other inventions, are parented by human needs. Sometimes this birth takes place by sheer fluke. The first drum played a hundred thousand years ago, if not earlier, was perhaps nothing more than a termite-ridden trunk of a felled tree pounded with a club to loosen grubs to feed upon. Played to a cadence, the hollow sound morphed into music. Simil arly, some 50,000 years later, the first stringed instrument may arguably have been a hunter’s bow indifferently strummed during the wait to spot game.
Anthropological research suggests our Neanderthal ancestors were wearing colourful shaped and polished stone pendants as early as 60,000 years ago. They were also interring their dead with similar ornaments and powdered dyes.
Labels: A Chorus of Craft, Book of Days 2016, Crafts
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Feat of Clay
01 December 2016
Humans are known to have experimented with clay for nearly 30,000 years when they first began to create figurines for domestic and ritual use. But it was with the establishment of the first settlements that works of clay were mass produced. From the first sun-dried objects it was only a short way to fired pieces. The basic pit kiln firing at 800 degrees Celsius was followed by the updraft kiln capable of attaining temperatures of up to 1200 degrees as seen in Harappa dating as far back back as 2400 BCE. Working clay into ringing terracotta had come of age.
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| A red slip is applied to a miniature Harappan urn before painting it in the same ancient style |
As he sits on the edge with his feet turning the wheel in the shallow pit to turn the smaller wheel on which he shapes the formless lump of moist clay, Mohammad Bashir of Harappa knows he keeps an ancient tradition alive. Belonging to the Kumhar or potter clan, Bashir follows a family profession handed down through more generations than he can count. Though he does not know how long man has been creating clay objects, he says that living in riverine areas like the Punjab, there was never any shortage of material and it was only natural for it to be put to use.
Read more »Labels: A Chorus of Craft, Book of Days 2016, Crafts
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Making the Tenor
14 July 2016
The sun has just dipped beneath the dunes, setting the western horizon ablaze. Overhead, a copper-toned waxing moon hangs against the first stars of night. The sand, already beginning to cool, tempers the desert air soughing through the branches of the kundi tree where four or five owlets engage in a nattering argument. The day done for him, Allah Vasaya leans back against the bolster on his charpoy under the kundi.
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| Ready bells of the three different sizes and tenors |
From the direction of the toba – the pond that slakes man and beast alike – he hears the clangour of livestock bells and he recognises the deep, resonant bhoongan sound of the one his prized bull wears. The animals are drinking for the night and soon the bull will lead the rest of Allah Vasaya’s livestock home. Minutes later, the ringing becomes a medley of sounds from the bells of his cows and the smaller ones worn by sheep and goats.
Read more »Labels: A Chorus of Craft, Book of Days 2016, Crafts
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Book of Days 2016
02 December 2015
Beginning eight years ago with Tales Less Told, Pakistan Petroleum Ltd again asked me to prepare a theme for their diary and table calendar for the year 2016. After some deliberation Saquib Hanif, the company’s Chief Public Relations Officer (who has since moved on to a higher position) and I decided to do something on crafts.
But we did not want to do what has already been flogged to death by the usual run of the mill diaries. We resolved to look at crafts that are on the verge of dying. Now, in the more than three decades of my life as a traveller, I had seen most of the crafts at some time or the other. In those years I had sometimes worried about the precarious condition of the practitioners of those fine crafts: nearly all of them complained their income was far from commensurate with the hard work and time they put into their creations. Many of them were not teaching their children their craft. Conversely, if they were, the children were not practicing it because it put bread on the table with some difficulty.
Over the years I had felt we would lose these crafts. And indeed we have lost many. Others continue to hang on by a mere thread. There is one, the lacquer work turnery of Dera Ismail Khan, that has picked up. According to Fahim Awan, the master craftsman, it was after I wrote a piece for Herald in 2003 that he started receiving buyers and his business picked up.
In the course of this work for next year’s diary, I learned that some of these crafts are dying because the ordinary city dweller has no idea what can be had. In our ignorance we prefer synthetic rubbish over the finest pieces of creation ranging from rugs to shawls, to shoes, to stoneware.
For next year’s publication, I picked twelve artisans and their craft that most Pakistanis would not even imagine exist. The work took me from Turbat to Badin to Chitral and to a remote corner of Baltistan. I visited Kashmore, Dera Ismail Khan and Thar and a few other places. On purpose I keep this secret for the time being so that you strive to get a copy of the diary. If not, follow the blog to read through the year what we are about to lose forever.
Once again, the work for the diary is an appeal to the institutions and the people of Pakistan to save what they can. But once again I fear my appeal will go unheard.
Related: Waters of Empire (2015), Discoveries of Empire (2014), Stones of Empire (2013), Wheels of Empire (2012), Roads Less Travelled (2011), Sights Less Seen (2010), Tales Less Told (2009)
Labels: A Chorus of Craft, Book of Days 2016, Crafts
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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