Art and Culture / Handcrafted language The Akshara Project’s Mumbai exhibition used traditional crafts to reimagine calligraphy and bring alive India’s regional scripts

In a unique collaboration between India’s myriad crafts and scripts, an exhibition in Mumbai celebrated not just Indian languages but also its calligraphy. 



The Akshara Project, which linked 150 handcrafted products with 14 Indian scripts, was conceived and curated by noted revivalist Jaya Jaitly, who has been waging a crusade for  40  years to accord crafts their rightful place  in museums across the globe. The idea is to enable craftspeople to appreciate a new facet of being literate by exploring their own scripts and cultural stories through their traditional skills.



 The exhibition, held at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya earlier this month, proved that craft is as much a form of writing as a script,  and promoted  an appreciation of India’s  huge variety of regional scripts.



 Alongside festive scenes  of the Chhath from her native Bihar, Premshila Devi also embroidered the stories  in Devanagari script in her wall hanging. 



 Another iconic artist, Savitri Devi, included in her work Maithili folk songs  that echoed the sentiments of a fisherman, a shepherd and a potter who wish Sita had been born in their families. The embroidery work grew  beyond a mere pictorial description to transform into a  text of sorts, forging an interaction between image and script and thereby making interventions that mandate a renegotiation about the potential of craft narratives and new forms of storytelling.