The Northeast is on a cultural offensive. Textiles, music and food, once exotic and even inaccessible, have logged into national trends. For example, when Mizo student Dipongshi Chakma returned to her village in Mizoram after completing her graduation in Arts in Guwahati, she noticed village women engaged in weaving traditional textiles with intricate patterns and crochets, others using bamboo and cane to make household products, and even children making toys. Their skills rarely translated into livelihoods. “People knew a lot, but were doing nothing with their skills,” says Chakma. She founded Bodhi Bloom Society, which now works with more than 500 artisans across remote parts of Mizoram. Enrolled are 286 women weavers. Young people, too, are trained in bamboo craft and related skills.
Says Chakma, “Mizoram has plenty of bamboo. You open your window, and see it everywhere.” Artisans use it to make laundry baskets, jewellery boxes and chairs but find distance, poor transport and limited markets as a hurdle for access to sell their products. Bodhi Bloom connects them by finding them customers and institutional buyers. “They cannot always sell their products. So we do it for them,” Chakma clarifies.
However, Bodhi Bloom’s infrastructure is yet to expand. It operates from a rented room as both an office and a meeting place. Lacking dedicated production centre or machinery, scaling up when demand rises is difficult. The organisation is using waste by making saleable decorative products from discarded bottles. Chakma hopes to eventually empower tribal livelihoods by going beyond handicrafts, and drawing on traditional medicinal knowledge.
The cultural activist’s larger goal is to change how tribal communities realise the importance in skills they already have. “I won’t always be there with them,” she says. “But I’ll make sure that our people learn now itself, so that they can guide others later.” The present is the future. It is yet to be translated, that is all.