NEW DELHI—For women who migrated from Pakistan to India during the war of 1971, life turned around when their community craft traditions found a new market.
“After the war, these women were very frightened and never ventured out of their homes. It was then that Urmul [an artisans cooperative] started providing them work at home,” said Kusum Rani, who manages women in the northwestern city of Bikaner for RangSutra.
RangSutra is a company of thousand artisans from remote regions of India that supplies products to leading retail chains around the country and the world.
The company sells quality, handmade products that are both traditional and functional, with a goal to “ensure a fair price to the producer, as well as quality products to the customer,” it says on its website.
Badli Bai and co-worker Samu Bai represented RangSutra at the “Women of India” exhibition at a market in Delhi from Nov. 12-19, organized by the Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development.
Both Badli and Samu know over 15 embroidery stitches, many of which are unique to their community and cultural heritage.
Indo-Pakistan War
The war led to a large-scale migration of Hindus from Pakistan to India. Many of these migrants belonged to the Sindh region of Pakistan and are generally called Sindhis.
Badli Bai was one of those immigrants, and when she was eight years old, she and her family crossed the Thar Desert by foot, walking 6-9 miles a day, to reach into India.
“We thought, ‘Let’s live in a free country,’ so we left our village in Pakistan,” Badli recalled.
Badli grew up in India but never attended school, and the only skills she knew were cooking and embroidery, which she picked up from her mother and other women in the community. In those days, women stayed in the house, looked after the children and did the cooking and cleaning. A career nor any kind of part time work were considered an option for women like her.
