Ramesh Ramanadham, the director of RS Crafts on the languishing crafts of the Telugu region
Rare are the times that we talk about the crafts that are lost. Our state and city are hosts to some of the most beautiful art. Despite it all, most are unaware and care little to revive crafts that are on the verge of disappearing for good. Making efforts to revive such works is Ramesh Ramanadham, the director of RS Crafts. He held a session on the languishing crafts of the Telugu region on Tuesday, at the Crafts Council of Telangana (CCT), Banjara Hills. The talk focused on how the lost crafts of the region can be retrieved again if all join hands towards the cause.
Ramesh was delivering a lecture on the lost crafts of the Deccan Plateau, as part of the monthly meetings with skilled experts organised at CCT. “My lecture was about the betel nut cutters of Suryapet and the brass buttons of the Nizam Button Factory, Old City. The ones from Suryapet are usually very sharp and people used to make them out of iron that wouldn’t get rusty.
Sadly, today they have become extinct. They are unique cutters in that they were well decorated— a mix of brass and iron. So, here we need to look at the technological progress concerning the material that they possessed. We never really look at any craft from a scientific perspective. This means we are not just losing the craft but losing science — that idea is something we are focusing on,” he asserts.
He goes on to talk passionately about the Nizam Button Factory and says, “Buttons in the Deccan Plateau were made using horns that were found in the area of Nizamabad (Telangana). These were animal horns that were used until the year 2000, but nobody is making them today. Earlier, they made combs and other artefacts using those horns. These artisans from the Pichakuntal community, were nomads who would go around asking for alliance from people, carrying these horns.”
Ramesh is both saddened and hopeful after the seminar. “My heart broke to see how people at the session have never heard of these things but thankfully, they were thrilled upon learning about these crafts and will hopefully work towards the revival,” he says. He adds that before the button factory was established, it was all handmade buttons. “Artisans in Warangal made buttons from bell metal, much before the Mughals. Later on, they migrated, and manual buttons were being made and worn in Hyderabad.
Once industrialisation started, the then Nizam put up this button factory and they became collector’s items. If you have a button, it means you have a few lakhs in your pocket! Such was the status of these. Practice buttons were made with wool, shell, cloth and many other materials. Even pearls were used as a button. The strategy that I proposed was to get softer brass lumps to be made by craftsmen and those lumps be given to children who are into this practice — they can be asked to design what they have in mind thus making brass buttons interesting again,” he signs off.