शिल्पकला
From विकिपीडिया
Indian handicrafts appear in its finery, providing a glimpse of a highly enriched cultural tradition with all its history and ethnicity. The domain of Indian crafts indeed appears to be too vast and diverse to comprehend. But what appears, as most striking is the ageless aesthetic appeal, which has lent to the continuing tradition of the crafts.
The origin of the craft is not known due to the seemingly lack of an appreciation of, their cultural as well as the productive basis and the people who create them. It is not only that most people do not have any idea of the craft practices being pursued in far off rural and tribal regions of the country, they are also unaware of the crafts traditions of the areas to which they belong.
In recent years, the arrival of the country's crafts in the globalised marketplace and unprecedented expansion of the domestic and foreign markets has resulted in many master crafts-persons being 'discovered' from their existence in their remote backward areas and brought to the centre stage. The illiterate/semi-literate crafts-person with his/her magic hands thus becomes the flagship of country's culture and an important agent for promoting foreign trade.
