Visalakshi Ramaswamy and the Resilient Kottan

“Aachi knows all the trending things,” begins Durga Gopalan about Visalakshi Ramaswamy, Chennai’s quiet champion of Chettinad culture and crafts. Take for instance, the Kandanghi sari. Woven with thick and coarse cotton in Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, and introduced by the Nagarathars or the Nattukottai Chettiar community to which Ramaswamy belongs, this sari comes with a checked or striped body and two broad contrasting borders. It has seen a revival in cities, with young sari enthusiasts adding at least a couple to their collection, to be paired with crop tops, white shirts and Birkenstocks.

Then there are the kottans or palm leaf baskets, also from the dry and arid region, revived under Ramaswamy’s supervision and a lesson in continuity and change. Featuring the cross gundumani weave, the Segappolai kottan is the most commonly used basket in Chettinad rituals and at weddings. Purple and red, it is seven inches tall, with nine checks on the base and the same on all four sides. But Ramaswamy has experimented with weaves, shapes and jewel tones. Gopalan, who has been working at the Foundation for years and is clearly fond of the designer, lets on that she is their ‘Pinterest queen’. “You don’t have to take a kottan design from kottan,” is Ramaswamy’s quick response, for she finds inspiration everywhere.

Thanks to Ramaswamy’s intervention, the conventional kottan now sits alongside more craft-intensive jewellery and sari boxes, wine bags and sculptural pieces that could belong in a museum shop. I myself am partial to an assortment in lime green from several years ago and have my fingers crossed for a new batch in indigo.

Ramaswamy’s unusual designs and colourways have resulted in enquiries from several international brands, including the Swedish flatpack giant, IKEA. But with her women already working to capacity, producing the 10,000 bags required for such orders would be near impossible, she says.

Never too late to begin

At 79, Ramaswamy has spent a lifetime designing saris, furniture and even weddings for close friends but the last 25 years have been the busiest. In 2000, she launched M. Rm. Rm. Cultural Foundation and has since promoted the kottanthe Kandanghi sari, Athangudi tiles and rare techniques such as lime-egg plaster on walls and stencil paintings, all crafts from over 75 ancestral villages of the Chettiar community in Tamil Nadu. She says her stints at the living art museum, DakshinaChitra, and with Crafts Council taught her what she needed to know. The former, for close to a decade, involved craft workshops, from papier-mâché to palm leaf decorations.“I no longer regret not studying further. I think I finally got over it,” she reveals, adding that her biggest support was her husband.

Ramaswamy married very young, which interrupted her academic dreams. But she has been invested in the crafts since her twenties. A collection of 100 saris designed by her sold out within hours at the Shilpi boutique in Alwarpet back then. “My first sari, at 15, was a checked Kanjeevaram with a tall Chettinad border from the legendary Radha Silks. My sister and sister-in-law tried dissuading me, telling me I was too young for that style. But I cannot be easily persuaded,” she says gently. A squirrel squeaks insistently from her verandah, as if in agreement.

Gallerist Sharan Apparao, who had teamed up with Ramaswamy for some projects says the craft revivalist is “positive, resourceful and hands-on, with the ability to look beneath the surface to find opportunities.”

Behind the scenes

In 2018, Ramaswamy received the Hindu World of Women Award for her contribution to rural development through the revival of arts and crafts. Back then she said she preferred to work behind the scenes. “I hate being in the newspaper,” she says when we meet at her home one morning in July. “I am very diffident. I meet many young people with whom I exchange ideas and I don’t mind doing it in a quiet way. But I hate being on a stage.”

On most days Ramaswamy prefers to work from her home in MRC Nagar, which adjoins her Foundation’s HQ and craft store, Manjal. Unassuming from the outside but in reality a hive of activity, this is where customised baskets, fashioned from palm leaf or from long strips of plastic, are packed at breakneck speed. They make their way to some of the country’s most high-profile weddings. Locals bring out-of-towners here to shop for gifts back home or for beach and picnic bags. A friend and colleague swears by the plastic Manjal basket she takes to the gym. In fact, the city’s Japanese and Korean residents favour the intricately woven plastic options too, for their cheery designs and durability.

Museum from the heart

Later this year, Ramaswamy will be opening a lifestyle museum, dedicated to the Nattukottai Chettiar community, in her 125-year-old ancestral mansion, known as the MRM house in Kanadukathan in Karaikudi. “It will have the utensils we used, our way of life, our lifestyle and rituals and ancestral worship. There is so much about the community that must come from the heart,” she explains. She was inspired by the But her story must begin with the kottansshe agrees. The Chettiars are a mercantile community where the men travelled abroad while the women managed both the household and finances.

‘Aachis’ or elderly women in the community worked on these baskets or taught the craft as a pastime, and they were used for storage, at festivals and wedding rituals, or gifted by mothers to their daughters as part of their trousseau. But as the lifestyle of the Chettiar community changed, women began accompanying their husbands, leaving no time for basket weaving. Skills were forgotten. “I wanted to revive the craft but it was only made in purples and reds. I thought long and hard about why crafts die — when you don’t make a living off it. It has to be of benefit to everybody. So I decided to turn it from a ritualistic object into a marketable object,” Ramaswamy recalls.

Getting women on board

She found it challenging initially to get women from the villages to come and train under the aachis. “They said the government had also offered them training for two weeks, given them a stipend, bought everything back from them and then that was that. These women then went back to their farming,” she narrates, recalling how she made a commitment to take care of them. The initial group consisted of seven craftswomen from the Keelayapatti village in Chettinad. They were trained for a year by Kannamai Aachi, an octogenarian from the Chettiar community who cracked jokes and was interested in everyone’s stories. The women learnt how to process the palm leaf, splice it to size, dye it to the now-characteristic bright colours and master the nuances of weaving.

Today, the Foundation works with over 100 women from eight villages and continues to be self-funded. There have been international exhibitions, in Scotland, Japan, Thailand, even Cuba. In 2023, Ramaswamy presented Chettinad: An Enduring Legacy at IIC Delhi. The response was overwhelming she says, adding that it inspired the idea of the museum. And last month, 25 years of Project Kottan was celebrated with Fibre to Form, a showcase of Chettinad palm leaf basketry at The Folly in Chennai’s Amethyst.

The retrospective featured new experiments with beads (a revival of designs that originally featured Czechoslovakian beads), crochet and indigo. The last has been an uphill task for the Foundation, what with the palm leaves being too brittle for indigo, and blue turning green. But it appears that they have had a breakthrough, recently, courtesy the Indigo Art Museum by Arvind Ltd.

On common ground

“Although Project Kottan began as a craft revival project, it has emerged as a sustainable community development initiative,” says Ramaswamy, adding that in her opinion, crafts have a “wonderful way of bridging communal and religious barriers that are especially prevalent in rural India.” As for the craftswomen, consistent employment and year-round orders have resulted in improved sanitation and education in their villages.

“More girls are getting an education. Several of them are working as nurses in Singapore and other countries. One of them is a draughtswoman,” says Ramaswamy proudly, adding that she encourages them to be vigilant with their personal finances. “I am a Chettiar and it is in my blood,” she chuckles. “If I have  ₹5, I can spend  ₹4, not  ₹10!”

The exhibition will be travelling to the Chettinad Festival later this year. On Instagram @manjalshop