Sholapith Craft

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The term craft is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word craft meaning strength or skill or thoughtful creation of object. Craft includes all activities of human being revolving in or around their social life through the production of objects by manual means without the use of mechanical aids where individuals and group satisfaction are visible. Anthropologist prefers to signify craft as technology to refer to the process of manufacture and material culture for the artifacts related with the crafts (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; Vol. 3; 1968). Scholars opine that it is a skill or manual art (Bark, 1978) and Chattopadhyay (1975) said that it is man’s creation. The craft is mingled with emotion, expression and feeling of the…show more content…
They are beautiful (sundaram), practical and functional (shivam), and true and relevant (satyam). Thus Indian craft is the confluence of aesthetics; utility and heritage. Here an attempt was made to analyze the present state of Sholapith craft of West Bengal. 2. Objectives: The objectives of the present study are as follows- (1) Identify the production cluster of Sholapith craft of West Bengal and Classification of Sholapith products (2) It is an effort to find out the production process of Sholapith crafts, the implements and raw materials used in it and technological aspects associated with these products. 3. Methodology: The present effort is grounded by the ethnographic approach and methods. The data were textual and contextual type i.e. the former is from the documents and the latter is from the studied areas. The techniques of primary data collection were observation method, non-structured, semi structured and indepth interviews. 4. Sholapith…show more content…
Kath shola is rather hard but Bhat shola is light in weight and soft. Almost the whole of the shola plant is its stem. Its bark is grey and inner body white. It grows to a height of 5-6 feet. The sholapith is the cortex or core of the plant and is about 2-3 inches in diameter. The pith plant is recognised by the shallow layer of leaves that flot on the marshy water at a depth of two to six feet. Good quality pith is pure white and smooth with a soft bark and no nodes, while poor quality pith is one where the core is reddish with a hard bark and has many nodes. The pith collector wades into the water to collect this reed, which is then dried thoroughly and sold as sticks in length of two to three feet. Shola seeds usually get germinating at the advent of pre-monsoon when fields get moisture. Dormant seeds which remain deposited in the soil get sprouting and take three months to become full grown plant. It has full blooming during the months of September-October, followed by

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