Sixty two year old
Tagar Rani Dey of Cooch Behar is the only Shitalpati weaver to have ever received a National Handicrafts Award, which she won in 1990 when she was thirty. She has not looked back since.
The craft of Shitalpati, a very special kind of mat, is woven in West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Bangladesh. In West Bengal, the Rural Craft and Cultural Hub (RCCH) Project which aims to develop a vibrant creative sector by safeguarding and professionalizing the traditional skills of West Bengal, gave Shitalpati and nine other crafts a boost, through its collaboration with UNESCO since 2017. In the same year, Shitalpati of Sylhet, Bangladesh was recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.
Shitalpati being a traditional household occupation in Cooch Behar among the cane weaving community, every child learns the art from a young age. Tagar too learnt the craft from her parents as a young schoolgirl and continues to weave to this day. Her specialization is weaving ultra fine mats, for which she also received awards, both at district and state levels, when only in her twenties. The fineness of a mat depends on the number of splits into which a cane is divided; the more the splits - a single cane can be split into as many as 25 strips - the finer the weave.
Within a few years of her receiving her first award, Tagar trained under the master weaver, the late Narayan Chandra Deb of Ghugumari and mastered the art of weaving motifs into a shitalpati mat. Over time, she has added to her product range, weaving items such as tablemats, boxes, purses and so on, but her chief focus remains her traditional mats.
Tagar, a well-known figure in her community, has been the chief trainer in numerous workshops organised by the government in the district, and has taught more than 1000 students till date. Her students are both traditional weavers from nearby villages who come to learn new designs and product innovations, as well as members of non mat-weaving communities - all of them hoping to benefit from the surge in promotional activity that this cottage industry has been receiving.
Thanks to her skills and the recognition she has received, Tagar is a leading member of the Shitalpati weaving community of Cooch Behar and sustains herself through a decent business. She has several weavers working directly under her supervision and she hires more people when larger orders come in. Her son, Sanjib, also a three-time state awardee assists her. Her husband, the late Madan Mohan Dey too had received state level awards numerous times.
Her poor health does not allow her to participate in fairs and exhibitions as she once used to, but Tagar is extremely busy at home. Her latest venture is training a small group of skilled women to weave extra fine mats with new jamdani motifs, using both natural and dyed fibres. She is trying to overcome the problem of fixing the dye on the silky shitalpati splits.
Though she and her family have had their fair share of struggle in the past, she feels that the increased popularity of shitalpati had benefited the entire community, until Covid struck. Thanks to country-wide government promotions and the diversification of the mat into manufacturing of shoes, bags, belts, folders, furniture etc, their dark days, she feels, are behind them. Tagar is proud of the fact that she has had several individual foreign customers who have appreciated her work - but laments the fact that there is no mechanism in place to encourage large scale direct marketing by artisans. Buyers from Japan once approached her a while ago, but she was unable to supply because of shortage of weavers commensurate with her skills at the time along with other logistic issues.
Tagar takes particular pride in the fact that even members of her own weaving community desire to buy her patis. However, Tagar is possibly a more privileged member of her community, where many still struggle to survive.