Meena Devi Has Been Cutting Gota for Forty Years

Gota patti is ribbon work: flat metallic tape, folded and cut into leaves, petals and geometric repeats, then appliquéd onto cloth. It is Rajasthani, it is old, and it is much harder than it looks, because the whole effect depends on repeats being identical and the tape being cut on exactly the right bias.

Meena Devi cuts hers by eye. She works in Jaipur, has done for forty years, and when we asked her to measure the folded leaf she had just produced it came in at eleven millimetres, which was the number she had been told to hit. She was mildly amused that anybody wanted to check. Asked how she does it, she said she does not know, and that her hands learned it before she was twenty.

This is the part of craft that is genuinely difficult to transmit, and it is why the apprenticeships are seven years rather than two. The technique can be taught in a fortnight. The calibration cannot be taught at all — it can only be accumulated, and it accumulates at whatever rate it accumulates.

She has trained nine women, six of whom still work. That is a good rate. It is also, if you follow the arithmetic forward, not a rate at which the craft grows. Every honest conversation about Indian handwork arrives at this same place eventually: the skills are intact, the economics are survivable, and the demographics are the problem nobody has solved.