PUPUL JAYAKAR [1915-1997]

Pupul Jayakar nee Mehta was an Indian writer, social worker, philanthropist, revivalist, cultural consultant and activist, known for putting traditional Indian arts, crafts and textiles on the global platform and making sustainable weaving, handlooms and handicrafts in post-independent India.

Pupul was a combination of disarming honesty, blithe spirits, wide-ranging erudition and articulation. Her unconventional ideas earned her criticism and even abuse but she refused to budge. She believed in the credibility of working with smaller groups. 

Born in a middle class Gujarati Brahmin family, in Etawah, UP, the transferrable job of her ICS father enabled her to absorb early the local crafts and traditions and nuances of India, its contradictions, disparities, and inherent strengths. Her proximity to three successive prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, and appointment as cultural adviser to latter two, established her cultural suzerainty. She presided over the country’s cultural scene for nearly 40 years.

Graduating from the London School of Economics, she trained as a journalist at Bedford College, London in 1936, but was denied a job with the Times of India being a woman. In 1937 she married Manmohan Jayakar, a barrister and settled in Bombay where she launched Toy Cart, an English-language children’s magazine. 

Her personal life was full of emotional upheavals. In 1948, she met J. Krishnamurti, the philosopher and helped establish the Krishnamurti Foundation in India and abroad. Assistant to Congress activist Mridula Sarabhai of the Kasturba Trust, she was also Assistant Secretary of women’s affairs in the National Planning Committee. 

To her, a piece of fabric was a synthesis of texture, colour and design. She collaborated with international designers, inviting French designer Pierre Cardin to India to explore and incorporate traditional Indian fabrics in his designs. 

Thereafter, many leading European and American fashion designers delved into the trove of Indian textiles, creating high fashion. It set the stage for establishing institutions of design and fashion in India. Her regenerating India’s second largest economic sector after agriculture, brought about, possibly inadvertently, a radical change in the dress and style of the urban woman in India. It became fashionable for the chiffon clad elite to wear handloom sarees!

She founded the National Crafts Museum in 1956; the Handloom and Handicrafts Export Corporation of India in 1958; the Handicrafts and Handlooms Corporation of India and the All India Handicrafts Board. In the 1980s, she organised a number of Indian arts festivals in France, USA and Japan and during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, the Apna Utsav Festivals. 

Pupul was associated with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, which worked for restoration of monuments, their management, and advocation of heritage property conservation; the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. She conceived the idea of a National School of Design; established the Weavers’ Service Centre, Besant Nagar, in Madras; worked closely with the Crafts Museum, New Delhi and the Calico Museums of Textile, Ahmedabad and chaired the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal.

Author of 17 books on textiles, terracotta and rural crafts, her two biographies: J. Krishnamurti: A Biography and Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography were acclaimed. She also co-authored the catalogue introduction for a Museum of Modern Art exhibition titled The Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India. 

Pupul was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1967 for social service. A biopic titled Emergency, with actress Mahima Chaudhary as Pupul, and Kangana Ranaut as Indira Gandhi based on the 1975 chapter is slated to be released in 2023.

Pupul passed into the ages in her artefact-studded flat in Mumbi, dying of cardiac arrest aged 82.